Former president Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, claims Democrats and President Joe Biden "don't care" about inflation because they "don't want us to have any shared traditions like Thanksgiving."
During an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday night, Eric Trump's wife proclaimed, "Everything costs more now, so it's not just the turkey," before launching into an overcooked Turkey Day conspiracy theory.
"They have told us from the beginning that they want to fundamentally transform America," Lara Trump said, apparently referring to Democrats. "Well, how do you do that? You have to change America from the inside out. You have to take away our traditions. So it might seem a little funny and a little ridiculous — oh, don't have a turkey then people won't come over, where last year remember they didn't even want us to get together, so I guess we're lucky they're letting us have Thanksgiving this year."
"But at really the core of this, they want to divide Americans up, they don't want us to have any common ground, they don't want us to have any shared traditions like Thanksgiving," she added. "A lot of places last month actually did away with Halloween because they wanted to be inclusive of the people who didn't celebrate Halloween. ... It all goes to fundamentally transforming this country, and the way you do that is you make sure we have no commonality whatsoever, no traditions as Americans whatsoever, you start chipping away at that. And they don't care that Thanksgiving costs a lot more, whether you're driving to somebody's house this year, paying for all that food on the table, they don't care. Joe Biden is certainly very happy right now where he is for Thanksgiving."
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Wednesday continued railing against Fox News during an appearance on Steve Bannon's "War Room," and he went so far as to suggest the right-wing news network was in on the conspiracy to deny President Donald Trump a chance to be reinstated.
Bannon asked Lindell why he'd organized a failed protest outside of Fox News earlier in the day in which roughly a dozen people demanded that the network cover Lindell's false claims about the 2020 presidential election.
Lindell then went off on a wild rant about Fox wanting to be sued by Dominion Voting Systems for airing his claims about the company stealing the election for President Joe Biden.
"Dominion sued them just so they could fire Lou Dobbs," Lindell claimed. "I believe Fox is in on it, that they asked Dominion, 'Hey come and sue us!'"
Lindell then accused Fox News of being "controlled by Big Pharma" by saying that they're "pro-vaccine."
A former campaign surrogate for Joe Biden pushed back on Fox News Wednesday after the network repeatedly criticized the president over his Thanksgiving plans.
Throughout the day, Fox News had called out Biden for enjoying a "lush" holiday at the Nantucket home of a billionaire.
But reporters failed to note that former President Donald Trump often spent Thanksgiving breaks at his Mar-a-Lago resort. That all changed when former Biden surrogate Kevin Walling joined a panel discussion about Biden's vacation plans, which were called "lavish" by Fox News contributor Liz Peek.
"Is it tone deaf?" Fox News host Gillian Turner asked Walling.
"Listen, the right-wing media is going to attack the president if he's staying at a Best Western," Walling explained. "They're always just going to attack him no matter what he does. He's staying with friends in Nantucket, something that the Biden family has done since the president lost his first wife."
The guest then reminded Fox News viewers about Trump's frequent vacations.
"I actually prefer it this way where he's not charging the Americans people millions of dollars to secure him at his properties," Walling said. "The Secret Service isn't paying hundreds of thousands of dollars like they did with President Trump for just golf carts alone."
The former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice overseeing Republicans' review of the 2020 vote has been meeting with "oddballs" as part of his blunder-plagued audit.
"Michael Gableman met with a host of election conspiracy theorists this fall as part of his taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 presidential contest for Assembly Republicans," the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreports. "Among those Gableman met with were Peter Bernegger, a felon convicted of fraud who has been using the open records law to gather images of Wisconsin ballots, according to Nate Cain, a West Virginia consultant who has assisted Gableman."
The newspaper reported, "Gableman and his team last month also met with Shiva Ayyadurai, who has contended without evidence that the votes were taken away from Donald Trump based on a science fiction novel; Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive who has spent a year making over-the-top false claims that the election was hacked by the Chinese; and Douglas Frank, the chairman of the math and science department at an Ohio school who has falsely asserted that votes in Michigan were manipulated with a mathematical 'key.'"
Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the "oddballs" he is meeting with "are all election skeptics who have bought into the big lie."
There are also concerns about Gableman's staffing decisions.
"Assembly Republicans hired Gableman at taxpayer expense this summer to conduct his own review of the election," the newspaper noted. "Among those Gableman has retained to assist him is Cain, who last year told a conservative YouTube host that a civil war could start if the election was not audited. He also wrongly claimed it was statistically impossible for the ballots that were counted the latest to go so heavily to Joe Biden."
Assembly Republicans gave Gableman $676,000 to conduct his review.
The FBI is investigating a second local election data breach linked to conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, this time in Ohio, after raiding the home of a Colorado election clerk accused of leaking voting system passwords last week.
FBI and state investigators are looking at an attempted breach of an Ohio county's election system at the office of John Hamercheck, the Republican president of the Lake County Board of Supervisors, The Washington Post first reported last week. The incident appears to be similar to a data breach in Mesa County, Colorado, where election clerk Tina Peters is under federaI investigation after voting system passwords were leaked to right-wing blogs and QAnon conspiracy theorists. Data from both breaches were featured at the MyPillow founder's conspiracy-laden "cyber symposium" in August. Both Hamercheck and Peters discussed voter fraud claims with Lindell's sidekick Douglas Frank before the breaches, according to the Post.
State and county officials told the Post that no sensitive information was obtained in the Ohio breach but they determined that a private laptop was plugged into the county network at Hamercheck's office. Routine network traffic data obtained in the breach was distributed at Lindell's event.
The FBI confirmed that it is investigating the breach. A spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, told the Post that investigators believe that a government official "facilitated the attempted breach."
Officials said several layers of security prevented the laptop from accessing sensitive information.
"It's concerning that somebody would — especially somebody in a government office, somebody who is an elected official, or somebody who's part of county government — would not realize all of those safeguards exist and would try to engage in some sort of a vigilante investigation," LaRose told the outlet. "The good news is that our system of cybersecurity in Ohio is among the best in the nation."
Hamercheck denied any knowledge of the breach during a board meeting on Tuesday, saying there has been "much false or misleading information" about what happened.
"To my knowledge, there was never an attempt to access or breach the Lake County Board of Elections computer network that day," Hamercheck claimed, though he did not elaborate.
Hamercheck said he has not been interviewed in the investigation but vowed to share more information "as soon as we are finished gathering and verifying the appropriate materials."
The breach came after Frank, a part-time math and science teacher who has claimed to have discovered secret algorithms used to rig the presidential election against former President Donald Trump, traveled the country to recruit local election officials into Lindell's conspiracy theory campaign, ostensibly aimed at undoing the 2020 election result and "reinstating" Trump. (There is no constitutional pathway for doing that.) Frank previously told the outlet he had traveled to more thant 30 states and met with 100 election administrators, claiming that his presentation had convinced Peters to pursue his baseless conspiracy theory. He told the Post he had no recollection of speaking with Hamercheck but the newspaper reported that Frank took part in a phone conversation with the official earlier this year.
"Do I remember that call? No," Frank said. "Does it sound like me? Yes."
County records obtained by the Post show that Hamercheck, an engineer, used his security badge to swipe into the offices where the breach originated multiple times and that a private laptop was connected to the county network.
Local resident Lois Osborn pressed Hamercheck on the breach during Tuesday's board meeting after saying she was "very disturbed" by the news reports.
"There was a breach coming from John Hamercheck's office," she told the board, calling for him to be censured. "In my mind, this was something very inappropriate for an elected official in Lake County."
Ron Young, one of the other commissioners, told Osborn it was too early to consider sanctions.
"We have very sophisticated, very skilled law enforcement — nationally, state level, locally — working on this issue," Young said. "And I think it'd be absurd for me to stand up and offer some sort of censure of this gentleman, who at least from my observation has always performed ethically, morally and properly."
The FBI and state authorities last week raided the home of Peters and three others, including Sherronna Bishop, who previously worked as campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert's, R-Colo. Bishop has spoken at events with Peters and introduced Frank during a recent event in Colorado. Search warrants in the raid suggest the FBI is investigating potential wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and damage protected computers.
State investigators say Peters shut off surveillance in her office and allowed an unauthorized person to access voting machine servers, data from which were later leaked to conspiracy theorists and featured at Lindell's August symposium.
A judge last month barred Peters from overseeing elections. Peters has denied wrongdoing and accused the Justice Department and state officials of political bias.
Lindell has used the leaked data and Frank's "research" to push wild conspiracy theories that Dominion voting machines were set up to flip votes from Trump to President Joe Biden. Dominion sued Lindell and other TrumpWorld conspiracists for $1.3 billion over the false allegations earlier this year.
After his August "cyber symposium" failed to show any evidence of a massive election-fraud conspiracy, Lindell on Tuesday announced that he would hold a 96-hour "Thanks-a-thon" live stream on his web channel to rehash his claims.
Lindell promised over the summer to bring a fantastical lawsuit to the Supreme Court "before Thanksgiving" that would overturn the election and reinstate Trump. Lindell claimed that "tons" of state attorneys general were ready to sign on to the suit, though he did not name a single one. On Tuesday, Lindell appeared to reverse field once again, claiming that attorneys general had backed away from his case under pressure from Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, who admitted last week that Biden won the election — which Lindell sees as another part of a grand conspiracy.
"You can't tell me why Ronna McDaniel, the head of the RNC, made a statement saying Biden won three days before this Supreme Court complaint was supposed to go to the Supreme Court," he said. "What about the timing of that, America!"
IN OTHER NEWS: Fox News criticizes Biden for 'lush' Thanksgiving plans while ignoring Trump's visits to Mar-a-Lago
Fox News criticizes Biden for 'lush' Thanksgiving plans while ignoring Trump's visits to Mar-a-Lago
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Americans are spending their way into the holiday season, while jobless claims have fallen to historic lows, new data showed Wednesday -- offering some respite for President Joe Biden as he steers the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic amid soaring inflation.
The raft of surveys paint a picture of a country where companies are increasingly holding on to staff while workers are channeling their paychecks to businesses across the world's largest economy, all while dealing with the uncertainty posed by rapid price increases.
In a landmark for the labor market, new filings for jobless benefits last week dropped below their level before the pandemic struck, plunging to a low not hit since 1969, the government said.
Meanwhile, spending and incomes both rose more than expected last month -- though prices also increased five percent compared to October 2020, their biggest jump since November 1990.
Biden cheered the employment data, saying in a statement that it signaled a "historic jobs recovery" and that "more Americans are getting back to work, and more Americans have money in their pockets."
Spending and incomes have also climbed above pre-pandemic levels thanks in part to massive spending measures enacted in Washington, Gregory Daco of Oxford Economics said.
"As we look forward to Thanksgiving, there is much to be thankful for in this fiscally-stimulated recovery," he said in a note, referring to the Thursday holiday.
"Still, the recovery process isn't complete, with spending on services well below its pre-pandemic trend, and the transition from public- to private-driven growth will be delicate."
'Quirk' behind jobless drop
The US economy has come a long way since March 2020, when the beginning of what would become the world's largest Covid-19 outbreak caused more than 20 million people to lose their jobs.
Weekly filings for unemployment benefits shot into the millions before leveling off for much of the year. Their retreat to levels nearer those seen before the pandemic only came in 2021, with the release of Covid-19 vaccines.
The latest data from the Labor Department brings the closely watched metric of job market health back below where it was on the week of March 14, 2020 before the layoffs began.
But analysts were suspicious. Claims decreased by 71,000 from the week prior and hit a level not seen for generations, which Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics attributed to a "seasonal adjustment quirk" that "will substantially reverse next week."
"That said, the trend in claims is clearly falling," he wrote in an analysis.
Spending through inflation
Even as the economy has rebounded, Biden has seen his approval ratings fall in recent months, in part due to the spike in inflation.
Personal consumption expenditures data released by the Commerce Department outlined the extent of last month's increases, with energy prices up 30.2 percent from October 2020 while food prices were 4.8 percent higher.
However spending exceeded analysts' forecasts with a 1.3 percent gain while incomes climbed by a more-than-expected 0.5 percent.
The latter was due to increasing wages and gains from assets, the data showed, and undercut by the tapering of government benefit payments, likely due to the expiry of pandemic aid programs.
Consumers directed their spending towards both goods and services, the report said.
Much of the $123.8 billion increase in goods spending went to motor vehicles and parts, while international travel was a component of the $90.5 billion increase in services spending that was felt across sectors.
Rubeela Farooqi of High Frequency Economics said the data were a good omen for overall growth in the last quarter of the year, but warned of "some risk from rising infections and broken supply chains that could be disruptive during the holiday season."
The economy's recovery this year was dented in the third quarter by the Delta wave of Covid-19 infections, which again snarled businesses.
On Wednesday, the Commerce Department revised its GDP growth forecast up slightly to 2.1 percent, annualized, but that remained well below the pace of 6.7 percent in the quarter before.
Fox News aired segments on Wednesday criticizing President Joe Biden for spending a "lush" Thanksgiving with friends and family but ignored former President Donald Trump's history of visiting Mar-a-Lago during his presidency.
During one segment, host Sandra Smith reported that Biden was planning to visit a "billionaire friend" during the holiday.
"So is Scranton Joe looking out of touch with the working class?" she wondered. "A lot of critics say, yes, indeed."
Meanwhile, the network displayed graphics with the words, "Let Them Eat Cake" and "Critics slam Biden for Lush Thanksgiving Vacation."
"The critics are all over this one," White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich agreed. "He boarded Air Force One to stay at a friend's [home] in Nantucket."
Heinrich went on to note that Biden would have access to a tennis court while at his friend's "compound."
"Critics say this luxurious stay shows that he's out of touch with the problems that are facing working-class Americans," she added.
Heinrich reported that Biden "is not the first president to spend a holiday with a wealthy friend" before pointing out that Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush had also visited Nantucket for the holiday.
The code Republicans are using to profanely insult President Joe Biden became a rallying cry for an anti-masker arrested at the Las Vegas airport.
Katrina Alspaugh allegedly shouted "Let's Go Brandon" while being arrested for violating airport rules, KLAS-TV reports.
The Associated Press describes the "Let's Go Brandon" phrase as "conservative code for something far more vulgar: 'F*ck Joe Biden.'"
Officers were summoned to Terminal 1 McCarran International Airport after a woman refused to wear a mask on an Allegiant Air flight.
"The woman, later identified as Alspaugh, had been involved in a prior incident at the security checkpoint, police said. During that incident, Alspaugh reportedly attempted to punch another passenger that pointed out Alspaugh was not wearing her mask, police said. The other passenger refused to press charges and Alspaugh proceeded to board her flight," the network reported.
After allegedly refusing to wear a mask on the plane, Alspaugh was removed from her flight and issued a trespass notice.
"According to police, as Alspaugh was being taken off the jet bridge in a wheelchair, she yelled obscenities and 'Let's go Brandon.' Police said this only added to the disturbance and they arrested her," KLAS-TV reported.
China and Russia reacted furiously Wednesday to US President Joe Biden's planned democracy summit, which will exclude them, with Beijing angered over an invitation for Taiwan and the Kremlin branding it divisive.
The global conference was a campaign pledge by the US president, who has placed the struggle between democracies and "autocratic governments" at the heart of his foreign policy.
The inclusion of Taiwan, and not China, led to an angry rebuke from Beijing, which said it "firmly opposes" the invitation to "the so-called Summit for Democracy."
Beijing claims self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory to be retaken one day, by force if necessary.
Around 110 countries have been invited to the virtual summit, including the United States' major Western allies but also Iraq, India and Pakistan.
But Russia said the guest list, released Tuesday on the State Department website, showed that the United States "prefers to create new dividing lines, to divide countries into those that -- in their opinion -- are good, and those that are bad."
"More and more countries prefer to decide themselves how to live," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, adding that Washington is "trying to privatise the term 'democracy'."
"That can't do so and should not do so," he said.
Diplomatic coup
The invitation is a major coup for Taipei at a time when China is ramping up its campaign to keep Taiwan locked out of international bodies.
Taiwan said the gathering would be a rare opportunity to burnish its credentials on the world stage.
"Through this summit, Taiwan can share its democratic success story," presidential office spokesman Xavier Chang told reporters.
Only 15 countries officially recognize Taipei over Beijing, although many nations maintain de facto diplomatic relations with the island.
The US does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country but maintains it as a crucial regional ally and opposes any change to its status by force.
China baulks at any use of the word "Taiwan" or diplomatic gestures that might lend a sense of international legitimacy to the island.
"I agree Taiwan more than qualifies -- but it does seem to be (the) only democratic govt invited that the US govt does not officially recognize. So its inclusion is a big deal," tweeted Julian Ku, a Hofstra University law professor whose specialties include China.
Taiwan's foreign ministry said it would be represented at the summit by its de facto US ambassador Bi-khim Hsiao and digital minister Audrey Tang, who is one of the world's few openly transgender national politicians.
Scrutinzed guest list
The long-advertised meeting will take place online on December 9 and 10 ahead of an in-person meeting at its second edition next year.
India, often called "the world's biggest democracy", will be present, despite increasing criticism from human rights defenders over democratic backsliding under Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
So too will Pakistan, despite its checkered relationship with Washington.
Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was dubbed an "autocrat" by Biden, did not make the list.
Neither did the city-state of Singapore, or Bangladesh, one of the world's most populous democracies.
In the Middle East, only Israel and Iraq were invited. The traditional Arab allies of the US -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates -- are all absent.
Biden also invited Brazil, which is led by controversial far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
In Europe, Poland is represented, despite recurring tensions with Brussels over respect for the rule of law, but Hungary's far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban is not.
On the African side, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Niger are invited.
'Decline of democracy'
"For this kick-off Summit... there's a case for getting a broad set of actors into the room: it provides for a better exchange of ideas than setting a perfect bar for qualification," Laleh Ispahani of the Open Society Foundations told AFP.
Rather than using the summit as an anti-China meeting, Ispahani urged Biden to address "the serious decline of democracy around the world -- including relatively robust models like the US."
This summit is being organized as democracy has suffered setbacks in countries where the US had placed great hopes.
Sudan and Myanmar have experienced military coups, Ethiopia is in the midst of a conflict that could lead to its "implosion," according to US diplomats, and the Taliban took power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US troops after two decades.
Voting rights advocates within and beyond Georgia ramped up calls for congressional action after the Peach State's Republican lawmakers became the latest to approve a gerrymandered political map intended to give the GOP a political advantage for the next decade.
Following similar moves by GOP-controlled state legislatures in Ohio and Texas, the Georgia General Assembly sent the new congressional map to the desk of Republican Gov. Brain Kemp, who is expected to sign it into law. These redistricting efforts have come as right-wingers in the evenly split U.S. Senate block various voting rights bills and a handful of Democrats refuse to support killing the filibuster.
The Georgia GOP's map is designed to increase the number of congressional districts the party controls from eight to nine, leaving Democrats with just five. According to an analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Though Georgia's voters are split between the two political parties, none of the state's 14 congressional districts would be competitive."
It's not just the new congressional districts that serve Georgia's GOP. Democracy Docket notes that "the state House and Senate maps ... were criticized by Democrats for cementing a Republican advantage in the General Assembly and failing to account for the growth of Georgia's minority population."
Common Cause Georgia executive director Aunna Dennis said in a statement Monday that "when the redistricting process is led by the politicians, the maps will be drawn to benefit the politicians—and that's exactly what state legislators have done today."
"While these maps might be beneficial to the politicians in power, they are a complete disgrace to the voters of Georgia," Dennis declared. "None of the maps accurately reflect the changing population of our state."
"Our preliminary analysis shows that despite population growth in the state being driven largely by Black, Latinx and Asian populations, and despite the state's share of the white population decreasing by about 5% from 2010 to 2020, the amount of majority-BIPOC districts in these proposed maps have extremely marginal increases," she noted. "In fact, the new congressional map decreases the amount of majority-Black districts from the former district map."
Dennis said the maps were "intentionally designed to silence" communities of color and accused state leaders of continuing "to ignore the voters throughout the entire process." She also reiterated her group's support for independent redistricting commissions, saying that "district lines need to be drawn putting the interests of people, not politicians, first."
The Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia Rep. Mariam Paris, a Democrat, said the new district lines endanger two Democratic Black women in the state's congressional delegation, Reps. Nikema Williams and Lucy McBath.
"At a time when women are already underrepresented, particularly women of color, we should not be drawing maps that target women incumbents to make it harder for them to run and win in new districts," Paris said during the House debate. "But the map before us today does exactly that."
As the newspaper details:
The map redraws the Democratic-leaning district held by McBath, making it more Republican by extending north from metro Atlanta into conservative strongholds in Forsyth and Dawson counties. McBath won reelection last year with 55% of the vote, but under the new map, Republican voters would outnumber Democrats by 15 percentage points in next year's elections, according to the AJC's analysis. McBath flipped the 6th Congressional District in 2018, winning election in an area that was once a Republican bastion represented by Newt Gingrich, who became speaker of the House and led the GOP to take control of the U.S. House in 1994. Now the district is poised to return to Republican representation.
McBath — whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed in 2012 by a man who confronted him about the volume of his music — said Monday that Kemp, the Republican Party, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) "will not have the final say on when I am done fighting for my son."
Voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams — a Democrat who formerly served as minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives and narrowly lost the gubernatorial race to Kemp in 2018 — suggested in a series of tweets Monday that the new map shows the GOP is struggling to compete in the state.
"The bill will be eagerly signed by a man who has spent more than a decade using his status to disempower voters of color and intimidate the groups and individuals who organize them," Abrams said. "But neither Lucy McBath nor Georgia's organizers and voters of color will give up so easily."
President Joe Biden narrowly won Georgia in 2020 — prompting then-President Donald Trump to pressure Kemp to call a special election and to ask Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" more than 11,000 votes, moves that have led to a criminal probe in Fulton County.
Highlighting that the Georgia map is part of a national trend of GOP state lawmakers trying to give Republican congressional candidates clear advantages, Berman expressed frustration with Sens. Joe Manchin. D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who refuse to support abolishing the filibuster to pass federal voting rights protections.
"It's beyond enraging that Manchin and Sinema continue to say voting rights legislation needs 60 votes when [the] GOP [is] rigging elections and shutting Dems out of power for next decade on simple majority party-line votes," he said, calling it "total asymmetric warfare."
"Voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around," tweeted Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga. "Today's partisan redistricting decision at Georgia's State Capitol undermines voters' voices and harms our democracy."
"Congress must pass federal voting rights legislation," he added. "We can't wait any longer."
Early next month, new state legislative districts go before the Ohio Supreme Court. The congressional map approved last week is on its way to court, too. In both cases, Ohio Republicans controlled the process throughout, and approved maps that garnered no support from the minority party — directly at odds with the stated intent of the constitutional amendments overwhelmingly approved by voters. These new lines are transparently partisan, but they're built to be right at the bleeding edge of defensible. The new Senate plan offers a glimpse at state leaders' strategy.
Packing and cracking in Cincinnati and Cleveland
Three different state senators will represent portions of Hamilton County. Cuyahoga will get four. They're the second and third most populous counties in the state, so splitting the counties was likely unavoidable. But political scientist David Niven takes issue with how those splits were made.
“Gerrymandering isn't just about drawing a bunch of districts for your party to win. It's also about drawing districts for the other party that they can't lose," Niven explained. “You maximize the number of their voters who are bunched together, so they harm the dominant party in as few districts as possible."
This practice, known colloquially as packing and cracking, influences outcomes by changing what researchers call the efficiency gap. Efficiency has to do with the relative weight, or power, of a given vote. Casting a ballot in one party's stronghold is less efficient, for instance, than casting it in a toss-up race. When the margins are tighter, a single vote means more.
According to analysis from PlanScore, the Senate map as a whole gives Republicans a nine-point edge. Dave's Redistricting puts the efficiency gap at 11 points.
Niven says the areas around Cleveland and Cincinnati are poster children for this approach. He contrasts the 23rd District in Cleveland where Democrats can expect about 80% of the vote, with the neighboring 27th District which gives Republicans a slight edge.
“It's almost perfectly efficient, it's almost the ideal district from a Republican perspective, just enough Republican votes that they win — no wasted votes," Niven said. “You know, if you put any of those Democrats from 23 into 27, and they border each other, you could do this, you would have two Democratic districts."
In Cincinnati, Niven says Republican drafters took their tinkering with efficiency a step further. Hamilton County skews Democratic. In 2020, voters there gave Joe Biden 56% of the vote — that's 15 points more than Donald Trump's share. But the current map is likely to produce two Republican state senators and just one Democrat representing Hamilton County because of major differences in population.
“That's the special sauce, it's not only the drawing of the lines, but it's taking liberties with the size of districts," Niven said. “They cram quite a few more voters into the Democratic district than into the Republican districts, because if you if you apportion them evenly it would be harder to make two Republican districts."
We're not just talking about 100 people here, 100 people there — we're talking about a 29,000 or so difference. And you know, obviously that's a strategic choice. It has absolutely nothing to do with trying to achieve fair representation.
– Political Scientist David Niven
This stands in stark contrast to the process for the congressional map.
Republican lawmakers there insisted on as little population deviation as possible. Every district in the congressional map is equivalent, plus or minus one person. Sponsor Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, used an equal population argument to justify splitting Summit County. And Republicans used population as cudgel as well. Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, criticized the Democratic proposal noting one district was 748 voters above the ideal population while another was 491 voters below.
Those considerations went out the window for the Ohio Senate map.
“The Democratic district has 371,000 people. One of the Republican districts has 342,000 people," Niven said of the Hamilton County Senate districts. “We're not just talking about 100 people here, 100 people there — we're talking about a 29,000 or so difference. And you know, obviously that's a strategic choice. It has absolutely nothing to do with trying to achieve fair representation."
It's worth noting that courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have determined populations from district to district do not need to be exactly the same, and they do give greater leeway to state legislative lines. But while cases like Tennant v. Jefferson County and Reynolds v. Sims established that small deviations are fine, “as nearly as is practicable" populations must be equivalent. Further, they determined that where states do deviate, they must “justify population differences between districts that could have been avoided."
Flipping the math outside Columbus
In 2020, Senate District 16 was decided by just 116 votes. Incumbent Sen. Stephanie Kunze, R-Hilliard, was able to fend off a challenge from first time Democratic candidate Crystal Lett.
“We were in the race for about two years," Lett, who now works with Red, Wine and Blue, said. “It was an insanely hard-fought race. I don't think I could have possibly worked harder than I did."
Franklin County has grown considerably since the previous Senate map was drawn in 2011. That influx puts the district's current population more than 12 percent higher than the ideal population, and it has also pushed the district to the left, creating more of an opening for candidates like Lett.
But the results aren't likely to be as tight as they were in 2020 anytime soon. Under the previous map, district 16 favors Democrats over Republicans 52%-45%. With the new map, that advantage flips — favoring Republicans 52%-46%.
Mapmakers accomplished that swing by excising suburbs like Worthington that are trending blue, while adding in the entirety of largely rural Union County.
“I think the needs of Union County voters and the needs of Western Franklin County voters are significantly different," Lett argued. “I think it'd be a huge challenge to represent both areas and represent them well. And I think that's maybe the biggest offense of gerrymandering itself is that it lumps communities in that don't have much in common and expects someone to be able to meet the needs of everyone that they represent."
She also calls it “interesting" that she no longer lives in the district.
“They literally drew the line around my precinct to draw me out of the district," she laughed. “I am by a mile no longer in Senate District 16, which I can't imagine was done on accident."
The six-point swing in the 16th District is actually one of the biggest on the map, but by keeping the margin within the range of what could be considered competitive, it has the sheen of fairness. Similar shifts can be seen throughout the map. While a handful of left leaning districts see their margins climb markedly, right leaning districts see their figures move slightly — sometimes up, sometimes down, but often just enough to maintain an advantage. Niven says while those changes are subtle, they're significant.
“It's not that far of a distance from standing on the deck of a boat to being, you know, drowning in the water a few feet away," Niven said. “It's not that many votes, a lean Democratic district to a lean Republican district, but it makes a world of difference."
Sen. Kunze is term limited, so she won't end up running in the new 16th District. Still, she doesn't see the inclusion of Union County in her district as all that surprising given the population growth in central Ohio. And she rejects the idea that incorporating a largely rural neighboring county will change the complexion of the district. Instead, she highlights Jerome Village right across the county line from Dublin.
“That growth and influx is dynamic and increasing all the time, and to me, my little bit of time that I've seen and known people that moved out to Jerome village, that looks much more similar to a Franklin County (voter) than it does to a Union County voter," Kunze said.
Niven argues the impact of those changes affect more than just the margins. He says drawing in Union County re-centers the district — pushing it away from a growth area for Democrats and toward something of a no-man's land.
“So realistically, this would be an afterthought race for Democrats," Niven said. “Not one that they would go into fully expecting that they could win, which is I think where it is right now."
But Kunze and Lett are more sanguine about the district's competitiveness. Speaking about the current GOP advantage, Kunze said, “I expect that to drop. I expect it to remain a very competitive seat."
Although Lett believes the new district would be more challenging for Democrats, she thinks it's still winnable.
“If I swung the district nine points in 2020, could another Democrat come in and swing the district back to having a Democrat win? I think that's obviously possible," she said.
And that is part of the trade off when mapmakers maximize the efficiency of one party's votes. Although the lines are static, people aren't. Populations shift constantly, and given enough time, margins can narrow, or even flip.
But here again, Republican lawmakers may have insulated themselves by favoring a purely partisan process. Assuming the courts allow it to take effect, the new map will only be in place for the next four years, because no Democrats voted for it. With supermajorities in both chambers, and a map that gives them an edge, the GOP's grip on power seems unlikely to slacken before the latest map expires.
After that, Republicans can go back to the drawing board, and Ohioans could see the same process play out again.
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.
Oil majors have raised gasoline prices for the sake of their own profits, US President Joe Biden said Tuesday as his administration looked for ways to lower prices at pumps nationwide at the beginning of the holiday travel season.
The White House has upped the pressure on oil markets amid a spike in energy prices that has driven overall US inflation to record levels.
Biden had earlier in the day announced the United States would release crude from its national stockpile along with China, India, Japan, Korea and Britain in a bid to drive global prices lower, while again taking aim at oil majors he accused of unfairly raising prices.
"The price of gasoline in the wholesale market has fallen by about 10 percent in the last few years but the price at the pump hasn't budged a penny," Biden said at the White House.
"In other words, gas supply companies are paying less and making a lot more," he said, accusing companies of "pocketing the difference" between wholesale and retail prices.
Last week, he urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the causes of the nationwide spike in gasoline, saying oil companies have increased prices at the pump even as their expenses decline and profits soar.
Analysts say the case for misconduct by oil firms is not clear cut. Energy is a global market and crude prices are rebounding from the depths of the pandemic downturn last year, when they briefly went negative.
The United States is dealing with a record wave of inflation as it goes through its own stronger-than-expected economic rebirth, with consumer prices seeing their biggest annual jump in more than three decades last month.
"We and this administration are leaving no stone unturned as we examine the market to figure what's behind the high prices," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters Tuesday.
"If historical averages were true today, people would be paying about 30 cents less per-gallon at the pump based upon the differential between unfinished gas and gasoline at the pump. So he's asked for the FTC to take a look at this."
Joe Biden has invited Taiwan to a virtual summit on democracy alongside more than 100 countries -- a move that sparked indignation from authoritarian China, which is not on the list.
Taiwan thanked Biden for the invitation and said the gathering would be a rare opportunity for the self-ruled democracy to burnish its credentials on the world stage.
"Through this summit, Taiwan can share its democratic success story," Presidential Office spokesman Xavier Chang told reporters.
China said it "firmly opposed" the inclusion of an island it regards as "an inalienable part of Chinese territory". Beijing claims self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory to be re-taken one day, by force if necessary.
The global conference was a campaign pledge by the US president, who has placed the struggle between democracies and "autocratic governments" at the heart of his foreign policy.
The "Summit for Democracy" will take place online on December 9 and 10 ahead of an in-person meeting at its second edition next year.
The meeting was long advertised, but the guest list -- published Tuesday on the State Department's website -- will be closely scrutinized.
Unsurprisingly, America's main rivals China and Russia are not on it.
The invitation is a major coup for Taipei at a time when Beijing is ramping up its campaign to keep Taiwan locked out of international bodies.
Only 15 countries officially recognize Taipei over Beijing although many nations maintain de facto diplomatic relations with the island.
The US does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country but it holds it up as a rare model of progressive democracy in Asia and maintains it as a crucial regional ally.
China balks at any use of the word "Taiwan" or diplomatic gestures that might lend a sense of international legitimacy to the island.
"I agree Taiwan more than qualifies -- but it does seem to be (the) only democratic govt invited that the US govt does not officially recognize. So its inclusion is a big deal," tweeted Julian Ku, a Hofstra University law professor whose specialties include China.
India, often called "the world's biggest democracy," will be present despite increasing criticism from human rights defenders over democratic backsliding under Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
So too will Pakistan, despite its checkered relationship with Washington.
Democracy in decline
Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was dubbed an "autocrat" by Biden, did not make the list.
The city-state of Singapore and Bangladesh -- one of the world's most populous democracies -- did not make the list either.
In the Middle East, only Israel and Iraq were invited. The traditional Arab allies of the US -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates -- are all absent.
Biden also invited Brazil, which is led by controversial far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
In Europe, Poland is represented, despite recurring tensions with Brussels over respect for the rule of law, but Hungary's far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban is not.
On the African side, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Niger are invited.
"For this kick-off Summit... there's a case for getting a broad set of actors into the room: it provides for a better exchange of ideas than setting a perfect bar for qualification," Laleh Ispahani of the Open Society Foundations told AFP.
Rather than using the summit as an anti-China meeting, Ispahani urged Biden to address "the serious decline of democracy around the world -- including relatively robust models like the US."
This summit is being organized as democracy has suffered setbacks in countries where the US had placed great hopes.
Sudan and Myanmar have experienced military coups, Ethiopia is in the midst of a conflict that could lead to its "implosion," according to US diplomats, and the Taliban took power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US troops after two decades.
