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It’s Tuesday, the traditional day for elections and for our pause-and-consider newsletter on politics and policy. We think of it as a mini-magazine in your inbox.
2024 AND DEMOCRATS
By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent
For months, a host of plotlines have played out on the Republican side of the 2024 presidential field. Now we have the leader on the left formally launching his campaign.
Via a three-minute video that began with images of Jan. 6 and abortion protests, President Joe Biden formally launched his reelection bid this morning. There’s already a theme forming around his campaign: “Let’s finish the job.”
With this, we thought about how to best bulk up for the now-here 2024 campaign.
Our bodies and brains will both need attention if we are going to get through the next 19 months. For the body: A friend of ours who works for the U.S. Capitol Police passed this link to his guide to martial arts.
For the brain: An easy-to-digest look at the dynamics on the Democratic side.
THE OTHER (NON-BIDEN) CANDIDATES
As is common when an incumbent president is running for reelection, the Democratic field is small. Prior to Biden’s announcement this morning, a total of six people had filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2024. (That compares to 22 Republican candidates, four of them with national profiles, who have done the same at this point.)
Five of those candidates are not well-known nationally:
- Willie Carter, a Texan who has run every cycle since 1988 and is campaigning on a message of faith, as well as a strong military, addressing homelessness, banning assault-style weapons outside of the military and promoting affordable but not mandatory health care.
- Armando Perrez-Serrato, a Californian who ran for governor in 2022, calling for lower taxes but also universal health care.
- Christin Powers, a Floridian who has run as a candidate previously and stresses concern for drug addiction, among other things.
- John Washington III, a Texan who is running on a slate of issues, including an end to property tax.
- There is one FEC-declared candidate for whom we failed to find more detailed information: Herbert Ezekiel Smyth. (If you exist and are reading this, Mr. Smyth, email us!)
But the FEC filings also show one non-Biden declared Democratic candidate who is nationally known: Marianne Williamson.
An author and spiritual leader, Williamson’s philosophy centers around self-love, attention to community and embracing what she sees as the innate power of humanity. As a politician, she is progressive, with anti-poverty and anti-incarceration plans. She is among the few national candidates to ever endorse reparations for slavery.
Williamson is the only one on the FEC’s declared list who has raised more than $10,000, and she has raised quite a bit more: at least $772,000 as of her last filed report.
Also in the ring, though his FEC filing has not yet posted, is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The son and nephew of Democratic legends, this Kennedy has raised fringe, debunked theories in the past, including about COVID-19 vaccines, that have led to some questions by journalists about how to cover him. He is an environmental lawyer and longtime activist in that arena.
BIDEN
You know the history in our country: Most first-term presidents start out as the frontrunner for their party’s nomination in the next presidential contest.
Biden is no different.
But there are some unusual features to the Biden candidacy nonetheless.
- (Dis)approval. Just 41 percent of people in our PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll released Tuesday approve of the job Biden is doing. That's within a point of where Trump was — 42 percent — just before he announced his own reelection bid in 2019.
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Image by Jenna Cohen/PBS NewsHour
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- Biden is in a historically precarious place. According to Gallup, presidents with approval ratings at 45 percent or below have not been reelected in modern times. However, former President Barack Obama, with Biden on his ticket, was reelected at a level just above that — 46 percent.
- An ousted former president. It has been more than 100 years since an ousted former president attempted to get that job back, as Donald Trump is campaigning to do. That was in 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt lost the Republican primary and formed his own “Bull Moose Party.” (He came in second, but lost in the general election as well.)
- An unpopular former president. With Trump as a potential adversary, the low-approval-rating Biden may nonetheless have an advantage in popularity. A whopping 64 percent of Americans told us they do not want Trump to become president again, though he remains popular among his Republican base, the NewsHour’s Laura Santhanam reported.
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Image by Jenna Cohen/PBS NewsHour
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- Attempting a first. No American has ever been elected twice as vice president and gone on to serve two full terms as president, as Biden hopes to do. And only one — Richard Nixon — has been elected twice to both jobs. (He resigned before serving out his second term as president.)
- The other first? Age. Biden is 80 years old, the oldest president in history, as you may have read. Should he serve another full term, he would be 86 years old at the end of it. That would be about eight years older than the next oldest president, Ronald Reagan. He was just short of 78 years old when he left office.
The bottom line: Thus far, there is no indication that any additional Democrats are willing or able to compete with Biden for the party’s nomination.
The party has a small field of candidates with Biden as the single outright frontrunner.
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More on politics from our coverage:
- Watch: After announcing his 2024 reelection bid, Biden spoke about “investing in America.”
- One Big Question: Why announce now? Four in 10 Americans approve of how President Joe Biden is running the country. NPR’s Tamara Keith and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report discuss.
- A Closer Look: Tracking and combating the rise of false online information about abortion.
- Perspectives: Arkansas is one of seven states that quickly banned abortions after Roe was overturned last year. Leslie Rutledge, the state's Republican lieutenant governor, weighs in on the debate over access to abortion medication.
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AS BOOK BAN ATTEMPTS SOAR, LIBRARIANS ARE CAUGHT IN THE CROSSHAIRS
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Watch the segment in the player above.
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By Gabrielle Hays, @thegabhour
Communities Correspondent, St. Louis
There’s been a tug-of-war over state library funding in Missouri as GOP-led calls for book removals and restrictions continue to soar nationwide.
Last month, Missouri House Republicans moved to defund public libraries. Here’s what happened:
- The Republican-led House voted to cut $4.5 million in aid from the state budget.
- The legislator who proposed the cut pointed to a lawsuit led by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenged the state’s book ban passed last year.
- Under that new law, school librarians face potential criminal prosecution if they don’t remove “explicit sexual material” books or materials from shelves.
- Now, the state Senate Appropriations Committee plans to restore the funding.
The American Library Association, which annually tracks attempted book bans in the country, pointed to the Missouri fight over library funding as an example of how libraries are affected in what’s been an unprecedented past year for book challenges. In 2022, there were 1,269 calls to censor library books and resources, the highest number in more than two decades, according to the ALA’s latest report. |
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Image by Jenna Cohen/PBS NewsHour
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The ALA’s report underscores how these challenges not only target books, but librarians, too. They have endured harassment from organized, conservative groups, as well as threats to their personal safety and employment.
The PBS NewsHour spoke to Judy Garrett, who has been a librarian in Missouri’s rural Gentry County for 27 years. She said library service is “not just my vocation, it’s my avocation,” adding that it’s been “devastating” to see her life’s work denigrated.
Conservative groups often say their attempts to ban books are a way of standing up for parents’ rights.
Garrett feels “nothing could be further from the truth,” she said. “The only thing that these [restrictions] do is take a parent's choice away. Someone else is deciding what is going to be available in a public library or in a school library for your child to read. You don't get to make that decision. A politician who has never even been to your town is going to start making that decision for you and for us.”
Libraries already respect parents’ wishes on what their children read, she added.
“But that doesn't mean that they get to make the decision for the person sitting next to them because they don't. That's up to that parent to decide. In the midst of all this, [librarians] seem to be the only ones that are actually standing up for parents.”
#POLITICSTRIVIA
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Watch the segment in the player above.
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By Cybele Mayes-Osterman, @CybeleMO
Associate Editorial Producer
The media world reeled following Fox News’ announcement Monday that Tucker Carlson will leave the network. Since he began hosting “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in the coveted 8 p.m. primetime slot in 2016, Carlson became the network’s top-ranked host, whose outrage-driven monologues amplified white nationalist messages on cable TV.
Carlson’s false claims about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection also became a focal point of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox. Internal communications that surfaced in court papers revealed that Carlson did not believe some of the narratives he publicly alleged. Last week, the network paid out a settlement of $787 million before the trial began.
Before Carlson entered journalism, he applied to join a federal agency but was rejected.
Our question: Which federal agency denied Carlson’s application?
Send your answers to [email protected] or tweet using #PoliticsTrivia. The first correct answers will earn a shout-out next week.
Last week, we asked: Only two countries set their debt limits at a specific amount of money rather than a percentage of its GDP. One is the U.S. What is the other?
The answer: Denmark. While both countries have similar laws, the debt limit doesn’t make headlines as a political issue in Denmark.
Congratulations to our winners: John Njoroge and Judi Toohey!
Thank you all for reading and watching. We’ll drop into your inbox next week. |
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