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Voters wait in line to vote at a polling place on October 15, 2020 in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Record numbers came out for in-person, early voting which began today in North Carolina. (Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images)

At President Donald Trumps recent (and possibly COVID-19 infectious) in-person rally at the White House, Black supporters of Trump attempted to recruit significant numbers of African Americans for the audience.It is just one of other awkward attempts the Trump campaign has made to improve its racial optics.

Given the presidents history of racist rhetoric and conduct, however, polls do not reveal such tepid efforts are likely to convert any significant number of Black voters.

Read More: Why is the Trump campaign courting Black male voters?

Nonetheless, there has been recent anxious debate as to why 14% of Black men reported voting for Trump in 2016 given how narrowly Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to Trump.

Rather than progressive candidates or campaigns wringing their hands about the likely small percentage of Black men who may vote for Trump in 2020, their focus should be upon turning out African American men and women in larger numbers period. As long-term voter turnout numbers reveal, Black men vote in greater numbers when Black women vote in greater numbers.

Treating the Black male voter problem in isolation is to ignore the fact that Black women are most often key organizers and mobilizers of the Black vote, including the votes of their brothers. Of course, there must be specific appeals targeted at the concerns and votes of Black men.

But scholars and activists of intersectionality warn us about the dangers of privileging the leadership and lives of Black men over those of Black women.

Read More: Megan Thee Stallion pens NY Times op-ed championing Black women: Were all we have

It is true that in 2016 there was a slight gender gap where greater numbers of Black men reported voting for and having more favorable views of Trump as compared to Black women (see the tables.) Still, pro-Trump Black women and men were a fraction of the Black vote; other than Black women, Black men were the least likely of all race-gender combinations to support Trump; and in general Black men and women held views that were small differences of degree and not in kind.

Overwhelming majorities of African American women (80.1%) and Black men (71.1%) voted for Clinton for president or had favorable views of Clinton (78.2 % and 71.5%, respectively).

2016 CMPS: In the election of President, did you vote for

2016 CMPS: Had favorable or somewhat favorable views of

And it is unlikely that these slight differences can be explained by differences in ideology, given that roughly equal percentages of Black women and men ideologically identified as liberal (35.8% vs 36.26), moderate (37.1% vs. 39,6%), or conservative (15.3% vs 14.4%).No matter the labels, Black women are somewhat more likely than Black men to support left-leaning policy proposals such as universal healthcare or same-sex marriage.

While there is a presidential turnout gap between all race-gender combinations of women and men, the gap is most pronounced between Black women and men.In 1980, about 56% of Black women turned out to vote as compared to 51% of Black men.In 2016, while overall Black turnout declined to 59% (from 66% in 2012), the gap between Black women and men was 10% or 64% for the former as compared to 54% for the latter.

Read More: 6 states where low Black voter turnout helped Trump win in 2016

Simulations conducted by the Center for American Progress indicate that if Black turnout in 2016 matched that of 2012, African Americans could have been the critical margin of victory for Clinton in the critical Blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Thus, the reason why in 2020 a bevy of groups from the Black Male Voter Project to Amplify Action are attempting to increase Black turnout especially among Black men.

Of course, there are structural barriers that may very specifically and directly impact Black mens rates of voter participation from felony disenfranchisement to GOP-led purges of inconsistent voters.While Black women for various reasons may be enthused by the Democratic vice-presidential candidacy of Sen. Kamala Harris(D-CA), we do not know if her candidacy will have an Obama effect with Black men even though Harris has made pitches directed at Black men in battleground states like Michigan.

There is an array of issues that speak to Black mens interests including questions of economic and occupational inequalities. But we do not know if Black men will be drawn to the economic and health policy platforms of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

In the end, a multi-pronged approach that targets both Black women and men may be the most successful and progressive strategy.

Todd Shaw is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches political science and the African American studies.

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How progressives should handle the Black male voter problem - TheGrio

Law Forward is a nonprofit law firm that works in close collaboration with allies across the state and beyond. By protecting the interests of ordinary people under the Wisconsin and U.S. Constitutions, Law Forward will defend the principles of good governance, fair play and equality.

Wisconsins ruthless legislative leadership has undertaken a systematic effort to undercut democratic norms and to disenfranchise voters, Jeffrey A. Mandell, founder, president and lead counsel, said.

Rather than legislating to address the needs of Wisconsin families, they have repeatedly used the courts as a tool to entrench their own power. The people deserve to have an advocate in these fights. Law Forward will aggressively combat these efforts and stand in defense of Wisconsins proud, progressive tradition of innovation and pragmatism.

Respected Madison trial attorney Douglas M. Poland will serve as the litigation director, bringing with him a decade of experience in challenging unlawful gerrymandering in federal courts. Law Forward has also hired its first full-time staff counsel, Mel Barnes, who brings an insightful, strategic perspective on how Wisconsins government interacts with the most contentious and important issues.

The organizations diverse Legal Advisory Council will be co-chaired by former Sen. Russ Feingold and former Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton.

Law Forward is essential infrastructure to protect the rule of law in Wisconsin, Feingold, president of the American Constitution Society and co-chair of Law Forwards Legal Advisory Council, said. We need a savvy, strategic, systemic effort to rebuff the assault on Wisconsin democracy that has been underway for a decade now. I am confident that Law Forward is the effort we so badly need to ensure a functioning democracy and move Wisconsin in a better direction.

Lawton, a co-chair of Law Forwards Legal Advisory Council, said, A many decades-long concerted conservative attack on Wisconsin democracy, funded by dark money, has taken a toll on families and on our communities across the state. Now, we will have Law Forward to stand up for us, give us voice in our courts and ensure government works on behalf of all Wisconsinites. Now, finally, we will have a consistent, coordinated progressive voice for justice in Wisconsin courts.

The organization is already prepared to prosecute litigation necessary to address any attempts to suppress vote participation on or before Election Day, and will continue to focus on strategic impact litigation designed to counteract recent destructive efforts by the conservative legal movement to transform Wisconsins legal landscape.

In particular, Law Forward is well positioned to challenge extreme partisan attempts to gerrymander election districts based on Mandells experience in Wisconsins appellate courts, Polands expertise on redistricting issuesincluding his experience on the legal team that brought the Gill v. Whitford partisan gerrymandering case to the U.S. Supreme Courtand Barness work at Planned Parenthood bringing strategic impact litigation focused on constitutional questions.

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Wisconsin Progressives Launch Effort to Reverse Assaults on Democracy through the Courts - Milwaukee Courier Weekly Newspaper

This past July, Bernie Sanders said Joe Biden will be the most progressive president since FDR. Democrats agree that theirs is the party of progressivism, while few people challenge that brand and what it represents.

Yet progressivism is the problem in America today. If progressives achieve their ultimate goals, the United States can no longer exist as a self-governing, constitutional republic. Its long overdue that we call progressivism what it is: the greatest present threat to a free America.

Thats not to say every progressive is a bad person with bad intentions. Many progressives genuinely believe theyre helping others, unaware of how much suffering results from the politicians and programs they support. Their lack of self-knowledge, however, is no excuse for the rest of us to ignore the ideology that fuels divisive and destructive politics.

Progressivism is not new. It began as an intellectual movement 150 years old, stretching back to the 1870s. Early progressives tended to be academics, university professors, and administrators who created the first Ph.D. graduate programs in the late 19th century. Americas first progressive president, Teddy Roosevelt, creaked the door open to the vastly more damaging presidency of Woodrow Wilson, arguably the most archetypal and memorable early progressive who made the transition from academics to politics, winning the White House in 1912.

Many early German-trained American progressives went on to fuel the socialism embedded in Adolf Hitlers Third Reich as well as the communism of Lenins Soviet Union and Mao Zedongs China. In the United States, progressivism took a different path mainly because the Constitution thankfully made it difficult to conduct the kind of social engineering experiments they ran in Germany, Russia, China, and other nations.

Following the devastation of the Civil War, American progressives were convinced America had been ill-founded. They set out to establish a better, more scientific, more progressive foundation for American politics, policies, government, and culture. In place of the self-governing constitutional republic of the Founding Fathers, progressives started planning for a new kind of republic (as the title of Herbert Crolys progressive magazine suggested).

Their dream was a regime of total central planning, free from constitutional constraints, where unelected government bureaucrats and other experts divide subjects (not citizens) into tribes and decide which ones are allowed to do what, as well as how, when, where, and why.

For progressives, the solution to any problem is a government plan. Unlike the Founders Constitution, the purpose of progressive government is to subsidize, regulate, license, supervise, and otherwise plan every aspect of our lives. Nothing can be left to the private realm of unprogressive, self-interested citizens making their own choices, especially not those in business seeking profit.

Bernie is right about Joe Biden hes a model progressive. When asked what hell do in various situations, Bidens answer is typically some version of: Ill do whatever the experts say.

As progressives see it, even elected members of the government should be controlled by unelected experts. This, of course, raises a valid question: Why then, do we need elected members of government at all? Perhaps unelected bureaucrats are the progressive version of the philosopher-kings Plato wished for?

As progressive government becomes involved in everything, everything becomes politicized. In modern progressive America, as virtually every subject now involves some degree of government regulation, funding, or oversight, its become nearly impossible to have a discussion that doesnt become political.

Its also nearly impossible for citizens to form friendships with those who hold different political opinions. Questioning progressive government programs often gets one instantly accused of being hateful, stupid, or both.Yet the hallmark of progressive programs, now spanning more than a century, is repeated failure, often on grand scales.

During the Great Depression, for example, while promising to provide jobs and resources to those in need, progressive central planners regulated entire industries, dictating wages, prices, and production schedules. Progressives politicians confiscated enormous amounts of private capital, paid farmers not to farm, slaughtered millions of livestock, dumped millions of gallons of milk into rivers, and burned thousands of acres of crops, while hungry, struggling Americans went without food, saw their taxes increase, and remained unemployed.

A generation later, in 1964, progressives declared a War on Poverty. Since then, progressives have spent more than $22 trillion, far more than all U.S. military wars from the American Revolution to today, combined. More than half a century later, after creating hundreds of government programs and hiring millions of bureaucrats, progressive programs have failed to reduce significantly U.S. poverty rates.

In recent decades, progressive politicians have thrown mountains of other peoples money at education, while student achievement measures have stagnatedor even declinedwhile many public schools have become little more than institutions of progressive indoctrination that line the pockets of union bosses.

Today, we live in the most progressive era of American history, with a government that regulates and controls more areas of our lives than ever before. Never in American history has it been more difficult and expensive for ordinary citizens to start a business, own a home, or provide for a family.

As progressivism spreads across the United States, we see increased rates of child abuse, spousal abuse, partner abuse of all kinds, fatherlessness, substance abuse, neglect, depression, random mass murders, teenage suicides, and other pathologies fueled by idleness, dependency, and lack of responsibility. Coincidence? Unlikely.

And what do progressives offer as solutions? More of the same failed regulations, subsidies, central planning. More progressivism just the opposite of what we need.

To be progressive today is to feel morally superior because the progressive politicians, programs, and policies one supports are marketed as helping others. Yet slapping charitable-sounding labels on wasteful, counterproductive, unconstitutional, and often corrupt government programs doesnt help the people who need it most.

So, who does benefit from progressivism? Unelected government bureaucrats, elected politicians who dish out progressive favors in exchange for expanding power, and politically connected corporate cronies who use progressive regulations, subsidies, and special perks to crush their politically unconnected competitors.

After 150 years of American experiments in progressive central planning, the verdict is in: Its bad. No more. Its time progressivism becomes the term of condemnation it so richly deserves to be. To call oneself progressive is no reason to be smug. And he who would be the most progressive president since FDR is precisely the one who never should be president.

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Calling Joe Biden 'Progressive' Is The Same As Calling Him A Failure - The Federalist

A coalition of progressive attorneys is forming a new nonprofit law firm in Wisconsin on the eve of the next election and months ahead of the next round of redistricting.

The group, called Law Forward, will be run by attorneys who've fought Republicans in court on issues ranging from redistricting to Wisconsin's 2018 lame-duck legislative session. It will be advised by a council that includes former Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold and former Democratic Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton.

Broadly speaking, it could serve as a counterweight to the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a nonprofit law firm that's been a powerful ally of Republicans in the state's courtrooms for the past decade.

"I think that's an inevitable shorthand, but I think that we're more than just a reaction to WILL," said Jeff Mandell, the founder, president and lead counsel for Law Forward. "We are a reaction to a much broader conservative campaign that has been concerted over the last 10 or 15 years in Wisconsin to distort Wisconsin governance and to test out radical theories."

Mandell said Law Forward is designed to defend "ongoing attacks on the state's progressive tradition" and on the way government works in Wisconsin. He said the group will be funded by "organizations, individuals and foundations which share our goals," but declined to offer more specifics.

Mandell was the lead attorney in the first case that challenged laws Republicans passed during the waning days of Gov. Scott Walker's administration that limited the power of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul. He also served as special counsel to Evers ahead of Wisconsin's April election, and more recently, successfully fought efforts by Kanye West and the Green Party to get on Wisconsin's presidential ballot.

Law Forward's litigation director will be Doug Poland, who has represented Democrats in multiple redistricting lawsuits, including one that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017. He was also involved in a lawsuit that successfully extended deadlines for absentee ballots in the April election and another that sought to do the same in November.

Poland said he worked with national groups during the last redistricting challenge.

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"They can provide some very good depth of knowledge in specific areas, but they don't know Wisconsin particularly well," Poland said. "We already have our finger on the pulse of what's going on here."

In addition to Mandell, Law Forward's board of directors includes Christine Bremer Muggli, former president of the Wisconsin Association for Justice, the state's trial lawyers' association.

The group's advisory council, which is chaired by Feingold and Lawton, also includes Marquette University Law professor Ed Fallone, who has run twice for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Ian Bassin, co-chair and founder of the national group Protect Democracy, and Dean Strang, a longtime Wisconsin defense lawyer.

When it comes to legal fights over issues like voting, redistricting or government power, Democrats and Republicans have typically relied on a shortlist of lawyers with expertise in their fields and partisan leans.

While both parties still rely on those lawyers, WILL has given conservatives a different avenue to the court system, using private donations and grant funding to advance an ideology of "the promotion of free markets, limited government, individual liberty, and a robust civil society." That's let the group file briefs in a wide range of high-profile cases and sometimes file lawsuits on behalf of individual plaintiffs.

Without a similar model on the left, Mandell said Wisconsin progressive have been more reactive.

"There can be people who want to bring those cases as plaintiffs, but they have to figure out how to fund them," Mandell said. "They either have to recruit private law firms that are willing to do those cases on a pro bono basis, which can be very difficult, or they have to figure out where the money's coming from for those cases. And one of the things that Law Forward is going to be able to do is raise money around a set of values."

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Wisconsin Progressives Forming Nonprofit Law Firm With Election, Redistricting On Horizon - Wisconsin Public Radio News

Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersBiden defends his health plan from Trump attacks Progressives blast Biden plan to form panel on Supreme Court reform Sanders: Progressives will work to 'rally the American people' if Biden wins MORE (I-Vt.)predicted that progressives would look to move Democratic presidential nominee Joe BidenJoe BidenMore than 300 military family members endorse Biden Five takeaways from the final Trump-Biden debate Biden: 'I would transition from the oil industry' MORE toward theirpriorities if he wins the White House this November and Democrats sweep Congress.

If you want a progressive agenda to come out of the United States Congress, were going to have to rally the American people by the tens of millions to demand that we have a government that represents all of us and not just wealthy campaign contributors. Were going to have to correct and deal with a very corrupt election system where massive voter suppression that exists every single day right now, he said on Hill.TVs Rising Thursday.

Sanders said Democrats should tackle legislation he plans to introduce to begin the process of moving toward Medicare for All, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, and a massive infrastructure plan.

We have got to lay out an agenda that speaks to the struggles and the desperation of working-class Americans, he said.

Sanders recognized that Biden, a well-known centrist steeped in old traditions of bipartisanship in Congress, does not share many of his progressive policies but argued his plans would still move the country forward.

[I]f you look at Bidens economic proposals, theyre not Bernie Sanderss proposals. Dont want to suggest they are. But they will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, equal pay for equal work, making it easier for workers to join unions, $2 trillion investment in combatting climate change and creating millions of good paying jobs in energy efficiency and sustainable energy, paid family and medical leave. No small things, he said.

Sanders and other progressives have been on a campaign to persuade liberals who may be skeptical of Bidens centrist brand of politics to back the former vice president, with the Vermont lawmaker maintaining that the first step to moving the country in a more progressive direction is defeating President TrumpDonald John TrumpMore than 300 military family members endorse Biden Five takeaways from the final Trump-Biden debate Biden: 'I would transition from the oil industry' MORE this November.

You know what, if Trump is reelected, all that were going to be on for the next four years is defensive, defensive, defensive procedures. I want to get on the offensive, he said. And that is why, in my view, every progressive, every person in this country who thinks for two minutes about whats at stake, should be voting for Joe Biden.

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Sanders: Progressives will work to 'rally the American people' if Biden wins | TheHill - The Hill