Larry French/Getty Images for The Jefferson Awards Foundation
He’s already missed the deadline to be on the ballot in some states.
Last week Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she would name former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a former businessman and civil rights attorney, to her cabinet. Instead, he announced he actually wants to be president.
Patrick told senior Democrats Wednesday night that he will be throwing his hat into the race and has plans to add his name to the ballot in New Hampshire later today — making him a last minute addition to the already stacked Democratic presidential primary.
His announcement video, released Thursday morning, highlights his upbringing on the South Side of Chicago, where his grandmother told him they were “not poor, just broke,” and bemoans that the American Dream is increasingly inaccessible.
“I admire and respect the candidates in the Democratic field,” he says in the video. But this election, he says, is about “the character of the country” — not just about defeating President Trump on Election Day, but about what happens next.
While making an appearance on CBS News to talk about his newly minted campaign, Patrick did not endorse “Medicare-for-all,” but said he supported a public option. He also talked about the viability of pushing for a simpler tax structure while calling out the other Democratic candidates for their infighting and divisive “my way or the highway” approach.
The deadline to be on the ballot in New Hampshire is Friday. Patrick has already missed the cutoff to make it on the ballot in Arkansas and Alabama. This is a historically late entrance into the presidential race and will put Patrick, an already little-known name in national politics, at a major disadvantage.
His bid for the Democratic nomination for president comes with no fundraised capital, minimal structure to the campaign itself, and none of the polling numbers needed to qualify for DNC-sponsored, televised debates.
There is a historic precedent for a late entrant in the primaries going on to become the nominee — Bill Clinton declared his candidacy for president in October 1991. But that was nearly 30 years ago, and Clinton still declared a month earlier than Patrick.
William Taylor and George Kent will testify at the first public hearing in Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
Update: The first impeachment hearing has concluded. The next hearing will be on Friday, November 15, and feature testimony from former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
After that, there will be hearings on Tuesday, November 19. The morning will feature Jennifer Williams (a State Department official advising the vice president’s office) and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (a National Security Council staffer). The afternoon will feature Kurt Volker (the former US special representative to Ukraine) and Tim Morrison (a National Security Council staffer).
On Wednesday, November 20, US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland will testify in the morning. Defense Department official Laura Cooper and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale will testify in the afternoon.
Then, on Thursday, November 21, former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill is scheduled to testify.
Original post: The first public hearings in the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry will kick off at 10 am ET Wednesday,when Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee call their first two witnesses: William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, a State Department official. You can watch them testify on CSPAN or other major networks, as well as streaming live on Vox’s Facebook.
Led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the hearings are intended to publicly spotlight evidence and testimony Democrats believe is quite damning for President Donald Trump — evidence that Trump tried to urge or coerce the government of Ukraine into investigating Trump’s rivals for political reasons.
Both witnesses, Taylor and Kent, extensively testified behind closed doors to the committee last month and are now expected to reiterate their accounts for the American public.
Taylor had a front-row seat for events at the heart of the scandal as he was working with State Department officials who were trying to get Ukraine to commit to the investigations Trump wanted. And Taylor criticized the effort in real time. “As I said on the phone,” Taylor wrote in a text to a colleague, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
Kent was based in Washington but he was aware of some of the current scandal’s episodes while they were unfolding. More broadly, he has deep experience in Ukraine and has strong views about what’s happening here: namely, he believes that corrupt oligarchs and former Ukrainian officials won Rudy Giuliani’s ear.
As the first public testimony in a presidential impeachment inquiry, Wednesday’s hearing will naturally be historic. However, few are expecting dramatic new revelations, since these witnesses have testified behind closed doors already. The hope, for Democrats, is to throw more of a public spotlight on what Taylor and Kent are saying — and, in contrast, Republicans are hoping to discredit them.
The scandal: Trump and Ukrainian investigations
To recap: Democrats launched their impeachment inquiry in September after a scandal broke about President Trump pressuring the government of Ukraine to investigate the family of his potential 2020 rival Joe Biden.
Initially, concerns were raised inside the administration by an anonymous whistleblower, who filed a complaint in August — a complaint the administration initially tried to withhold from Congress. “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.
The story first told by the whistleblower and then corroborated and expanded on by other witnesses, documents, and reporters since then, goes as follows:
Shortly after Ukraine elected a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in April 2019, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani began urging Zelensky’s team to launch certain investigations Trump wanted.
Specifically, Trump’s team demanded investigations into Burisma (a Ukrainian gas company that Joe Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of) and into purported Ukrainian interference with the 2016 US election.
When Trump talked to Zelensky on the phone on July 25, he brought up both investigations specifically and urged Zelensky to talk to Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr about them.
The Ukrainians were seeking a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky. Trump officials told them that they wouldn’t get it unless they committed to those investigations: a quid pro quo.
Trump also blocked nearly $400 million in military assistance Congress had approved for Ukraine’s government. One official, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, admits telling the Ukrainians that they wouldn’t get the aid unless they placated Trump by launching the investigations.
Democrats’ argument is simple: This was an attempt by Trump to solicit foreign help interfering with the 2020 election, it’s a corrupt abuse of power, and they are now seriously considering impeaching Trump for it.
Trump and his defenders, meanwhile, have offered a shifting series of arguments — either that the facts on certain matters, such as the withholding of military aid, aren’t clear, or simply asserting that even if Trump did do all this, he shouldn’t be removed from office for it.
The hearings: How they’ll work
After announcing their impeachment inquiry in late September, Democrats conducted the first stage of it behind closed doors — asking various current and former administration officials to come in and give sworn depositions about what happened between Trump and Ukraine.
The effort proved fruitful — surprisingly so. Some key officials obeyed a White House instruction to refuse to testify but others, mostly from the State Department or the National Security Council staff, showed up anyway and answered questions. One, Kurt Volker, even turned over a set of text messages that have become key to the investigation.
Democrats used this phase of the inquiry to gather facts about what happened, away from the cameras — as well as to figure out which witnesses would be most forthcoming and knowledgeable. Meanwhile, Republicans complained about these closed-door hearings — but those Republicans who were on the relevant congressional committees were permitted to attend and participate in the questioning.
So now, Democrats are moving to the next phase: the public hearings. And they intend to run things as follows.
The first round of questioning will be 45 minutes each for Schiff and Devin Nunes, the committee’s top Republican. However, both Schiff and Nunes are likely to delegate significant amounts of questioning time to staff attorneys — specifically, Daniel Goldman for the Democrats and Steve Castor for the Republicans.
This will be a change of pace for congressional hearings. They’ll start off with a lengthy block of time for a professional questioner with ample time for follow-ups, rather than the traditional five-minute segments trading off between Congress members of each party. (Democrats believe this approach, which they experimented with at the end of a hearing in September, will be better suited for telling a coherent story.)
After that first 90 minutes is up, the hearing will revert back to that traditional format of five minutes per member of Congress for questioning. Democrats expect things to wrap up sometime between 2:30 pm and 4:30 pm.
The witnesses: William Taylor and George Kent
Democrats have decided to begin their hearings with two witnesses who they have good reason to believe will be helpful to their narrative. Both are State Department officials with long careers and deep experience in Ukraine in particular, and both are rather appalled by what Trump did with Ukraine.
William Taylor’s official title is chargé d’affaires of the US embassy in Kyiv, making him currently the top US diplomat there. His background includes stints in the US Army and in various diplomatic posts (including serving as Ambassador to Ukraine under George W. Bush).
Taylor was asked to reenter the government this year to replace former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch (though he does not have the ambassador title). He testified that he had some trepidation about accepting the job — due to a “web of political machinations, both in Kyiv and in Washington.” And indeed, soon after he took up the post in June, he realized that there was a separate, “highly irregular” channel of US policymaking, one that included Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as well as US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
Taylor testified that Sondland told him early on — all the way back in late June — that the Ukrainians had to commit to certain “investigations” if Zelensky wanted a White House meeting with Trump. Referring to detailed contemporaneous notes he took, Taylor chronicled how his concern over this increased as the summer went on.
By early September, Taylor said, he grew even more concerned because a colleague told him that Sondland was now linking hundreds of millions of dollars in withheld military aid for Ukraine to the investigations. “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” he asked Sondland in a text. Taylor says Sondland soon spoke to him on the phone and confirmed that he was doing just that — at Trump’s behest. He said something similar in another call on September 8, Taylor testified:
Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman. When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.
Finally, on September 9, Taylor put his concerns in writing again: “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” he texted Sondland. The ambassador then called Trump himself to discuss how to respond.
George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, will be testifying alongside Taylor. Kent is a career foreign service officer who has served two stints in Ukraine over the years and took up his current Washington-based post in the summer of 2018. Ukraine is currently one of six countries in his portfolio.
Compared to Taylor, Kent wasn’t as personally involved in the events that transpired in Ukraine this summer. What he will bring to the hearing, though, is deep knowledge of the country, combined with strong opinions on the machinations that have been taking place. Kent made clear in his closed-door testimony that he believes Giuliani has been working with several corrupt current or former officials in Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office to push allegations that have no merit.
Kent will also be able to speak authoritatively about the Bidens’ role in Ukraine. He testified that, in early 2015, he did tell a member of Vice President Biden’s staff that Hunter Biden’s board seat on the gas company Burisma could be seen as a conflict of interest. However, Kent said, he was told that because Biden’s other son Beau was dying of cancer, there was no “further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time.”
Kent will also debunk the claim from Trump allies that Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, to help Burisma and his son. He testified that the idea to push Shokin’s ouster came from the US Ambassador to Ukraine at the time, not Biden. He also testified that Shokin was extremely corrupt — when an anti-corruption unit in Ukraine went after his former driver (and seized a cache of diamonds from him), Shokin “went to war” to try to retaliate against anyone involved in the investigation, Kent said. That is why the US determined he had to go.
After Wednesday’s hearing wraps up, the next planned hearing is on Friday, when former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is slated to testify. She was ousted from her post back in April so she wasn’t around for many of the key events of this scandal. But her fate is a sort of prologue to the story since she is viewed as the victim of a smear campaign from Giuliani and his Ukrainian allies.
The Intelligence Committee is expected to call more witnesses for further hearings next week but this phase of the inquiry will likely conclude before Thanksgiving. After that, the House Intelligence Committee will write a report summarizing their findings.
Once Congress returns in December, the action will shift to Rep. Jerry Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee, which will review that report and likely draft articles of impeachment against Trump.
Any articles of impeachment approved by the committee will then be sent on to the full House to be voted on. Democrats hope to hold those votes before Christmas. If a majority of the House votes to approve any article of impeachment, then Trump is impeached and the process moves forward to the Senate, which will hold a trial determining whether he should be removed from office.
As for what will happen, the current state of play is that Trump is quite likely to be impeached in the Democrat-controlled House as even most moderate Democrats profess to be disturbed by the Ukraine scandal.
But it’s tremendously difficult to actually remove a president from office. It takes a two-thirds vote in the Senate (a threshold that has never been reached), and that chamber is Republican-controlled anyway. And so far, nearly every Republican senator — Mitt Romney being the lone exception — remains supportive of President Trump. Democrats hope their hearings will create a public uproar that will reshape that political situation, but that will be a tall order.
Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett explains why today’s rich are far less materialistic, but a far greater threat to equality.
If you’re anything like me, today’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show will make you think about the way you shop, learn, eat, parent, and exercise in a whole new way.
My guest is Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California whose most recent book, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class documents the rise of a new, unprecedented elite class in the United States. Previously, the elite classes differentiated themselves from the rest by purchasing expensive material goods like flashy clothes and expensive cars. But, for reasons we get into, today’s elite is different: We signify our class position by reading the New Yorker, acquiring elite college degrees, buying organic food, breastfeeding our children, and, of course, listening to podcasts like this one.
These activities may seem completely innocent — perhaps even enlightened. Yet, as we discuss here, they simultaneously shore up inequality, erode social mobility, and create an ever-more stratified society — all without most of us noticing. This is a conversation that implicates us all, and, for that very reason, it is well worth addressing.
You can listen to this conversation — and others — by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
Imelda Marcos — and her attempt to rewrite history — is the subject of The Kingmaker. | Lauren Greenfield / Showtime
The Kingmaker director Lauren Greenfield talks about her revealing Imelda Marcos documentary.
Lauren Greenfield has built a career partly on chronicling excess. In films like The Queen of Versailles (2012) and Generation Wealth (2018), the documentarian explores the fabulous, over-the-top wealth concentrated among tiny numbers of people, providing a window into extravagance that seems to teeter on the edge of the tragic — all this money, and for what?
So it’s fitting that her new film The Kingmaker looks at one of the most famously extravagant women in recent history: Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines. When Marcos and her husband, dictator Ferdinand Marcos, were driven into exile in the United States in 1986, Imelda left behind a stash of more than 1,000 pairs of shoes. And that might be the only thing a lot of people know about her.
But there’s much more to Imelda Marcos — and that’s what Greenfield dives into in The Kingmaker. Marcos is interviewed throughout, and at first we just get her side of the story. But then Greenfield slowly fills in what’s missing and challenges any outright fabrications by talking to people who remember the reign of terror that was the kleptocratic Marcos regime, and draws a line between that regime and the more recent rise of the murderous authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte.
I spoke with Greenfield in New York about whether Imelda Marcos believes her own lies and how to undercut an unreliable narrator in a documentary. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Alissa Wilkinson
Imelda Marcos, it turns out, is the unreliable narrator of your documentary. Did you expect that going in?
Lauren Greenfield
Frankly, I was just so excited to be able to talk to her. I didn’t really have an expectation for what she would say.
I thought she was surprisingly candid in the first interview, so it seemed more like she believed her own story, rather than telling untruths. It took me like a little while to realize that what she said was just not true. She first told me about how great her marriage was, and I really didn’t know otherwise. But then, I learned about the affairs. I learned about other things that were obviously untrue [such as the state of the Marcos marriage, the way the Marcoses accumulated their wealth, and the living conditions in the Philippines under Marcos’s imposition of martial law]. When it got to the really egregious things, then it became really clear.
I realized she had a strategic narrative that was part of redeeming the name of Marcos and part of coming back to power.
Alissa Wilkinson
Do you now think those are deliberate lies that she’s plotted out? Or have they changed over time?
Lauren Greenfield
No, I think they’veevolved over time. A lot of the things she says are just lines that she repeats. She would repeat the same thing to me two or three times. And then, when I would do research, I would see also her repeating it in other places. But then, she’ll come out with something totally unexpected, and I think this is why she’s so interesting to talk to.
Andy Bautista, who’s the former head of the PCGG [the Philippines’ Presidential Commission on Good Government], says, “She comes out with these spontaneous admissions.” So, she’ll say [in the film], “I had my money in 170 banks.” He didn’t know that, and he spent years going after her ill-gotten wealth.
She is unguarded in some respects, mostly because she doesn’t think anything she did was wrong. So why not say it?
Lauren Greenfield / ShowtimeImelda Marcos in The Kingmaker.
Alissa Wilkinson
In some ways, the movie feels like a psychological portrait more than anything else — a portrait of a wealthy, delusional person, and she’s certainly not the only one. But do you have a sense of who’s enabled her delusions or her lies? Who’s helped her craft that narrative? Are her children part of that?
Lauren Greenfield
I think she’s somebody that nobody says “no” to.
I’m sure there were probably times that people on our staff thought a film about her was not a good idea. But she wanted to do it. And she’s unstoppable.
The children definitely are complicit in the narrative of, “Everything was good during the Marcos regime and there’s nothing to say sorry for.” In an interview with [Marcos’s son, the politician and vice presidential candidate] Bongbong [Marcos] before the election, a reporter said, “Are you going to say sorry for martial law?” Which is what people wanted. And Bongbong said, “If I hurt anybody, I would say sorry, but what do we have to say sorry for? Should we say sorry for the road? Should we say sorry for the infrastructure? Should we say sorry for the highways that were built?” And so in way, it’s very Trumpian, like leaning into the story. Nothing was wrong. Never saying sorry.
Alissa Wilkinson
It’s not as if the people of the Philippines are responsible for any of what happened during the Marcos regime, but you do talk to some Filipinoswho seem to have adopted the Marcos family’s narrative, which papers over or outright denies what really went on.
Lauren Greenfield
Yeah. There’s that, as well as the young electorate who didn’t know and were not taught [the history of the Marcos regime] in schools. I think the Marcoses have taken advantage of that and also fueled this narrative on social media to a very vulnerable population.
The new government also never did what a country like Germany did after [World War II], where it made sure to inculcate history in the young people. They were forgiving, and a lot of people remained in government who played both sides of the coin. And the judiciary has vulnerabilities to corruption — there are hundreds of cases against Marcos, but if there were convictions, they didn’t stick. Nobody ever did jail time.
Alissa Wilkinson
The houses in which we see Mrs. Marcos during your interviews with her are pretty incredible and they seem carefully arranged — all of those possessions and pictures and artwork and so on. Did she decorate them herself?
Lauren Greenfield
There are three houses and a palace in the film. Those photographs that are out in the garden of the family home and start falling over — a lot of those photographs have been reproduced and are also in the other properties. So in her Manila apartment, all the same pictures are there. And this, I don’t really even understand: In one property, you’ll see a priceless work of art, but in another property, you’ll see a replica.
I don’t know who does her interior decoration but it’s very distinctive, and I definitely wanted to have that as part of her portrait in the interviews. Then, I tried to contrast that with the credible truth-tellers and keep their interviews very raw and unfiltered and unmediated. They’re just these credible voices, no makeup, no artifice. Hers is a world of artifice.
Evergreen PicturesLauren Greenfield interviews Imelda Marcos for The Kingmaker.
Alissa Wilkinson
I feel like a lot of documentaries bend over backward to make sure the viewer knows that the subject is raw and authentic. In a way, this movie is just the opposite. She’s certainly an authentic version of herself but that self is constructed from artifice. How do you interview a person like that?
Lauren Greenfield
First of all, I did want to also show her humanity, and I think you’re drawn into her humanity at the beginning of the film. But I tried to have the interviews themselves function as cinéma vérité. It’s not just about what she’s saying, but it’s also about the maids coming to help her or about a look or a gesture.
Alissa Wilkinson
Like when she knocks over those frames and breaks the glass in them, and the man nearby just starts cleaning them up while she keeps talking without missing a beat.
Lauren Greenfield
That’s really what I consider a véritémoment. Or in the interview where she starts moving a gold sheep or asking about makeup — in that interview setting, there are still telling, apparently unrehearsed moments.
But the truth is, she’s so charismatic and so convincing that when I experimented with people looking at the footage, if she would tell you a story, you would believe it. And so that really led to the structure of the film, in which truth-tellers and real footage is sometimes layered right on top of the lie, so the audience knows.
I haven’t seen that film. But I definitely felt like there is a criticism, which I think is legitimate in this era of disinformation, of giving airtime to somebody who’s spreading this misinformation.
So in this case, I felt that we needed to hear the narrative that she was trying to spin. Then, when we deconstructed it, we needed to understand why she was doing it and to debunk it. All of those things were important.
That was the idea, but it wasn’t easy. That was why I had to go out and find other voices. She is so charismatic, and a lot of people are coming to [see the film] with no knowledge of her. And even if they do have knowledge of her, it’s not necessarily knowledge that’s going to give you the tools to have context for what she’s saying.
Alissa Wilkinson
Right, like many Americans may not remember anything other than her infamous shoe collection.
Lauren Greenfield
And even so many young Filipinos who have seen this movie have been saying, “Thank you. My parents fled Marcos, but I didn’t know why.” Andy Bautista has been saying that he thinks the shoes are a distraction. And in a way, I think that’s a powerful idea, because she’s so harmless if all she is is a vain, rich woman with shoes. It’s a way to distract. It reminds me of when she says early on in the film something about women being underestimated and that it’s useful.
Alissa Wilkinson
Has Imelda Marcos seen the movie?
Lauren Greenfield
She hasn’t.
Alissa Wilkinson
Do you think she will?
Lauren Greenfield
We haven’t showed it in the Philippines yet. I think she will when we show it in the Philippines.
Alissa Wilkinson
What do you suppose she’ll think of it?
Lauren Greenfield
It’s so hard to know. She might like a lot of her scenes, and the “kingmaker” title. But I don’t think she’ll like the other voices we brought in, because [the Marcoses] have spent a lot of time and money drowning out the other voices. They’re trying to sell a narrative and they’re not going to like anything that goes against it. They probably won’t like me giving time to their opposition.
Alissa Wilkinson
Your movies are about wealthy people, albeit vastly different ones. Is there something that ties them together?
Lauren Greenfield
I do think this movie is a big departure for me. I’ve looked at wealth, but this movie looks at the connection between money and power. Money goes a long way in politics in the Philippines. Money also goes a long way in fueling a propaganda campaign on social media.
But the other thing I think that overlaps with [my 2018 documentary] Generation Wealth is Imelda’s psychology. It’s why I included some of her backstory at the start of the film; I don’t think she was always the Imelda like we know her to be now. I think she became that person.
In Generation Wealth, everybody’s drive [toward extravagance] comes from a trauma, often from childhood. With Imelda, her story is that she became an orphan, was traumatized, becomes a beauty pageant queen, then falls into the arms of Marcos, who can give her love. She’s ambitious and he can give her a better life, get her to Manila and start the drive toward being important and rich. He was already a Congressman and already had aspirations to higher office. Then I think when he betrays her, that’s when she becomes insatiable in terms of material things. And I think that the material things are not for their own safety.
I don’t think she cares that much about the shoes or the clothes or even like the jewelry. I think it’s about what it gives her, how she gets to be this queenly figure that people love.
So ultimately, I do think she’s looking for love, but it’s a kind of adulation-style love. It’s just a symptom of something deeper, which is kind of human and vulnerable. But I didn’t want to let her off the hook for any of the consequences of the regime.
Alissa Wilkinson
It’s hard to know where the line is between acknowledging that someone like her is a hurt person and also holding the powerful responsible.
Lauren Greenfield
When I started it, I thought there was a possibility this movie would be a redemption story. But the opposite ended up happening. Because she ends up repeating her actions in helping Duterte get put into power, it reveals how much agency she had the first time. Historically, I think some have thought, “Maybe she was just the wife of Marcos. Maybe he was really the corrupt one.” I think he was the one who taught her. But I think after the revolution, she was very powerful. But more recently, it was Marcos money that got Duterte to power — and 30,000 people have been killed in the last two years. There’s blood on their hands.
The Kingmaker opened in limited theaters on November 8 and will premiere on Showtime in 2020.
Hate the idea of capsule wardrobes and workday uniforms? Here’s how to look like yourself.
A few years ago, an essay titled “Why I Wear The Exact Same Thing to Work Every Day” went viral. Written by an art director named Matilda Kahl, it detailed how Kahl had spent three years wearing a weekday uniform of black trousers and white silk blouses with a neat black leather bow tied around her neck.
The story was picked up everywhere: Kahl later told Business Insider that, in the days after it was published, she was doing two TV segments, four radio interviews, and responding to dozens of newspaper inquiries a day. I was working as a fashion editor at a digital publication at the time, and I understood immediately why the idea struck a chord: Getting dressed for work is a nearly universal challenge, made doubly difficult if you’re a woman. Still, to me, the approach seemed a little extreme.
Called ”uniform dressing,” it’s an attempt to simplify this daily task by eliminating the element of choice, thereby saving the wearer the time and trouble of having to put together a new outfit every morning. It is, in Silicon Valley parlance, a means of reducing friction — a concept that has practically become gospel in recent years.
While Kahl clearly has a sense of style — that leather bow? Inspired. — the logical end of optimization in fashion isn’t a world in which everyone chooses an idiosyncratic everyday look, but rather one in which personal style ceases to exist. The idea that the perfect wardrobe is one that does away with “decision fatigue” in order to bring us one step closer to finding our inner Mark Zuckerbergs is less convincing when you consider that tech’s obsession with efficiency is also responsible for such joyless innovations as Soylent.
Still, that isn’t stopping corporations from trying to automate the messy art of self-expression: Amazon’s new styling service, Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe, promises to deliver clothing recommendations “curated just for you” through data gleaned from an online quiz. Like Stitch Fix, the popular online personal styling service launched in 2011, it employs both artificial intelligence and human stylists.
Elsewhere, data seems to have already won: Algorithms have so thoroughly buffed away individualism that something called an “Instagram face” exists (and you probably know without clicking what it looks like). Cities have become uncanny valleys of ads for millennial lifestyle startups, each virtually indistinguishable from the next. Everything looks nice and fine and perfectly aspirational, particularly when viewed through a screen; it also, to me, makes the idea of “uniform dressing” feel like giving in.
In the context of this pervasive sameness, personal style can be a way of pushing back, of asserting an identity beyond your productive output or the data points Facebook has collected about you.
”I’m a strong advocate for personal style because it’s a way that you can strengthen your relationship with yourself,” says Mecca James-Williams, a stylist and contributing editor for The Zoe Report, who has dressed stars including Solange Knowles, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and Orange Is The New Black’s Samira Wiley. “Outside of just looking good, it’s another avenue in which you can practice self care, self love.”
Getting there isn’t always easy: Shopping can be overwhelming, proportions are often perplexing, and all of us have days where we stand in front of our closets feeling confounded by what’s inside. But a little effort now can mean way more confidence (and compliments) down the road.
Here are some tips for finding a style that works for you:
Start with basics you can build on
Peter Nguyen, a New York City-based private personal stylist for men in tech, and the founder of The Essential Man, says that even clients who aren’t especially interested in fashion usually come to him not with empty closets, but with closets full of clothes they never wear. “What I find a lot of these guys will say is, ‘You know, I thought my wardrobe was kind of boring, so I stopped by Zara or J.Crew or something, and I saw this crazy sweater and so I bought it, really hyped up, and then I got home and I had no idea how to wear it.’”
Nguyen likes to first identify the pieces they’re missing. “The way I describe it to them is: It’s like cooking, right? You want to learn the classic recipes first before you go and add your own spin and personality to it. So where I usually start with them is really building a foundation wardrobe: really timeless, versatile pieces, a lot of neutral colors, basic denim, chinos, dress shirts.”
James-Williams recommends mapping it out day by day: “I would take the process slow and think about it in terms of, ‘Okay, I wear one outfit each day. What do I need?’ Sometimes I like pants. Sometimes I like skirts. So I find four to five pieces in the pants category and the skirt category that I know I will like, and then build that up to tops.”
While “basics” will look different for everyone depending on factors like your personal preferences, profession, and gender presentation, some foolproof places to start are a great fitting pair of jeans; an everyday jacket (try a blazer, bomber, or motorcycle); non-denim trousers (think about what you like in jeans, such as a tapered leg or a slightly cropped inseam, and try pants with similar elements); and a selection of T-shirts and dressier tops that pair easily with the bottoms in your wardrobe. Even introducing one of those categories can be revelatory if you’ve been missing it.
If you’re a rookie in the fashion department, it helps to work with someone who understands fit, whether that’s a sales associate, a trusted friend, or a personal stylist. They can steer you toward pants that won’t gap when you sit and suit jackets that won’t swallow you whole. They can tell you what can easily be fixed by a tailor — a service certain retailers, including Nordstrom and Levi’s, offer for free — and what may not be worth the extra cost.
Getting a second opinion can also help you break bad habits: If you’re used to wearing your shirts two sizes too big, that’s probably what you’re going to grab from the rack. Having someone push you to at least try something new can help you see yourself in a new light. (This is basically the entire premise of Queer Eye.) Once you have the essentials down, it’s much easier to try a trend or experiment with something new when the opportunity arises.
Get rid of the dead weight in your wardrobe
The average American buys 65 new pieces of clothing per year, according to the research firm Kantar, but we spend a far smaller share of our income on the category than we used to. Because clothes have gotten so cheap, we’re encouraged to buy in greater and greater volumes — a habit that makes the experience less satisfying with every subsequent purchase, according to one theory recently posited by a Morgan Stanley analyst (and probably backed up by the pile of forgotten shirts languishing in the back of your closet). In economics, the law of diminishing marginal utility states that as consumption of a good or service increases, the marginal utility (or satisfaction) consumers derive from each additional unit declines. Or, in shopping terms: the tenth shirt we buy inevitably brings less happiness than the first.
All of this excess can make it hard to see — let alone put together — the pieces you actually want to wear.
”Sometimes you think you have all these pieces, but then when you really sit down and look, you’ll find there’s a hole, or this button doesn’t really button over your cleavage well,” says James-Williams.
Getty Images/iStockphotoGet rid of clothes you don’t wear anymore.
A closet cleanout forces you to evaluate what actually works for you. Start by taking everything out at once, so you don’t forget about pieces lurking out of view. Then, eliminate pieces that only fit an imagined future self, are stained beyond repair, and/or are too uncomfortable to wear. Keep the workhorses of your closet — your everyday essentials — as well as anything you genuinely love to wear. And don’t, under any circumstances, put anything back in that needs to go to the dry cleaner or tailor — do that now! Or it might sit there for months. (I say this from plenty of personal experience.)
These days, depending on the quality of your unwanted items, they could even net you some extra dollars to put toward your next, more thoughtful purchase. Resale sites such as Poshmark, The RealReal, and thredUP; local consignment shops; and marketplaces like eBay all offer the chance to turn castoffs into cash. If you donate rather than going the resale route, do your research on local and national organizations (including recycling facilities) to ensure your stuff doesn’t end up among the 10.5 billion tonnes of textiles added to landfills every year.
Look for inspiration everywhere
If you have a smartphone or laptop, you have access to a world of outfit ideas. Make liberal use of Pins, saves, and bookmarks on apps like Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit; browse through magazines and books (old and new); and collect screencaps of stylish characters from movies and TV (Shiv Roy, anyone?). Look up from your screen, too: Take note of what stylish friends, coworkers, and strangers are wearing; visit stores you otherwise wouldn’t; walk around a new neighborhood or city and people watch.
The key, says Beth Jones, the stylist, blogger, and YouTube creator behind B. Jones Style, is “not just seeing it as something that somebody else can do, but actually thinking, ‘How can I interpret that for myself?’ Or, ‘What could I take from that and bring into my everyday life?’” It doesn’t have to be a head-to-toe outfit — it could even be an unexpected color pairing or a new-to-you silhouette.
Remember, too, that there’s a world of inspiration on Instagram beyond jet-setting influencers and celebrities — take advantage of it and follow people with different budgets, backgrounds, and body types. That way, you’re less likely to get stuck thinking that style is something only certain people can achieve.
Subreddits like r/malefashionadvice and r/femalefashionadvice have millions of members, many of whom have probably asked some of the same questions you’re wondering about. And Jones has cultivated a diverse community around her hashtag-cum-mantra #alwaysplaydressup, and says she’ll sometimes scroll through their photos when she wants to get out of a rut. Check out the tagged posts for brands you like — not just the professional photos on their feeds — and, if there’s someone on the app whose style you’re into, see if they’re following any other cool accounts you haven’t discovered yet.
Push yourself to put in a little effort
Just because you live a normal life full of Monday morning meetings, carpool pickups, and commutes doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to an equally mundane wardrobe.
”I think a lot of it comes back to the way that we get stuck in our heads about things,” says Jones. “Like, ‘Do I have the confidence for this?’ Or, ‘I don’t have anywhere to wear this.’ Or, ‘I’m a mom with little kids. What will people think?’”
As a mom of two boys, Jones says she’s usually getting dressed for softball games or Target runs, which means putting together outfits that are comfortable but still “bring some joy and a spark to the day.” For her, that might mean colorful track pants and a fanny pack rather than Lululemon leggings and a T-shirt — anything that feels more playful and creative than the default option.
If you work in an office, a common challenge these days is striking a balance between looking professional and keeping up with the more relaxed dress codes many companies (even Goldman Sachs!) are adopting.
”I always recommend being slightly overdressed rather than underdressed,” says Nguyen. “Because you can always pull it back a little bit and wear jeans and a nice sweater — you don’t have to roll in a T-shirt and shorts even if your boss does. It’s all about where do you want to go with your career and how seriously do you want to be taken?”
”Boring office clothes” may allow one to look “professional, not special,” as The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan argued in a recent essay defending the much-maligned retail chain Ann Taylor. But they can also make a dull day even less inspiring — and they’re hardly the only option, given the proliferation of subscription rental services that allow members to try new pieces without the commitment.
Find your niche
Spend some time discovering what you’re naturally drawn to and nurture that interest. Maybe you’re a burgeoning sneakerhead, or perhaps you want to live that #cloglife. Maybe you’re into jumpsuits, zany socks, or Hawaiian shirts. This doesn’t have to be the garment or style you’ve been told “highlights” your best “assets,” and it certainly doesn’t have to be trendy. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be something you wear out of the house (case in point: caftans).
For Jones, it’s blazers: The style, she says, has the power to transform just about any outfit, whether it’s a mannish tweed version paired with a turtleneck and trousers, or one in purple leather atop an animal print skirt. “I always say, ‘Make it better with a blazer,’” says Jones. “A great, cool, classic blazer — that can be from a thrift store so easily. You can find one for, like, $5.”
Nguyen recalls working with a client in his late 30s who was into sneakers. “He owns his own business, so he’s doing a lot of investor meetings, and we built a wardrobe for him that was pretty classic — a lot of blazers and chinos and things like that. But adding those streetwear elements to that classic wardrobe makes sense for him because he’s a collector.”
Think of this as a way to get better in touch with your tastes — an approachable gateway into cultivating a style that feels uniquely “you.”
Hilary George-Parkin is a writer based in New York City. She covers fashion and consumer culture for publications including Vox, Glamour, Fashionista, and CNN. She last wrote about a shoe that’s taken over urban streets for The Highlight.
The number of 2020 Democratic candidates who are running for president has passed two dozen. | Javier Zarracina/Vox. Getty Images
The biggest questions about the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, answered.
The 2020 presidential primary campaign field has started to winnow down, but there are still new candidates jumping into the race four months to go until the first states vote.
Any Democrat with dreams of occupying the Oval Office can see Donald Trump is a vulnerable president who hasn’t broadened his appeal beyond his base. A lot of them are running for their party’s nomination next year to be its standard-bearer in the 2020 election.
There is a clear top tier of four candidates: former Vice President Joe Biden — the early, if unimposing, frontrunner; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has steadily risen to the top of the field; Sen. Bernie Sanders with his solid base of left voters; and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has been trending upward lately. After an early boomlet, Sens. Kamala Harris is down in the polls. Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang have also been in the fray for months. A fair number of candidates have left the race: former US Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, among others.
But the field isn’t set yet. Ex-NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg filed for the Alabama primary right a headline of the deadline. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is entering the race. Even Hillary Clinton is taking calls encouraging her to run again, though she says it is exceedingly unlikely she’d seek the White House for a third time.
The Democratic field includes a record number of women and nonwhite candidates, a mix of high-wattage stars and lesser-known contenders who believe they can navigate a fractured field to victory. The debates started in June, with most candidates getting a chance to appear on stage, but the number of participants started to winnow in the third debate in September. The fifth Democratic debate will be held on November 20.
Whoever emerges from the Democratic primary will face Trump, who along with the Republican National Committee has already raised more than $300 million for reelection to a second term. Recent history tells us Americans usually give their presidents another four years. That should lend Trump an advantage. But the president has been historically unpopular during his first term, and he’s now mired in an impeachment inquiry after an explosive scandal in which he asked the Ukrainian president for political dirt on Biden. Impeachment polling doesn’t look great for Trump.
The last few months have demonstrated really anything can happen. It’s silly to pretend anybody knows how this campaign is going to end, and the 2016 election should have humbled all political prognosticators. Still, the 2020 campaign has already started. Here is what you need to know to get oriented.
Who is running for president in the 2020 election?
On the Republican side, there is of course President Donald Trump.
A few Republican officials — former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and popular Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan — have hinted they might challenge the president in a primary. But any primary challenger would be a huge underdog against the sitting president. Republican leaders have said they want to protect Trump by potentially having state parties change the rules for their primaries to guard against an insurgency.
The GOPers trying to supplant him are former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, a libertarian-leaning Republican who has officially entered the race former radio host and former Rep. Joe Walsh, who has apologized for saying racist things on Twitter. Former Rep. Mark Sanford, an ideological conservative who was a member of the Freedom Caucus while he was in the House, briefly pursued a primary challenge but he has already dropped out. No other Republican is going to topple Trump, we can safely say.
On the Democratic side, the field is mostly set after these unexpected late entries, and candidates have started to drop out. The contenders, in rough order of standing, are:
From left: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Jay Inslee, Beto O’Rourke, John Hickenlooper, Michael Bennett, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, John Delaney, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Biden thought hard about running in 2016, but he decided against it, being so soon after his son Beau’s death and with the party establishment uniformly behind Hillary Clinton. He’s still very popular with Democratic voters, and the former veep apparently wasn’t sure any of the other potential candidates would beat Trump. Though surely inflated by name recognition, Biden had a sizable early lead in the early Democratic primary polls. However, Warren recently (albeit very narrowly) surpassed him.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): The 2016 runner-up is running again. He has the biggest grassroots base of any potential candidate, and he has been the leader of the push to move the party leftward. A more competitive field has presented Sanders with a very different race this time. And Sanders recently had a heart attack while on the campaign trail; while he’s recovering, he has openly said he won’t be able to get back to the breakneck speed of events he once had. Still, for many of the Democratic left, Sanders is the only candidate with the credibility to pursue their top-tier issues, like Medicare-for-all.
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg: Something of a viral political star, though he leads a city of “just” 100,000 people, Buttigieg is a military veteran and a Rhodes scholar, and he would be the first openly LGBTQ president in American history. Redevelopment and infrastructure projects have been staples of his tenure as mayor, but he’s also gotten plenty of questions of how he handled racial issues in South Bend.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA): The former California attorney general started generating White House hype almost as soon as she got to the Senate in 2017. As a younger black woman, she personifies the Democratic Party’s changing nature. She’s endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major middle-class tax credit, though her days as a prosecutor may present problems with the progressive grassroots. Harris made a big splash in early polls, but she’s now languishing in the second tier of candidates and hoping her campaign can reset in Iowa.
Andrew Yang: A humanitarian-mind entrepreneur who also served in the Obama administration. He’s running on a policy platform that includes, among other things, a universal basic income that would pay out $1,000 a month to every American over age 18.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN): She will look to blend her folksy, Midwestern manner with some crossover appeal, given her history of working across the aisle with Republicans and winning elections handily in a purplish state. Klobuchar is also known for her willingness to crack down on big tech firms focused on privacy and antitrust issues. She is struggling with a lack of name recognition, however, and she has been the subject of several reports about her alleged harsh treatment of staff.
Former San Antonio mayor and HUD Secretary Julián Castro:Castro got VP buzz in prior elections; now he’s running in his own right after serving in Barack Obama’s Cabinet, on an aspirational message as the grandson of immigrants.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI):Gabbard fires up a certain strain of antiwar progressive. She’ll face tough questions, though, about her apparent friendliness with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and her past comments on LGBTQ rights.
Tom Steyer: The billionaire Democratic donor has decided to enter the arena himself. He first rose to political prominence for his focus on combatting climate change and lately he has been on a crusade to convince congressional Democrats to impeach Trump. Steyer is positioning himself as a (well-funded) outsider running against a host of lifelong politicians.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Bloomberg had toyed with a Democratic presidential run, even though he governed the country’s biggest city as an independent, for a while now. Late in the game, he seems to have decided to finally take a shot, filing for the primary in Alabama ahead of the deadline there. He has a few policy wins that he can tout to Democratic voters, mostly notable on guns, but a centrist billionaire with some policy ideas that are anathema to the progressive base has not been a successful model in 2020 so far.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick: Patrick had sworn off a presidential bid months ago, but he’s reversed course and jumped into the campaign. The ex-gov is a longtime friend and ally of Barack Obama, and he’s trying to position himself as a candidate who can maintain unity within the party and country while still trying to tackle the big problems that have given the more left candidates such lift in the campaign. Whether he’ll succeed is another story: Cory Booker has a similar profile and hasn’t caught on so far, Democratic voters said they were already with the candidates they had before Patrick joined in, and he arguably lacks a signature progressive policy achievement despite eight years governing a liberal state with a Democratic legislature.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO): Bennet is a well-regarded but nationally little-known senator. He tacks toward the center ideologically. The passion that fuels his candidacy is a fervent frustration with the way Washington works now. Bennet believes Americans are not nearly as divided as the parties in Washington and is positioning himself accordingly.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock: Bullock, a two-term Democratic governor in a Trump-friendly state, is campaigning as a Washington outsider who will confront moneyed interests and reform the campaign finance system. He can also claim the successful expansion of Medicaid, with the buy-in of a Republican legislature, to showcase his bipartisan bona fides.
Former Rep. John Delaney: The most notable thing about Delaney is he’s been running for president for over two years, more or less living in Iowa, the first state on the presidential calendar. He was the first choice of just 1 percent of Iowa Democrats in a December 2018 poll.
Former Rep. Joe Sestak: The retired three-star admiral and former Pennsylvania representative in Congress is a late entry to the race, announcing his campaign three days before the first Democratic debates. Sestak is pitching himself heavily on his naval experience — his campaign logo prominently features the moniker “Adm. Joe” — and the global leadership experience he says it provides.
Marianne Williamson: A self-proclaimed “bitch for God” who has been a spiritual adviser to Oprah. Her previous political experience is a failed run for Congress as an independent in 2014.
Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam: The mayor of a Miami suburb, it seems safe to assume Messam has the lowest name recognition of any Democrat in the race. The son of Jamaican immigrants, he’s raised wages for city workers as mayor and confronted the Republican-led state government over gun control.
Who has dropped out of the 2020 presidential campaign?
Quite a few Democrats have already given up the ghost.
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke: The former Texas Congress member is maybe 2020’s biggest wild card. O’Rourke built a historically successful fundraising apparatus during his losing 2018 Senate run against Ted Cruz. He’s young, and he gives a good speech. Obama’s old hands seem to like him. The open question is whether his self-evidenced political talents are matched by policy substance.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: De Blasio, mayor of America’s biggest city and already the unlikely victor of a contentious Democratic primary to get there, touted his progressive achievements in the Big Apple as a model for the nation: enacting universal pre-K, ending stop-and-frisk, and an ambitious local health care program.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY): Gillibrand had evolved over the years from a centrist Democrat in the House to a progressive. She endorsed Medicare-for-all and universal paid family leave; a pillar of her Senate career has been cracking down on sexual assault in the military. Gillibrand was presenting herself as a young mom in tune with the #MeToo era and the Democratic women who powered the party to historic wins in the 2018 midterms.
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper: Hickenlooper is a moderate ex-governor who pitched his ability to work across the aisle. On the issues, he touted his record on gun violence, environmental regulations, and expanding Medicaid. He conveyed an everyman persona, having founded a Denver brewery before he ever ran for public office. He decided to run for the Democratic nomination to challenge GOP Sen. Cory Garder in 2020 instead.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee: Inslee centered his work on environmental issues and the threat of climate change. He has pushed a bill to get his home state off coal energy and all other carbon-producing energy sources by 2045. It hasn’t always been smooth — voters in Washington rejected an Inslee-supported carbon fee in 2015 — but the governor hoped to quickly build a profile by focusing relentlessly on humanity’s direst existential threat. He has opted instead to seek a third term as governor.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA): Another Pelosi skeptic who helped lead the unsuccessful rebellion to stop her from becoming House Speaker again in 2016. Moulton, who represents a district in Massachusetts and is an Iraq War veteran, positioned himself as a moderate in contrast to the socialist energy animating the left and seeking to take over his party.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH): The Ohio congressman is pitching himself as the Democratic answer for Trump Country, arguing he can connect with the blue-collar workers the party has lost in the Midwest. He cited the closure of the Lordstown GM plant in his home state as part of his motivation for running. Ryan has a history of long-shot bids: He challenged Nancy Pelosi for the House Democratic leader post in 2016.
Former Sen. Mike Gravel: The 88-year-old former senator, famed for reading the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record, ran 2020’s oddest campaign. Two teenagers convinced Gravel to launch a protest candidacy targeting the center-left and the forever war of mainstream American foreign policy. He endorsed Gabbard and Sanders after he’d exited the race.
Who else might run for president in the 2020 election?
Well, never say never but the field might finally be set with Bloomberg and Patrick. There were a handful of names we were still watching throughout the summer — former senator, Secretary of State and presidential nominee John Kerry and Georgia state senator StaceyAbrams chief among them — but both have since said they will not run. Hillary Clinton would shake up the race if she decided to join, but she continues to tamp down on the speculation she could run again. People are going to start voting soon. We should have all the candidates we’re going to get.
When do candidates have to decide whether or not to run?
Each state has its own filing deadline for federal candidates. A couple states — Alabama and Arkansas — have already had their deadlines pass. South Dakota, on the other hand, doesn’t close the door on candidates until the end of March.
More realistically, it’s difficult to imagine a candidate being viable if they don’t start competing, at the absolute latest, in California or Texas on Super Tuesday, March 3, when they’ll already have missed the first four primary states. Nine other states vote on Super Tuesday too. California’s filing deadline is December 13 and Texas’s is December 9. We are in the final stretch for any other candidates to get off the sidelines and make a run.
When are the next 2020 Democratic presidential primary election debates?
The Democratic National Committee announced it will hold 12 debates, starting in June 2019 and extending into 2020.
The next Democratic debate is November 20 and will be held in Atlanta, Georgia. It could be a much more intimate affair than the 12-candidate extravaganza at the fourth debate in October. Candidates must secure at least 165,000 individual donors, including 600 individual donors from 20 states. Or they must reach 3 percent in the polls in four Democratic National Committee (DNC) approved surveys, or 5 percent in two DNC approved polls from the four earliest primary and caucus states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
When are the 2020 Democratic presidential primary election and caucus nights?
The votes that matter won’t be cast for another six months. We have months of formal announcements, speeches, policy rollouts, campaign gossip, unpredictable polling, and some debates before any elections happen, when candidates start collecting the delegates they’ll need to claim the nomination.
Early momentum is always critical, especially in a big field with so many candidates trying to prove that they’re viable. With that in mind, the first two months of the primary schedule:
February 3: Iowa caucuses
February 11: New Hampshire primary
February 22: Nevada caucuses
February 29: South Carolina primary
March 3 (“Super Tuesday”): Alabama, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Vermont primaries
March 7: Louisiana primary
March 10: Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio primaries; North Dakota caucuses
March 17: Arizona, Florida, Illinois primaries
There are at least three more months of primaries and caucuses after that. But the candidates will focus their attention and organizing on the earlier states, and we should know a lot more about the field and the strongest candidates once the first sprint is over.
How do you win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination?
The short version is you have to win a majority of the delegates.
Every state has different rules for its primary elections or caucuses in terms of allocating delegates. Candidates win delegates proportional to where they finish in the results, though they generally have to hit a minimum threshold of 15 percent to be awarded any delegates.
In terms of numbers, there will be an estimated 3,768 delegates for the 2020 Democratic National Convention (where the nominee will be formally selected) up for grabs during the primary elections. One candidate needs to win at least 1,885 delegates to be nominated.
You might hear talk of a “brokered” or “contested” convention if no candidate gets the necessary delegates to win on the first ballot. But that hasn’t happened for decades, and it’s way too early to think that will happen in 2020. That doesn’t mean it’s not a possibility, but let’s wait for some votes to come in before we start up that parlor game.
Democrats have made one major change from the 2016 primary on “superdelegates” — elected officials, party leaders, and other prominent Democrats who have votes in addition to the regular delegates awarded by state elections. In the past, superdelegates didn’t have to follow any rules and could back whichever candidate they desire and make up their minds at any point in the process. When most of them endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, it gave her a built-in delegate advantage over Bernie Sanders, though she still won enough votes independent of the superdelegates to secure the nomination.
In a series of reforms, the DNC has stripped superdelegates of a vote on the first ballot. So unless the convention has to move to second or third votes because no candidate has a sufficient number of delegates — something that hasn’t happened since the 1950s — superdelegates won’t matter in 2020. (Arguably, they never did. Many pointed out it was unlikely for superdelegates to use their power to overturn the outcome of the primary system, but it nevertheless created consternation within the party.)
A voter casts his ballot at a polling place at Highland Colony Baptist Church, in Ridgeland, Mississippi, on November 27, 2018. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
When you don’t weight by education, you might massively underrate Trump.
Georgia is far from the reddest state in America, but it’s not the bluest either. Trump won a majority of the vote there in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points — stronger than his performance in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, or Arizona.
The state features not one but two Senate races in 2020, making his apparent unpopularity a huge deal for the future of American politics. It could all but guarantee Democrats a win in the Electoral College and potentially deliver them a majority in the Senate.
Jessica McGowan/Getty ImagesAfter waiting in line for 1.5 hours, Olando Narcisse casts his ballot on Election Day in Atlanta, Georgia on November 8, 2016.
The bad news for optimistic Democrats is that the fine print on the poll contains a sentence that should be a huge red flag to contemporary consumers of political polling: The data are weighted based on race, age and sex to accurately reflect the demographics of the state.
There’s nothing wrong with weighting your sample based on race, age, and sex to match the demographics of the state. That’s standard practice in the industry. The problem is what the poll didn’t weight on — educational attainment. Many state-level polls omitted this factor in 2016, leading them to underestimate Trump’s strength in key swing states. The most responsible pollsters responded to 2016 by making sure to improve their weighting. But many pollsters — especially those doing state-level polling — continue not to weight by education.
This failure to weight not only leads to errors (which could be compensated for by averaging), it leads to systematic bias against Trump and the GOP, meaning everyone who publishes or disseminates unweighted polls ends up contributing to misinformation about the real state of American politics.
Poll weighting, explained
The most basic idea of polling is that you can get a pretty good idea of what a population of several million people thinks by asking a sample of just a few hundred of them.
The trick is that for this to work, you want a random sample of the state’s population. If you sample a few hundred people coming out of an exurban megachurch, you’re going to get a sample that’s quite biased toward Republicans. If you sample a few hundred college students, you’ll get a sample that’s quite biased toward Democrats. Traditional telephone polls avoid this by calling people at random. That would work great if everyone you called picked up the phone and agreed to answer your poll. But, of course, they don’t. And experience has taught pollsters that proclivity to answer polls is not randomly distributed across the population.
Jessica McGowan/Getty ImagesVoters line up to cast their ballots at a polling station set up at Grady High School in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 6, 2018.
Consequently, pollsters “weight” certain respondents more or less heavily in the sample in order to construct a virtual survey pool that matches what they know about the overall demographics of the state.
Typically, that means giving extra weight to younger and non-white respondents, who are harder to reach, and giving reduced weight to older and white ones.
A long-time methodological disagreement among pollsters is whether you should use party identification as an additional demographic weight. The case for doing so is that by matching the partisanship of your sample to what you think you know about the underlying partisanship of the state, you can avoid creating noisy or biased samples. The case against partisan weighting is that the popularity or unpopularity of the incumbent president could, in fact, cause people to change which party they identify with.
Education weighting is a newer issue. Pollsters used to not do it because it didn’t seem very important. These days, however, college graduation has become clearly correlated with both tendency to answer polls and tendency to vote for Democrats.
The double divide on education
In the AJC poll, about 62 percent of respondents have at least a bachelor’s degree, with 26 percent having completed some graduate study.
Back in the real world, Census Bureau statistics show that in the best-educated state (Massachusetts), just 42 percent of the adult population has a college degree. The national average is 31 percent, and in Georgia it’s 30 percent. College graduates turn out to vote at a higher rate than non-graduates, so it’s not totally wild to imagine a Georgia electorate that’s somewhat better-educated than the census data.
But the AJC poll is way off the mark. And it’s not alone.
For somewhat mysterious reasons, a huge gap has opened up in the demographics of who is willing to answer pollsters’ questions with better-educated people much more likely to take surveys. At the same time, the partisan affiliation of white voters has come to be sharply stratified along the lines of educational attainment. These two facts in combination mean that any state poll that does not explicitly weight by education ends up over-counting college graduates and thus over-counting Democrats.
A recent Emerson poll, for example, showed Democrats with a huge lead in Michigan — and also showed Michigan with roughly the educational attainment of Massachusetts.
i would start by noting that they don’t adjust their poll by education, which means that the college educated share of this sample is about the same as Massachusetts IRL
Given that failure to weight by education leads to very predictable problems, it’s unfortunate that so many outlets don’t do it.
One reason may simply be apathy — all else being equal, it’s easier not to change procedures. Another reason is that precisely because non-college people are less likely to answer pollsters, it’s annoying and expensive to get enough of them in your sample to have a reliable survey. Since response rates are falling in general, thus bringing up costs, there’s an understandable reluctance to change methodologies in ways that raise costs even more.
Last but by no means least, the reality is that the people doing this kind of polling have only weak incentives to actually get things right. Unfortunately, bad polling can have a significant impact on the real world.
Good polling matters
National opinion polling, which is available in large quantities from well-known pollsters who do proper weighting, makes it pretty clear that Trump is unpopular nationwide and would likely lose the popular vote were the election held tomorrow.
Both of those things, however, were true of the 2016 campaign, and he became president anyway. So there’s a critical question of how the race looks in the main swing states. Polls that don’t weight by education typically show the pivotal states as mirroring national polling in showing substantial Democratic leads. But in reality, these are states where non-college whites are a larger share of the electorate than you see nationwide. Consequently, properly weighted polls generally show Trump stronger in these states than he is nationwide — exactly the result we saw in 2016.
The question of whether 2020 is likely to be a blowout (as the improperly done polls indicate) or a nail-biter (as the better ones usually show) isn’t necessarily a decisive factor in one’s thinking about the Democratic primary, but it’s definitely relevant. More realistic polls make worrying about electability seem a lot more reasonable than polls that are calling Trump’s political viability in Georgia into doubt.
The plague is still a problem around the world — including in the US.
If you thought it went the way of bloodletting and medicinal leeches, think again. Two people have just come down with the plague. Yes, the plague.
In China, two patients diagnosed with the infectious disease are receiving treatment in a Beijing hospital.Public health officials are working to make sure the disease doesn’t spread to others. But the news has reportedly sparked panic among citizens.
The plague comes in three varieties: Pneumonic plague is an infection of the lungs; septicemic plague is a blood infection; and bubonic plague affects the lymphatic system. That last varietyis the one we know as the Black Death, the epidemic that wracked Europe in the Middle Ages.
Pneumonic plague may be less famous than the bubonic form, but it’s even more deadly. And it’s pneumonic plague that has now been identified in China.
It’s not clear exactly how the two infected people caught it, but they didn’t catch it in Beijing: They came from Inner Mongolia and traveled to the capital seeking treatment, according to Chinese officials. A bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which is carried by wild rodents and the fleas that feed on them, causes all three types of the plague. Pneumonic plague is highly contagious and transmissible between humans — it can be spread when an infected person coughs.
That fact caused alarm among Chinese citizens on Tuesday, when the news broke. One user on the popular site Weibo wrote that the government should release information on how the patients traveled to Beijing — if they used public transport, they may have spread the plague to other passengers. “How many people have they encountered potentially?” wrote the user, per the New York Times. “Only 2 kilometers away from Chaoyang Hospital. I’m shaking and trembling.”
Other users complained that the government should have announced the outbreak sooner (the patients reportedly sought treatment on November 3) and with greater transparency. Meanwhile, Chinese censors told online news aggregators in the country to “block and control” discussion of the plague, the Times reported, adding that China has a history of covering up infectious outbreaks. (The government keeps tight reins on the press, and media censorship could be a wild card in how a disease spreads or doesn’t.)
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, writing on Weibo, told Beijing residents not to panic because the risk of the plague spreading further is “extremely low.” It also said that officials have disinfected any sites that may have been exposed to the bacteria.
Hopefully, there will be no further transmission of the infectious disease in China. But this is an important reminder that the plague, despite common perception, is not a thing of the past. And nor is it limited to China. In recent years, the plague has popped up in countries from Madagascar to the United States. This is a global problem.
And it’s a reminder of the ever-present risk of pandemics — a risk for which experts say we’re really not prepared. In September, experts warned in a major report that the risk of a global pandemic is growing. “There is a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people,” they wrote.
The plague is more of a concern than you might think — even in the US
When you think of the plague, you may think of Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the Bard’s day, the Black Death wiped out a quarter of his town’s population.
And before that outbreak, back in the mid-14th century, the bubonic plague killed an estimated 60 percent of Europe’s population. Sixty percent. It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of such a catastrophe — or the speed with which the highly contagious disease spread over just six years. Here’s a GIF to help you visualize it:
Thankfully, the infectious disease isn’t decimating human populations at such an alarming rate anymore. Although it’s lethal when left untreated, recovery rates are fairly good if it’s treated with antibiotics soon after onset.
But the plague — bubonic as well as pneumonic — continues to affect people from Africa to Asia, from South America to North America. It afflicted 3,248 people and killed 584 around the world between 2010 and 2015, the WHO reported.
In 2014, China saw one man die and 151 people placed in quarantine because of the plague, with the city of Yumen sealed off. And just this year in Mongolia, a couple died from plague, reportedly after eating a marmot, leading to another quarantine.
In 2017, Madagascar suffered a terrible outbreak of plague, with 2,417 cases confirmed, and a death toll of 209.
The plague, then, is still a concern worldwide. It’s something we’d do well to address — along with pandemic preparedness more broadly — before it’s too late.
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Good apologies are difficult. Companies should make them anyway. | Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
According to a professional apologizer.
Thanks to the internet, apologies look, feel, and sound far different from how they used to. They come in formats that seem unimaginable even just a decade ago: a screenshot of a Notes app, a teary-eyed confessional on YouTube, or a long-winded tech company blog post.
In recent years, apologies and professional statements of regret have become more pervasive than ever, especially in the business world. Corporate contrition, from both high-profile and small businesses alike, is not rare inasmuch as it’s a safety blanket for brands mindful of damage control.
Dishing out a public relations-approved apology gives the impression of appearing sorry, while the company (that’s supposedly in the wrong) attempts to regain its handle on the situation by reminding customers of its values and the intent of its actions — often before the apology itself.
For example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (or his public relations team) penned a 900-word statement shortly after the Cambridge Analytica data breach, yet it still took the company multiple tries (after Facebook’s stock dropped) for Zuckerberg to say: “I’m really sorry.”
Or in the case of Pepsi’s advertisement with Kendall Jenner, which received backlash for using protest imagery, the company simply said it “missed the mark” in what it was trying to portray.
In The Apology Impulse, co-author Sean O’Meara, a professional apologizer and public relations professional, argues that the corporate world has ruined the sanctity of the apology by failing to say sorry and over-apologizing. The book, which was published on October 29, examines the most egregious and effective business apologies in recent memory, from United Airlines’ passenger-dragging debacle in 2017 (and its failure to properly apologize) to Johnson & Johnson’s calm handling of a Tylenol recall in 1982.
Here, O’Meara discusses what makes an effective apology, the worst apology archetypes, and how social media has made customers demand more cultural responsibility and sensitivity from businesses — and whether or not that’s reasonable.
You outlined several archetypes in the corporate apology starter pack, like the “faux-pology” (when a company expresses limited fault) or the “passive apology” (using passive voice in a statement). In your opinion, which type is the worst and why?
That’s a tough one because I hate all of them. The worst habit an apologizer can fall into is leading with a qualifying character reference, or the Schrodinger’s apology.
Let’s say there’s been a privacy hack with a company and one of the first things addressed in its corporate statement is, “We take the protection of consumer data very seriously.” As a customer, you know there’s a “but” coming in the apology. It assumes that the people you’re giving the apology to are stupid. If you’re going to apologize, if you fail, you don’t get to speak to your own virtues.
That adds insult to injury. If you’re apologizing, you’re conceding that you failed. If you’re conceding that you’ve failed, it’s just not the time to give yourself a character reference and say, “Hey. We’re great 99 percent of the time. We messed up here.” If the customer is the 1 percent — if you’re that person that’s really unlucky — that’s going to make them feel worse because they’re like, “Okay. I’m the person that suffered from this rare and exceptional failure, as you put it. That gives me no comfort whatsoever.”
In one chapter, you outlined how it took three of the world’s biggest brands — United Airlines, Facebook, and Papa John’s — three tries each to apologize correctly. These apologies were mostly triggered by a financial loss or a drop in stock prices. Do you think most corporate apologies require a financial incentive?
The short answer is yes. A company’s finances and investor confidence really play a part. With a lot of the high-profile apologies in the book, I suspected some companies were evasive because they were trying to avoid litigation. That’s a myth. Some people believe that saying sorry invites litigation because it’s an admission of guilt. It’s been proven not to be true, particularly in studies on the United States’ health care sector.
It actually lowers the chances of litigation if you apologize. It’s kind of like a game of chicken where a company doesn’t want to say sorry because it doesn’t want to get sued, but it also doesn’t want its stock price to keep tanking. Whichever one becomes more severe first — if the stock price keeps going down, executives lean toward saying sorry versus risking a lawsuit. It does get complicated in that scenario.
Does a proper apology necessarily have to include the phrase “I’m sorry” or could action be more effective to consumers than a statement itself?
I used to think no, but I changed my mind when I was writing the book. I used to think you had to say sorry, but how Johnson & Johnson responded to customers getting poisoned through Tylenol proved me wrong here. The CEO came up with a solution, and he went on TV to deliver that message. The company took a huge financial hit, but they definitely saved lives by quickly enacting a solution.
With that level of action — and I’m not expecting every organization to be able to do this — that was as good as saying sorry. Tylenol didn’t technically owe anybody an apology, but they were sorry because of what happened. Instead of putting out a press release or going on an apology tour, they poured all their energy into fixing the problem, innovating and protecting their customers. So brands can deliver contrition without using the s-word.
In the book, you write that apologies are costly. Why is that, and what are the financial effects?
There’s the obvious cost of promoting an apology to make sure that people get the message. That can be anything up to the hundreds of millions of dollars. I think Uber’s apology campaign was the most expensive one we documented at $500 million.
Then there’s the cost of being sorry. If you imagine an organization that has been criticized for, let’s say, a marketing campaign that people didn’t like or found offensive.
If the company apologizes, it has to presumably scrap that campaign and the creative that goes with it. For example, Dove had a campaign with women taking off their sweaters. As the first woman took her sweater off, the next model in the shop appeared. The way it was edited, it appeared like a black model took off her sweater for a white model to appear. The implication that people took from that was Dove implied that using its products will make you whiter.
I don’t think that’s what Dove intended, but that’s how it looked from a certain angle. Dove had to end that campaign and obviously replace it. You can’t just leave a vacuum where you’re not advertising. There’s the cost of replacing the creative or withdrawing a product, and then there is the extra cost to the organization of being vigilant.
One thing organizations don’t realize is once you say sorry, you’re on notice. Consumers are hyper-vigilant to what you do next. All that extra care, all that extra market testing, focus groups, that all goes into the budget of what it costs to be sorry as an organization.
Can brands ever really issue an apology that feels real and human?
It is rare, but it can be done. I think when you see these apologies, which are usually a social media post or use very vague language, a brand will just pop that out on the internet and they’ve apologized. That, to me, isn’t genuine regret. That is public relations.
JetBlue had a great example of a proper apology when there was a massive snowstorm in 2007. There was bad planning and the airline ended up having to cancel hundreds of flights so thousands of customers were affected.
CEO David Neeleman didn’t immediately apologize. He looked at how JetBlue failed and then made a YouTube video. I’m pretty sure it was the first high-profile corporate apology via social media. If you watch it, you’ll notice that David Neeleman, he’s not a natural publicist. He’s very much a businesslike CEO. He’s sitting in his office and he’s talking to camera and it’s not slick, but it’s authentic in the right way.
Brands go for authenticity and they pay millions of dollars to emulate authenticity. This was real authenticity. This was a guy who was not overly sorry. He was explaining what consumers can expect when his company failed again. He didn’t say if we fail again. He acknowledged that he’s running an airline and there are a lot of moving parts. There will be a future where JetBlue has to cancel flights and people are inconvenienced.
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The southern state is the third and final one to vote on its governor this November, and it’s the latest one where the Republican candidate has tied himself closely to the president. Republican challenger Eddie Rispone is taking on incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards, the rare Democratic state executive in the Deep South, and he’s leaning heavily on Trump to do so.
Edwards first won the governor’s seat by staging a major upset in 2015, when he defeated former US Sen. David Vitter by a 55 to 44 percent margin. At the time, his surprising win was the result of a number of factors: Bobby Jindal, the prior Republican governor, was immensely unpopular, Vitter ran a highly negative campaign that alienated Republicans, and Edwards steadily made the case for himself while effectively hammering his opponent on a prostitution scandal.
This time around, the circumstances are slightly different. While Edwards is credited with some major achievements during his first term, including Medicaid expansion and a budget surplus, he’s now going up against both the dominance of Republicans in the state and voters’ commitment to Trump. In the month leading up to the election, Trump — who won Louisiana by 20 points — has paid multiple visits. Edwards will need to rally Democrats, including a strong base of African American voters, along with a contingent of moderate Republicans, in order to hold onto his seat.
Matt Sullivan/Getty ImagesLouisiana Republican candidate for governor, Eddie Rispone speaks alongside President Trump during a “Keep America Great” rally in Monroe, Louisiana on November 6, 2019.
Polling from early October gives Edwards an edge, though more recent surveys show a tight race. The Cook Political Report has moved its prediction of the race from “Lean Democratic” to “Toss Up.”
The final outcome of Saturday’s race has some big implications: It could demonstrate whether Democrats can maintain a foothold in the Deep South, while also indicating how much pull a Trump endorsement still has. Both are in question following the losses of a popular Democrat in Mississippi’s gubernatorial race and the defeat of a Trump-backed Republican incumbent in Kentucky’s.
John Bel Edwards has cast himself as a conservative Democrat, who is anti-abortion and pro-guns
Edwards’s appeal to potential independent and crossover voters is that he’s basically as close to a Republican as a Democrat can be.
He’s known for signing a law banning abortion as early as six weeks, one of the most stringent in the nation, and he’s openly touted his support for gun rights. His own biography is also widely seen as broadening his reach: He’s a US Army veteran who attended West Point, has close family ties to top law enforcement officials, and his Catholic faith is a cornerstone of his candidacy.
“On the social issues, he’s leaving nothing for the Republicans to hit him with,” says Joshua Stockley, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. And although Edwards has obviously not received Trump’s endorsement, he has sought to downplay his disagreements with the president, and was even invited to a White House state dinner last year.
Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty ImagesLouisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and his wife Donna arrive at the White House for a state dinner on April 24, 2018.
While Edwards’s conservative positions have prompted outcry from his base at times, experts in the state don’t see these positions deterring Democratic voters too much, largely because they face a choice between him and someone even more to the right on a range of issues. The governor’s seat is also the party’s only hope for any power over policy as the Republican majority in the state legislature is poised to grow following this year’s elections.
Edwards currently has a solid 52 percent approval rating: He’s helped the state achieve its first budget surplus in years, successfully implemented Medicaid expansion, and raised teacher salaries. Rispone’s campaign, meanwhile, has tried to nationalize the race and reframe Edwards as just another liberal.
“Rispone’s just doing the, ‘He’s a liberal Democrat that loves Pelosi and Obama,’” says Stockley. “He’s throwing out generic Republican cliches that can be used in any election in any state anywhere.”
Rispone, a successful business executive, is known for founding a specialty contracting company, serving as a longtime donor to conservative causes, and spending millions of his own money into his campaign. He’s argued that he is best positioned to advance Republican priorities, like tax cuts, and, of course, that he’s tightly aligned with the president.
“Louisiana cannot take four more years of a liberal Democrat governor raising your taxes, killing your jobs, attacking your industries, and taking money from open borders extremists,” Trump argued at a rally while stumping for Rispone.
Trump’s visits to the state matter quite a bit, says Christie Maloyed, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
“There was not significant outreach by the Edwards campaign during the primary election, whereas for the primary, the Republicans were extremely energized, bringing in Mike Pence, Donald Trump Jr., and Donald Trump himself,” she told Vox, noting that the visits translated to a surge in turnout during the state’s jungle primary, compared to the one in 2015.
The race is the latest test of Trump’s endorsement power and a potential testament to Republican dominance in Louisiana
Because it’s taking place after both the Mississippi and Kentucky races, Louisiana is effectively the third litmus test of Trump’s endorsement in a Republican state. How much a Trump endorsement can affect a race is a key question going into the 2020 election, which will feature dozens of Republicans on the ballot, some of whom will be counting on the president’s assistance in competitive statewide races.
While experts caution that the president’s support isn’t able to save flawed candidates, like Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, who lost his reelection bid after angering various constituencies, a Rispone loss would mean that two of three statewide officials Trump has backed in recent races have failed.
Matt Sullivan/Getty ImagesCommunity members listen as President Trump speaks during a “Keep America Great” rally in Monroe, Louisiana on November 6, 2019.
Although these outcomes can’t entirely be attributed to the president, they certainly wouldn’t be a positive sign for Trump, even if the specific candidacies of Rispone and Bevin weren’t that strong. Additionally, Edward’s reelection could suggest that Democrats shouldn’t cede southern states completely, encouraging the party and its donors to invest more heavily in future races.
“A John Bel win would mean that the Democratic moderate is not dead in the South,” says pollster and political strategist John Couvillon. “You don’t need to write the South off a hundred percent of the time.”
But while an Edwards victory would be significant symbolically and could build momentum for future power shifts, at the present its effect on the day-to-day lives of Louisianans would be limited.
This is because Louisiana, in particular, has seen Republicans grow increasingly more dominant with every election cycle, so much so that members of the party are hoping to establish a supermajority in the state’s House and Senate following this cycle. If they hit this threshold, Republican lawmakers could theoretically overturn potential vetoes were Edwards to stay in office, giving them broad power to dictate policy. And perhaps of greater significance to Democrats in the state, a Republican legislative supermajority would have significant sway in redrawing district lines following the 2020 census.
Much of the state’s shift in favor of Republicans has been due to rural districts moving toward conservatives, with a number of those legislative seats flipping from Democrat to Republican this cycle. A district map redrawn by Republicans could help ensure these shifts are permanent.
The gubernatorial election this week will determine whether Republicans will have to reckon with a Democratic governor as they seek to make these moves.
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Cornelius Reign Allen 