Back to the Battleground: Examining four crucial states in 2020

The four states pivotal to electing Donald Trump occupy special ground on America's electoral map, right on the fault line where the political and economic priorities of the East meet the concerns and sensibilities of the nation's old industrial core. Between the Democratic Party and the voters of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin there was a failure of understanding in 2016, and Trump emerged as the answer. Will that history repeat in 2020? The Globe dispatched reporters all over this varied, fascinating, and critical turf to seek the stories of people and communities and explore what may have changed for them since the last election.

Read here.

In DACA ruling, Sonia Sotomayor shows she’s ‘a voice of one’ on systemic racism on the most conservative Supreme Court in decades

WASHINGTON ― Along with the Supreme Court’s majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a widely celebrated ruling this month that temporarily kept in place an Obama-era program shielding hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation. But in her own short and piercing partially concurring opinion, she went further than any of her colleagues.

Sotomayor declared the court erred by rejecting claims that anti-Mexican and anti-Latino racial hostility was at the root of President Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative.

“I would not so readily dismiss the allegation that an executive decision disproportionately harms the same racial group that the President branded as less desirable mere months earlier,” she wrote, citing Trump’s own statements likening Mexican immigrants to “‘people that have lots of problems,’ ‘the bad ones,’ and ‘criminals, drug dealers, [and] rapists.’”

Trump rode to the White House on an overtly anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim platform. His two picks for the Supreme Court — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have made it the most conservative in more than 75 years and a poor venue to challenge systematic racial bias, legal experts said. But Sotomayor, a liberal who is the first and only Hispanic justice, has emerged as a sharp, steady and often lonely critic of administration policies she sees as clearly motivated by racial and ethnic discrimination — and of her colleagues’ willingness to look the other way.

Read here.

Kamala Harris rises to a top Democratic VP contender despite long concerns about her criminal justice past

WASHINGTON — As protests continued after the killing of George Floyd, community organizers in a recent virtual town hall pressed California Senator Kamala Harris on what should be done about racist cops and whether Congress would be “a wet blanket” on the hopes of young activists clamoring for big change.

In a warm but direct tone, the moderators also hit on perhaps the most significant concern regarding Harris as a top potential running mate for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden: How can people trust you to change the criminal justice system when, as California’s attorney general for six years, you were part of that system?

For Harris, the question wasn’t new. She’s faced similar probing in recent years, first as a Senate candidate in 2016, then during her presidential run last year. Both campaigns came after earlier waves of Black Lives Matter demonstrations opened the way for more critical examination of the nation’s laws on crime, justice, and punishment.

Now, after Floyd died while begging for breath as a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes, Democratic voters are grappling with their own question: With America at a tipping point over police brutality and institutional racism, will voters see Harris’s law enforcement past as an asset or a liability?

Read here.

In a major election-year ruling, Supreme Court blocks Trump’s move to end DACA — for now

WASHINGTON — In a blow to President Trump, the Supreme Court on Thursday found administration officials unlawfully ended a federal initiative that provides temporary legal status for immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children — a decision that will protect, for now, more than 640,000 students and workers from deportation.

In a 74-page ruling written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the justices found the move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which President Obama created more than eight years ago through an executive order, was “arbitrary and capricious.” The court allowed DACA to temporarily remain in place, finding that Department of Homeland Security officials did not properly explain their rationale for its termination when the department decided to unwind the initiative in September 2017.

Read here.

‘It means open season:’ Under Trump, the Justice Department has largely stopped investigating police departments for systemic abuses

WASHINGTON — In Chicago, the investigators in 2017 said police officers shot at moving vehicles with no justification, and endangered young people by bringing them to rival gang territory and leaving them there.

In Seattle, they wrote in 2011, two police officers tasered and beat a mentally ill man in the middle of a crisis, leaving him with a brain injury.

And in Baltimore, where the investigators in 2016 found a full 91 percent of people arrested for trespassing or failure to obey were Black, they said officers punched and pepper-sprayed a juvenile after they accused him and his sister of loitering; they were standing in front of their own home.

In each case the investigators involved were from the US Department of Justice, and in all three cities they determined the local police department had systematically deprived citizens of their constitutional rights — findings that set the stage for those cities to enter into court-enforced reform plans, known as consent decrees.

For 20 years, investigations like those, and the consent decrees that followed, were key to federal efforts to bring more accountability to policing in the United States, especially during the Obama administration. But as the nation reckons again with racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is all but out of the business of systemic police reform.

Read here.

Washington takes on the look of a war zone in Trump’s show of force against protesters

WASHINGTON — Largely peaceful protesters have gathered near the White House the past few days to sing hymns, chant “Black lives matter,” and take a knee in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. But after outbreaks of violence over the weekend, the downtown location of the demonstrations increasingly has looked like a war zone.

Black fencing was erected around Lafayette Park to keep protesters from getting too close. Nearby roads have been blocked with military vehicles. Stone-faced officers in bulletproof vests and long body shields — some in fatigues, others in ominous dark, unmarked uniforms — have formed intimidating barriers. And helicopters have patrolled over mostly deserted streets with boarded-up storefronts.

Donald Trump won the election espousing old notions of law and order, often delivered with a clenched fist, and a rallying promise to build a wall along the southern border. Since taking office, he has embraced the trappings of authority, touting his relationship with police and uniformed sheriffs, summoning military vehicles and jets for a Fourth of July extravaganza, and expressing his admiration of dictators and strongmen.

Now, as the nation convulses with anger over racism and police brutality, he has put on a show of force in Washington to demonstrate the type of response to protests he’d like to see in other cities should they fail to quell the civil unrest.

But how much of it is show in a presidential election year? And how much could actually translate into use of force?

Read here.

Joe Biden already was under pressure to pick a Black woman running mate. The outrage over George Floyd’s death adds to it

WASHINGTON — Influential Black political organizers and activists are ramping up pressure on presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden to select a Black woman as his vice presidential running mate after days of national unrest over police brutality and the killing of George Floyd.

“We are past this just being about a VP pick,” said LaTosha Brown, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter Fund, calling Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis “a turning point for the presidential election.” "We need a unifying voice, a voice who will have appeal across the political spectrum and who will be able to speak to the pain and anger of Black America right now.”

Biden’s selection was always going to be consequential. Now it’s even more so.

The vetting process has been taking place in the midst of a pandemic that has ravaged Black, Latino, and Asian Pacific communities, and many believe Biden’s choice will be crucial to energizing key portions of the electorate that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton failed to excite in 2016. But the latest crisis over racism and police brutality has upped the stakes.

Read here.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Trump focuses his ire more on the protesters than the crime

As anger and violence erupted in US cities over the weekend in outrage over the death of George Floyd, President Trump and the Justice Department focused their ire more on the protesters — with plenty of allegations about thugs and looters and the radical left — than on the core issue of the protests: police brutality.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, whose city is one of many to be hit with demonstrations, said Sunday that Trump’s comments were “making it worse.”

“We are beyond a tipping point in this country. And his rhetoric only inflames that. And he should just sometimes stop talking," she said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

The federal response has been met with condemnation and rebuke from criminal justice groups and civil rights leaders, Democratic lawmakers, and some law enforcement officials, who called the protests the culmination of a decades-long cycle of racism and police brutality against Black people and years of failed reforms under Republican and Democratic presidents.

But they said perhaps no other administration in modern US history has done more to curtail investigations and efforts meant to curb corrupt police practices, militarize law enforcement agencies, and stoke racial tensions than the Trump administration.

“We don’t need condolences, we need justice,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund. “And right now, you have a Department of Justice who believes in everything but justice."

Read here.

As the Supreme Court weighs their fate, thousands of DACA recipients have become their families’ sole providers because of coronavirus

WASHINGTON — Luz Chavez has marched to the Capitol building, occupied senators’ offices, and rallied outside the Supreme Court in a desperate bid to prevent the federal government from snatching her life from under her.

The coronavirus outbreak has only made her effort more urgent.

A junior at Trinity Washington University and a political organizer, Chavez, 22, is one of more than 640,000 people who have been in limbo since the Trump administration ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a temporary protective status for immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.

Since November, Chavez has been waiting for the Supreme Court to decide the fate of the initiative and thus her own, a ruling that could come any time in June. But nothing could have prepared her for this second crisis, which has raised the stakes even higher on that decision because now her family is dependent more than ever on the money she brings into the household.

Read here.

Twitter helped make Trump president. Now they’re at war

WASHINGTON — President Trump has all but admitted he wouldn’t be in the White House without Twitter. But as his battle with the company escalated Friday, the question is whether he can stay there without his preferred social media platform, if the dispute comes to that.

Trump is so far showing no signs of leaving Twitter, which he’s boasted in the past is like owning his own newspaper. He’d rather fight than switch. But Twitter this week pushed back on Trump’s online practices, for the first time adding a fact-check to misleading tweets about mail-in voting. And early Friday morning, the platform hid a Trump tweet that it said incited violence by warning looters in Minneapolis they would be shot.
With the presidential election only months away, and his rallies deemed a public health threat in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, Twitter’s new measures are not only a soft blow to his communication strategy, they also are a jab at his ego, experts said.

"This is something that is as important to him as hamburgers and french fries,” Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, said of the president’s relationship to his Twitter account. “He really, really loves it.”

Read here.

‘We are not a virus, we are human beings.’ Trump’s China bashing could alienate Asian-American voters

WASHINGTON — In Chinatowns from Boston to San Francisco, restaurants and markets saw their business dwindle last winter well before any coronavirus cases had surfaced in the United States because of false claims that Asians spread the virus. Then, as the pandemic struck the nation, the dirty looks, insults, and innuendos gave way to assaults and beatings.

For Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, the outbreak has another dimension that can’t be stopped by social distancing and personal protective equipment.

“We are not a virus,” said Vanna Howard, a candidate for Massachusetts state representative and a member of the state Asian American Commission. “We are human beings.”

Now, as President Trump and Republicans blame China for the coronavirus outbreak, Asian-American leaders and political groups are scaling up efforts to push back against a rising tide of anti-Chinese sentiment they said hurts all people of Asian-Pacific descent.

They’re also urging presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden not to do his own pummeling of China in responding to political attacks that he has been soft on the country. That means he will have to tread carefully to avoid alienating Asian-American voters, a fast-growing slice of the electorate that increasingly leans Democratic and could be pushed further left by Trump’s China bashing.

Read here.

How memes, text chains, and online conspiracies have fueled coronavirus protesters and discord

WASHINGTON — The footage in the WhatsApp text chain message was real: a local Boston TV news report on the January arrest of Harvard professor Charles Lieber, a chemist charged with lying to federal authorities about receiving funding from Wuhan University of Technology in China.

The text that accompanied it was not: “The US has found the man responsible for fabricating and selling the coronavirus to China,” it read in Spanish.

In fact, authorities have found no such connection between Lieber and the virus.

To the alarm of disinformation experts, the pandemic is creating the conditions for conspiracy theorists and foreign agents, seasoned political strategists and amateur crusaders alike to sow confusion about the virus, downplay its severity, and instigate discord over the response to the outbreak.

In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump supporters, Republican operatives, and Russian actors harnessed the power of Internet content to disseminate contagious messages and influence political narratives, not all rooted in truth.

Only this time, the online manipulation campaigns aren’t just about damaging civil discourse or a campaign, researchers said. They could be deadly.

“We are not talking #pizzagate,” said John Voiklis with Knology, a social science think tank, pointing to a debunked conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 election and falsely linked prominent Democrats with human trafficking at a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. “We are talking about a real disease that could sicken you and your relatives.”

Read here.

Live from his basement, Joe Biden tries to win over donors in the middle of a pandemic

WASHINGTON – During a virtual fund-raiser in late March, as the coronavirus pandemic forced presidential campaigns to contend with a strange new digital-only existence, a donor worried about Joe Biden’s prospects.

“What I’m concerned about is that we see Donald Trump every day with this crisis giving his press report,” the caller said. “How do we get more of you and less of him on our airwaves?”

Speaking from his home in Wilmington, Del., the former vice president pointed to his new high-speed Internet connection and the basement recreation room transformed into a television studio. Beginning the next day, Biden assured the donors, he was “going to speak to these issues.”

And so he has, although how many people are paying attention is still a major question for the presumptive Democratic nominee.

A politician known for backslapping and handshaking retail politics has been learning to connect with voters — and just as importantly raise money — in virtual spaces at a time when businesses are shuttering, the ranks of the unemployed are surging, and families are bracing for an uncertain future.

Read here.

The coronavirus outbreak has helped Trump get the immigration crackdown he’s long pursued — and provided him with a new foil

WASHINGTON – Since the coronavirus mushroomed into a global health crisis this winter, President Trump has used the aggressive practices that public health experts have recommended to combat the pandemic to advance some of the most stringent immigration actions at the nation’s southern border since he took office.

Federal officials have implemented the tightest border controls in decades, instantly deporting or turning away refugees, asylum seekers, and young migrants attempting to cross into the United States without parents or guardians. At the same time, the administration has moved so slowly to release people from detention centers and shutdown immigration courts, it has sparked legal challenges from immigrant rights groups that argue the centers and courts have become infection hot spots.

In effect, the pandemic has allowed Trump, using his authority to respond to a national emergency, to enact the type of strict immigration crackdown he had been unable to put in place because of opposition from Congress and the courts. The outbreak also could allow Trump to make China a new focus for his anti-immigrant message in an election year, adding to the fears he has stoked about Latinos at the southern border.

Read here.

Coronavirus exposed the lack of Internet access. Now some in Congress want to close that digital divide

WASHINGTON — Gina Garro didn’t even get to tell her students goodbye.

Like many schools rushing to prevent the spread of coronavirus, Garfield Elementary in Revere abruptly shut its doors late one afternoon, with little plan for how teachers would continue their lessons online. As two weeks turned into three, Garro, who co-teaches special education classes, attempted to video chat with her kindergartners and first-graders. But she worried not all of their parents had computers or knew how to use the Internet.

She was right. Out of her 24 students, only eight to 10 have ever logged on.

“The fear is that those kids are moving along, have the support to move along, and those kids who we can’t really reach are going to fall further behind,” she said.

Read here.

Coronavirus consumes Trump’s presidency — and Biden’s plan to take him on this spring

WASHINGTON — At a campaign rally the night before Super Tuesday in early March, President Trump had plenty to brag about.

“Jobs are booming in our country, incomes are soaring, poverty has plummeted, confidence is surging,” Trump said, ticking off the key bullet points in his argument for reelection before summarily dismissing the threat that the coronavirus could pose to the United States. “We know what we’re doing,” Trump declared.

Former vice president Joe Biden was having a good night, too. Some of his top former rivals had just endorsed him and turbocharged his campaign toward a slew of primary victories that made him the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

But one month later, the country has turned upside down. The coronavirus outbreak has killed thousands of people and the attempt to slow its ravages has ground the economy to a standstill, throwing millions of Americans out of work; nearly all the stock market and employment gains of the Trump era have been erased, as if overnight.

It has also upended the battle for the White House to a degree with little precedent, confronting Trump with a life-or-death test of his governance while Biden, his likely opponent, is relegated to the sidelines.

The election is now likely to turn on Trump’s handling of the crisis, according to political strategists, which means that he has the spotlight to himself. But he could also, if he stumbles, be his own biggest opponent as he swaps raucous campaign rallies for a series of increasingly somber daily briefings in which the president, as is his pattern, often struggles to get the facts right.

“Crises are make-or-break moments for elected officials,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “How they’ve handled the crisis has overshadowed almost everything they’ve done.”

Read here.

Joe Biden has come the closest to reassembling the Obama coalition. He still has work to do

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama launched his long-shot presidential bid in 2007 with a rallying pledge to build “a more hopeful America,” then pulled off an historic victory by expanding the Democratic base with large numbers of young people, white voters from the North, and minorities.

It was a new road map for success for the party and in 2020, all the top candidates in the Democratic race tried to follow it. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, has come closest to reassembling that uncommon coalition, even though his campaign hasn’t had the money to pull together the organization most assumed was necessary to do it.

Boosted largely by overwhelming support from one key component of the coalition — Black voters — Biden in recent weeks pulled off a stunning turnaround from disappointing candidate to surging front-runner. But veteran political operatives warn he has much more to do, particularly in bringing in young and Latino voters, if he wants to follow the Obama road map, not just to the nomination but to the Oval Office.

“Biden has a lot of work ahead,” said Michael Ceraso, who worked on campaigns for Obama and for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016. “Obama had a way of breaking ceilings because of the Obama machine way of organizing and because of how Obama inspired people.”

Read here.

Amid coronavirus fears, the presidential campaigns of three septuagenarian candidates go digital

When historians sift through the strangest Internet moments of the coronavirus pandemic, there will be images of professional wrestlers taunting each other in empty arenas, self-recorded videos of celebrities warning people to stay home — and Joe Biden’s “Illinois Virtual Town Hall.”

Filmed from his home state of Delaware, Biden appears in front of American and Illinois flags, pacing as he usually does before a room full of people. Except in this video, he is alone and holding a black cellphone to his mouth. Some scenes are garbled; in others he walks off screen.

“Am I on camera?” he asks once before later concluding, “I am sorry this has been such a disjointed effort here because of the connections.”

The coronavirus outbreak has brought the 2020 presidential campaign nearly to a halt, forcing Biden, 77, and the other two septuagenarians left in the race — Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, 78, and President Trump, 73 — to go digital as they avoid the large gatherings that public health officials warn will spread the virus and could endanger the candidates’ own health.

Read here.

‘We’ve come back home’: Riding a wave, Joe Biden is on an upsurge after recent wins

ST. LOUIS — Sun glinting off his aviator shades and a pearly white smile beaming, former vice president Joe Biden was high on his comeback as he wound his way to the stage at a downtown plaza where supporters cheered under the iconic Gateway Arch.

“What a difference a week makes,” he told the boisterous crowd of more than 1,500 people on Saturday. “This time last week, I was in South Carolina. They hadn’t finished voting and the press and the pundits had declared Biden’s campaign is dead. But South Carolina had something to say about that.”

Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are in a neck-and-neck, two-man contest for the Democratic presidential nomination heading into another big election Tuesday this week, even as Biden has taken the lead in national polls. But Biden’s slew of Super Tuesday victories last week after his big South Carolina win has rejuvenated him and his supporters, allowing him to expand his advertising and ambition as he shifts his message. Now Biden is billing himself as the unlikely underdog, as he attempts to strike at the core of Sanders’ “electability” pitch.

Read here.

Women react with anger, dismay to Warren’s departure

WASHINGTON — It was a “pinky promise” that Senator Elizabeth Warren would make with little girls in her “selfie” line: “I’m running for president because that’s what girls do,” she would say, squatting down and locking fingers so they remembered it.

As Warren stood outside her Cambridge home Thursday to announce she was dropping out of the 2020 race, her thoughts turned to those moments when asked about having only two white men — former vice president Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders — left as the main Democratic candidates.

“One of the hardest parts of this is all those pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years,” she said, her voice catching a bit. “That’s going to be hard.”

It’s not just those little girls who will have to wait.

For women across the country who hoped to see Warren — or any qualified woman — become the first female president, the news of her departure from the race was yet another disappointment mixed with heartache, and anger. The Democratic nomination process started with six diverse female candidates, including Warren and three other senators, after the 2018 congressional midterm elections saw women and people of color make historic gains.

But now, only one woman remains: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who has earned just two delegates and never broke into the top tier of contenders.

Read here.