Latest news with #Democratic-voting
Economist
23-05-2025
- Business
- Economist
Trump's first term coincided with a MAGA baby boom. Will his second?
AS AMERICAN ELECTIONS grow ever more polarised, the line between the personal and political has blurred. Research has shown that following presidential elections, the victor's supporters become more innovative and entrepreneurial, and take more risks with their investments. A paper published in 2022 by Gordon Dahl of the University of California, San Diego and co-authors argued that Donald Trump's first presidential victory over Hillary Clinton appeared to affect even one of life's most consequential choices: whether or not to have children. From late 2016 to the end of 2018, fertility fell much less in Republican-voting areas than in Democratic-voting ones. Relative to expectations based on prior trends, the study said, this Trump bump and Clinton collapse shifted 1-2% of American births from blue counties to red ones.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
GOP Rep. John Rose launches run for Tennessee governor
LEBANON, Tenn. (AP) — Republican U.S. Rep. John Rose on Thursday announced his candidacy for Tennessee governor in 2026, putting him on a likely collision course with U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who also appears set on running. Rose is the first major candidate to join the race to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Bill Lee. For weeks, Rose had told various Republican groups across the state he planned to launch a bid. Blackburn hasn't formally launched a campaign yet. Her likely candidacy as a two-time statewide elected official and ally of President Donald Trump has scared off some potential opponents, but not Rose. 'I'm a conservative outsider, Tennessee small business owner and farmer,' Rose told reporters. "And I think that when I can tell the people about my experience and my preparation, hopefully that will make the case, and others can make their case, and we'll let the people of Tennessee decide." Flanked by tractors and supporters outside of an agricultural center, Rose made some specific promises in his launch Thursday. Among them, he said he would facilitate widening interstates and highways, ensure every Tennessean is within a half hour of emergency medical care and hire a teacher for education commissioner. He also pledged support for anti-abortion efforts, gun rights, mental health resources and nuclear power expansion. Rose, who also is a former state agriculture commissioner and attorney, has enough personal wealth to help self-fund his campaign. He is in his fourth term in the House and represents a heavily Republican district spanning 19 counties, including many right-leaning rural areas and a section of Democratic-voting Nashville. Since being elected to Congress in 2019, Rose has touted that he's 'one of the most conservative members.' He's voted against foreign aid to Ukraine, objected to the 2020 election certification and later voted to overturn the election. Both Blackburn and Rose have voiced strong support for Trump in a state that voted for him overwhelmingly the past three presidential elections. Trump endorsed Blackburn in her 2018 and 2024 Senate races, in which she faced little formal opposition from fellow Republicans. Trump had endorsed Rose for Congress as well. In a statement Thursday, Blackburn said she will be the strongest conservative candidate, saying Trump is leading America into a 'Golden Age." 'This is our time to prove what conservative leadership can do as power for education, regulation, health care and benefits return to the states,' Blackburn said. Tennessee has remained a conservative stronghold. Lee defeated a Democratic opponent in 2022 by 32 percentage points, and Trump won Tennessee in 2024 by nearly 30 points. Four others have opened fundraising accounts for potential gubernatorial bids: Republican Cito Pellegra, Democrat Tim Cyr and independents Stephen Cortney Maxwell and Manasa Reddy. Because Blackburn was reelected last year, her Senate seat isn't at risk by running for governor. If Blackburn wins, a Senate seat opens up, and Blackburn as governor would possibly get to appoint the temporary replacement. Rose's congressional seat should be an open contest next year, as well. Rose is the owner and president of Boson Software LLC, an information technology training firm. He previously served as the chairman of the Tennessee State Fair Association. His personal worth is between $24 million to $106 million, according to a 2023 congressional financial disclosure. He briefly went viral last year when one of his sons made silly faces and hand motions on camera while Rose gave a speech decrying Trump's felony conviction in New York. ___ Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville contributed to this report.
Associated Press
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
GOP Rep. John Rose launches run for Tennessee governor
LEBANON, Tenn. (AP) — Republican U.S. Rep. John Rose on Thursday announced his candidacy for Tennessee governor in 2026, putting him on a likely collision course with U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who also appears set on running. Rose is the first major candidate to join the race to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Bill Lee. For weeks, Rose had told various Republican groups across the state he planned to launch a bid. Blackburn hasn't formally launched a campaign yet. Her likely candidacy as a two-time statewide elected official and ally of President Donald Trump has scared off some potential opponents, but not Rose. 'I'm a conservative outsider, Tennessee small business owner and farmer,' Rose told reporters. 'And I think that when I can tell the people about my experience and my preparation, hopefully that will make the case, and others can make their case, and we'll let the people of Tennessee decide.' Flanked by tractors and supporters outside of an agricultural center, Rose made some specific promises in his launch Thursday. Among them, he said he would facilitate widening interstates and highways, ensure every Tennessean is within a half hour of emergency medical care and hire a teacher for education commissioner. He also pledged support for anti-abortion efforts, gun rights, mental health resources and nuclear power expansion. Rose, who also is a former state agriculture commissioner and attorney, has enough personal wealth to help self-fund his campaign. He is in his fourth term in the House and represents a heavily Republican district spanning 19 counties, including many right-leaning rural areas and a section of Democratic-voting Nashville. Since being elected to Congress in 2019, Rose has touted that he's 'one of the most conservative members.' He's voted against foreign aid to Ukraine, objected to the 2020 election certification and later voted to overturn the election. Both Blackburn and Rose have voiced strong support for Trump in a state that voted for him overwhelmingly the past three presidential elections. Trump endorsed Blackburn in her 2018 and 2024 Senate races, in which she faced little formal opposition from fellow Republicans. Trump had endorsed Rose for Congress as well. In a statement Thursday, Blackburn said she will be the strongest conservative candidate, saying Trump is leading America into a 'Golden Age.' 'This is our time to prove what conservative leadership can do as power for education, regulation, health care and benefits return to the states,' Blackburn said. Tennessee has remained a conservative stronghold. Lee defeated a Democratic opponent in 2022 by 32 percentage points, and Trump won Tennessee in 2024 by nearly 30 points. Four others have opened fundraising accounts for potential gubernatorial bids: Republican Cito Pellegra, Democrat Tim Cyr and independents Stephen Cortney Maxwell and Manasa Reddy. Because Blackburn was reelected last year, her Senate seat isn't at risk by running for governor. If Blackburn wins, a Senate seat opens up, and Blackburn as governor would possibly get to appoint the temporary replacement. Rose's congressional seat should be an open contest next year, as well. Rose is the owner and president of Boson Software LLC, an information technology training firm. He previously served as the chairman of the Tennessee State Fair Association. His personal worth is between $24 million to $106 million, according to a 2023 congressional financial disclosure.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump Officials Warn 60 Colleges of Possible Antisemitism Penalties
The Trump administration warned 60 universities on Monday that they could face penalties from pending investigations into antisemitism on college campuses, a threat sharpened in recent days by its cancellation of funding to Columbia University and the arrest of a protest leader there. The list of five dozen schools included colleges from both Republican- and Democratic-voting states, elite Ivy League schools such as Brown and Yale, state schools including Arizona State University and the University of Tennessee, and smaller institutions, like Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., which has about 2,000 students. President Trump seized on accusations of antisemitism as a cudgel against Democrats during his presidential campaign and has continued to prioritize the issue from the White House. Mr. Trump's push comes as college campuses are embroiled in debates over what, precisely, constitutes antisemitism and whether that definition should include protests against Israel — even as many of the protesters themselves are Jewish. Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to strip funding from schools that allow 'illegal protests,' but did not elaborate on what he meant by that phrase. His administration has also canceled $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University for what it said was 'inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.' The Trump administration has not said whether that decision was based on a particular finding from any of the three investigations into religious discrimination that were opened during the last 14 months of the Biden administration. Instead, Mr. Trump's new antisemitism task force notified Columbia on March 3 about a 'comprehensive review' of the school's federal contracts and grants. The administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from the school four days later. The administration also invoked an obscure legal statute to arrest and try to deport a recent Columbia graduate who led protests there, though a federal judge in Manhattan ordered him not to be removed from the United States for now. During a confirmation hearing last month for Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump's education secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the Republican chairman of the Senate Education Committee, pressed Ms. McMahon about how she would direct the department to address its 'backlog' of antisemitism investigations. At the time, Ms. McMahon told Mr. Cassidy that she needed to learn more about the issue. On Friday, four days after her confirmation, the department announced that it would prioritize the resolution of antisemitism investigations. According to department records, there were active investigations into religious discrimination at 40 of the 60 college campuses when Mr. Trump assumed office. At the time, nearly all of those cases were less than 14 months old. An online database of existing federal investigations into colleges and universities has not been updated since Mr. Trump took office in January, and an Education Department spokesman said he was unable to provide information beyond the agency's news release. Ms. McMahon said in a statement on Monday that federal funding was a privilege for colleges and contingent on 'scrupulous adherence' to anti-discrimination laws. 'The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite U.S. campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,' Ms. McMahon said.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
DOGE protesters to Democrats: 'Do something!'
Hundreds of protesters crowded below the Department of Labor's steps on Wednesday, summoned by Democrats, the AFL-CIO and alerts they'd seen online. 'It's on Constitution,' said a volunteer in a purple ACLU vest, redirecting a man who was carrying his 'THIS IS A COUP' sign in the wrong direction. By 3:30 p.m., the sidewalk below the stairs was full. From there, the speakers — from Congress, from labor, from the agencies being hollowed out — were barely audible. 'They don't want anyone who's not a white man to have a fair chance to succeed in this world,' said Emily Martin, the chief program officer at the Women's Law Center. 'What's the plan?' shouted one protester through a green knit balaclava. 'This is a government, right now by the billionaires, for the billionaires, and we will not allow it to stand!' declared Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. 'Do your job!' shouted another protester, 20 feet from Markey's megaphone. 'Go back to work!' Direct actions against the new Trump administration, in Washington and Democratic-voting state capitals, were smaller than the first protests against his first term. They impeded the work of DOGE only once: A 'kickoff meeting' between Elon Musk and DOL employees at the Frances Perkins Building was moved from in-person to virtual. 'Obviously, the speed is surprising,' AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler told Semafor. 'The blatant disregard for the norms that they're trampling on, things that could potentially be illegal — it's sort of like, ask for forgiveness instead of permission.' The rally broke up at 4:30 p.m., with no sign of Musk. Timothy Snyder's book 'On Tyranny,' published weeks into the first Trump administration, was left behind on the platform where organizers had placed their amplifiers. The speed and range of DOGE actions, and the gusher of leaks from affected federal workers, have fueled a multi-level resistance — and angst about whether any of it will work. There is little Democrats can do to slow down Republican legislation on the Hill, and less they can do to exercise oversight if the GOP doesn't agree with them. They learned that lesson again on Wednesday, when members of the House Oversight Committee bungled a surprise vote to subpoena Musk over the details of his effort to restructure government agencies with semi-anonymous employees. (The vote was not alerted on a group text used by committee Democrats, and not all of them made it back in time.) At the moment, congressional Democrats are playing a supplementary role in an anti-Trump resistence. They are reacting to the reporting on DOGE's work and showing up at protests; they are cheering on lawsuits filed by attorneys general and the constellation of liberal groups that plotted out a second Trump resistance after the election. On Monday, when Democrats gathered outside USAID's headquarters in solidarity with suspended workers, they were cheered on by a partially-masked crowd as they marched into the building, then were told to leave. By Wednesday, at rallies outside the Capitol and the DOL, the cheers were mixed with interruptions and boos — especially when they mentioned the lawsuits, even though several have already halted some early Trump orders. 'The Democrats are just letting Donald Trump completely control what everyone's talking about,' said Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who launched a challenge to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week. He did not talk to Ocasio-Cortez before announcing his campaign, he said, and Ocasio-Cortez is not taking a position in the race. 'They're just on their back foot playing defense,' Chakrabarti argued. 'Instead, look at what the Republicans did with something like Hunter Biden's laptop or Hillary Clinton's emails — both complete non-issues that they turned into issues. The Democrats have the advantage of having real stuff to talk about – a billionaire, Elon Musk, going in and leaking the information of every CIA employee in an email to the White House, canceling Head Start programs around the country, collecting people's social security numbers without their consent.' To be fair, Democrats have been running around screaming about the potential risk to CIA operations from DOGE employees's access to, and use of, classified information. And every out-of-power party irritates its activist base when it can't dramatically impede the work of a new administration. Republicans were initially slow to embrace the Tea Party movement organized by libertarian groups and conservative activists in 2009; Democrats were furious that key senators, and even party leaders, provided key support for the early Bush agenda in 2001. The two basic problems for the congressional opposition are that the real power to slow Musk down resides in the courts, and that the atomized media environment makes it hard for even a news junkie to follow what they're doing. At one point at Wednesday's Labor rally, a union organizer pointed across the block to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, informing protesters that all their complaints were being filed there. But this didn't mollify protesters, a mix of federal employees and local liberals who supported the cause, from demanding that the Democrats walk in the other direction, to the Capitol, and do… something. Musk's emergence as a high-powered Trump Inc. CEO is popular with Republicans. They're very comfortable defending the work of young programmers (young, like the Founding Fathers) and an 'unelected' billionaire disrupter (they've been saying 'unelected bureaucrat' before these protesters were born) over the output of senior federal employees. And they're having fun with the sound and images of Social Security-aged Democrats doing Mario Savio impressions outside brutalist federal buildings. What Democrats can't say — and probably shouldn't, because it sounds ghoulish — is that the public might not care about this unless something terrible happens, something that wouldn't if the workers were inside the buildings, and not holding signs and bullhorns outside. In his Substack, Ken Klippenstein compared the Democrats' legal fight against DOGE to the investigations of Russian influence in the 2016 election – i.e., a political dead end. 'Instead of making a plainspoken case to the public about how DOGE could negatively affect their daily lives, Democratic leaders conducted astroturfed 'demonstrations' in front of USAID, Treasury and other government shrines,' he wrote. 'They adopted the conspiratorial tone of the MAGA opposition to the Democrats that they have been so contemptuous of in the past.' The Trump White House and House GOP leadership has dusted off an old playbook, highlighting the most intense rhetoric from the protests and suggesting that Democrats want a violent insurrection. 'Congresswoman LaMonica McIver says, 'We are at war,'' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said from the Brady Room on Wednesday. 'Ilhan Omar says, 'We might actually see somebody get killed.' And Chris Van Hollen says, 'We have to fight this in the Congress. We have to fight this in the streets.' So what now? And may I just point out, if you heard that type of violent, enticing rhetoric from our side of the aisle, from Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, I think there would be a lot more outrage in this room today.' Omar did not suggest that someone would be killed in anti-DOGE protests. In an MSNBC interview, she worried that 'an American who works for the American government' could be killed abroad because a USAID app used in emergencies was shut down. In Pittsburgh's WESA, Oliver Morrison an anti-DOGE rally in Pittsburgh where protesters vented their frustration with Sen. John Fetterman. 'Scores of demonstrators were chanting 'Fetterman! Fetterman! Do your job!''
