Saturday, June 21, 2025

A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award. [nyt]

 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/us/white-supremacist-university-of-florida-paper.html

A White Nationalist at University of Florida Wrote a Paper Promoting …

Reporting from Gainesville, Fla.
13–17 minutes

The University of Florida student won an academic honor after he argued in a paper that the Constitution applies only to white people. From there, the situation spiraled.

Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.

In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”

Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”

At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.

The Trump-nominated judge who taught the class, John L. Badalamenti, declined to comment for this article, and does not appear to have publicly discussed why he chose Mr. Damsky for the award.

That left some students and faculty members at the law school, considered Florida’s most prestigious, to wonder, and to worry: What merit could the judge have seen in it?

The granting of the award set off months of turmoil on the law school campus. Its interim dean, Merritt McAlister, defended the decision earlier this year, citing Mr. Damsky’s free speech rights and arguing that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”

Ms. McAlister, in an email to the law school community, also invoked “institutional neutrality,” an increasingly popular policy among college administrators. It instructs schools not to take public positions on hot-button issues.

But the question of how officials should respond to Mr. Damsky — who, in an interview, said that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong” — is not merely academic.

Well beyond the classroom, bigoted and extremist views are on the rise and vying for mainstream acceptance, raising questions about whether principles of neutrality and free-speech rights are proper and adequate responses to the threats.

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, recently allowed millions of people to view Kanye West’s new song saluting Hitler when other platforms removed it. Vice President JD Vance criticized European governments’ efforts to ostracize far-right political parties, on the grounds that doing so violates principles of free speech.

At the University of Florida, the story of the book award took a dramatic turn soon after Ms. McAlister defended the decision to honor Mr. Damsky with it. It was then, in February, that Mr. Damsky opened an account on X and began posting racist and antisemitic messages. After he wrote in late March that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” the university suspended him, barred him from campus and stepped up police patrols around the law school. He is now challenging the punishment, which could result in his expulsion.

Mr. Damsky’s hateful posts drew shock and fear in some corners of the university. According to Hillel International, the university has the largest number of Jewish undergraduate students in the country. Its student body is 48 percent white, 22 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Asian and 5 percent Black, according to school data.

A spokesman for the university declined to answer questions related to this article or to make any administrators available for interviews. But in emails to Mr. Damsky obtained by The New York Times, university officials wrote that his posts had made numerous students fear for their safety. The officials also cited another student’s claim that Mr. Damsky had described his paper as concluding “on a call for extralegal violence,” which Mr. Damsky denies.

In an interview, Mr. Damsky said that he belonged to no organization or group, and that he did not pose a physical threat to anyone. He said he was being unfairly targeted for sharing his ideas, and blithely shrugged off the criticism. The disciplinary measures he faces could result in expulsion. He said he planned to fight them vigorously.

“You know,” he said, “I’m not, like, a psychopathic ax murderer.”

Mr. Damsky said his ideas were well formed before he started law school, shaped by reading authors like Sam Francis, a white nationalist, and Richard Lynn, who argued for white racial superiority and eugenics.

He grew up around Los Angeles and studied history at the University of California, Santa Barbara; he wanted to become a prosecutor, he said, after watching progressive-minded California prosecutors adopt policies that he believed were soft on crime.

Many law students learned about his extremism last fall, when a draft of a paper he wrote for a different class was passed among students and faculty members. Mr. Damsky, who just completed his second year of law school, assumes that a fellow student shared it with others. Like his paper for the originalism seminar, it also argued the Constitution was written exclusively for white people. It went on to suggest that nonwhites should be stripped of voting rights and given 10 years to move to another country.

In January, Carliss Chatman, an associate law professor at Southern Methodist University, began a stint as a visiting scholar at the school. It was not long, she said, before a number of Black and Jewish students came to her with concerns about Mr. Damsky.

Ms. Chatman was struck, in part, by her own experiences at the school in contrast to Mr. Damsky’s award. She had proposed teaching a class during her time there called “Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.” But administrators at the law school changed the name to “Entrepreneurship,” she said, before listing it in the course catalog.

She attributed the change to Florida lawmakers’ crackdown on diversity-oriented language and themes in public education, a push that preceded the Trump administration’s broader war on progressive ideology.

“I just find it fascinating that this student can write an article, a series of articles that are essentially manifestoes, and that’s free speech,” Ms. Chatman said, referring to Mr. Damsky, “but my class can’t be called ‘Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.’”

As the spring semester got underway, word spread that Mr. Damsky had won the book award in Judge Badalamenti’s originalism seminar.

Mr. Damsky’s paper includes arguments similar to those recently adopted by the Trump administration, including a call to “reconsider” birthright citizenship, and an assertion that “aliens remain second-class persons under the Constitution.”

It also argues that courts should challenge the constitutionality of the 14th Amendment, which ensures birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which protects the right to vote for nonwhite citizens.

Mr. Damsky concluded the paper by raising the specter of revolutionary action if the steps he recommended toward forging a white ethno-state were not taken. “The People cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty,” he wrote, adding that if the courts did not act to ensure a white country, the matter would be decided “not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword.”

Ms. Chatman called Mr. Damsky’s arguments “anti-intellectual” and absurd: “We fought a whole Civil War that freed slaves and said ‘We The People’ now means everyone.”

But it was the granting of the award that galled her the most.

“We should not be giving awards to things that advocate for white supremacy and white power,” she said, adding that she believed the award had “emboldened” Mr. Damsky to begin posting the racist and antisemitic comments on social media.

Mr. Damsky’s argument that at least some of the framers meant for the Constitution to apply only to white people is by no means a new one. Evan D. Bernick, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University, notes that the argument can be found in the Ku Klux Klan’s founding organizational documents from the late 1860s.

Among originalists, though, this interpretation has been widely rejected. Instead, conservatives have argued that much of the text of the Constitution “tilts toward liberty” for all, said Jonathan Gienapp, an associate professor of history and law at Stanford. They also note that the post-Civil War amendments guaranteeing rights to nonwhite people “washed away whatever racial taint” there was in the original document.

While Mr. Damsky’s papers were written in a formal style consistent with legal scholarship, his social media posts have been blunt, crass and ugly. A critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, he argued in one post that President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were “controlled by Jews,” whom he called “the common enemy of humanity.” In posts about Guatemalan illegal immigrants, he said that “invaders” should be “done away with by any means necessary.” He lamented the “self-flagellatory mind-set” of modern-day Germans, noting their failure to revere Hitler.

Judge Badalamenti, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, was one of two instructors of the class in which Mr. Damsky won the award. A member of the conservative Federalist Society, he has earned praise from both liberals and conservatives over the course of his career. The class was co-taught by Ashley Grabowski, a lawyer and Federal District Court clerk who, like the judge, is an adjunct professor at the law school.

Ms. Grabowski did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Damsky said he assumed that it was the judge who graded his paper. He also said that the judge “is not a white nationalist.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I would prefer it if he was.”

Students took their complaints to Ms. McAlister, the interim dean. She addressed the granting of the award to Mr. Damsky in at least two town-hall-style meetings, according to an email she wrote to students and an article in The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper. In the February email, the dean wrote that the law school, as a public institution, was bound by the First and 14th Amendments, meaning that no faculty member may “grade down a paper that is otherwise successful simply because he or she disagrees with the ideas the paper advances.”

Institutional neutrality, she wrote in her email, “is not agreement or complicity with the ideas that any community member advances.”

“It’s just that — neutrality,” she added. “The government — in this case, our public university — stays out of picking sides, so that, through the marketplace of ideas, you can debate and arrive at truth for yourself and for the community.”

Some at the law school agree with her stance. In an interview, John F. Stinneford, a professor at the university, said that it would be “academic misconduct” for a law professor who opposed abortion to give a lower grade to a well-argued paper advocating abortion rights.

If it were a good paper, he said, “you should put aside your moral qualms and give it an A.”

A number of students disagree, but several declined to be interviewed on the record for fear that criticizing the school, or a sitting federal judge, would harm their future job prospects.

One former student, who graduated in May, had his post-graduation job offer rescinded by a large law firm when he told them he had spoken to The New York Times for this article, criticizing Mr. Damsky’s paper and Judge Badalamenti for granting him the award. The student asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing other job offers.

Before his suspension, Mr. Damsky had been offered a summer internship in the local prosecutor’s office. But in early April, the prosecutor, Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, rescinded the offer.

“You could imagine,” Mr. Kramer said in an interview, that “having someone in your office who espouses those kinds of beliefs would cause significant mistrust in the fairness of prosecutions.”

Richard Fausset, based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.

 

Posted by at No comments:

Single Moms Will Bear the Brunt of the Republicans’ Budget Cuts [Grace Segers for newrepublic]

 https://newrepublic.com/article/197027/single-moms-cuts-trump-budget

 Grace Segers/

Singled Out

Single Moms Will Bear the Brunt of the Republicans’ Budget Cuts

Whenever lawmakers start carving up benefit programs, women raising children alone are always the first to feel the pain. Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” follows in that grim tradition.

When Mia’s son was an infant, she understood the expectations she would need to meet: A poor single mother living in Capistrano Beach, California, she had to care for his welfare and try to maintain a steady income, while also navigating the stigma that accompanied signing up for the federal and state benefits that would help keep her afloat.

“I felt a lot of shame that I couldn’t somehow do this by myself, or that I needed to get government help,” she recalled. “I remember hearing a lot of jokes about single moms raising kids, and the statistics about single moms and what happens to their children.”

Mia, who asked to be referred to by her first name to protect her anonymity, feels fortunate to have the support of her extended family in caring for her now 15-year-old son. When her son was a young child, she relied on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC; today, she participates in Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, previously known as food stamps. Her son has severe asthma and pulmonary issues, meaning that Medicaid covers the inhalers and doctor’s appointments that he needs to survive—medical care that she would not be able to afford without this assistance.

“We are in poverty, and I almost feel like I wouldn’t be able to leave it because I can’t imagine how much I would have to pay, and how I would be able to do that,” she said.

As congressional Republicans attempt to reshape the social safety net with a massive bill to extend tax breaks and dramatically slash federal spending, they have largely focused their efforts on tightening work requirements for childless adults, although portions of the measure would also affect parents receiving benefits. Mia is worried about how stricter work requirements will affect her family; in the past, she has had to participate in mandated employment training in order to receive SNAP benefits because a substitute teaching position did not grant her enough hours to meet preexisting requirements.

“It has been difficult to try to navigate, because I do work and I have a child, and I’m not exactly clear on when I’m supposed to do these like other hours,” she said.

For Mia, single motherhood can occasionally feel like a “trap.” At her current salary level, she is able to qualify for those Medicaid benefits that allow her son to receive the care he needs for his asthma. If she earned too much to be eligible for Medicaid, however, she would need to spend hundreds of dollars per month on her son’s medical needs. It isn’t that she wants to live in poverty; she simply does not know how she would support her family on even a middle-class salary.

“If you’re trying to get ahead, or you’re trying to move out of that poverty, you’re on your own,” Mia said.

Mia’s experiences are indicative of the struggles that single mothers in the United States have faced since the inception of the modern social safety net, a catch-22 of being expected to provide for their children while also feeling as if the supportive resources are insufficient.

American social policy has long been heavily influenced by concepts of deservingness. This stemmed in part from the nation’s foundational cultural concept of a “Protestant work ethic”—essentially, the idea that anyone who can work should work, and that individual labor is fundamental to a functioning community.

Federal assistance programs and tax policies intended to assist poor Americans are generally tied to income: If a person earns too much, they cannot receive some benefits, but if they do not have a high enough salary, they can be cut off from others. In the case of SNAP and Medicaid, a household with an annual income above a certain amount will no longer qualify for the benefits. Meanwhile, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, requires households earn a certain amount to become eligible for cash benefits. With the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, recipients must earn a certain amount each year in order to receive the full credit.

Federal supports for poor families are often crucial for single parents—especially single mothers—in part because single mothers are disproportionately likely to be struggling economically. Analysis by the Center for American Progress found that single mothers earn 56 cents for every dollar made by fathers. Roughly a quarter of single mothers are low-income, and single parents are more likely than married parents to be Black or Hispanic. Single mothers are also more likely than their married counterparts to struggle with food insecurity and are more likely to struggle with their mental health, in part because of the deep psychological stress caused by living in poverty.

Mia has been on and off government assistance for years, sometimes because she was working a job that paid her a salary higher than the earning requirements. But the shame and guilt that she felt for needing to rely on these programs sometimes kept her from taking the benefits for which she was eligible. That sentiment changed during the coronavirus pandemic, and she came to terms with the fact that she needs the assistance.

“I need just a little bit of support to keep things in balance because I go into debt, or I’m using money I didn’t have. So I worked through my own feelings of shame and embarrassment,” she said.

Single parents tended to struggle financially during the height of the pandemic, with one study finding that single parents faced higher rates of poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, and stress compared to two-parent families. That was alleviated in part by a temporary, pandemic-era program: In 2021, the poverty rate for single mothers and for children in general was slashed dramatically, largely due to the expanded version of the child tax credit that was briefly in place for six months of that year. This change, along with many of the enhanced benefits for low-income families implemented during the pandemic, was permitted by Congress to expire.

In general, social safety net programs, including non-cash benefits and tax credits, have been crucial to lowering poverty rates. Nick Gwyn, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that without these benefits, single mothers would likely see even higher poverty rates. But despite their effectiveness, he continued, they have not been a universal balm.

Although most social safety net programs are generally oriented toward low-income families of any kind, TANF was explicitly designed to assist single mothers. That program has roots in “Mothers’ Pensions,” an early-twentieth-century policy that was targeted specifically toward low-income widows. These policies, administered by individual states, formed the basis of the New Deal–era Aid to Dependent Children, the first federal program that offered cash assistance to primarily white poor single mothers.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, perceptions about who single mothers were, and the expectations about how they should behave and be treated, began to transform. In 1962, Congress updated the Aid to Dependent Children program to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, expanding eligibility requirements that made it easier for nonwhite women to participate in the program. Meanwhile, women began entering the workforce in substantial numbers—including married women—which helped shift public perspectives on whether a single mother could and should be working.

“It wasn’t until married mothers started working that we started thinking single mothers should be working [as well], even though single mothers always had worked at higher rates than married mothers,” said Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.

By the 1980s, the perspective on single mothers had transformed from considering them as objects of charity to worrying that they were draining resources without contributing work. Black single mothers were disproportionately likely to be low-income, and the public perception of single mothers was influenced by racial bias. This trend was embodied by President Ronald Reagan’s denunciation of the “welfare queen,” a Black mother reliant on federal assistance who was not working. Critics accused the AFDC of discouraging marriage, in part because the program was specifically targeted for households without a male parental figure.

Posted by at No comments:

Repeal of Clean Energy Law Will Mean a Hotter Planet. Republicans plan to terminate billions of dollars in clean energy tax credits. [nyt]

 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/climate/inflation-reduction-act-climate-change-heat.html

 

Repeal of Clean Energy Law Will Mean a Hotter Planet, Scientists Warn

Republicans plan to terminate billions of dollars in clean energy tax credits. Experts say that will mean more greenhouse gas emissions and more dangerous heat.

When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, he called it “the most aggressive action ever, ever, ever to confront the climate crisis.”

Now, Republicans are poised to undo the law, and scientists are warning the result would increase the likelihood that the Earth will heat up by an average of 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of this century.

“We’re already in an era now where climate change is going to be increasingly dangerous,” said Jonathan T. Overpeck, a climate scientist and the dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability.

That amount of warming — 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) over the course of a century — may sound small. But 2024, the hottest year on record, was the first calendar year where the global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and it delivered deadly heat, violent hurricanes, severe drought and devastating wildfires.

The Biden administration’s strategy to fight climate change consisted of tax breaks to nudge the country toward clean energy and away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is heating the planet, paired with strict limits on pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes.

Sign up for Your Places: Extreme Weather.  Get notified about extreme weather before it happens with custom alerts for places in the U.S. you choose.

That would have put the United States on track to cut emissions about 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, closer to the goal that scientists say all industrialized nations must meet in order to keep global warming within relatively safe limits. The United States is currently the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China. But it is the country that has pumped the most carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

“By exiting the I.R.A. and eliminating other regulations and laws designed to protect the climate, the United States is going to make itself and the world more vulnerable to dangerous climate change going into the future,” Dr. Overpeck said.

President Trump has denounced the Inflation Reduction Act as the “green new scam.” He wants Congress to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal support for solar, wind and other clean energy and use the savings to help make his 2017 tax cuts permanent while also increasing spending on the military and immigration enforcement. At the same time, his administration is weakening or erasing limits on greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging more production of oil, gas and coal.

“President Trump was given a mandate to roll back the radical climate policies that are burning a hole through taxpayers’ wallets and jeopardizing the American dream for future generations,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The administration is delivering,” she added.

On Monday, Senate Republicans unveiled their plan to achieve Mr. Trump’s goals, two weeks after the House passed a measure that would gut clean energy incentives entirely. The Senate version retains some support for technologies favored by conservatives, like nuclear power and geothermal energy, but still rapidly ends federal money for solar and wind power, electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel and more. It also increases some subsidies for fossil fuels.

The Senate proposal “achieves significant savings by slashing Green New Deal spending,” Senator Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho, said in announcing it.

Democrats, economists and environmental advocates said pulling out federal support for clean energy would endanger more than $500 billion in planned investment in manufacturing of solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries — most of it in Republican districts — and put more than 400,000 jobs at risk. It would also make electricity more expensive, they said.

The Republican package would “cook the planet and increase prices,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii.

The United States has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 20 percent below 2005 levels, according to the research firm Rhodium Group, largely thanks to cheap natural gas displacing coal. The country’s emissions fell by just 0.2 percent in 2024, Rhodium found. But Biden-era policies were expected to accelerate the decline in the coming years.

That’s because the Inflation Reduction Act “put clean energy on sale and made it more economically attractive than conventional fossil fuels,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of energy systems engineering and policy at Princeton University.

But repealing the act would effectively stop the drop in emissions, according to early analyses from several groups, including the Princeton REPEAT project, Rhodium Group, Resources for the Future and the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

“We are not going to be transitioning to the energy of the future, and that means we’re going to emit a lot more carbon than we would have,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University.

Many scientists had hoped that states would step up efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as they did during the first Trump administration. But some are facing legal attacks and political pressure from Washington. Congress recently overturned California’s plan to eventually ban the sale of gas-powered cars, for example.

Mr. Jenkins said the outlook, in terms of aggressively fighting global warming, seemed “bleak.”

“I’d like to say there’s a silver lining here,” Mr. Jenkins said. “There isn’t much of one. We’re dismantling substantial portions of the most important climate policy the U.S. has ever passed.”

The Big Picture

Want to catch up on the recent torrent of news?

Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.


Posted by at No comments:

Trump and GOP’s tax bill would sell off USPS’s brand-new EVs Postal Service officials told lawmakers the proposal would cause “substantial harm” [washingtonpost]

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/21/trump-usps-trucks-taxes/

Trump and GOP’s tax bill would sell off USPS’s brand-new EVs

Postal Service officials told lawmakers the proposal would cause “substantial harm” to “our customers, your constituents.”
 
Jacob Bogage
6–7 minutes

A little-noticed provision of President Donald Trump and Republicans’ massive tax and immigration legislation would force the government to undo billions of dollars in electric vehicle investments made by the U.S. Postal Service, undoing much of the Biden administration’s climate push at the mail agency while dealing it a sharp financial setback.

The Postal Service in 2022 embarked on plans to purchase 66,000 electric mail delivery vehicles, many of them bespoke “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles” from the defense contractor Oshkosh. The agency has also purchased hundreds of E-Transit delivery vans from Ford and spent more than half a billion dollars remodeling its outdated mail and package sorting facilities to accommodate electric and low-emissions vehicles.

The agency expects to spend $9.6 billion on the project in total; $3 billion of that comes from taxpayer dollars to cover the cost difference between gas-powered vehicles and more expensive EVs. The remaining funding comes from the Postal Service’s independent accounts. The agency is largely self-sufficient, financed by the sale of postage products.

The Senate’s version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill would see the General Services Administration take possession of the nearly 7,200 new postal EVs and associated infrastructure and put the assets up for auction. The proposal is unlikely to generate much revenue for the government; there is almost no private-sector interest in the mail trucks, and used EV charging equipment — built specifically for the Postal Service and already installed in postal facilities — generally cannot be resold.

“The funds realized by auctioning the vehicles and infrastructure would be negligible. Much of infrastructure is literally buried under parking lots, and there is no market for used charging equipment,” Peter Pastre, the Postal Service’s vice president for government relations and public policy, wrote to senators this month.

A summary of the legislation released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the provision “aims to cut unnecessary costs and focus USPS on delivering mail and not achieving the environmental initiatives pushed by the Biden Administration.”

A spokesperson for Paul did not respond to a request for comment.

The proposal comes as congressional Republicans search desperately for spending cuts to offset the nearly $4 trillion cost of their tax policies. The legislation would extend tax cuts from Trump’s first term and end taxes on tips and overtime wages while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on immigration enforcement and national defense.

To offset the cost and reduce federal borrowing, the legislation would cut more than $1 trillion from social safety net programs and unwind most of President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included the largest-ever U.S. investment to combat the climate crisis.

The mail trucks were part of that program. Biden administration officials hoped that postal procurement would bolster the small-but-growing domestic EV market, both for commercial fleets and individual consumers.

But the GOP’s bill eliminates almost all of the Biden-era EV and clean energy incentives; House and Senate Republicans are debating whether to cut them immediately or phase them out over several years.

The main source of savings from the postal proposal would come from revoking unspent funding, though much of that money has been obligated as part of the Postal Service’s contracts with vehicle and infrastructure vendors.

“It will cost the Postal Service $1.5 billion of funds that we desperately need in order to serve the American people, and it will seriously cripple our ability to replace an aging and obsolete delivery fleet,” Pastre wrote. “We urge the Senate and the committee to pause and consider the substantial harm this proposal would cause to the Postal Service and our customers, your constituents.”

Representatives for the Postal Service and Oshkosh did not respond to requests for comment. A Ford representative declined to comment.

The Postal Service is in desperate need of new delivery vehicles. Its fleet of “Long Life Vehicles” hit the streets between 1987 and 1994; the trucks are so old, the mail agency must reverse-engineer discontinued vehicle parts to conduct basic repairs. The vehicles occasionally burst into flames due to decades of overuse.

But the program to replace those trucks has faced significant setbacks. Oshkosh encountered delays and engineering problems during early manufacturing runs, and disagreements — and accusations of corporate dishonesty — among executives plagued the production process, The Washington Post reported in December.

Oshkosh was supposed to have delivered about 3,000 vehicles by the end of 2024. Instead it had provided roughly 100 and raised its prices as the Postal Service ordered additional EVs.

After Congress approved vehicle funding for the agency, Oshkosh charged an Inflation Reduction Act “premium adjustment” that increased the overall value of the Oshkosh purchase by more than half a billion dollars, according to company financial disclosures.

Some of Trump’s allies have identified the program as an example of government waste. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) wrote on social media in December that the vehicles were “a Democrat Green New Deal scam that’s throwing your money away.”

Postal Service stakeholders are set to testify before a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee Tuesday to discuss the mail service’s finances and operations.

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, June 20, 2025

Cuomo and Mamdani should be on same ticket, everybody wins

Posted by at No comments:

The Winning Playbook of Zohran Mamdani [nymag]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/zohran-mamdani-morris-katz-campaign.html

NYC Mayor’s Race: The Winning Playbook of Zohran Mamdani


How Zohran Wins

The Mamdani campaign broke the rules of running for mayor. Will it be enough?

 

Last summer, a loose network of the city’s political operatives who consider themselves members of what they call “the competent left” — progressive but also determined to actually win elections — were in despair. Lefty incumbents and challengers were losing to moderates in primaries, Donald Trump looked set to win back the White House, and the Democratic Party was rapidly distancing itself from its liberal base as if its taint could affect the whole party. That’s when a few members of this cohort started reaching out to Morris Katz, a 28-year-old fellow operative who was commuting back and forth to Nebraska where he was working to elect Dan Osborn, a union steamfitter running a strong independent campaign against a Republican senator. They wanted to know if Katz would meet with a 32-year-old Queens assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani, who was thinking of running for mayor.

He demurred. The left was reeling, so why get involved with a democratic socialist who had almost no shot of winning? “I was thinking, ‘How are we ever going to win again?” Katz tells me. “We were just constantly getting tripped up by these self-inflicted wounds and these candidates who let themselves become caricatures of themselves. We had no message discipline, we’re getting fucking outspent everywhere and we’re not focused, and we say we are this grassroots movement but we are not actually that inspiring.”

Then Mamdani himself reached out and Katz felt he could demur no more. The two met at Qahwah House, a Yemeni coffeeshop in Astoria where Mamdani asked, “Am I crazy for thinking about this?”

Katz told Mamdani that he thought he might be but to give him his pitch anyway.

“His pitch was that the left is really struggling, and that this campaign can be a model for what  strong campaigns should look like,” Katz says. “He said that people agree with us on economics, and at a moment when income inequality is rising, we actually have the ideas that can address it, but the problem is we just run these undisciplined campaigns that aren’t able to execute on it, that get distracted by a million other things, and we don’t try anything creative and aren’t able to run professional campaigns.”

Political operatives are supposed to keep a kind of professional distance from their clients, but after 45 minutes of Mamdani describing what kind of mayor he hoped to be, Katz was enamored. “I left thinking, I love this man. And I am supposed to be skeptical. What is going to happen when the rest of New York gets to know him?” he says.

At the time, the prospect of his candidacy seemed ludicrous. Here was a two-term member of the State Assembly with a scant legislative record, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America at a time when even its putative fellow travelers in office were pivoting away from the party. But over last summer and fall, Mamdani, his senior adviser Katz, and campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church sketched out a three-part plan to get the attention of voters and then to get them to take the young upstart as a serious contender for City Hall. Now, with just days to go until the primary ends, Zohran Mamdani has become the unmistakable story of this election, someone whom even his rivals — even advisers to Andrew Cuomo — acknowledge has run the best campaign of this cycle, one that has gone remarkably according to plan.

Katz has the manic energy of a sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated 20-something New Yorker caught up in a cause. When we met for lunch outdoors in the Flatiron District, he had just come from the campaign office and headed back when we were finished. Colleagues say they will call late at night and he will still be in between meetings.

Politics was not in his blood. His grandfather, Harry Jay Katz, was a nightclub owner, newspaper publisher, and restaurateur known as “the Philadelphia Playboy” in part for his efforts to open a Playboy Club in that city. His mother, Julie Merberg, is a children’s-book author and publisher and his father, David Bar Katz, is a screenwriter and producer who was behind Ray Donovan. (David discovered the body of Philip Seymour Hoffman, his close friend, in Hoffman’s apartment after he died of a heroin overdose in 2014. When The National Enquirer reported they were lovers, David sued and used the settlement money to give an annual prize to young playwrights.) Morris was raised in Tribeca and went to Beacon High School, an elite public school on the West Side, thinking he would also be a screenwriter, having written a half-dozen screenplays by the time he graduated.

Morris Katz, left, with Zohran Mamdani, right, after a mayoral debate in June. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Reuters

When Trump first won in 2016, Katz was a student at Skidmore College and got caught up in the liberal fervor of the moment. He volunteered for a Democrat running against Representative Elise Stefanik upstate near where he went to school. Though his candidate lost, Katz caught the politics bug, using his screenwriting chops to write ads and give messaging advice to Democratic candidates.

Earlier this year, he joined Fight Agency, a Democratic media firm whose mission is to find candidates for high office who aren’t the typical lawyers or legislators but are embedded in their communities and help them craft the kind of messages that can win over voters that Democratic campaigns tend to ignore. Their candidates are usually on the left side of the economic spectrum but exude a kind of working-class authenticity combined with a populist economic message that cuts across the usual red-blue geographic divides. Take, for instance, Ruben Gallego, a “Medicare for All” supporter who has pushed Democrats to appeal to Latino men who want to drive around in a “big-ass truck,” and John Fetterman, who, before his sharp turn to the right, was best known as pro–trans rights, pro–legal weed Bernie Sanders supporter from the Pennsylvania Rust Belt.

“If you just look at the polling and do what it says, you are going to keep getting the same result,” says Tommy McDonald, a mentor to Katz and founder of Fight Agency. “The question is, Can you make your campaign about larger things in order to cut through a crowded race? It’s about finding candidates that don’t fit the mold, find out what makes them tick, and what is authentic to them and to the people of your community, and if you do that, you can make the campaign about something larger.”

A large part of the surprising strength of the Mamdani campaign has of course been the candidate, who is a natural in front of the camera and staked out the far-left lane of the mayoral race at a time when the rest of the field was running to the center. His team made a decision early on that, unlike DSA campaigns of the past, they wouldn’t focus on firing up their base, figuring that the base would fire up itself. Instead, they would try to talk to New Yorkers who wouldn’t ordinarily listen to an Astoria socialist by using an economic message. While the rest of the Democratic field was talking about crime and disorder, Mamdani made “affordability” the buzzword of the campaign by promising free buses, free child care, and a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments. It’s a familiar technique of Rebecca Katz (no relation), another co-founder of Fight Agency, who pushes candidates to articulate simple, digestible policy ideas that align with their overall message and narrative. Mamdani has been so successful at it that polls show voters now rank the affordability issue as higher in importance than crime.

“It’s about ensuring that New Yorkers were seeing themselves in the policies we were putting forward and in the kind of politics we were espousing,” Mamdani tells me. “There has been a willingness in this campaign to look beyond the way mayoral campaigns have been run in the past. So often these campaigns are contested on network TV or through mailers or radio and we are a campaign that has looked to engage with New Yorkers as they engage with the world around them and speak directly to their concerns.”

That meant social media. Mamdani’s launch video, in which he walked around the streets of Astoria over a hip-hop-inflected backbeat and talked up affordability, got over a million views in the first 48 hours. His campaign then broke the 24-hour record for mayoral-campaign fundraising. Each of the next videos became viral sensations, including one in which he took the “polar plunge” into the frigid waters off Coney Island in a suit to call attention to his plan to “freeze the rent.” In another, he talked up rising halal-cart prices to highlight affordability — never mind that the traditional Democratic strategy guide would suggest a Muslim candidate avoid anything associated with halal. The video was picked up by Eater and other food media. Another simply showed Mamdani arriving unannounced at the homes of donors to thank them, showing the sort of ease with people that became his strength as a candidate.

“There is a broader lesson for the party in that one,” says Katz. “A lot of times, the consultant approach is you have your playbook and you’re jamming these candidates into your playbook. With Zohran, it’s the other way around. If you believe your candidate can pull something like that off, you just have to let him cook. That’s our campaign motto: ‘Let Zohran cook.’”

There is a risk to this, however, and to any campaign that puts authenticity at the highest value. Compared with his rivals, Mamdani has scarcely backed away from his earlier calls to defund the police, and the campaign didn’t scrub his social-media feeds of tweets in which he criticized capitalism or proclaimed that “defunding the police is a feminist issue.” Just this week, Mamdani set off a torrent of criticism when he refused to reject the slogan “Globalize the intifada,” which many Jews see as a call for violence.

The campaign didn’t hire a digital fundraising firm, an almost unheard-of practice in a mayoral race, figuring that its fundraising would have to happen organically and that it would be a waste of money. And while the typical mayoral playbook calls for hoarding money until the end of the race, the Mamdani campaign went on the air earlier than its rivals, pushing ads on Knicks playoff broadcasts. Instead of doing 30-second spots during local newscasts, it ran two 15-second spots that bookended the ad breaks.

Still, much of the Mamdani-mentum has been organic. That’s how you get both “Hot Girls for Zohran” — an outfit that is unaffiliated with the campaign, to say the least — making goofy viral car-wash videos and knockoff Mamdani merchandize worn in the city’s chic precincts and “Mamdani for Mayor” becoming a status symbol on Hinge.

A Marist poll this week showed Mamdani down 11 points, a big gap but a significant improvement over Cuomo’s previous 22-point lead. The Mamdani campaign’s hope is that its field operation, which consists of a staggering 46,000 volunteers and has already knocked on more than 1 million doors, will bring out the kind of irregular voters that public polls aren’t catching. The Cuomo campaign has privately delighted in the fact that its closest competitor is a 33-year-old socialist and a Muslim dogged by accusations of antisemitism. As the race has gotten closer, a super-PAC associated with Cuomo has been blitzing the airwaves with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of attack ads every day, calling Mamdani inexperienced and radical.

But if the Cuomo campaign thinks it has the opponent it wanted, Katz says that the Mamdani campaign does too and that the waning days of the race will turn into a referendum not just on the future of New York but the future of the Democratic Party.

“Democrats lose because they refuse to take strong positions to fight for working people and refuse to take on corporate power,” Katz says. “That was our analysis of the 2024 election, and that’s our analysis of this race. It’s the politics of Andrew Cuomo that gave us Donald Trump. And so we have to ask voters what they prefer, Big money and small ideas or a new generation not beholden to billionaires?”


Posted by at No comments:

Do Not Run Kamala Harris, Absolute Trash

 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/future-forward-pac-kamala-harris/683154/

Inside the Democratic Rupture That Undermined Kamala Harris’s Presidential Hopes

In the weeks before Election Day, it seemed like the candidate had two campaigns.



Kamala Harris’s campaign thought it knew exactly how to beat Donald Trump. With just weeks left before Election Day, it warned over and over that he was “unhinged, unstable, and unchecked.” But instead of amplifying that message, Future Forward—the $900 million super PAC that the campaign was counting on for a flood of ads—had a different plan. The campaign leader Jen O’Malley Dillon grumbled in private meetings that the group had gone rogue, threatening Harris’s chances of winning. O’Malley Dillon told her team that she had never seen anything else like this.
Usually super PACs follow the lead of the candidates they support, while taking on less savory tasks, such as viciously attacking their opponents. But Future Forward had built a bigger internal research program than the campaign had, and its leaders saw only one clear path to victory. Harris had to stay laser-focused on the economy. She had to present herself as a disrupter, not as a protector of the status quo.
The Harris team liked Future Forward’s economic ads, but they believed that Trump’s approval ratings were dangerously high. There needed to be a sustained, direct attack on him. They also argued that the super PAC had delayed its advertising for too long, had not targeted those ads enough to different groups of voters, and had failed to properly distribute money for get-out-the-vote efforts. So Harris’s team shifted strategy to do some of that themselves. Harris told reporters that she saw Trump as a fascist, and recruited some of his former advisers as her spokespeople.
Future Forward’s team scoffed. “People might not mind ‘unhinged’ if their fingers are caught in the door,” one Future Forward strategist started telling colleagues inside the organization. They did not believe that there was evidence in the voter data to justify a switch back to the politics of protecting democratic norms.
Campaigns and groups such as super PACs are not allowed to directly coordinate on many ad-spending decisions, but there are legal ways for them to signal their desires. Future Forward began quietly raising alarms in private polling memos that it knew the campaign would read. O’Malley Dillon publicly suggested in September that top donors give to other groups in addition to Future Forward.
“They are very driven by ad testing, which is spot by spot—a lot of trees. But the way I see it, the presidential campaign is a forest,” a top Harris-campaign adviser told us about their objections to Future Forward’s approach. “The candidate is the candidate, for good or bad. You have to follow their lead.”
Neither side would change course. When Harris eventually lost, she did so with the backing of two different efforts that sometimes worked at cross-purposes, an error that both sides still believe may have cost Democrats the election. “We should have been one streamlined engine whose true mission was to elect Kamala Harris and defeat Donald Trump,” Rufus Gifford, a veteran Democratic fundraiser who worked for the Harris campaign, told us. “And it is clear that that was not always what happened.”
Once the election was decided, the remaining restrictions on communication and coordination were lifted. But seven months after the loss to Trump, there has been little meaningful discussion of what happened between the fighting factions of the Democratic Party—although O’Malley Dillon and Chauncey McLean, a co-founder of Future Forward, did meet on Wednesday to talk through their post-election views.
Anger has continued to fester as Future Forward positions itself to play a major role in the 2028 presidential election. One strategist involved in the controversy has taken to calling it “the largest fight for the soul of the Democratic Party that no one is talking about.”
The unusual circumstances of the 2024 presidential election—a brash, prototypical, seemingly Teflon candidate on the Republican side, and a last-minute candidate switch on the Democratic one—set the stage for the collapse of the traditional super PAC–campaign dynamic. But the resulting conflict also revealed a fundamental flaw in the multibillion-dollar architecture that Democrats had built to defeat Trump, raising questions about who controlled the Democratic Party in 2024, and who will steer it into the future.
“Is Future Forward meant to be the group that determines the strategy for the presidential candidate? I’m not sure,” one major donor to the group told us.
This story is based on interviews with more than 20 senior Democratic strategists, donors, or advisers who worked to defeat Trump last year, as well as a review of a trove of previously unreleased Future Forward testing and briefing documents obtained by The Atlantic. Many of the people we spoke with requested anonymity because they typically avoid public comment, were not authorized to speak, or are strategists who want to work for future campaigns.
Defenders of Future Forward say the party needs to continue to replace its reliance on all-star campaign gurus and activist groups with cutting-edge data science that can precisely measure what voters want. They believe that Harris’s campaign ultimately betrayed her candidacy by drifting away from the central economic narrative of the race—a choice between a Democrat who would make things better for working people and a Republican who would reward his rich friends. "It’s pretty clear that there was one path for her, and we saw success there—we had to make it about what voters wanted, not what we thought they should care about,” one person involved in the Future Forward effort told us. “We will never know if it would have been enough, but it is the question going forward.”
Three weeks after the election, Future Forward leaders sent a private memo to their donors. They claimed that Future Forward’s television ads had been about twice as successful at persuading people to support Harris as “other Dem” television spending, a category dominated by the Harris campaign. “Our execution,” they concluded, “proved more effective at moving the needle.”
The next step, they told donors, was to expand Future Forward’s preparations for the 2028 campaign. They plan to provide “testing for the individual would-be candidates so they can learn—early—what works and does not work for them and with the general electorate,” the memo said.
“There is an opportunity,” they told donors, “to fundamentally improve how Presidential campaigns work.”
Veterans of the Harris campaign and members of other outside groups, however, have argued against an expansion of Future Forward’s role and pushed for a rethinking of how super PACs are used. “I think our side was completely mismatched when it came to the ecosystem of Trump and his super PACs and ours,” O’Malley Dillon said on Pod Save America, the same day that Future Forward sent its memo. Harris senior adviser David Plouffe, appearing alongside O’Malley Dillon, was even more blunt about the GOP advantage: “I’m just sick and tired of it,” he declared.
“One group making the decisions for the entire ecosystem and thinking they were making better decisions than the campaign and the candidate should not be how we move forward,” another senior Harris-campaign adviser told us. “They don’t have the experience. They don’t have the understanding of the nuance of this. They didn’t know better.”
America’s first political campaigns were self-financed by wealthy candidates like George Washington, who used their money to buy voter support with booze. In the second half of the 20th century, Congress decided to limit the amount of money any single person or company other than the candidate could use to influence American elections and to outlaw vote purchases. Federal courts pushed back in 2010, over the objection of Democratic Party leaders. Some of the laws meant to limit corruption, they decided, violated the First Amendment rights of the rich.
Whiskey can no longer be traded for votes, although donors can throw alcohol-soaked parties to celebrate the general notion of voting. The wealthiest Americans, companies, and unions get to spend unlimited amounts to influence elections’ outcomes, but those funds cannot go directly to the candidates’ campaigns or to their political parties, which have strict contribution limits. The really big checks go to “independent” nonprofits, which often do not report their donors, or to so-called super PACs, which disclose their activity to the Federal Election Commission. Future Forward raised money both ways.
Under the new system, major-party presidential candidates need at least one outside operation with deep pockets in their corner, or else they place themselves at an enormous disadvantage. Candidates are barred from privately “coordinating” on some types of spending with these groups, but they can communicate in other ways: Their campaigns can signal their strategic desires by talking to reporters, who print their words, or by way of discreet posts on public websites. Super PACs can do the same or speak directly to the campaigns through “one-way” conversations, often Zoom briefings where the campaign team does not speak or turn on their cameras.
Candidates also have the ability to signal donors to support the “independent” groups of their choosing before the start of a campaign. This typically involves placing trusted aides at the outside groups, as Trump did at the start of the 2024 campaign cycle with a group called MAGA Inc., or as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did with Priorities USA. Joe Biden decided to go a different direction in July 2023, when his advisers Anita Dunn and O’Malley Dillon gave interviews to The New York Times that strongly implied that Future Forward had received Biden’s unofficial super-PAC “blessing.” A top Biden fundraiser, Katie Petrelius, joined the group to encourage donors.
McLean and his team quickly incorporated the Times article into the March 2024 pitch deck they showed donors, a copy of which we obtained. But unlike MAGA Inc., Future Forward did not present itself as simply an extension of the Democratic campaign, with Biden himself, and later Harris, as its north star. Internal staff talking points—released just before Election Day and marked “not for distribution”—described the group’s power as coming from its impact on the electorate, not from “being anointed or pre-determined” by a candidate.
The group’s mission had instead been set at its founding, after the 2018 cycle, when strategists who had met during Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign concluded that they could bring a new level of mathematical precision to the art of voter influence and apply that wisdom to the spending of dozens of Democratic-aligned groups. During the 2024 campaign, the group granted more than $220 million to 73 organizations, including Emily’s List and Somos Votantes, for advertising, issue advocacy, voter mobilization, and registration. Future Forward has never issued a press release, and with the exception of two summer Zoom briefings, where questions were screened, the leadership has mostly avoided larger group conversations about strategy with the other outside operations fighting to defeat Trump.
Future Forward’s approach infuriated many members of veteran Democratic voter-mobilization and persuasion groups, who felt sidelined from both donors and from the strategy conversation. “Resources were not allocated early enough, or to long-standing organizations that know their audiences,” Danielle Butterfield, the executive director of Priorities USA, told us.
But Future Forward believed there was a superior way to run campaigns and allocate money. By March 2024, it was telling donors that it could produce “the absolute best ads that are proven to be effective across platforms” with a voter response rate “55% better than the average ad.” Over the course of 2024, Future Forward conducted hundreds of focus groups and collected more data on American voters than any other political effort in history, including more than 14 million voter surveys in the final 10 months before Election Day. The group created and tested more than 1,000 advertisements to support Harris’s presidential bid from dozens of ad firms, using a randomized-controlled-trial method that compared the vote preference of people who had seen an ad against those who had not. The best-testing spots blanketed the airwaves in swing states starting in August and were used to purchase more than 3 billion digital-video ad impressions.
As a matter of fundraising, the pitch was a massive success, attracting more than 69 percent of all Democratic presidential super-PAC dollars—more than three times the share of the top super PAC in 2020, according to an analysis by the independent journalist Kyle Tharp. Much of that money came from America’s wealthiest Democratic supporters, such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. (Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic, gave to a part of the Future Forward effort that does not disclose its donors, according to The New York Times.) For context, $900 million is more money than the Democratic National Committee raised last cycle and nearly twice as much as Trump’s own campaign collected. The Biden and Harris operation ultimately raised $1.2 billion.
“Future Forward wasn’t started by allies of one candidate or campaign,” the group’s talking points declare. “While it can upset (or even upend) the status quo in politics, no decision is made that isn’t in the best interests of impacting the outcome of the election.”
The Biden and Harris campaigns operated with a different model. They had a similar data operation, with horse-race polling, focus groups, and randomized-controlled trials of ads, but it was overlaid with a crew of veteran campaign strategists. Biden and one of his top advisers, Mike Donilon, believed from the start of his campaign that big themes about individual freedom, democracy, and Trump’s character would shape the outcome. Their goal was to use the data from ad testing to inform the judgment of the senior advisers, not to determine what they would do. Future Forward had a different approach.
“I think they thought that if we were doing something different from what they were doing, we were stupid,” a third Harris-campaign strategist told us. “The reality is we just believed in the strength of our strategy and disagreed with theirs.”
Tensions between the two approaches surfaced early. Concerned about Biden’s relatively weak position in polling, the campaign launched an ad blitz in late 2023, aiming to reset voters’ views of the president. The campaign specifically targeted Latino and Asian audiences. Future Forward, which had long favored advertising close to Election Day, held back, even as MAGA Inc. began going on the air the next year. The first Future Forward super-PAC spot did not run until after Trump’s indictments, felony convictions, and assasination attempt; the Republican convention; and the switch to Harris. The election’s exit polls showed that 80 percent of voters had made up their minds before the end of August, when the full force of the group’s spending hit the airwaves.
From the start, there were doubts inside the operation about Biden’s view of the race. At the beginning of 2024, the group secretly commissioned 154 ads for Biden and tested them from February to April, according to another internal document. The results suggested that the single worst ad it tested echoed the threat-to-democracy themes that Biden’s team had embraced—casting Trump as breaking from presidential norms, seeking revenge on his opponents, and threatening to put them in jail.
Biden nevertheless launched ads in June that highlighted Trump’s recent felony conviction and questions about his sanity. “Something’s snapped,” Biden started saying of Trump. Future Forward insiders told us that they’d planned to start airing ads after the first debate, in June, hoping that the face-to-face meeting between Biden and Trump would mute concerns about the president’s age. When the opposite happened, the Biden team made it clear through various channels that they still wanted Future Forward to start spending to shore up Biden’s position. After all, they had blessed the group, and many of Biden’s top donors had made contributions.
Dunn, the closest of Biden’s advisers to Future Forward, informed the campaign that the group did not think ads defending Biden at that point were a good investment, according to people familiar with the conversation. McLean later described the decision to refuse Biden’s call for help as the hardest choice he had ever made. Biden, the group concluded, was the only one who could prove to voters that he was up for the job, even if donors were not withholding checks to try to force him out of the race. No outside group, no matter how well funded, could cause voters to unsee what they’d witnessed.
After Biden left the debate stage, nothing about the Democratic bid proceeded as planned. Despite the chaos, both sides of the $2 billion effort to defeat Trump found themselves working from the same playbook in early August, when Harris hit the campaign trail backed by a massive introductory advertising push by her campaign and Future Forward. Those early ads shared common traits—a tour through Harris’s biography, a focus on the economy, and a pitch that she was offering the country something different. “The data continues to point to the benefits of a mostly forward-looking and largely economic campaign,” Future Forward concluded in an August 9 messaging document.
"We built a coherent story: This is an economic contrast; she’s going to be better for your bottom line than he is,” a Future Forward strategist told us about the group’s ads. “We weren’t just taking the top-testing ads off the spreadsheet, because then you would have gotten gobbledygook.”
But the agreement broke down in September. Harris’s advisers knew that economic concerns ranked highest for voters, but they decided that those issues would not be enough to defeat Trump. Trump’s approval ratings increased after the July assassination attempt and the Republican convention, as the “something snapped” argument faded away. Harris’s campaign believed that no one had set a clear negative frame for Trump. Over hours of internal debates, it came up with a new, triple-negative tagline: “unhinged, unstable, and unchecked.” Expecting that Future Forward would not shift course, it bought advertising to fill what it saw as the gaps left by the super PAC.
Harris began to appear at events with Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming representative who was once Republican royalty, and new campaign ads featured former Trump advisers warning of his return to the White House. The campaign believed that it could improve margins among moderates and the college-educated conservatives who had long been concerned about Trump’s behavior. For Future Forward’s number crunchers, the message switch was a disaster.
The group sent up a warning flare. “Make the argument about voters’ lives,” declared an October 15 document posted on a website that campaign strategists could read. “Our task remains more about Harris than Trump.” By embracing Cheney and other conservatives, Harris was hewing to the unpopular status quo and defending institutional norms at a time when up-for-grabs voters wanted change. The document noted that ads focused “on Trump’s fitness as disqualification alone, without tying to voter impact” were among their worst-testing. The document included polling results that found that 53 percent of voters nationwide said they preferred a “shock to the system,” compared with 37 percent who favored “a return to basic stability.”
The differences in approach were so stark that, at one point, a data firm working with Future Forward worried that the campaign was using faulty data. In fact, both the campaign and the super PAC were using highly sophisticated methodologies for their testing, and the main issue was interpretation. “Future Forward’s theory of the case didn’t change when the case—when the race—changed quite a bit,” a Democratic strategist working with the campaign told us.
The Harris strategists were not the only ones concerned about Future Forward’s conclusions. Inside the super PAC, people focused on outreach to Latino and Asian American audiences were worried about the group’s decision to turn away from creating targeted ads, after Future Forward’s testing showed that those populations were best moved by the same ads as the rest of the country, according to people familiar with the discussions. For voters who did not speak English, the group ran ads in eight languages.
At the core of these strategy disagreements was a debate over whether ad tests that focused on measuring vote-choice persuasion had limits. Some strategists argued that ads also had to build a sense of political and ethnic identity, and excite people to get more involved in politics or share messages on social media. Rather than just respond to public opinion, they wanted to try to drive it in new directions. Trump had proved himself a master of elevating relatively obscure issues—such as government-funded surgeries for transgender people—to change the entire political conversation.
“There is an art and a science to persuasion,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder of the Democratic donor group Way to Win, told us. “It requires striking an emotional chord with people that will stick, and that goes beyond what can be captured in randomized control trials alone.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic data strategist who works with Way to Win and has criticized Future Forward’s methods, argues that ad testing in online panels creates an artificial environment where people are forced to watch the tested spots. “That does not mirror conditions in real life,” she told us. “This testing cannot tell us what would cause people to pay attention and what would cause your base to want to repeat the message. What would cause your base to wear the equivalent of the red hats?”
A Future Forward spokesperson told us that this critique was misguided. “Data can’t solve every problem, but it shows what voters really think, not what people who work in politics wish they thought,” the spokesperson said.
Others complained that Future Forward’s decision making on ads was too secretive. Ad firms got paid for production costs, and then submitted their spots to Future Forward for testing—and they received a commission of the spending, at a rate below industry standard, if their ad was chosen to run. About 25 firms got paid for ads that aired. But about 12 percent of the group’s ads were made byaffiliates of Blue Sky, a firm partly owned by McLean and Jon Fromowitz, two leaders of the group, who were making the decisions. Other ad makers received a larger share, and Future Forward said that it was not unusual for large campaigns to have strategists who work on ads.
“Who watches the watchmen?” one person familiar with the operation told us, explaining the risk of self-dealing.
Since the election, Future Forward has continued to churn out voter-survey data with the aim of shaping how Democrats communicate with voters. The regular “Doppler” emails, which are sent privately to a select group of Democratic officials and strategists, test everything from the social-media posts of lawmakers to podcast appearances by former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and excerpts of rallies featuring Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
In these messages, party leaders are still urged to “make criticism of Trump economic and personal,” avoid personal attacks, use specific numbers such as “$880 billion in Medicaid cuts,” and create “vivid contrasts” such as “tax breaks for the wealthy vs. food aid cuts.”
The Democratic National Committee, which is working on an audit of the 2024 campaign due this summer, is expected to look at the campaign’s relationship with Future Forward, say people familiar with the plan. But there’s still no clarity on how the party and its top candidates, donors, strategists, and data wonks will choose to structure the 2028 effort to win back the White House.
Everyone we spoke with for this story agreed on one thing: What the Democrats did in 2024—using two competing camps that deployed conflicting strategies—cannot happen again.

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)