It’s becoming a theme: Donald Trump’s efforts to steal an election are quashed by the bravery of a few non-MAGA Republicans.
Continue reading “Key Nebraska Sen Rebuffs MAGA Attempt To Coax Him Into Depriving Harris Of Likely Electoral Vote”How Sheriffs Define Law And Order For Their Counties Depends A Lot On Their Views—And Most Are White Republican Men
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Many Americans will find on their November 2024 ballot a space to vote for an important office: local sheriff. While there are exceptions, sheriffs have a long history of using their power to maintain a particular, unequal balance of power in society, often along racial and class lines.
A recent example of this arose on Sept. 13, 2024, when Bruce Zuchowski, sheriff of Portage County, Ohio, posted a message on a Facebook page headed by a graphic that included his official portrait and which was labeled with his official title. Zuchowski called for the public to write down the addresses of people who have campaign signs supporting Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in their yards.
That way, he said, when immigrants arrive and need housing, “We’ll already have the addresses of the … families … who supported their arrival.”
The post, which Zuchowski later claimed appeared on his “personal Facebook page,” used derogatory terms for immigrants and for Harris. It also included screenshots of two Fox News stories about migrants in Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, which are both places that former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, and his running mate JD Vance have falsely claimed to be sites of dangerous activity by immigrants.
Sheriffs in the U.S. don’t often get national news attention, but Zuchowski’s request was covered in The Washington Post, NBC News and The Guardian, among others.
There are more than 3,000 sheriffs elected at the county level in the United States, each of whom has authority and autonomy to both set and enforce law enforcement policy. For example, sheriffs in many states can decide whether their deputies will wear body cameras and what happens to the footage recorded during routine stops.
In our book, “The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States,” we provide a comprehensive look at this office and detail the history of sheriffs enforcing inequality both by using formal powers of their office, such as cooperating with federal immigration officers, and with informal powers, such as communicating about who belongs in their community.
Zuchowski’s post, which vilifies immigrants and targets people who support immigrant rights, is just part of that long history of sheriffs using their power as a tool of social control, as we document in our book.
Various sheriffs have participated in social control throughout American history. For instance, in the 18th century, an Alabama sheriff ran slave auctions and Georgia sheriffs played a central role in enforcing slave codes. In the 19th century, a Pennsylvania sheriff quashed union efforts to protect workers’ rights against exploitative businesses. In the 20th century, Southern sheriffs’ roles in voter suppression during the Civil Rights Movement are well documented. In the 21st century, racial profiling has been a problem in the enforcement of traffic laws by sheriffs in Arizona and California, among other states. Zuchowski is just one 21st-century sheriff entering the debate over immigration policy and immigrants’ rights.
Personal views affect public service
In the wake of Zuchowski’s post, The Portager, a news website in his community, reported residents saying the sheriff’s post constituted voter intimidation. Some residents have called for investigations of the sheriff’s office by local, state and national agencies, including the Department of Justice’s civil rights division.
So far, the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office says the sheriff has broken no laws.
In both our book and previous work, we document through two national surveys how variations in sheriffs’ views on race and ethnicity may shape their office’s policies and practices.
Zuchowski’s comments about immigrants, including calling them “Illegal human ‘Locust,’” denies their humanity by comparing immigrants to animals.
In our research, we have found that sheriffs’ negative attitudes toward immigrants are statistically correlated to their offices’ anti-immigrant policies. For instance, sheriffs with more negative attitudes are more likely to have an official policy to check the immigration status of crime victims and witnesses. That relationship held even after we controlled potential influence of other factors such as political partisanship and the share of the native-born population in a sheriff’s county.
Similarly, as we show in our book, sheriffs with racist views were less likely to report to us their deputies have been trained to reduce racial and ethnic bias in traffic enforcement. That issue is a problem in Portage County, according to the local NAACP, which in 2023 released a report claiming the sheriff’s office unfairly targets Black drivers.
Politics plays a role
Since his initial post, Zuchowski has defended himself on social media, writing:
“If the citizens of Portage County want to elect an individual who has supported open borders (which I’ve personally visited Twice!) and neglected to enforce the laws of our Country … then that is their prerogative. With elections, there are consequences. That being said … I believe that those who vote for individuals with liberal policies have to accept responsibility for their actions! I am a Law Man … Not a Politician!”
Despite Zuchowski’s claims, he is indeed a politician. Like other sheriffs in the United States, he was elected by voters. He was the Republican nominee in 2020 and is running for reelection in 2024.
Like sheriffs across the country, Zuchowski had extensive law enforcement experience, including working in the Portage County Sheriff’s Office prior to running to head the office. We found that more than 85% of sheriffs worked for the previous sheriff before seeking election. And like most other sheriffs, Zuchowski is a white Republican man. We and others find that more than 90% of sheriffs are white and over 98% are men.
Across the United States, sheriffs will ask voters for their support this fall to remain in office. In most counties, these elections are uncompetitive: Sheriffs usually run either unopposed or against weak candidates.
In this way, Portage County is an exception. Zuchowski’s first election was a competitive race for an open seat, and he faces a challenger to his reelection bid in the 2024 election. His Democratic opponent, Jon Barber, is similarly a white man with a law enforcement background.
But Barber’s campaign website highlights another common challenge for voters: how to pick a good sheriff. His site focuses on transparency, accountability and community policing, with no discussion of immigration. Voters don’t get a clear message about any substantive differences that might exist between the two candidates.
Will Zuchowski’s comments matter for voters? Elsewhere around the country, voters have reelected sheriffs who have made anti-immigrant and racist comments.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
You’re Not In Nebraska Anymore
I wanted to update you on the situation in Nebraska that we discussed at the end of last week. In short, Republicans were making another run at changing Nebraska’s electoral vote allocation system to winner-take-all, a change which under an unlikely but not far-fetched scenario could hand Trump the presidency. That second bite at the apple looked particularly ominous since it appears that Maine may have lost its opportunity to make the same change and thus neutralize the effort in Nebraska. As we noted on Friday, trying doesn’t mean succeeding. And observers in Nebraska seemed at least skeptical that things had really changed since Republicans tried to do so at Donald Trump’s instigation. There were some articles out of the Nebraska press over the weekend that suggested there was still little chance Republicans could get the votes to make this change. But today we have a report out of Nebraska that the guy who seemed to be the pivotal vote seems to have given a categorical no. State Sen. Mike McDonnell (R) said: “Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live, or what party they support. I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change.”
Continue reading “You’re Not In Nebraska Anymore”A Tale of Two Polls
I wanted to take a look at the polling news from this weekend and try to help you make some sense of where the race is. Obviously I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in November or necessarily which polls to believe. But I think I can provide some overview of and context for why different polls might seem to show different things, and how to think about that difference. Yesterday, NBC News released a poll showing Harris beating Trump by 5 points nationwide and 6 points if third-party candidates were added. Another national poll from CBS showed Harris 4 points up over Trump nationwide. But it was the NBC poll which got the most attention because poll watchers still give some extra credit to the big, largely phone-based polls from the major national media organizations.
Obviously, no single poll should bulk too large in anyone’s thinking. But what gave the NBC News poll a lot of attention wasn’t so much the result, which was obviously good for Harris, as the fact that it tended to match and confirm and perhaps amplify the trends we’ve seen from a lot of other polls since the debate. Those polls show Harris solidifying a small national lead, consolidating small leads in the Blue Wall states while running about even through the southern tier swing states. There’s been a large volume of polls showing that. But people wanted to see one of those big, high-priced, phone-based polls say the same thing. In part, that was because you have the Times-Siena poll, which as I’ve explained in the past is very respected but also has a totally disproportionate impact on the media narrative about the race, saying something different. That poll has continued to show a much closer race than the great majority of other polls. A nationwide poll from last week from Times-Siena showed a tied race at 47 percent after one a few weeks earlier that showed Trump ahead by 1 percentage point. So that NBC poll wasn’t just another solid poll for Harris. It made it seem a bit more like Times-Siena is an outlier. Not wrong necessarily but an outlier from the majority of campaign.
Continue reading “A Tale of Two Polls”New Details Emerge On How Trump Already Weaponized DOJ The First Time
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Best Predictor Of Trump II Is The Abuses Of Trump I
As we prepare for the very real possibility of Trump II and the abuses it would entail – as outlined in public statements by Trump himself, in Project 2025, and the fever dreams of MAGA acolytes – perhaps the best evidence of what we’re in for is what we already endured the first time around.
It remains remarkable that Trump’s abuses of the Justice Department, as serious as they were, wound up overshadowed by the two impeachments, both of which originated from his effort to cling to power, either through corruptly influencing the 2020 election (the First Impeachment) or ignoring the results altogether (the Second Impeachment). Only the Second Impeachment, in the cartoonish-yet-alarming Jeff Clark incident, touched on the myriad ways Trump weaponized the Justice Department and used its powers to target his perceived political enemies.
If you’re having trouble recalling all the ways in which DOJ’s independence, professionalism, and reputation were sullied by Trump’s depredations, the NYT offers a much-needed reminder in a tight, accessible and very on-point package it published over the weekend.
The lead story in the package, authored by reporter Michael S. Schmidt, includes new, never-before-reported details about efforts by the Trump White House Counsel’s Office to steer him away from even worse abuses of the Justice Department and to memorialize those efforts in a self-protective memo, drafts of which they reportedly snuck out of the White House for safekeeping. Your ass-covering memo doesn’t do you much good if it’s hidden away in a White House vault you can no longer access – or is simply destroyed.
A valuable sidebar to the main story is a list of some of the highest profile instances of Trump abusing DOJ to target people he considered threats. It’s a good refresher if time, ambiguity, and the sheer volume of Trump’s transgressions have overwhelmed your memory.
Finally, Schmidt runs through the key findings in a short video:
In Related News …
NYT: Trump’s Talk of Prosecution Rattles Election Officials
The Rules For 2024 Election Are Still Being Written
- Georgia: The now-notorious Georgia Election Board issued a new rule requiring election workers to hand count the total number of ballots cast statewide (machines can still tabulate individual ballots at the precinct level). The rule change was opposed by the state attorney general and secretary of state, both Republicans, and is likely to be challenged in court as exceeding the board’s legal powers. The new rule is expected to cause hours of delay in announcing the election results, which is part of a broader GOP scheme to gum up the works in key states in hopes of creating chaos that Donald Trump can exploit if he is trailing in the election.
- Nebraska: Donald Trump got personally involved in a renewed push to convince the Nebraska legislature to change the state’s Electoral College allocation to winner-take-all ahead of the November election.
- Arizona: The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that 100,000 voters for whom there is no record of having provided proof of citizenship when they registered to vote will nonetheless be sent full ballots for the November election. “We are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests,” the court held.
2024 Ephemera
- Liz Cheney suggests that the Republican Party name may not be salvageable and a new conservative party may be needed.
- NC-Guv: GOP nominee Mark Robinson is losing campaign staff in droves after last week’s CNN report, though its not clear why all his previous excesses hadn’t been sufficient reason to leave or never sign up in the first place.
- Politico: Trump Defender Mike Davis Vows a ‘Reign of Terror’ — Is It All an Act?
Trump Still Slow-Rolling The Jan. 6 Case
After initially blowing their filing deadline and having to ask for permission to file late, Trump lawyers turned a relatively routine discovery-related motion in the Jan. 6 case into an extended re-argument of why U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan should dismiss the entire superseding indictment because of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
UPDATE: Trump Assassination Attempts
- In a new court filing, prosecutors alleged that the would-be Trump assassin in the Florida golf course incident acknowledged in a prewritten note that he had planned the attack as an assassination.
- Secret Service releases a terse five-page preliminary report about its failures in advance of the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
GOP Gov’t Shutdown Watch
Congress has reached a deal on a clean CR that would avert a government shutdown by providing funding until Dec. 20, setting up another of those lame duck, holiday season shutdown cliff hangers that have become more the norm lately.
Elon Musk Is Just A Normal Guy Doing Normal Guy Things
What really concerned Musk, however, was that people weren’t retweeting him enough. Teams of engineers were assigned to solve the problem of reduced engagement with Musk’s tweets. Matters came to a head during the 2023 Super Bowl, when he obsessed over the fact that a tweet by Joe Biden received several times as many likes as his own. Nobody dared suggest that the world just found their boss easy to ignore. Engineers were summoned from their Super Bowl parties to headquarters to fix the problem, which they did with a new line of code: “author_is_elon”, a tag that forced everyone to pay even more attention to the richest man in the world.
Climate Watch
- The tension between AI and climate goals: With the electricity demands of AI threatening to derail tech companies’ goals for reduced carbon emissions, Constellation Energy has reached a deal to reopen the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant by 2028 and sell all of its energy to Microsoft. “Never before has a U.S. nuclear plant come back into service after being decommissioned, and never before has all of a single commercial nuclear power plant’s output been allocated to a single customer,” WaPo reported.
- Fast is not good: A new study of Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years finds that while the planet has been dramatically warmer and cooler than it is at present, its climate has never changed with the speed of the manmade climate change we are now witnessing.
- Reuters: “Former President Donald Trump has said he would cancel all unspent funds from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law if he wins the presidential election on Nov. 5. But the vast majority of grants will be spent by the time a new president takes office in January, and targeting what remains would be a massive legal challenge, according to Biden administration officials.
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Making America Deportable Again
Bluster is such an inherent part of Trumpian policymaking that it can be hard to know what’s real and what’s merely being said for rhetorical punch. I’ve struggled with this in particular around Trump’s immigration proposals: he’s calling for something obviously impossible — rounding up all undocumented immigrants in the country and deporting them — while expanding it to something both larger in scale and in who it will affect.
Continue reading “Making America Deportable Again”Trumpy Georgia Board Passes Another Disastrous Rule Blatantly Designed To Delay Election Results
In a change that the Republican state attorney general believes is unlawful, the MAGA-controlled Georgia state election board voted Friday, in a 3-2 vote, to enact a new rule that requires counties in the state to hand-count ballots — a process that is based on conspiracy theories about voting machines that experts say is both inefficient and error-prone.
Continue reading “Trumpy Georgia Board Passes Another Disastrous Rule Blatantly Designed To Delay Election Results”About Those Crowd Sizes: Take A Look For Yourself
When Kamala Harris officially entered the presidential race late last month, she hit the ground running. The Vice President has been traveling the country, drawing large, energized crowds. Her newfound popularity, and, specifically, the size of those crowds, has predictably become a thorn in the side of Donald Trump, who sees crowd size as the ultimate measure of success.
Continue reading “About Those Crowd Sizes: Take A Look For Yourself”Nebraska, Maine and New Annals of WT Actual F
I suspect this won’t matter. A lot of facts aren’t known. And I’m not sure all the players have yet put their cards on the table. But I wanted to address the topic Nicole put on your radar yesterday. Republicans are making another push to change the electoral law in Nebraska and thus take away a single electoral vote which Kamala Harris is likely but by no means guaranteed to win. We start by making clear that Nebraska has every right to do this. All but two states allocated their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. It’s shifty and inappropriate to do it so late in the cycle for a clearly partisan purpose. But there’s no issue here of voting rights or election rigging. They can do this. I should note here that I don’t think it will end up making a difference. But, yeah … it could. It’s certainly possible that Donald Trump could become president again because of this.
Now, we don’t know whether Nebraska Republicans will be able to come up with the votes. We’ll come back to that. But if you remember when this came up earlier in the year, Maine (the other state with this system) said it would also make the change if Nebraska did. In other words, if Nebraska made the change, then Maine would counter and cancel it out. Nebraska Republicans were struggling to come up with the votes anyway. So that seemed to be the end of it. There wasn’t any point.
Continue reading “Nebraska, Maine and New Annals of WT Actual F”Trump’s Lawyers Rehash Already-Rejected Arguments In Endless Bid To Dismiss Immunity Case
Trump’s lawyers late Thursday night — having missed the 5 p.m. deadline set by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — used a basic procedural step to revive many arguments Chutkan had already rejected, a bid to get the immunity case dismissed or delayed.
Continue reading “Trump’s Lawyers Rehash Already-Rejected Arguments In Endless Bid To Dismiss Immunity Case”