Senate to vote on expanding Social Security payments for some teachers, firefighters
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(NEW YORK) — In a final lame-duck push, the Senate will attempt to pass legislation aimed at providing full Social Security benefits to millions of Americans this week.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in floor remarks Monday he’d push for a vote on the Social Security Fairness Act before the week is out.
“We will vote and every Senator will choose. Where are you? Do you stand on the side of public retirees who deserve their benefits, or bungle this golden opportunity by blocking this bill?” Schumer said in a floor speech.
The closely-watched legislation repeals provisions that limit the ability of some retirees who also collect pensions from claiming social security benefits. Among those impacted are retirees who at one time worked as firefighters, teachers, postal worker, a police officer, or in other public sector jobs. A provision that limits the benefits allotted to those workers’ surviving spouses would also be eliminated.
The legislation already passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support in November, but Congress would need to act this week to avoid having to restart the process of passing the legislation in the new year.
The bipartisan bill has 62 Senate cosponsors, all but ensuring that it would have the necessary 60 votes it needs to overcome the Senate filibuster and pass.
It has strong advocates on both sides of the aisle.
“It is unfair to penalize Americans who have taught our children, protected our streets, and ran into burning buildings,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate’s Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a post on X earlier this month.
But there is some concern among Republicans about the cost of the bill and the increased strain it could put on the already underfunded Social Security trust fund.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that the bill would increase the deficit by $196 billion and increase the rate at which the Social Security trust fund becomes insolvent.
As a result, there could be challenges on the floor that limit the ability to expedite passage of this bill. And there’s certainly a time crunch to consider.
The Senate isn’t short on things to accomplish during this last week of the lame-duck session. It is currently working to process the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act. Senators must also approve a government funding bill before the end of the week if they wish to avert a shutdown.
If the Social Security Fairness Act is challenged in a way that slows the process of its passage, the Senate may run short on time to get this done.
It is not yet known when the Senate will vote on this legislation.
Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post via Getty Images
(ATLANTA) — Early in-person voting kicks off in Georgia on Tuesday as uncertainty over new election rule changes looms large in one of the crucial states that will decide this year’s presidential election.
Georgia counties will provide early in-person voting for at least 16 days, with some counties offering an extra voting day on Sunday. Nov. 1 will be the last day of early in-person voting.
The commencement of Georgia’s three-week period for early voting comes as the Georgia state election board recently passed sweeping new changes to the state’s election system, including how votes are tabulated.
Over the summer, the Republican-controlled State Election Board passed a rule requiring all ballots to be hand counted on election night, prompting legal challenges and pushback from both major parties as officials warned about potential delays in reporting results.
Georgia’s Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, told the board it was operating outside of its authority, and warned that the rule changes were likely not lawful. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign joined a lawsuit from Georgia Democrats suing to block the last-minute rule changes.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas A. Cox Jr. scheduled hearings this week to hear about the lawsuits challenging the new rules, including the hand-counting provision and new rules that expand access to poll watchers.
Another prominent Republican in the state, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also promised that while Georgia law mandates certification on Nov. 12, he raised concerns about potential false claims that could arise as potential reporting delays linger.
“Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker, you know, responses, quicker results, and that’s why we’re going to post all the early votes by 8 p.m,” Raffensperger said in an interview with the Washington Post on Monday.
“Well, this now drags on for the final 30 percent until one, two, three, or four o’clock in the morning.” he said. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, and so we don’t support it, but the judge will make that determination. We’ll find out. We’ll follow the law.”
Georgia voters will already face changes this election cycle due to the state’s Election Integrity Act, SB 202, passed in 2021, which adds more verification for voters requesting absentee ballots, limits the amount of ballot drop box locations, and, in one of the most controversial rule changes, the law now makes it a misdemeanor to give away food or water within 150 feet of a polling place or within 25 feet of a voter in line.
Advocates of the rule change argue that those rule changes will provide more transparency to the election process and have been set in place well before November’s election so poll workers and voters have had time to understand the changes.
However, Democrats have repeatedly attempted to block provisions of the law, claiming that the strict rules on identification will disenfranchise voters and criminalize portions of the election process.
Candidates are educating their voters about the new voting landscape in Georgia, emphasizing how crucial turnout will be in the state.
Former President Bill Clinton spent time in middle Georgia on Sunday and Monday, focusing on mobilizing supporters in rural areas for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“They’ve been able to make it easier for states that agree with them to make it harder for people to vote, but not impossible, and Georgia has more experience than almost any other state in climbing those barriers and breaching them,” he said at a campaign stop in Columbus on Monday.
Former President Donald Trump will mark the start of early voting in Georgia with a series of campaign stops on Tuesday. He will first tape a Fox News town hall focused on women’s issues before delivering remarks at a rally in Atlanta.
The Harris campaign is deploying surrogates around the state on Tuesday and the vice president is expected to visit the state later this week as polling shows an extremely tight race in the Peach State — which helped secure President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 after it narrowly flipped in favor of Democrats.
According to polling forecasts from 538, a victory in Georgia for either campaign would be pivotal to ensuring an electoral victory, which would give Trump around a 3-in-4 shot at winning the presidency and Harris about a 9-in-10 chance of becoming the next president.
That polling is reflective of how both campaigns have been prioritizing Georgia.
“If we lose Georgia, we lose the whole thing and our country goes to hell. Because we can’t have her be president of the United States. She’s grossly incompetent. We can’t let that happen,” Trump said during a rally in Atlanta in August.
Trump in recent weeks has publicly mended his relationship with Brian Kemp, the state’s popular Republican governor, after furiously lashing out at him after Kemp refused to give in to Trump’s demands in 2020 to prevent state officials from certifying the election.
Earlier this month, the two appeared together for the first time since 2020 when Trump toured the state after Hurricane Helene devastated parts of Georgia.
Harris has campaigned on the issue of abortion in Georgia, using the state’s six-week abortion ban and Trump’s role in overturning Roe vs. Wade to appeal to suburban women — a key voter bloc.
“Now we know that at least two women, and those are only the stories we know here in the state of Georgia, died, died because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said last month after a ProPublica report tied the deaths of two Georgia women to the state’s restrictive ban.
“This is a health care crisis, and Donald Trump is the architect. He brags about overturning Roe v. Wade in his own words, quote, ‘I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.’ He is proud, proud that women are done.”
(WASHINGTON) — As Election Day nears, tens of millions of voters have already cast their ballots throughout the country.
Whether through mail-in ballots or early in-person polling stations, more than 68 million Americans, roughly 43% of the 2020 turnout, had voted against standing in line on Election Day as of Friday afternoon, according to data from the University of Florida’s Election Lab.
Academic experts, reporters and pundits have been going through basic and limited data gleaned from the early voting numbers, trying to get clues about next week’s outcome.
That picture, however, is not exactly black and white, according to Charles Stewart, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data science lab.
“It’s like talking about the weather,” he said. “The candidates, the press, etcetera — really are trying to draw conclusions just on the face value of the data, but there really isn’t a lot there to say who is winning.”
That said, Stewart said the early voting data does provide some insights when it comes to this year’s voting patterns and overall turnout — indicators that could help explain how the election turns out.
A flip in the ways people early vote
Voting trends have shown that more people have been choosing to cast their ballots before Election Day, and this has increased in numbers over the last 30 years, but 2020 turned out to be a major outlier, according to Stewart.
In the last presidential election, 69% of the 158 million total votes were cast before Election Day either through the mail, which included mail ballots dropped off in person, or at early voting poll sites, according to data from MIT.
Some 43% of the 2020 early votes came from mail ballots, according to the data.
Stewart said the COVID-19 pandemic forced many voters, who were already heavily engaged and wanted to be safe, to opt into using mail ballots or smaller voting lines if available.
“There was a speculation of what would happen with the shift once the pandemic was over,” he said.
However, in this year’s early voting there’s been a drop in voters choosing mail-in voting, Stewart said.
“The main trend I’m seeing is that the interest of voting by mail has shifted to voting in-person,” Stewart said.
He noted that shift is apparent in Georgia, which has seen record early voting numbers, with over 3.8 million ballots cast as of Friday. Roughly 92% of those were cast at in-person polling places and the rest via mail, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.
Stewart said some states, including swing states Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona, only offer early voting through in-person absentee options. Under this option, a voter must request an absentee ballot, fill it out, and then deposit it in either a ballot box or at a designated location, and they are counted as a mail ballot voter.
Some voters may not have the time or energy to go through those extra steps to cast their ballots early, and are likely going to vote in-person Stewart said.
“If you have to vote early in person you have to figure out where that precinct is but you have to find out which is closer to your house or errands. With voting by mail, you have to take the effort to apply, to fill it out and return it and hope that the mail is delivered on time,” he said. “With Election Day voting you likely have a polling site that is much closer to you.”
Early-voting method preference hasn’t the only thing that’s seen a flip, according to Stewart.
Partisan numbers do not give any indication of outcome
Stewart said historical trends show that the majority of early voters made their decisions a long time ago and are likely politically active.
This year’s data shows that to be the case, he said, bit noted a major change in partisan turnout in several battleground states, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.
Registered Republicans have seen a higher early voting turnout in battlegrounds Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina in this election compared to 2024 as of Friday, according to the data.
Typically, Democrats have had an advantage in early voting. However, Trump has pushed his supporters to cast their vote earlier and that appears to have an impact, Stewart said.
While Republican officials have been touting these higher numbers as a sign of growing support, Stewart warned there is more nuance to the data.
He noted it shows, so far, that a large number of the registered Republicans who cast their votes eary came from people who voted on Election Day in 2020 and were not new voters.
Stewart said this would mean there would be fewer Republican voters casting their ballots on Election Day and thus their votes may not be reported until much later on election night or even for days afterward.
In 2020, many swing states saw their Democratic tallies rise throughout the election night and into the week, creating a “red mirage” effect on the outcome.
That mirage and “blue wave” could be muted this time around, Stewart said.
“Whatever the blue shift is, there will probably be less of a steep slope to it,” he said.
What do gender, race say about the early vote
Democrats have been touting the gender gap as a factor in their favor in the early voting numbers, as over 54% of women have cast their vote as of Friday, according to the University of Florida data.
Stewart said that assumption is not noteworthy.
Women have always been the majority of the electorate in presidential elections, going as far back as 1980, according to the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Stewart said this is also true of early voters.
“It’s not always obvious to the public that there’s always been a gender gap,” he said.In 2020, many swing states saw their Democratic tallies rise throughout the election night and into the week, creating a “red mirage” effect on the outcome.
That mirage and “blue wave” could be muted this time around, Stewart said.
“Whatever the blue shift is, there will probably be less of a steep slope to it,” he said.
What do gender, race say about the early vote
Democrats have been touting the gender gap as a factor in their favor in the early voting numbers, as over 54% of women have cast their vote as of Friday, according to the University of Florida data.
Stewart said that assumption is not noteworthy.
Women have always been the majority of the electorate in presidential elections, going as far back as 1980, according to the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Stewart said this is also true of early voters.
“It’s not always obvious to the public that there’s always been a gender gap,” he said.
When it comes to race, white voters are more likely to cast their votes by mail than Black voters, according to the MIT data.
Stewart said this stems from traditions going back to the civil rights movement.
“African Americans fought and sometimes died for being able to march into the voting booth. That’s been instilled in the community,” he said.
This practice is one factor in large numbers of Black voters heading to in-person early voting poll sites in states such as Georgia and South Carolina, where that option is available.
Churches, civil rights groups and other organizations with ties to the Black community have been pushing voters to head to the early voting polls, using campaigns such as “souls to the polls” so that they can avoid any complications on Election Day.
Groups in Georgia in particular have stressed voting early to circumvent some of the restrictive voting laws that have been put in place since the 2020 election.
As of Friday evening, more than 1 million Black voters have cast their ballots, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.
“The mobilization efforts have clearly proven effective,” Stewart said.
Signs point to high turnout
Stewart said the one definite conclusion that can be drawn from the early voting data is that this year’s overall turnout will be “on par” with 2020’s, which was the highest voter turnout by percentage in over 100 years.
“It could be the high 160 (million),” he estimated.
Stewart said that the early-voting trends have shown that voters under 25 have not yet voted and they will typically line up on Election Day.
“Those populations are really heavily represented on Election Day,” he said.
Stewart reiterated that with the pandemic over, a good number of the 2020 early voters will likely shift back to Election Day voting, especially if it presents itself as the easier option for their locations and schedules.
As for the future, Steward predicted that the rise in Republican voters voting early will continue in future cycles along with the overall trend of the electorate opting for early voting.
“The data is showing this organic increase in early voting even after the pandemic,” he said. “Voters want more options, and they will seriously consider voting if they have more choices.”
(NEW YORK) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday hammered former President Donald Trump as thin-skinned and a threat to U.S. democracy in a combative interview with Fox News.
The interview marked an opportunity for Harris to appear on a network that frequently criticizes her and praises her opponent, a notable moment after Republicans had panned her for only granting interviews with friendly reporters or podcasters. True to form, the interview was testy throughout, including multiple exchanges in which Harris and Fox News anchor Bret Baier repeatedly spoke over each other.
Harris raised Trump’s recent rhetoric about the “enemy within” and threats to use the military to go after political opponents on and supposed chaos on Election Day to suggest that he’s unfit for a second term in office, adding that it is “clear to me” that Trump is “unfit to serve, that he is unstable, that he is dangerous.”
“You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him,” Harris told Fox News anchor Bret Baier.
“This is a democracy, and in a democracy the president of the United States in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it,” she said.
The remarks mark an escalation of her rhetoric describing Trump as dangerous for the country as he escalates his rhetoric about internal threats from Americans, including “radical left lunatics,” raising concerns about how he’d use the military in a future administration.
‘Not a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency’: Harris Harris also attempted to flesh out the differences Americans would see between President Joe Biden’s administration and her theoretical term in the White House, offering several examples after Republicans seized on her answer on ABC’s “The View” last week that “not a thing that comes to mind” when asked what she would have done something differently from Biden over the past four years.
“You’re not Joe Biden, you’re not Donald Trump, but, but nothing comes to mind that you would do differently?” Baier asked.
“My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency, and like every new president that comes into office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas,” she told Baier.
Harris specifically raised her plans to offer increased housing assistance to first-time home buyers and provide funds to start small businesses.
Still, she added that her administration would mark a turning of the page from what she called the divisiveness of the Trump era in U.S. politics.
Redirecting Her election would mark a change “from the last decade in which we have been burdened with the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump that has been designed and implemented to divide our country and have Americans literally point fingers at each other,” she said.
Pressed on immigration Baier also pressed Harris on immigration and high levels of border crossings for much of the Biden administration.
Harris did not directly respond to a question about how many undocumented immigrants were released into the country, instead panning Trump for opposing a bipartisan plan that would have beefed up border security. She did, however, express sympathy for families who had loved ones killed by those who crossed the border illegally.
“Those are tragic cases. There’s no question about that. There is no question about that, and I can’t imagine the pain that the families of those victims have experienced for a loss that should not have occurred,” Harris said.
“So that is true. It is also true that if border security had actually been passed nine months ago, it would be nine months that we would have had more border agents at the border, more support for the folks who are working around the clock trying to hold it all together to ensure that no future harm would occur.”
