(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Election Day [1] ['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags'] Date: 2023-04-04 Katjusa Cisar of Bolts explains that turnout in Milwaukee for an off-year election poses special challenges. Tuesday’s election will settle if conservatives keep a majority on Wisconsin’s supreme court or if it flips to the left, and all of those issues hang in the balance. Amid an outpouring of national attention and spending, the urgent questions the race will decide have dominated the campaign and its coverage. Will the state’s abortion ban from 1849 survive a legal challenge, will Wisconsin end up with fairer electoral maps for the rest of the decade, will voters regain access to drop boxes? For people who are volunteering their time on this race, these stakes are as enormous as they are self-evident. But they also face a difficult reality. This momentous showdown is taking place in an off-year, springtime, low-turnout election, far from the energy that greets a presidential race. Mobilizing people to come out in elections that aren’t synced with national cycles is always a challenge, and there’ve been efforts across the country to move their time. “Historically these spring elections have extremely low turnouts. This election is going to be all about who gets the people out to vote,” Christine Sinicki, a Democratic Assembly member who represents the southernmost parts of Milwaukee and some adjacent suburbs along Lake Michigan, told Bolts. Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times notes that we may have to wait a few days before a winner is declared in Chicago’s mayoral runoff election between Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson. Try not to hold your breath for the final outcome. The winner may not be known for days. “I highly doubt either camp will concede on election night because up to 100,000 votes may not be counted when we go to bed on election night,” said pollster Matt Podgorski of M3 Strategies, whose polling correctly placed the top four finishers in Round One of the mayoral sweepstakes within roughly half a percentage point. [...] With all of the talk about the racial divide between the candidates and the gender gap between progressives and conservatives, Podgorski talked more about the generation gap between Vallas and Johnson voters. He expects the mayor’s race to be decided by the “turnout ratio of younger vs. old.” “Do we get the normal age distribution of turnout? Or is the turnout gonna be a little bit older or a little bit younger than usual? ... Brandon’s voters are overwhelmingly young,” Podgorski said. x NEW: Final Independent #ChiMayor23 Poll Vallas 49.6% Johnson 45.4% Undecided 5% Victory Research, Mar 31-Ap 2, 900 people, margin +/- 3.27%@ILPollster — Mary Ann Ahern (@MaryAnnAhernNBC) April 3, 2023 Peter Slevin of The New Yorker profiles the campaign of mayoral candidate Paul Vallas, with an emphasis on the tough-on-crime issues that Vallas has championed. Until this year, Vallas, who prefers statistics to emotions on the campaign trail, has been notably unsuccessful as a political candidate. He lost races for Illinois governor and lieutenant governor; then, four years ago, he ran for mayor of Chicago, only to finish ninth in a fourteen-person field. On Election Day that year, the media spotted him drinking a beverage alone at the Billy Goat Tavern. A reporter with the Chicago Tribune wrote that Vallas’s “time in politics may have come and gone.” Now nearly seventy years old, he’s back, having raised more than seventeen million dollars, much of it from business interests, and securing the endorsements of a multiracial array of past and present Chicago politicians. Among them are Bobby Rush, a former member of Congress and a onetime Black Panther, and Willie Wilson, a tough-on-crime, repeat mayoral candidate, who finished fifth in February after saying that police should be free to chase suspects and “hunt them down like a rabbit.” [...] In Chicago, race and racism are never far from the political calculus. “A lot has changed since the eighties, but there are still deep divides, racially and economically,” Bowen, the political strategist, said. Lightfoot accused Vallas of using dog whistles to attract white conservatives (which Vallas’s campaign denied); Johnson has made explicit pitches to Black voters. At a candidate forum held at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, on the South Side, Johnson said, “I’m the only person on this stage who built an entire budget around Black people,” touting his work on the county commission. When Vallas argued that he was the one who had actually managed a multibillion-dollar budget, Johnson replied, “Everywhere he has gone, he has mismanaged budgets. I find it unconscionable for you to say that . . . a Black man can’t come and manage one.” In late March, Johnson held a rally at the Alpha Temple Missionary Baptist Church, in Englewood, a struggling neighborhood on the South Side, to talk about expanding child care. Before he arrived, about fifty Black supporters, many wearing long-sleeved “Brandon Johnson for Mayor” T-shirts, cheered speakers who lambasted politicians for neglecting the city’s most impoverished communities. Nate Sanders, who works at soul in Action, a civic-engagement organization based on the South Side, said that Vallas and his allies were spreading fear and trying to demonize Johnson for taking a different approach to violence. “They want you to be afraid of someone who says he wants to solve crime,” he said. “That doesn’t even make sense.” Johnson, mindful that crime takes a disproportionate toll on Black communities, and that his candidacy is suffering from allegations that he will “defund” the police, said this week that he would not cut “one penny” from the police budget. If I had a vote in this election, I suppose that I would hold my nose and vote for Johnson. Dahila Lithwick of Slate is all for not paying that much attention to the arraignment of Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom later today. The criminal indictment of a former president who occupied the office as recently as Number 45 is news. That the same person is also a candidate for president in the 2024 presidential election (and leading by wide margins in polls for the Republican nomination) is pretty big news. There’s no avoiding that Trump should get massive coverage now. The time for the mainstream media to “sideline” the “Donald Trump problem” was in 2015. Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post looks at a National Labor Relations Board ruling that renders employer-based non-disclosure agreements nearly useless. The board held that broad nondisparagement and confidentiality provisions violate Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees employees “the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection … [or] to refrain from any or all such activities.” To exercise those rights, employees must be able to share information about their workplace. The NLRB decision said workers’ rights “are not limited to discussions with coworkers, as they do not depend on the existence of an employment relationship between the employee and the employer, and the Board has repeatedly affirmed that such rights extend to former employees.” The ability to talk with ex-employees protects “employee efforts to improve terms and conditions of employment or otherwise improve their lot as employees through channels outside the immediate employee-employer relationship.” [...] All of this spells bad news for employers accustomed to buying silence from former workers. Indeed, the current administration has been generous preserving ex-employees’ freedom of speech and employment. The NLRB case follows a proposal by the Federal Trade Commission to bar noncompete agreements, which often accompany nondisparagement restrictions. Together, these two moves would drastically curtail an employer’s ability to control ex-employees, to the delight of union organizers, the media and business competitors. Paul Krugman of The New York Times looks at the reasons for the decline in life expectancy in red-state America. What explains the American way of death? A large part of the answer seems to be political. One important clue is that the problem of premature death isn’t evenly distributed across the country. Life expectancy is hugely unequal across U.S. regions, with major coastal cities not looking much worse than Europe but the South and the eastern heartland doing far worse. But wasn’t it always thus? No. Geographic health disparities have surged in recent decades. According to the U.S. mortality database, as recently as 1990, Ohio had slightly higher life expectancy than New York. Since then, New York’s life expectancy has risen rapidly, nearly converging with that of other rich countries, while Ohio’s has hardly risen at all and is now four years less than New York’s. There has been considerable research into the causes of these growing disparities. A 2021 paper published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives examined various possible causes, like the increasing concentration of highly educated Americans (who tend to be healthier than those with less education) in states that are already highly educated and the widening per capita income gaps among states. The authors found that these factors can’t explain more than a small fraction of the growing mortality gap. Paul Waldman of The Washington Post looks again at that Wall Street Journal-NORC poll about changing American values and finds that one value that is essentially unchanged. A recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found that Americans’ commitment to a series of traditional values — including patriotism, religion, marriage and tolerance for others — has declined over recent years, in some cases drastically. But “hard work” still came out on top, with 94 percent of respondents saying that it’s either very or somewhat important to them personally (even as the share that said it was “very important” declined). A careful researcher would caution that this might reflect “social desirability bias” — everyone knows the socially acceptable answer to the question “Do you value hard work?” [...] While people all over the world have a reverence for hard work, the United States is unusual because we’ve woven it into our national mythology. The American Dream says that if you work hard you’ll succeed, and we define success in monetary terms. The inverse of that idea is that if you don’t work hard you’ll fail, and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. For many, there is a moral hierarchy involved: Those who work hard are simply better and more admirable than those who don’t. It’s ironic that many of those who hold to this idea with the most fervor also know intimately that the American Dream is a lie. Sally Mahmoud-Werthman of STATnews says that emergency departments of the nation’s hospitals need to re-examine their relationship with law enforcement. The emergency department reflects America’s deepest and most entrenched problems while offering a critical safety net for individuals with psychiatric illness, unstable housing, substance use disorders, and many other chronic structural vulnerabilities. It’s also the entry point to medical care for patients affiliated with the criminal justice system. The ubiquity of law enforcement presence in the ED is a major health equity issue impacting patient care, privacy, and trust. Yet few institutional policies exist to regulate their presence or guide medical providers in navigating interactions with officers. As is true in other parts of life in the U.S., non-white and low-income communities are disproportionately exposed to law enforcement when visiting the emergency department. Police are a ubiquitous presence in emergency rooms, particularly in county hospitals and trauma centers located in urban, metropolitan areas. These hospitals often hire local law enforcement to provide on-site security services, and in some cases, patrol the ED waiting room. Physicians have witnessed officers collecting stickers (labels that contain personal demographic information) of patients who are not in custody and running background checks to see there is a warrant for someone. Patients may walk into the hospital with medical needs, and leave handcuffed with police. All of that exacerbates mistrust in the medical system and may violate patients’ privacy and constitutional rights. But we can’t simply ban law enforcement from the emergency department. Law enforcement need to enter the emergency department when accompanying patients in custody, investigating a crime, or if they are called to the scene by the hospital. This results in the convergence of law enforcement and medical staff in the ED, presenting a conflict of interest for patients, health care staff, and hospitals. Finally today, Alex Abad-Santos of Vox looks at the hypocrisy, double standards, and, yes, racism of white male sports commentary about the “trash-talking” by LSU’s Angel Reese during Sunday’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament championship game. From Angel Reese to Serena Williams to Simone Biles to multiple instances in the NFL and NBA, Black athletes have not only had to win on the court but do so in a manner that audiences — but in particular grown (white) men like [Keith] Olbermann and [Dave] Portnoy — determine respectable. They can’t be too confident or they’ll be seen as arrogant. They can’t be too passionate or they’ll be deemed angry. They can’t talk about their mental health without having their character called into question. Yet, when athletes like Clark or Larry Bird or Novak Djokovic or Tom Brady flash the same behavior, it’s a revered part of their legacy or a passionate commitment to the game. Female athletes like Reese and Clark are also battling an added, implicit layer of sexism. Some — grown men especially — believe there’s no room for trash talk in women’s sports because women are perceived to be better, gentler, and above the fray. Meanwhile, trash talking and vitriol are seen as an established part of men’s sports and its most compelling rivalries. This stripe of benevolent sexism undercuts competitors like [Iowa’s Caitlin] Clark and Reese who are conducting themselves with more dignity and toughness than how they’re being talked about. When asked about Reese’s taunting, Clark played it off. “I have no idea, I was just trying to get to the handshake line,” Clark said in a post-game interview, seemingly taking the loss in stride. “All the credit in the world to LSU ... They deserved it. They had a tremendous season. [Coach] Kim Mulkey ... only said really kind things to me in the handshake line.” That’s why even though I personally hate trash talking, I’ve always liked NFL cornerback Richard Sherman, and especially when Sherman trash talked. Oh, speaking of Serena Williams… x Here's proof that sisters will never stop irritating each other 😅 pic.twitter.com/wSq5qEO3PC — BBC Sport (@BBCSport) April 4, 2023 Have the best possible day, everyone! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/4/2161937/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Election-Day Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/