Stephanie Saul

The report by The Associated Press quoted one candidate for the Iowa state Senate, Tom Courtney, as saying he had “a bad taste in my mouth” after he was approached by the aide, Pat Murphy, a former Iowa House Speaker.

Reached by telephone, Courtney, from Burlington, Iowa, declined to comment on the report.

The AP article, which said that other candidates for state office had been offered similar deals, prompted swift denunciation from two of Steyer’s rivals in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted a link to the article, writing, “This ain’t it.”

And Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana tweeted: “You buy your way to the debate stage. You try to buy your endorsements. @TomSteyer, we won’t be bought.”

In a statement, the Steyer campaign denied it had made contributions to Iowa politicians as inducements for them to endorse him.

“Tom has not made any individual contributions to candidates in Iowa this year, and he will not be making any contributions,” the statement said, adding: “Our campaign policy is clear that we will not engage in this kind of activity, and anyone who does is not speaking for the campaign or does not know our policy.”

But the news release also included a statement from Murphy offering an apology for any misunderstanding.

“As a former legislator, I know how tricky the endorsement process can be for folks in Iowa. It was never my intention to make my former colleagues uncomfortable, and I apologize for any miscommunication on my part,” he said.

The controversy was the second this week for Steyer’s campaign. His South Carolina director resigned Monday after allegations that he stole volunteer data collected by the campaign of Sen. Kamala Harris of California. He downloaded the information by using an account obtained when he worked with the South Carolina Democratic Party. The Steyer campaign suggested the download was inadvertent.

Steyer, a Californian who made his fortune in the hedge fund industry, has said he has $100 million to spend on his campaign. But only three months before the pivotal Iowa caucuses, he remains in single digits in polls there.

It was not clear whether Steyer’s groups — NextGen America, For Our Future or Need to Impeach — had supported any Iowa candidates this year.

This article originally appeared in

Steyer Aide Apologizes for 'Miscommunication' on Endorsement Solicitation

Tom Steyer’s presidential campaign apologized Thursday for “any miscommunication” it might have conveyed following a report that a top aide had privately offered campaign contributions to local candidates who would endorse Steyer.

Despite the dead heat — Sanders and Warren each with 20% support among Democratic voters and Biden with 19% — the Monmouth University Poll released Monday may hint at a concerning trend for the candidacy of Biden, the poll’s previous front-runner, whose support declined from 32% when the Monmouth Poll was taken in June.

Sanders of Vermont and Warren of Massachusetts both picked up several percentage points of support since June. Voters were asked whom they would support among 23 Democratic candidates.

Patrick Murray, who runs the polling institute at Monmouth, in West Long Branch, New Jersey, said the poll suggested that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination was heating up.

“The main takeaway from this poll is that the Democratic race has become volatile,” Murray said. “Liberal voters are starting to cast about for a candidate they can identify with. Moderate voters, who have been paying less attention, seem to be expressing doubts about Biden.”

Murray cautioned that the results were just “one snapshot from one poll.” The poll of 800 voters included 298 people considered registered Democrats or Democratic-leaning and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points within that group. It was conducted by telephone from Aug. 16 to 20.

Warren’s favorable ratings also improved, while Biden’s slipped and Sanders’ remained stable.

While only one poll, the results seemed to bolster findings of a poll released last week by the Economist and YouGov that also hinted at a tight race, showing Biden with 22% support, Sanders with 19% and Warren with 18%. In the poll, 72% of Democrats gave a “favorable” rating to Warren — 2 points higher than Biden’s favorable rating of 70. Sanders’ favorable rating was 65%.

In interviews in Iowa, some of Biden’s supporters have indicated that they lack enthusiasm for his candidacy, suggesting that his strong poll numbers may mask a softness in his support.

The Monmouth Poll found that Biden’s support had eroded in states that hold earlier primaries, dropping from 26% to 20% since June. It had also fallen among a broad range of Democrats — including those who call themselves moderate, conservative and liberal; those with college degrees and those without; white voters and voters of color.

In a statement, the Biden campaign suggested that the poll was an outlier, noting that it was based on a relatively small sample size, and that an average of national polls calculated by RealClear Politics put the former vice president ahead, with 27.2% to Sanders’ 16.7% and Warren’s 16.2%.

Support for most of the other candidates for the Democratic nomination held firm in the Monmouth poll, albeit with far lower numbers than the three leaders.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California remained steady with 8% support. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey gained slightly, from 2% in June to 4% in August. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, got 4%, compared with 5% in June.

The poll delivered bad news for another candidate: California hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer. Steyer entered the race in July and has said he would spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign.

Because Steyer registered less than 1% support in the poll, he has not yet qualified for the third televised Democratic debate in September, with a deadline to qualify looming on Wednesday.

So far only 10 candidates have qualified, meaning the debate is currently set to take place on one night.

Poll Shows Biden Sliding to 3-Way Tie Atop the Field

A new national poll suggests that the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination may be tightening, with a virtual three-way tie among former Vice President Joe Biden and two more progressive rivals, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Patrick Murray, who runs the polling institute at Monmouth, in West Long Branch, New Jersey, said the poll suggested that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination was tightening.

Murray cautioned that the results were just “one snapshot from one poll.” The poll of 800 voters included 298 people considered registered Democrats or Democratic-leaning and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points within that group.

While only one poll, the results seemed to bolster findings of a poll released last week by the Economist and YouGov that also hinted at a tight race, with 72% of Democrats giving a “favorable” rating to Warren — two points higher than Biden’s favorable rating of 70. In that poll, Sanders’ favorable rating was 65%.

The Monmouth Poll found that Biden’s support had eroded in states that hold earlier primaries, dropping from 26% to 20% since June. It had also eroded among a broad range of Democrats — including those who call themselves moderate, conservative and liberal; those with college degrees and those without; white voters and voters of color.

Most of the other candidates for the Democratic nomination held firm in the Monmouth poll, albeit with far lower numbers than the three leaders.

The national poll was conducted by telephone from Aug. 16 to 20.

New 2020 Poll Shows Tightening Race Between Sanders, Warren and Biden

A new national poll suggests that the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination may be tightening, with a virtual three-way tie between former Vice President Joe Biden and two more progressive rivals, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Never one to shy away from a fight, Elizabeth Warren had found a new sparring partner. She had only recently started teaching at the University of Texas School of Law, but her colleague Calvin Johnson already knew her well enough to brace for a lively exchange as they commuted to work.

Indeed, on this morning in 1981, Warren again wanted to debate, this time arguing on the side of giant utilities over their customers.

Her position was “savagely anti-consumer,” Johnson recalled recently, adding that it wasn’t unusual for her to espouse similar pro-business views on technical legal issues.

Then something changed. He calls it Warren’s “road to Damascus” moment.

“She started flipping — ‘I’m pro-consumer,’” Johnson said.

That something, as Warren often tells the story, was her deepening academic research into consumer bankruptcy, its causes, and lenders’ efforts to restrict it. Through the 1980s, the work took her to courthouses across the country. There, she said in a recent interview, she found not only the dusty bankruptcy files she had gone looking for but heart-wrenching scenes she hadn’t imagined — average working Americans, tearful and humiliated, admitting they were failures:

“People dressed in their Sunday best, hands shaking, women clutching a handful of tissues, trying to stay under control. Big beefy men whose faces were red and kept wiping their eyes, who showed up in court to declare themselves losers in the great American game of life.”

Nearly 40 years after she began her bankruptcy research, Warren is among the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Along with Bernie Sanders, her fellow senator, she represents a progressive wing whose profound ideological division from their moderate rivals has turned this primary into a contest over the future of the party.

Warren’s political awakening didn’t simply happen all at once. Her road to Damascus was a long one. But over several decades, she transformed from a largely pro-business and politically disengaged academic — a sort of default Republican — to a fierce consumer advocate and bankruptcy expert whose advice was sought on Capitol Hill, and then, finally, to a Democratic force on the Hill herself.

Her bankruptcy work with two Texas colleagues, Jay Westbrook and Teresa Sullivan, resulted in a 1989 book, “As We Forgive Our Debtors,” regarded as a landmark among many bankruptcy lawyers and academics for its depth and conclusions. One central finding — that bankrupt debtors represented a social cross section of society — dispelled the popular narrative at the time. Even more controversial was the book’s uncompromising criticism of the credit card industry for enticing consumers to take on ever more high-interest debt.

Warren, who said she began the study on the lookout for “cheaters and deadbeats,” quickly realized that the people she was studying seemed familiar. Her own family in Oklahoma had teetered on the brink of financial ruin. It is a part of the biography she discusses in folksy speeches across the country — her father’s unemployment, her mother’s effort to save the family home with a minimum-wage job, and how that wouldn’t be possible today, with minimum wage paying below the poverty rate.

The revelations from her bankruptcy research, by her account, became the seeds of her worldview, laid out in her campaign plans for everything from a new tax on the wealthiest Americans to a breakup of big technology companies.

Yet as Warren’s candidacy has gained traction, critics have complained that she is too rigid and radical in her liberal ideas, dug in to a polarizing degree against others with differing views, and can come across as dogmatic and intellectually strident at times. Johnson, who admires Warren, describes her as “hard as nails.” Some Democrats worry that such perceptions make her seem too left-wing and hard to work with, and could make it difficult for her to build an Electoral College majority if she is the nominee.

But a look at Warren’s philosophical and political metamorphosis provides yet another perspective on her personality, revealing a woman who searched for answers and found something she had never expected, then altered her thinking accordingly.

As Westbrook put it, “She is really someone who is willing to learn and willing to be persuaded.”

Law andEconomics

In 1979, Warren recruited her parents from her native Oklahoma to her home in the Houston suburbs to help babysit her two young children.

Then a professor at the University of Houston, she would be spending several weeks at a luxury resort near Miami, one of 22 law professors selected to study an increasingly popular discipline known as “law and economics.’’ One of its central ideas is that markets perform more efficiently than courts.

Johnson, Warren’s former Texas commuting partner, believes that it was an important influence on her early thinking.

“Before Liz converted, she came to us from the decidedly anti-government side of law and economics,” he said.

The summer retreat was colloquially known as a “Manne camp,” after its organizer, the libertarian legal scholar Henry Manne. With financial support from industry and conservative foundations, Manne had formed a Law and Economics Center at the University of Miami. (He would later move operations to Emory University and then to George Mason University.)

The mission of the retreat was to spread the gospel of free-market microeconomics among law professors. One participant, John Price, a former dean of the law school at the University of Washington, described it as “sort of pure proselytizing on the part of dedicated, very conservative law and economics folks,” with an emphasis on an anti-regulatory agenda. One faculty member, he recalled, suggested eliminating the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

In the reputational pecking order of those attending its 10th annual edition that summer in Key Biscayne, Florida, Warren, with her law degree from Rutgers, was near the bottom.

The group included such legal luminaries as Abraham Sofaer, a Columbia law professor who had just been named a federal judge in Manhattan, and Frank Iacobucci, a professor at the University of Toronto who would later serve on the Canadian Supreme Court. Warren was one of only two women in attendance, along with Grace Ganz Blumberg, then a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

While some in the group have said Warren expressed skepticism at the libertarian ideology, Blumberg remembers someone very much developing the early stages of her career, who was “far more captivated than I” with the theories.

Afterward, Warren remained in contact with Manne, writing periodically to update him on her life and career, appreciative notes that suggest something of a mentor-mentee relationship.

In November 1979, during a visit by Manne to Houston, Warren confided that she was going through a divorce from her husband, Jim Warren, an IBM mathematical wizard who had chafed at Warren’s pursuit of a career outside the home.

Two months after her divorce was finalized, in a letter dated March 7, 1980, Warren thanked Manne for providing “lots of advice and comfort” during that Houston visit. She also shared another development in her life: She was engaged to be married again — to Bruce Mann, a Brown- and Yale-trained scholar in the history of law who had become her frequent tennis partner at the Florida retreat.

“You even provided (indirectly) my husband,” she wrote. “Can I ever thank you enough, or should I just request that in lieu of wedding gifts guests just send a donation to LEC?”

Warren wrote to Manne in 1981, attaching a copy of her latest published article. She was sending him one article a summer, she wrote, and each “increasingly reflects my time at LEC.”

The exact topic of the article is not reflected in the correspondence, which was released to The New York Times by the Manne Center at George Mason University. (Manne died in 2015.) Based on the letter’s date, however, it was probably a 68-page treatise on judicial interpretation of contracts published in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review.

“This is really hard-core law &amp; econ analysis,” Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason who formerly served as executive director of the Manne Center, wrote in an email. “If you had given me this article with the author anonymized and asked me who wrote it, I would have answered that it was one of the leading scholars in the law &amp; economics of commercial and contract law. Never, in a million years, would I have thought this article was written by EW.”

Several articles Warren wrote during that period, on utility regulation, promote a pro-industry position, experts said.

A 1978 article in the Rutgers Law Review — which would inspire some of her early debates with Johnson — argued in favor of a utility rate-setting model that Johnson said would allow utilities to charge customers for taxes that hadn’t yet been paid. A piece in 1980 for Public Utilities Fortnightly, an industry magazine, took a similar position, according to its editor, Steven Mitnick, who added, “It’s quite surprising that this was written by the person we know as Elizabeth Warren.”

But Price, the former University of Washington dean who became friends with Warren in Key Biscayne and is a supporter and contributor to her presidential campaign, sees nothing unusual in what he describes as Warren’s “reasonable evolution from what they were espousing” at the retreat.

Reflecting on his own shift from “Rockefeller Republican” to Democrat, he added, “I believe we just go through an educational process.”

As Warren sees that process, her early interest in law and economics revealed a period of “learning another tool, but then coming to understand the values that underlie that system.”

Traveling With R2-D2

By 1981, Warren and her husband had secured temporary teaching posts at the University of Texas, where she agreed to teach bankruptcy law. She quickly earned a reputation for lively lectures, putting students on the spot and peppering them with questions and follow-up questions — the consummate practitioner of the Socratic method.

Even visitors to her class got the treatment. One of them was Stefan Riesenfeld, a renowned bankruptcy professor who had come to lecture on the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. The law, which had expanded bankruptcy protection for consumers, was already under attack by the credit industry, which argued that it made personal bankruptcy too attractive.

Even so, Riesenfeld explained to Warren’s class, those who filed personal bankruptcy were “mostly day laborers and housemaids who had lived at the economic margins and always would,” she wrote in her 2014 memoir.

“I asked the obvious follow-up question: ‘How did he know?’” Warren wrote. After more questioning, it became clear that not only did Riesenfeld have no real answer, he was irritated by Warren’s probing.

The subject struck close to home. When she was growing up in Oklahoma, her father’s heart attack had thrown their household into precarious financial territory, forcing her mother to take a minimum-wage job answering telephones at Sears.

She remembers being fearful as she lay in bed at night listening to her mother cry. “She thought I had gone to sleep. I didn’t know for sure the details of why she was crying, but I knew it was bad and that we could lose everything,” Warren said.

(Later, the oil glut of the 1980s would destroy her brother David’s once-thriving business delivering supplies to oil rigs. Her brother John, a construction worker, would also struggle after the oil market collapsed. Her family ended up in such dire straits that Warren and her husband would ultimately provide financial assistance to some relatives, including help buying their homes.)

She wanted answers, more than Riesenfeld could provide. She began discussing her questions with colleagues.

“There was this new bankruptcy code, and nobody knew much about what was happening out there in the world,” Westbrook said. “We got to talking and decided it would be kind of interesting to go down and take a look at some of the cases on file in the Western District of Texas, San Antonio to El Paso. We literally went to the courthouses and talked to the judges.”

As the study expanded, the researchers began visiting other states to collect data from the court files — then available only on paper.

“We got two portable Xerox machines, which in those days were a big deal — high technology,” Westbrook remembered. “We had to buy a ticket for them. We didn’t trust them to baggage.”

They nicknamed the equipment R2-D2.

Dozens of people would eventually be involved in the effort, an analysis of a quarter-million pieces of data gathered from bankruptcy cases filed from 1981 through 1985.

Among the researchers was Kimberly Winick, then a University of Texas law student and now a lawyer in Los Angeles. While Warren didn’t talk a lot about her views, Winick said she believed that the project’s initial theory was that, “If you filed bankruptcy, you must be cheating.

“Liz was from a more conservative place,” Winick said. “And she was somebody who had worked very, very, very hard all her life. And she had never walked away from a debt. And I think she kind of started with the view — let’s see what people are doing and how they’re cadging on their debts and screwing their creditors.”

That was the conventional thinking of the day, promoted in a study by Purdue University researchers that was being widely circulated on Capitol Hill as evidence the 1978 bankruptcy law needed to be toughened, Warren said in the interview.

But when she and her colleagues analyzed the study, she said, they concluded not only that its methodology was flawed, but that it had been funded with a sizable grant from the credit industry.

“That’s where it starts to shift for me,” Warren said. “Once we figured out that this was a bought-and-paid-for piece of credit industry advertising, now I was a little more neutral.”

In the Fight

And there were the personal stories, voices from that cross section of society forced into bankruptcy.

“There was an elderly couple who told the story of their child, an adult man, who had a drug problem,” Warren said. “And how they had sold everything, he’d fallen back in again, and they cashed out their retirement accounts to put him through rehab.”

Another couple had left their jobs in the previous year. Even though they had quickly found new ones — as a psychiatric aide at a state hospital and a manager at a state agency — their income dropped 25%. They fell behind on their $45,000 mortgage and other debts. Their experience illustrated the study’s crucial finding that lenders had extended an enormous amount of credit to people who were clearly bad risks.

While the files did not tell the whole story, they provided enough evidence for Warren and her co-authors to write, “Repeatedly, we have been surprised by the data and forced to rethink our own understanding of bankruptcy.”

The study’s findings, laid out in their 1989 book, also explicitly raised questions about a central tenet of law and economics: that individuals respond rationally to economic incentives. As applied to bankruptcy — the more generous the bankruptcy provisions, the more people would file — that idea had been the rationale behind the campaign that succeeded in toughening the bankruptcy code in 1984.

Over the years, the research elevated Warren’s status, from little-known Texas professor to sought-after lecturer, writer and consultant in bankruptcy law. It also set the stage for her career in politics.

In 1995, Mike Synar, a former Democratic congressman from her home state, asked Warren, by then a Harvard professor, to advise a special commission reviewing the bankruptcy system. She balked, fearing the Washington work would render her scholarship impure, but signed on when Synar promised to keep her insulated from politics.

It was during that period, in 1996, that she switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, though she insists that her essential conversion was from “not political” to “political.”

“I didn’t come from a political family,” she said. “I hadn’t been political as an adult. I was raising a family, teaching school and doing my research,” she said.

“I quickly discovered that every single Republican was on the side of the banks and half the Democrats were,” she said. “But whenever there was someone who would stand up for those working families, it was a Democrat.”

She added, “I picked sides, got in the fight, and I’ve been in the fight ever since.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-republican-history.html" id="a0aef9e8-aede-3327-ac96-77a813435a02">The New York Times</a>.

(The Long Run)

The Education of Elizabeth Warren

Asked whether he would resume President Barack Obama’s deportation rate — which outpaced the first two years of the Trump administration — Biden said, “Absolutely not.” But he defended Obama’s record.

“To compare him to Donald Trump, I think, is absolutely bizarre,” he said.

The exchange over immigration began when Julián Castro, who served as Obama’s housing secretary, defended his proposal to decriminalize border crossings, which he has called the only way to end the Trump administration policy of separating children from their parents at the border.

Biden — who seemed to raise his finger during the June debate to indicate he favored Castro’s plan — has since disavowed that position.

“I have enough guts to say this plan doesn’t make sense,” Biden said Wednesday. “The fact of the matter is that when people cross the border illegally, it is illegal to do it unless they’re seeking asylum. People should have to get in line. That’s the problem.”

Biden called for a plan to “flood the zone” to process asylum-seekers and to significantly “increase the number of legal immigrants who are able to come.”

As for Castro, a Cabinet member under Obama, Biden said, “I never heard him talking about any of this when he was secretary.”

Other Democrats, siding with Castro, joined in piling on Biden, the front-runner.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York repeatedly asked whether Biden had tried to stop deportations during the Obama administration.

“I didn’t hear your response. You were vice president of the United States. I didn’t hear whether you tried to stop them or not, using your power, your influence in the White House,” de Blasio said.

He was joined by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who has released a plan that he said would “virtually eliminate” immigration detentions, who told Biden, “You invoke President Obama more than anyone in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then dodge it when it’s not.”

Americans view immigration as the country’s top problem at the moment, their concern prompted in large part by images of children separated from their parents at the border. Yet there is broad disagreement over a solution.

The Trump administration’s crackdown at the border — and the reaction by many Americans who believe migrants have been harshly treated — have pushed Democrats left on the issue. A number of the Democratic candidates have embraced not only decriminalization but also a plan to provide health care benefits to migrants in the country illegally.

Democratic political advisers worry that the candidates have moved too far left of center and that it will play into Republican hands by alienating general election voters. In memos, they have urged Democrats to embrace a more moderate message, one that emphasizes reforming immigration but also securing the border.

Before Tuesday night’s debate, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts argued for decriminalizing border crossings, President Donald Trump’s campaign released a new ad blasting Democrats on immigration, calling their ideas radical and socialist.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/politics/joe-biden-immigration.html" id="2239eefb-0735-3c5f-aa4f-dee5e4b94a36">The New York Times</a>.

At Debate, Democrats Challenge Biden Over Obama's Deportation Record

The topic of immigration was, once again, a major point of contention during the fourth Democratic debate, with former Vice President Joe Biden under attack from hecklers as well as his fellow Democrats over the Obama administration’s deportation record.

Many of those voters also express strong views opposing illegal border crossings, often rooted in their own family stories of coming to America. If you want a chance at the American dream, they say, you should play by the rules.

“I think everybody should come in the right way, just like our ancestors did,” said Christy Cowles, 59, a retired city worker who is a fan of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Voters like Cowles present a conundrum for Democrats on the sensitive topic of immigration. While many Democrats express a desire to ease the way for aspiring immigrants, party leaders also worry that an immigration agenda that shifts too far left could alienate voters in tightly contested states like Wisconsin, ranging from avowed liberals like Cowles to coveted swing voters.

In the first round of Democratic debates in June, candidates staked out aggressively liberal positions on immigration, with near-unanimous support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

The idea was first advanced by Julián Castro, a former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who is among those scheduled to be onstage Wednesday night in the second set of debates. Jeh Johnson, the head of homeland security during the Obama administration, criticized the concept as tantamount to permitting open borders. Since then, another candidate, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, also slated to appear Wednesday night, said he would virtually eliminate immigration detention.

In a sign of the escalating concerns within the party, several Democratic governors this month expressed alarm about open-borders rhetoric. And a document recently circulated to House Democrats from party consultants advised a more moderate approach — suggesting the party emphasize a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who “work hard and pay their taxes” but also stress the importance of secure borders.

“Beyond policy, the best frame on immigration acknowledges the problem and talks about solutions — both addressing border security and a path to earned citizenship,” read the memo, which was addressed to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

A recent Gallup poll found that immigration tops the list of issues that Americans view as important. Trump’s demands for a wall at the Mexican border, as well as tighter restrictions on immigration, have emerged as an emotional issue in the presidential campaign. The president and his supporters have called Democrats soft on enforcement; Democrats counter that the wall and inhumane treatment of those seeking asylum are antithetical to core American values.

There are few places where the topic is more contentious than in Wisconsin, a swing state where it has been used as a cudgel against Democrats, even in local races for positions with no role in federal immigration policy.

Rob Grover, a Democrat who ran for the state Assembly last year, said he was surprised when a flyer paid for by the Wisconsin Republican Party suggested he wanted to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Grover, who describes himself as conservative on immigration issues, said he had never expressed such a view. He lost his race in western Wisconsin.

Immigration has also emerged as an issue in other state races, with right-leaning appeals that appear designed to inflame anti-immigrant passion, according to Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, who blamed huge last-minute spending around immigration and other issues for defeating the Democratic candidate in this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Special interest groups on both sides of the race reported spending more than $4 million in an effort to sway its outcome.

With its Democratic city center and a surrounding rural area that skews Republican, Racine County often swings from one party to another, serving as a national bellwether in predicting the outcome of presidential races. In 2016, the county voted for Trump.

And in this swing district, some local Democrats have speculated that immigration helped torpedo their efforts last year to win the congressional seat held by former House Speaker Paul Ryan, according to Fabi Maldonado, a Racine County supervisor and immigration advocate.

The Democratic candidate, Randy Bryce, had been arrested while protesting Ryan’s position on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which delays deportation and allows work permits for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children.

“There was internal fighting in the Democratic Party over whether he was too open about supporting illegal immigration,” Maldonado said. “Some of that might be true, but you have to be for immigration rights if you want Latinx voters to turn out.”

Cowles, the retired city worker, said that her forebears arrived in Racine a century ago from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Germany, joining a wave of European immigrants who settled this lakefront city 30 miles south of Milwaukee. African Americans arrived during the Great Migration and, more recently, the Latino population has swelled to about 20%. The city has largely embraced its multiethnic mosaic. Tortillas are sold on the same block as kringles, the Wisconsin state pastry introduced by Danish immigrants. The Racine City Council recently endorsed the idea of permitting driver’s licenses for unauthorized residents.

Interviews with more than a dozen Democrats and left-leaning voters revealed disagreement on immigration. Some favored more relaxed policies and others urged caution, recalling stories passed down through generations about how their ancestors struggled to find sponsors before arriving on Ellis Island.

Kevin Hughes, who retired from a factory that makes shampoo, said he favored more liberal policies. “Everybody is going somewhere else to try to make a better life for their family,” said Hughes, 59. “Why would you want to criminalize that?”

Maria Haenel, 35, who was born in Illinois to Mexican parents, held a similar view. “Even if immigrants that have come over the border, even if they don’t have papers, they should be given a chance to get a work visa, or a student visa, or some type of help to stay here and be able to live the American dream,” said Haenel, a caregiver for older adults.

Yet some members of Racine’s Mexican American community said they worried about opening up borders too liberally. Lewis Mendoza, 68, takes pride in the contribution of Mexican people to the Wisconsin economy, particularly in the dairy industry, where a high percentage of workers are believed to be unauthorized.

“There was a time when blue-eyed, blond-haired people did that job,” said Mendoza, a Democrat who voted for Clinton. “You don’t see any white people anymore. It’s all Mexican people. What are you going to do if you send them back?”

But Mendoza, a veteran who has worked as a dishwasher in Racine restaurants alongside unauthorized workers, also expressed skepticism about migrants who enter the country illegally. “As far as just jumping over a fence or something, I don’t know about that. I’m a little leery about that,” he said.

Racine is known for its ethnic festivals, many held on the shore of Lake Michigan.

A lakefront fair last week sponsored by the Roma Lodge, an Italian welfare association, featured fireworks, Frank Sinatra music and a dinner of mostaccioli and ravioli. Jim Faraone, a former board member of the organization, was in charge of selling lottery tickets to raise money for local health charities.

Faraone, a Vietnam veteran, is a swing voter, having supported both Barack Obama and Clinton, but also Ryan, a Republican. He also expressed skepticism about an overly broad border policy.

“They shouldn’t be here unless they came in legally; it’s the only way,” said Faraone, 77, whose father immigrated from Italy and developed the home building business that Faraone later operated. Echoing Trump, Faraone expressed fear that other countries were offloading “murderers and other criminals” into the United States.

Ginny Ziolkowski, 70, also said she swung from one party to another, most recently supporting Obama and Clinton, but before that President George W. Bush. As for Trump, “I personally can’t stand him,” she said as she took in the view at Racine’s lakefront.

But Ziolkowski, whose husband was a Racine County executive — a lakefront park here bears his name — said she leaned conservative on immigration issues and opposed providing health care benefits to unauthorized migrants, another idea some candidates endorsed during the first debates. It’s clearly an issue the Trump campaign thinks works in its favor; on Tuesday, it released a new advertisement blasting Democrats for supporting the idea.

“I feel they need to come in legally if they want to live here,” Ziolkowski said. “And they should not be getting education, health care and other benefits.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/politics/wisconsin-democrats-immigration-policy.html" id="52247fff-ff77-3737-a18d-2c6143927f52">The New York Times</a>.

In Wisconsin Swing District, a Range of Views on Immigration

RACINE, Wis. — In this old manufacturing city that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, dislike for President Donald Trump runs wide and deep. Images of crying children at the Mexican border typically serve as Exhibit A on the list of grievances that Democratic voters cite against the president.

Plame, 55, is running for the northern New Mexico seat being vacated by Rep. Ben Ray Luján. Luján, who had been regarded as a possible successor to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has announced that he plans to run for Senate to replace retiring Sen. Tom Udall.

Plame, who moved to Santa Fe after leaving Washington more than a decade ago, has recently worked as a speaker and writer, but she is best known for the circumstances of her departure from the CIA, where she had served for two decades.

When her husband, U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an opinion essay in The New York Times in 2003 raising questions about a central underpinning for the invasion of Iraq — that President Saddam Hussein was acquiring nuclear weapons there — Plame’s identity was leaked to the media.

Columnist Robert Novak disclosed Plame’s undercover status in The Washington Post, quoting unnamed administration officials, in what was regarded as an effort by some in the administration to discredit Wilson’s opinions.

No one was ever prosecuted for the leak, but the ensuing investigation led to the conviction of I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Libby, who goes by Scooter, was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2018.

In congressional testimony, Plame said she blamed the Bush administration for intentionally disclosing her identity and undermining her career. And in a news release Thursday, she repeated that contention.

“My career in the CIA was cut short by partisan politics, but I’m not done serving our country,” she said.

In the news release, Plame indicated that health care would be a central focus of her campaign.

“The high cost of health care and prescription medicine is hitting everyone,” she said. “Everyone is losing under the health care system we have today except for insurance and drug companies.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/politics/valerie-plame-2020.html" id="b0b38a0f-d18a-38fd-afea-91f94b938f09">The New York Times</a>.

Former CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose cover was blown in a leak that touched off a political scandal during the George W. Bush administration, said Thursday that she plans to run for Congress as a Democrat.

Valerie Plame, Outed CIA Agent, Will Run for Congress in New Mexico

Speaking at a downtown rally near the border with Mexico, O’Rourke said that his hometown, El Paso, its embrace of immigration and its rich ties with Mexico represented the best of the American experience, adding that the challenges facing the country presented “a moment of truth.”

Quoting King, he said El Paso and its Mexican neighbor of Ciudad Juárez were “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

He added, “This is a campaign for America, for everyone in America.”

His words and the setting on the street that connects El Paso with Ciudad Juárez symbolized what his campaign said would be one of O’Rourke’s themes — a “unifying vision for bridging divides” to unite Americans from all walks of life.

But the speech by O’Rourke, a former three-term member of Congress, comes at a time of extraordinary discord over immigration, with a surge of migrants trying to enter the United States and President Donald Trump threatening to seal off the border in the coming week.

El Paso has been a flashpoint for much of that unrest, with hundreds of migrants now being held in a makeshift encampment under a bridge near where O’Rourke was speaking.

The encampment, where immigration officials are detaining people behind razor wire with little hot food, was set up last week when El Paso’s main border processing center reached overflow capacity following the largest influx of migrants in years.

Acknowledging the plight of the migrants, O’Rourke said, “Let us remember that every single one of us, including those who are just three or four blocks from here detained under the international bridge — behind chain-link fence and barbed wire — they are our fellow human beings and deserve to be treated like our fellow human beings.”

O’Rourke, who also had rallies scheduled for Houston and outside the state’s Capitol in Austin, stressed not only immigration but also health care, education, climate change, criminal justice reform, the economy, voting rights and racial inequality, all topics that have emerged as major issues in the effort by Democrats to unseat Trump in 2020.

“This is our moment of truth and we cannot be found wanting,” he told the enthusiastic crowd. “The challenges before us are the greatest of our lifetimes. An economy that works too well for too few and not at all for too many more. A health care system where millions are unable to see a doctor or be well enough to live to their full potential, and the last, best hope of averting the catastrophe that will follow climate change, fading before our very inaction. We must overcome these challenges.”

O’Rourke was introduced by his wife, Amy O’Rourke, an educator. The couple’s three children also attended.

O’Rourke has been campaigning for two weeks, often in impromptu sessions in cafes or intimate town halls. But this was billed as his first major public event and opportunity to present the broad themes of his campaign.

Speaking extemporaneously for 34 minutes, gesticulating as he walked around a stage set in the middle of the street, O’Rourke hit particularly hard on access to health care and prescription drug costs.

“When one of the largest providers of mental health care services is a county jail system, and in a nation that is in the midst of a maternal mortality crisis — three times as deadly for women of color — let us ensure that universal health care means we can see a primary care provider, all of us can get mental health care, and that universal health care means that every woman makes her own decisions about her own body,” he said.

He also called for better pay for teachers — “let’s pay them what they’re worth” — and a “world-class public school system from pre-K to 12.”

The crowd of several thousand supporters included Marta Lopez, 71, a retired state worker from El Paso, who had come wearing a black-and-white BETO T-shirt.

“We’ve lived here all our lives, and I feel we don’t need a wall,” said Lopez, adding that she admires O’Rourke’s positions on immigration as well as his pledge not to accept PAC money.

Several supporters of O’Rourke said they were intimidated by a gantlet of pro-Trump protesters blocking their way to the rally.

“They were just very confrontational and yelling scary stuff at us,” said Thelma Ramos, 38, of El Paso, who came with her 13-year-old daughter.

O’Rourke, 46, grew up in this border town, the son of a local political figure and a furniture store operator. He had little name recognition until last year, when he became a national figure during his unsuccessful effort to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican.

With a progressive sheen and grassroots appeal, O’Rourke set fundraising records in that Senate campaign. He continued that record-setting pace in the 24 hours after announcing his White House ambitions two weeks ago, raising more than $6.1 million online in one day. That outpaced the $5.9 million collected by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his first day.

Some recent polls place O’Rourke at third in popularity among Democrats expected to be in the race, behind former Vice President Joe Biden, who has not yet announced his intentions, and Sanders.

And if his style is entirely different from Sanders, he hit many similar themes.

“For too long in this country, the powerful have maintained their privilege at the expense of the powerless,” he said. “They have used fears and division in the same way that our current president uses fear and division.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/politics/beto-rally.html" id="2b511a76-1228-3924-aea9-aa870c5ff36a">The New York Times</a>.

Immigration at Core as O'Rourke Starts Campaign

EL PASO — Beto O’Rourke officially kicked off his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination Saturday morning, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., raising populist themes and praising the way immigration has enriched El Paso and the nation.

Stephanie Saul

Articles written by the author

Steyer Aide Apologizes for 'Miscommunication' on Endorsement Solicitation

Poll Shows Biden Sliding to 3-Way Tie Atop the Field

New 2020 Poll Shows Tightening Race Between Sanders, Warren and Biden

The Education of Elizabeth Warren

At Debate, Democrats Challenge Biden Over Obama's Deportation Record

In Wisconsin Swing District, a Range of Views on Immigration

Valerie Plame, Outed CIA Agent, Will Run for Congress in New Mexico

Immigration at Core as O'Rourke Starts Campaign

Immigration at Core as O'Rourke Starts Campaign

Immigration at Core as O'Rourke Starts Campaign

Immigration at Core as O'Rourke Starts Campaign

Gillibrand Aide Resigned Over Handling of Sexual Misconduct Claim

Former Gillibrand Aide Complained About Handling of Sexual Misconduct Claim

Former Gillibrand Aide Complained About Handling of Sexual Misconduct Claim

Kobach Wants to Build the Wall His Way, and Says He Has the President's Blessing

Democrats Find a Foil for 2020 Primary: Billionaires (Even Liberal Ones)

Kris Kobach announces bid for Kansas Senate seat

Harris' secret weapon: The sisterhood of Alpha Kappa Alpha

Sara Gideon to challenge Susan Collins for Maine Senate seat

Immigration at core as O'Rourke starts campaign