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Are Democrats Playing a Budget ‘Shell Game’ with Biden’s $1.75 Trillion Spending Plan?

As Democrats in the House of Representatives struggled Friday to schedule votes for two pieces of legislation vital to President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, there were complaints from members of both parties about the decision to move forward before lawmakers had an official budget “score” for the larger of the two bills.

Republicans staged a press conference Friday morning on the grounds of the Capitol, calling on Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to postpone a planned vote on the president’s Build Back Better package of climate and social services spending until the budget score, which is prepared by the Congressional Budget Office, is released.

Moderate Democratic members of the House also groused about the lack of a budget score. Meanwhile, in the Senate, which will have to sign off on the Build Back Better legislation if it is to become law, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin accused Pelosi and her leadership team of playing a “shell game” to disguise the bill’s effects on the federal budget.

Manchin contended Monday that “the real cost” of the $1.75 trillion bill would be nearly twice that amount if key elements of the package were extended or made permanent. Without knowing how this would “impact our debt and our economy and our country,” Manchin said he wouldn’t support it.

Both the White House and Democratic leaders in the House insist that the legislation they have put forward is fully paid for. By that, they mean that all new spending in the bill is offset, either by new revenue sources or decreased spending in other areas.

What is a budget ‘score’?

A common problem in political battles in Washington is that the two sides frequently talk past each other, using words and phrases that one party interprets as meaning something completely different than the other.

When it comes to how proposed legislation is expected to affect the federal budget, however, there is a neutral arbiter whose decisions both parties, sometimes grudgingly, respect.

The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, is an agency created in the 1970s to provide lawmakers with nonpartisan analysis of the expected economic effects of proposed legislation. When lawmakers ask the CBO to provide that analysis of a specific bill, the product the agency delivers is known as the legislation’s budget score.

“The CBO is the neutral gatekeeper,” said William Gale, a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and a former senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

“Especially in the politically charged environment we have, we need some organization to be able to put out numbers that the two sides can agree are legitimate,” he said. “If the numbers that two sides are using are completely different, then you can’t even really have a discussion about it. CBO, through many hard-won battles and careful work, has earned and I think deserves that role.”

Hard-won credibility

The CBO has the reputation of being something of a thorn in the side of the White House. The agency’s director is a presidential appointee, but the tradition of independence within the agency is typically adopted by the director, which frequently leads to intraparty strife.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who ran CBO for nearly three years during the first term of President George W. Bush, came under frequent fire from his own party after the agency under his leadership continued to present relentlessly honest assessments of the true effects of proposed tax cuts and ideas like a partial privatization of the Social Security system.

CBO directors usually “cause the most trouble for their own parties,” Holtz-Eakin told VOA.

“When I was appointed CBO director, the Republicans, of course, said good things about nonpartisanship … but they really wanted me to give them a break every now and then. And if you don’t, they get mad. So, every director, his own party is mad at him,” he said.

Build Back Better’s cost

None of this is to say that Congress is operating completely in the dark in the absence of CBO scores. The bill that is currently before the House has been reviewed by both the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), another arm of Congress, and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Both JCT and OMB have reported that, by and large, the Democrats’ claim that the spending in the bill is offset is accurate. However, because the elements of the bill keep changing, it is difficult to say for certain whether the latest version lives up to lawmakers’ claims.

The bill that was originally supposed to cost $3.5 trillion has been trimmed to $1.75 trillion at last count. But critics say that lower number doesn’t really reflect a 50% drop in spending.

Temporary programs, or permanent? 

Some longtime observers of congressional budget fights believe that objections from fiscal hawks like Manchin arise from the early termination of many programs that the Democrats plainly mean to make permanent.

In that case, the “shell game” Manchin is referring to involves strategies like reducing the overall cost of the bill by making a popular new refundable child tax credit expire after only one year, even though everyone involved knows that congressional Democrats plan to reintroduce the tax credit after it expires.

Moves like that have allowed Democrats to claim to Manchin that the latest version of the bill cuts spending in half. “But that’s not an apples to apples comparison,” said G. William Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.

“So the question then becomes, ‘Well, wait a minute, if it was really 10 years, what would it really cost?’ ” said Hoaglund.

As written, Hoagland said, he has little doubt that the bill has most of its spending offset, as Democrats claim. But that doesn’t provide the full picture — and that’s where the CBO might come in.

“All I can say is that I think that’s why you need an independent group of people who have no party affiliation, to be able to look at this and analyze it as separate and apart from everything else that’s going on,” Hoagland said.
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US Democrats Pass $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill, Ending Daylong Standoff

After a daylong standoff, Democrats set aside divisions between progressives and centrists to pass a $1 trillion package of highway, broadband and other infrastructure improvement, sending it on to President Joe Biden to sign into law.

The 228-206 vote late Friday is a substantial triumph for Biden’s Democrats, who have bickered for months over the ambitious spending bills that make up the bulk of his domestic agenda.

Biden’s administration will now oversee the biggest upgrade of America’s roads, railways and other transportation infrastructure in a generation, which he has promised will create jobs and boost U.S. competitiveness.

Democrats still have much work to do on the second pillar of Biden’s domestic program: a sweeping expansion of the social safety net and programs to fight climate change. At a price tag of $1.75 trillion, that package would be the biggest expansion of the U.S. safety net since the 1960s, but the party has struggled to unite behind it.

Democratic leaders had hoped to pass both bills out of the House on Friday, but postponed action after centrists demanded a nonpartisan accounting of its costs – a process that could take weeks.

After hours of closed-door meetings, a group of centrists promised to vote for the bill by Nov. 20 – as long as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that its costs lined up with White House estimates.

“Welcome to my world. This is the Democratic Party,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters earlier in the day. “We are not a lockstep party.”

The $1.75 trillion bill cleared a procedural hurdle by a vote of 221-213 early Saturday, which will enable Democratic leaders to quickly schedule a final vote when the time comes.

The standoff came just days after Democrats suffered losses in closely watched state elections, raising concerns that they may lose control of Congress next year.

The infrastructure bill passed with the support of 13 Republicans, fulfilling Biden’s promise of passing some bipartisan legislation. The phrase “infrastructure week” had become a Washington punchline during his predecessor Donald Trump’s four years in the White House, when plans to focus on those investments were repeatedly derailed by scandals.

“Generations from now, people will look back and know this is when America won the economic competition for the 21st century,” Biden said in a statement.

Aim to move forward

The party is eager to show it can move forward on the president’s agenda and fend off challenges in the 2022 midterm elections in which Republicans will seek to regain control of both chambers of Congress, which they lost to the Democrats under Trump.

Congress also faces looming Dec. 3 deadlines to avert a politically embarrassing government shutdown and an economically catastrophic default on the federal government’s debt.

With razor-thin majorities in Congress and a united Republican opposition, Democrats need unity to pass legislation.

The infrastructure bill, which passed the Senate in August with 19 Republican votes, would fund a massive upgrade of America’s roads, bridges, airports, seaports and rail systems, while also expanding broadband internet service.

The “Build Back Better” package includes provisions on child care and preschool, eldercare, healthcare, prescription drug pricing and immigration.

It would bolster the credibility of Biden’s pledge to halve U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 during the U.N. climate conference taking place in Glasgow, Scotland.

Republicans uniformly oppose that legislation, casting it as a dramatic expansion of government that would hurt businesses.

“This is potentially a very black day for America,” said Republican Representative Glenn Grothman, who characterized the legislation’s child-care and preschool provisions as a “Marxist” effort to have the federal government raise children.

The nonpartisan U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the social-spending bill would raise $1.48 trillion in new tax revenue over the next decade, short of its $1.75 trillion cost.

Pelosi and other top Democrats have said that fails to account for increased tax enforcement and savings from lower prescription drug prices. 

 
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Roads, Transit, Internet: What’s In the Infrastructure Bill

The House has passed a $1 trillion bipartisan plan to rebuild roads and bridges, modernize public works systems and boost broadband internet, among other major improvements to the nation’s infrastructure. The legislation now goes to President Joe Biden for his signature.

Once it is signed by Biden, the new law will reach virtually every corner of the country — a historic investment that the president has compared with the building of the transcontinental railroad and Interstate Highway System. The White House is projecting that the investments will add, on average, about 2 million jobs per year over the coming decade.

The bill cleared the House late Friday on a 228-206 vote, ending weeks of intraparty negotiations in which liberal Democrats insisted the legislation be tied to a larger, $1.75 trillion social spending bill — an effort to pressure more moderate Democrats to support both.

The Senate passed the legislation on a 69-30 vote in August after rare bipartisan negotiations, and the House kept that compromise intact. Thirteen House Republicans voted for the bill, giving Democrats more than enough votes to overcome a handful of defections from progressives.

Here’s a breakdown of the bill that Biden is expected to soon sign into law:

Roads and bridges

The bill would provide $110 billion to repair the nation’s aging highways, bridges and roads. According to the White House, 278,416 total kilometers of America’s highways and major roads and 45,000 bridges are in poor condition. And the almost $40 billion for bridges is the single largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the interstate highway system, according to President Joe Biden’s administration.

Public transit

The $39 billion for public transit in the legislation would expand transportation systems, improve accessibility for people with disabilities and provide dollars to state and local governments to buy zero-emission and low-emission buses. The Department of Transportation estimates that the current repair backlog is more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations and thousands of miles of track and power systems.

Passenger and freight rail

To reduce Amtrak’s maintenance backlog, which has worsened since Superstorm Sandy nine years ago, the bill would provide $66 billion to improve the rail service’s 735-kilometer-long Northeast Corridor as well as other routes. It’s less than the $80 billion Biden — who famously rode Amtrak from Delaware to D.C. during his time in the Senate — originally asked for, but it would be the largest federal investment in passenger rail service since Amtrak was founded 50 years ago.

Electric vehicles

The bill would spend $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, which the administration says are critical to accelerating the use of electric vehicles to curb climate change. It would also provide $5 billion for the purchase of electric school buses and hybrids, reducing reliance on school buses that run on diesel fuel.

Internet access

The legislation’s $65 billion for broadband access would aim to improve internet services for rural areas, low-income families and tribal communities. Most of the money would be made available through grants to states.

Modernizing the electric grid

To protect against the widespread power outages that have become more frequent in recent years, the bill would spend $65 billion to improve the reliability and resiliency of the nation’s power grid. It would also boost carbon capture technologies and more environmentally friendly electricity sources like clean hydrogen.

Airports

The bill would spend $25 billion to improve runways, gates and taxiways at airports and to improve terminals. It would also improve aging infrastructure at air traffic control towers.

Water and wastewater

To improve the safety of the nation’s drinking water, the legislation would spend $55 billion on water and wastewater infrastructure. The bill would include $15 billion to replace lead pipes and $10 billion to address water contamination from polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — chemicals that were used in the production of Teflon and have also been used in firefighting foam, water-repellent clothing and many other items.

Paying for it

The five-year spending package would be paid for by tapping $210 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief aid and $53 billion in unemployment insurance aid some states have halted, along with an array of other smaller pots of money, like petroleum reserve sales and spectrum auctions for 5G services. 

 
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US Indicts Russian Analyst Who Contributed to ‘Steele Dossier’

A U.S. federal grand jury has indicted the Russian analyst who contributed to the “Steele dossier” alleging potential ties between Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and Russia, a special prosecutor investigating the matter said Thursday.

Analyst Igor Danchenko is accused of five counts of making false statements to the FBI relating to sources for the material he gave a British firm that prepared the dossier, said John Durham, the special prosecutor appointed by the U.S. Justice Department during Trump’s administration.

At a brief hearing on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan ordered Danchenko’s pretrial release on $100,000 unsecured bail after his lawyer told the court he lived with his family in Virginia.

Danchenko’s lawyer indicated his client would plead not guilty to the charges although his plea was not formally entered. A prosecutor said that, if convicted, Danchenko could face up to five years in prison on each count of his indictment. 

The indictment alleges that between June and November 2017, Danchenko made false statements regarding the sources of certain information he provided to a British investigative firm which Durham did not identify.

Sources identified the firm to Reuters as having been linked to former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The dossier, which was circulated to the FBI and media outlets before the November 2016 election, set out still-unproven assertions that Russia had embarrassing information about Trump and some of his Republican campaign’s advisers and that Moscow was working behind the scenes to defeat his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

The indictment alleges Danchenko made false statements about information he said he had received from an anonymous caller who claimed the Kremlin might have been helping to get Trump elected. It says Danchenko knew the information to be untrue. A lawyer for Danchenko did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Two sources familiar with Durham’s activities said he had issued subpoenas seeking evidence from multiple sources, including people linked to Fusion GPS, the Washington investigations firm that commissioned the dossier.

Steele is a former British intelligence officer who prepared the dossier for Fusion GPS, which was working for a law firm that represented the Democratic Party and Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Steele declined to comment in an emailed message.

One of the sources familiar with Durham’s activities said Fusion GPS was not a target of Durham’s investigation. Steele had previously declined to cooperate with investigators working for Durham.
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3- and 4-Year-Olds in a Washington School Ahead of the Game

The 3- and 4-year-olds who attend prekindergarten at Two Rivers Public Charter School in Washington are part of the roughly 60% of U.S. children who go to preschool. U.S. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan aims to make pre-K free and universal, expanding it to millions more youngsters. VOA’s Laurel Bowman has our story.

Camera: Adam Greenbaum Produced by: Adam Greenbaum
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Texas Law Renews Contentious US Fight Over Abortion

Texas’ abortion law has landed in the nation’s capital this week, as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether limitations on a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy are legal. Lawmakers heard from experts Thursday who urged the high court to strike it down. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more.

Producer: Katherine Gypson.
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Democrats’ Virginia Losses Could Spell Trouble for 2022

U.S. Republicans won big Tuesday in at least one off-year state election. As VOA’s Carolyn Presutti reports, some see Democrats’ losses in the state of Virginia as a warning sign for the party ahead of next year’s midterm elections, when all seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and a third of the U.S. Senate will be up for grabs.
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Russian Analyst Who Helped Compile Trump-Russia Dossier Arrested by US Authorities

A Russian analyst who provided information for a dossier of research used during the Trump-Russia investigation has been arrested by U.S. authorities as part of an ongoing special counsel investigation, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Igor Danchenko is the third person, and second in a two-month span, to face charges in special counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation.

Danchenko functioned as a source for Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was paid by Democrats to examine ties between Russia and Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. The research he compiled was provided to the FBI and used by federal authorities as they applied for and received surveillance warrants targeting a former Trump campaign aide aide.

Both the dossier and the Durham probe are politically charged. Trump’s Justice Department appointed Durham as Trump claimed the investigation of campaign ties to Russia was a witch hunt and pointed to the dossier, some of which remains uncorroborated or has been discredited, as evidence of a tainted probe driven by Democrats.

But the dossier had no role in the launching of the Trump-Russia investigation and special counsel Robert Mueller ultimately found questionable ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, but not sufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges. Democrats have lambasted the Durham probe as politically motivated, but the Biden administration has not stopped it.

The Justice Department’s inspector general has faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for their handling of the dossier. Danchenko — who was not identified by name in the watchdog report — had revealed to FBI investigators during a 2017 interview about the dossier’s origins and veracity — “potentially serious problems with Steele’s descriptions of information in his reports.”  

But those qualms from Danchenko were omitted from the final three surveillance applications, making the dossier appear more credible than even one of its own sources thought it was, according to the report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Danchenko, who previously worked for the Brookings Institution, has himself suggested that the information he offered to Steele was not meant to be portrayed as indisputable fact.

“Even raw intelligence from credible sources, I take it with a grain of salt,” Danchenko said in an interview with The New York Times last year. “Who knows, what if it’s not particularly accurate? Is it just a rumor or is there more to it?”

It was not immediately clear what charges Danchenko might face. But it would be the third criminal action brought by Durham, following the September indictment of Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer accused of making a false statement to the FBI during a 2016 meeting, and a guilty plea last year from an FBI lawyer who admitted altering an email related to the surveillance of the Trump aide, Carter Page.
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Boston Elects First Woman, Person of Color as Mayor

Not every mayor-elect of an American city gets post-election congratulations from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan. 

Soon after news broke late Tuesday that Michelle Wu won the race for mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted its “heartiest congratulations to @wutrain on winning the #Boston mayoral race. We couldn’t be prouder of the 1st woman & Asian American to hold the city’s top job. More power to her as she keeps breaking those glass ceilings!”

In an historic race where the four top candidates were women of color, Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States, became the city’s first woman and person of color to be elected mayor of Boston.  

Seen a progressive Democrat and protégé of U.S. senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, Wu won 62.2% of the vote in Boston. Her rival, centrist Democrat Annissa Essaibi George, won 35.8% of the vote.  

“In 2021, we are still seeing barriers come down that can be a little surprising,” Wu told reporters Wednesday morning. She said when she ran for City Council in 2013, only one other woman served on the 13-member panel.  

“And now, just four election cycles later, to be coming into office with a City Council that is reflective and representative of our communities, to keep building on the progress of this current administration, and to do the work for partnership with communities is incredibly meaningful,” she said. 

An early start 

Warren, one of Wu’s professors at Harvard Law School, congratulated Wu soon after her win. 

“From teaching her in law school, to working together on my first Senate run, to supporting her campaigns, I’ve seen her positive energy, her good heart, and her ability to make big change for Boston,” Warren tweeted.

Early in her time at Harvard Law, Wu moved her mother, who suffered from schizophrenia, and her younger sisters to Boston from Chicago, Illinois, so she could take care of them while attending school. Wu, whose first language is Mandarin Chinese and who interpreted for her parents, has said that trying to run a tea shop in Chicago while caring for her family persuaded her to go into public service.  

Wu graduated from law school in 2012 and worked on Warren’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. She ran for Boston City Council in 2013, becoming the first Asian American woman on the council. She was reelected three times and was City Council president from January 2016 to January 2018. In September 2020, she announced she would run for mayor the following year.  

‘Extraordinarily impressive’ 

Denise Baer, a political scientist who teaches at George Washington University, told VOA Wednesday that Wu is “extraordinarily impressive” for having started her career early and building a broad base of support.  

But, she said, “I think it’s going to be really challenging for her to control the levers of power” in Boston, a city that has until now elected only white men as mayor.  

Wu takes office November 16. Her plan for the short transition, she said Wednesday, is to ensure “there will be a continuous ability to make sure residents are getting all the city services that are needed.” She also called for civility and “a growing sense of what’s possible in city government.” 

Kerri Greenidge, Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Boston-area Tufts University, said Wu’s election in a city known for its institutions of higher learning, as well as being a bastion of Democrat-dominated politics, means she will be taking control of a city “that has often struggled to live up to the highest ideals it has about itself.”  

“The fact that the city has not had a mayor that is of color or a woman has indicated that that city has not lived up to its reality” as a minority-majority city, one where the population is of a range of ethnicities, Greenidge told VOA in an email. 

According to U.S. census data from 2020, Boston’s white, non-Latino population makes up 44.5% of the population; those identifying as Black or African American alone, 25.2%; those identifying as Asian alone, 9.7%; and those identifying as Hispanic or Latino, 19.8%. Other races and those identifying as mixed race make up smaller percentages. 

Challenges and assets 

Among the goals Wu talked about in her campaign are reintroducing rent control to bring down the cost of living in Boston, which has been against state law since 1994; making Boston public transportation free, which her critics say is too costly; and solving the problems of homelessness and addiction as Boston’s winter begins to settle in. 

Her gender could be either an asset or a liability, according to Baer, who coauthored a study on women and higher office. The study found that women tend to be problem-solvers, “which makes them really excellent officials,” Baer said. But she noted that taking control of a well-established power base is challenging.  

“It’s going to take a lot of strong leadership,” she said. 

And Greenidge said she believes women of color are judged more harshly for their political actions than white men, particularly on the local level.  

“Michelle Wu will have to face that reality,” she said. But she believes Boston’s breadth of ethnicities will help. The city, she said, “has a strong and well organized Asian American, African American, and immigrant community, and those communities’ engagement will be key to mitigating any obstruction or difficulties that Wu will face.” 
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Across US, Asian American Mayoral Candidates Make Historic Gains

As elections took place in states across America on Tuesday, Asian American candidates made history with solidified and projected victories in three major cities. 

Mayoral races in Boston, Cincinnati and Seattle drew just as much national attention as the tight gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey.

Michelle Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, claimed victory in Boston’s mayoral race, as unofficial returns signaled a strong defeat of opponent Annissa Essaibi George, prompting the city councilor to concede.

Wu, 36, will now become the first woman, first person of color and first Asian American to serve as Boston’s mayor, breaking the city’s long tradition of electing white men to the top office. 

The former president of the Boston City Council ran on a progressive platform that emphasized racial, economic and climate justice. She gained voters’ support with her commitments to create free public transportation and align city contracting to close the racial wealth gap.

The Boston Globe reported that Essaibi George ran a “more moderate and traditional campaign.” In the end, Wu succeeded by securing the votes of progressives and Boston’s communities of color.

Following her victory, Wu addressed supporters.

“We are ready for every Bostonian to know that we don’t have to choose between generational change and keeping the streetlights on, between tackling big problems with bold solutions and filling our potholes,” she said.

Wu reiterated her commitment to working on behalf of all citizens. 

“I’ll never stop fighting to make all our systems work for all of us,” she said.

In Cincinnati

Aftab Pureval, a 39-year-old lawyer and son of Indian and Tibetan immigrants, will become Cincinnati’s first Asian American mayor.

After unofficial returns projected Pureval’s victory, his opponent, longtime Cincinnati City Council member David Mann, conceded.

Pureval, who is the current Hamilton County clerk of courts, ran on a commitment to bringing new ideas to the city, with goals of rebuilding Cincinnati’s economy, reforming its police department and creating more affordable housing, as well as addressing public safety and transportation.

Mann, a former Cincinnati mayor and U.S. congressman, campaigned as an experienced candidate who would steadily guide the city out of the pandemic, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer.

In a statement from his campaign Wednesday, Pureval expressed gratitude for voters’ support.

“We have the vision, and I can’t wait to help drive growth and equity in Cincinnati. I’m humbled to be a part of the wave of newly elected Asian American mayors,” he said. “Representation matters, and this is only the beginning.” 

In Seattle

In Seattle, early returns indicated that Bruce Harrell, 63, who is half Black and half Japanese, would likely become the city’s first Asian American and second Black mayor.

According to The Seattle Times, Harrell, a former member of the Seattle City Council, had secured 65% of the votes counted thus far and maintained a nearly 30 percentage-point lead over opponent and City Council President M. Lorena González.

“You believed in what we’re trying to do. We believe in this city. This city has awesome potential,” Harrell said while addressing supporters Tuesday night.

His campaign placed a strong focus on addressing Seattle’s homelessness problem and increasing the city’s police force, while also tackling concerns about systemic racism and implicit bias among first responders. González’s campaign previously expressed support for defunding the police department, according to The Seattle Times.

Despite Harrell’s significant lead, González maintained that her campaign would wait for the election’s final results.

“We respect every vote as equal, regardless as to when it was cast,” she said in a statement to supporters Tuesday night.
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Murphy Narrowly Wins Second Term as New Jersey Governor 

New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy narrowly won reelection Wednesday, eking out a victory that spared Democrats the loss of a second gubernatorial seat.

He’s the state’s first Democratic governor to get a second straight term in 44 years, defeating Republican former New Jersey General Assembly member Jack Ciattarelli. 

AP called the race Wednesday evening when a new batch of votes from Republican leaning Monmouth County increased Murphy’s lead and closed the door to a Ciattarelli comeback. 

Ballots left

Ballots remaining to be counted included a significant number of votes from predominantly Democratic Essex County, along with mail-in votes spread across other counties. Murphy won the mail-in vote by a wide margin, even in Republican leaning counties like Monmouth. 

Ciattarelli spokesperson Stami Williams disputed the call because of the close margin, calling it “irresponsible.” 

Ciattarelli waged a formidable campaign in the heavily Democratic New Jersey, his spending nearly equaling the governor’s and outpacing the GOP’s performance four years ago. But Murphy’s advantages, including 1 million more registered Democrats, proved too much for the Republican to overcome.

The victory gives Democrats a silver lining after GOP businessman Glenn Youngkin defeated Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race — prompting worries that President Joe Biden’s sagging approval ratings are hurting the party. This year’s elections were the first major tests of voter sentiment since Biden took office. 

The closeness of the race surprised experts, who watched public polls showing Murphy leading comfortably and looked to his party’s registration advantage.

“If you asked anybody several months ago within the state, I think anyone would have predicted a high double-digit landslide for Murphy,” said Ashley Koning, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University.

Trend stopped

Murphy’s win also ends the more than three-decade-old trend of the party opposite the president’s winning in New Jersey’s off-year governor’s race. Voters came out in much higher rates for Ciattarelli this year than they did for his GOP predecessor in 2017.

The 64-year-old governor said he was acutely aware of the political trends, calling them an “animating” force for his reelection effort that spurred him to run as if he were 10 points behind.

Murphy built his campaign around the progressive accomplishments he signed into law — like a phased-in, $15-an-hour minimum wage and paid sick leave along with taxes on the wealthy — and brought Democratic allies, like progressive U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, in to campaign for him. 

With a Democrat-led Legislature, Murphy achieved most of the promises he made in his first run four years ago when he vied to succeed Republican Chris Christie. Paid sick leave, taxpayer-financed community college and some pre-kindergarten, tighter gun laws, expanded voting access, recreational marijuana, more state aid for schools and a fully funded public pension — all promised and all delivered during the first term. A proposal for a public bank to finance projects went unfulfilled.

Murphy is a former Goldman Sachs executive and served as ambassador to Germany under former President Barack Obama, who campaigned for Murphy in the weeks before Election Day.

He has said his next term will be about enacting a Reproductive Freedom Act aimed at codifying Roe v. Wade in the state as well as additional gun control laws and the expansion of taxpayer-financed pre-kindergarten for 3-year-olds.

Headwinds facing Democrats, like Biden’s falling approval ratings and congressional Democrats’ struggles to enact their agenda didn’t factor heavily enough into some experts’ pre-election analysis, said Ben Dworkin, the director of Rowan University’s Institute for Public Policy & Citizenship. He counted himself among them.

A spokesperson for Ciattarelli said Wednesday that the campaign was focused on the vote count and said that a possible legal pursuit of a recount was on the table. Murphy also called Wednesday morning for every vote to be counted.

New Jersey does not have an automatic recount law, but the candidates are permitted to request one. The party that wants a recount has to file a suit in State Superior Court in the counties where they want to contest tallies. That has to be done within 17 days of Election Day.

Ciattarelli is a former state Assembly member, serving until 2018. He’s the founder of a medical publishing company called Galen Publishing, and served as a local and county official in Somerset.

He walked a line between standing up for the moderate stances he had in the Legislature — like supporting Roe v. Wade — and appealing to Republicans who embraced Trump, particularly on cultural issues that have captured attention across the country. 
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Voters Reject Replacing Minneapolis Police Department 

Sweeping police reforms have been at the center of a debate in the United States since the May 2020 death of African American George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A year-and-a-half later, amid spiking violent crime rates nationwide, voters in the city rejected scrapping its police department and replacing it with a proposed Department of Public Safety. 

In the first municipal election since Floyd’s death, voters rejected the referendum, known as Ballot Question 2, by a projected margin of 56% to 44%. The measure was seen as a high-profile test of support for the so-called “defund the police” movement. 

“The defund the police movement has been soundly rejected,” said Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York, a non-partisan organization that works to improve public safety through innovation. “I think there’s a growing realization that defunding the police is not an idea that people are going to accept.” 

Critics of the Minneapolis police force maintained the department has a long history of mistrust, abuse and discriminatory practices.

“This vote means maintaining the status quo … a city that continues to devolve,” said JaNaé Bates, an organizer and spokesperson for the initiative, on CNN. Bates said her group will continue to push to reform the police department. 

At issue was whether to amend Minneapolis’ city charter to replace the police department with a Department of Public Safety that would have brought a public health approach to policing rather than a narrow focus on law enforcement. The new public safety model envisioned a greater reliance on social workers and violence prevention counselors in emergency situations.

“The city’s residents decided they wanted their police department to stay in place. Now the real work begins,” Cedric Alexander, a former police chief and director of public safety in Dekalb County, Georgia, told VOA. “You’ve got to have good policing. You’ve got to have great police and you’ve got to have transparent open, well recruited, well-trained and well supervised policing.” 

Calls to shift resources away from police departments collided with headlines as homicides have soared in the United States, up 30% from 2019 to 2020, according to federal statistics. 2021 could eclipse the 2020 estimate of more than 21,500 murders. 

“People have understood that while the United States definitely needs to reform police, we cannot eliminate police. It’s just it’s a wonderful aspiration, but it’s something that’s not going to happen,”  but it’s something that’s not going to happen,” Aborn said. “At the end of the day, people want to know that the police are going to be out there patrolling, maintaining public safety and arresting people that commit violent crimes.” 

Calls for change 

Floyd’s death triggered months of anger, racial justice protests and demands for an end to police brutality in the United States and around the world. Floyd died May 25, 2020 after white former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned the handcuffed Floyd on the street with a knee to Floyd’s neck for roughly nine minutes. The incident was captured on video and disseminated across the globe. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder and manslaughter in April 2021 and is serving a 22.5-year prison sentence.

In recent years, videos of police using excessive, sometimes deadly force against Blacks and other people of color have become commonplace, sparking calls for police reforms and reallocating funding for law enforcement. Twenty-three major cities including Washington saw police budgets reduced last year, according to Smart Cities Dive.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is investigating the Minneapolis Police Department. Launched in April, the probe is focusing on the department’s use of force patterns to determine if it disproportionately targets Blacks and other residents of color.

Clarifying goals 

In Minneapolis, reform advocates sought to clarify their goals ahead of the referendum, maintaining that they did not seek the abolition of law enforcement but rather to change the scope and execution of officers’ duties.

Some residents were not convinced.

“I want the city to hire more officers and not take resources away from the police department,” news reports quoted a Minneapolis voter as saying.

The Minneapolis City Council will vote next month on a proposal to restore $192 million to the police department’s budget. The mayor has proposed hiring as many as 150 officers to replace those who recently left the force.

“We have swung from people calling for no police back to, ‘We want police because of rising crime,’” Alexander said. 

“We have to find that middle ground because we have to have public safety,” added Alexander, who served for four decades in law enforcement.

“Hiring more cops will not reduce violence but something has to be done more structurally to change policing and practices. The police department is not going to change by itself.”
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Republican Victory in Virginia’s Governor Race Seen as Bad Omen for Democrats

In an election with implications far beyond its borders, the state of Virginia on Tuesday elected Republican businessman and political neophyte Glenn Youngkin to serve as governor, ending a decade-long trend of Democratic domination of state-wide offices and signaling trouble for that party’s fate in next year’s congressional midterms.

“Together we will change the trajectory of this commonwealth,” Youngkin told a crowd of supporters at a victory celebration early Wednesday.   

Youngkin took 50.7% of the vote to best Democrat and former Governor Terry McAuliffe, who received only 48.6% in his bid to return to the job he left after leaving office in 2018 due to term limits.

Republicans were successful in all of the statewide races, winning the offices of attorney general and lieutenant governor. Winsome Sears, a conservative Republican, became the first female and first woman of color to win election as lieutenant governor in the commonwealth’s 400-year legislative history. The Republicans also seemed poised to retake the House of Delegates, one of the two chambers of the state legislature.

Biden seen as drag on McAuliffe

The race, which culminated a little over nine months into Democrat Joe Biden’s first year as president of the United States, was widely seen as a signal of public sentiment toward the president and his party. Biden carried Virginia easily last November, beating then-President Donald Trump by 10 percentage points.

Currently, though, Biden’s approval ratings have fallen into negative territory, with just over half of Americans expressing disapproval of his performance, which may have been a drag on McAuliffe’s campaign, according to analysts.  

“Since August, Biden’s national standing has weakened,” Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman wrote in an analysis published Wednesday morning by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “That decline, combined with the usual headwinds the president’s party faces in off-year elections, helped fuel Youngkin’s 12-point net improvement over Trump’s 10-point loss in Virginia last year.”

Warning signs for Democrats

The result in Virginia is a warning signal for Democrats in Washington. They have struggled to agree among themselves on a way to pass major elements of the president’s domestic agenda despite having control of both the House of Representatives and Senate, although by very slim margins. The party is in danger of losing control of both chambers of Congress in next year’s elections.

In another warning sign, Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, was locked in a tight reelection battle with Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli. The outcome will be decided by a tiny share of ballots yet to be counted. Murphy had been expected to win easily.

“Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D-NJ) surprisingly close race in the lower-profile and still-uncalled New Jersey gubernatorial contest also indicates that the poor Democratic environment was a main driver of the party’s poor 2021 Election Night,” Kondik and Coleman wrote.

A path for Republicans

The Virginia race suggests that there is a viable path forward for Republicans struggling to find their way out of the shadow of Trump, who, despite low favorability ratings with the general public, retains an iron grip on the party’s base.  

While Youngkin did accept Trump’s endorsement, Youngkin did not campaign with the former president, and rarely mentioned him in his public remarks, while McAuliffe used every opportunity to portray Youngkin as a Trump acolyte. Throughout the campaign, Youngkin, a wealthy investment businessman,  walked a very narrow path, projecting the image of an amiable suburban father while simultaneously stoking the anger of the former president’s base with warnings about hot-button issues.

Youngkin was able to successfully bleed away Biden voters in the suburbs of the state’s largest urban areas. In northern Virginia, for example, Youngkin took 35% of the vote in Fairfax County, where Trump won only 28% last year. In neighboring Loudoun County, Youngkin took 44.5% of the vote compared to Trump’s 36.5% last year.  

Early in the campaign, Youngkin refused to say whether he believed that Biden had won the presidential election, keeping himself in line with Trump, who claims, despite copious evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Youngkin eventually conceded that Biden won legitimately.  

‘Sycophantic’ devotion to Trump proves unnecessary

The Republican Party is likely to take a couple of lessons from the results in Virginia, said Jennifer N. Victor, an associate professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at Virginia’s George Mason University.

“First, Republicans can win without Trump on the ballot,” she said. “And Republicans can win with some emulation of Trump and Trump ideas, and maybe even a few Trump tactics, but that direct, almost sycophantic association with Trump is not necessary in order to get some of the benefits.”

Victor said she expects Republican candidates in 2022 to use the lessons learned from the Youngkin campaign.  

“Democrats are going to be at a structural disadvantage in 2022, and the president’s party usually loses seats in the midterm,” she said. “So, if Republicans use the Youngkin playbook in 2022, I’m guessing it’ll work out okay for them.”

Critical Race Theory

Throughout the campaign, Youngkin played up fears that Critical Race Theory, an academic discipline studied in law schools, is being taught in Virginia’s public schools. The theory is not, in fact, part of the state’s curriculum, but has been broadly conflated with arguments over how the more controversial aspects of U.S. history — particularly slavery and “Jim Crow” racism – ought to be taught in schools.  

Jim Crow refers to structural racism that was common in the Deep South throughout much of the 20th century. Jim Crow laws mandated segregation policies targeting Black people in the South.

Over the past year in Virginia, school board meetings have been regularly interrupted by white parents angrily denouncing schools for lessons that, they claim, teach white children to feel guilty about the nation’s historic treatment of minorities.  

Youngkin focused on their concerns, pledging to “ban” Critical Race Theory from the state’s schools. Late in his campaign, he ran a controversial ad featuring a woman who claimed that her son had suffered severe psychological distress after reading a book assigned in English class about slavery. The boy was a senior in high school at the time, and the book was Beloved, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.  

Analysts believe that McAuliffe harmed his own chances when, in a debate with Youngkin in September, he seemed to belittle the concerns of parents, saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”  

Trump takes credit

Despite Youngkin’s efforts to distance himself from the former president, Trump took credit for the victory, attributing it to supporters pushing his “Make America Great Again” slogan, which he abbreviated as MAGA.   

In a statement released by his spokesperson, he said, “I would like to thank my BASE for coming out in force and voting for Glenn Youngkin. Without you he would not have been close to winning. The MAGA movement is bigger and stronger than ever before. Glenn will be a great governor. Thank you to the people of the commonwealth of Virginia and most particularly, to our incredible MAGA voters.”
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