Harris-Walz campaign readies Labor Day blitz, courting union votes alongside Biden

(GREENBELT, Md.) — As Democrats in Maryland tell it, the state’s key Senate race isn’t about any particular person — even the candidates themselves.

On the campaign trail, you’ll hear Democrats vying to keep an open Senate seat blue knock former Gov. Larry Hogan, the GOP nominee. But you’ll also hear lamentations about Sens. Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, firebrands who are primed for committee chairmanships in a potential Republican-controlled Senate.

In paid television ads, you’ll see videos painting Hogan as a partisan, not the moderate he cast himself as during two terms in Annapolis. But you’ll also see attacks on outgoing Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, a vaunted political knife fighter and self-proclaimed “grim reaper” of liberal legislation.

That duality is a core feature of the campaign for Angela Alsobrooks, the Democratic nominee and Prince George’s County executive — as much as she’s talking about her opponent, she’s also sounding the alarm about a Senate she’s hoping to join.

There are few motivators in politics as potent as fear and anger. But Alsobrooks is at a disadvantage in that regard — Hogan left office in 2023 as a popular two-term governor with a reputation as a pragmatist before running for a Senate seat in a year when any race can determine the chamber’s majority.

And while Alsobrooks and her allies are still casting Hogan as a Republican whose values are misaligned with deep-blue Maryland, particularly on abortion, they’re also diverting some of their fire at prominent Senate Republicans and what they could do with committee gavels.

“Marylanders are very savvy. They understand that this race is about the 51st vote and about control of the Senate. It is bigger than Larry Hogan. It’s actually bigger than me,” Alsobrooks told ABC News Monday at an annual community barbecue her family hosts in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It is much bigger than any one person. It is about the future of our state and of our country and the kind of country that we want to build for our children.”

The Senate race is tight, especially by Maryland’s standards.

The 538 polling average shows Alsobrooks up by nearly 6 points in a state where Democratic presidential candidates typically romp by at least 25, a difference universally attributed to Hogan’s entry into the race.

Hogan has continued to reinforce his reputation as a moderate, saying he’d vote to restore abortion protections that existed under Roe v. Wade and serve as a check on the GOP’s more hard-line impulses. However, he has still said that as a lifelong Republican, he’d caucus with the GOP in the chamber, and Alsobrooks has made hay of his past record, including vetoing state legislation to expand abortion protections.

Still, the need to tie Hogan to bogeymen like Cruz, Graham and McConnell was underscored Monday, when conversations with nearly a dozen of Alsobrooks’ most vocal supporters revealed little negative to say about the former governor, but a greater eye on the levers of power in Washington.

“I guess he’s OK. He hasn’t really done a bad job since he’s been here in Maryland, but I think it’s time for a fresh face,” said Bertley Thomas, a retired teacher, about Hogan. “I am a lifelong Democrat, and so is Angela. Hogan happens to be a Republican, it doesn’t mean I don’t like him any less. However, I think we would like to see the Democrats control the Senate.”

Waymon Lynch, a small business owner, said she voted for Hogan twice, but praised Alsobrooks’ record as a local politician.

“He’s definitely not the Trump wing of the party, no, not at all. That’s not his history,” Lynch said of Hogan. “And if it were someone other than Angela running against Mr. Hogan, I might consider him. But in this particular case, it goes a little bit further than that.”

That’s not to say voters aren’t also considering the issues and where Hogan stands.

“I was really kind of concerned when all of a sudden he came out to run against her. I just feel that Democrats serve me and my needs, and I am for women’s rights,” said Valerie Callender, a dermatologist. “I know Angela is going to fight. She’s a mother, and she believes in women’s rights. And to take total control of their body, as a physician, I feel that’s very important.”

Nevertheless, the race’s dynamics have left Alsobrooks with limited ability to run against her actual opponent, instead making future colleagues of the very chamber she hopes to join top antagonists in the race.

“Angela Alsobrooks is playing the best card she has to play. She is never going to win a contest of personality or popularity with former Gov. Hogan. He is just far too known and too well liked for her to change public opinion on that front. So, she has to run exclusively on the notion that, regardless of how one feels about Gov. Hogan personally, he can and would be the deciding vote in favor of tipping the Senate over to Republicans,” said Maryland Democratic strategist Len Foxwell.

The argument requires voters to generalize the importance of the race beyond their state’s borders, but Democrats are betting that Marylanders — living in proximity to Washington and many working for the federal government — are more attuned than the average voter on the current 51-49 Senate majority and the importance of chamber control.

“The beauty of it is that the voters we’re talking about are voters in Maryland, and this is about one of the most savvy electorates that you can find, not just in the Washington suburbs, but throughout the state,” said Maryland Democratic Party Chair Ken Ulman. “We know what this is about.”

At the same time, Alsobrooks has work to do to define herself more concretely outside of her powerbase in Prince George’s County, particularly in the vote-rich areas in and around Baltimore.

Alsobrooks is working to boost her own policy bona fides with a new ad out Wednesday, noting the threat of GOP Senate control but adding what she would “also” do as Maryland’s senator, including taking on “price gouging” and standing “up for a woman’s right to choose.”

Hogan and his allies are trying to do the same, with a well-heeled supportive super PAC releasing an ad Wednesday hitting her over a CNN story alleging she improperly took tax deductions on properties in Maryland and Washington.

“Raising her name ID, especially in the Baltimore suburbs, is really important. When you see the polling, you still see Hogan has pretty universal name ID. We’ve got room to grow her ID,” Ulman said.

To be certain, Alsobrooks is still viewed as having an advantage.

Vice President Kamala Harris is anticipated to win Maryland, one of the nation’s bluest states, by as many as 30 points, possibly creating tailwinds long enough to carry Alsobrooks over the finish line and forcing Hogan to lean on a potentially unrealistic number of ticket splitters, voters who support one party for president and another in down-ballot races.

“If Larry Hogan doesn’t win this race, from what I’ve seen thus far, it has very little to do with whatever Angela Alsobrooks is doing,” Doug Mayer, a former Hogan aide. “If Larry Hogan doesn’t win this, it’s just because it’s extremely difficult to have a million switch voters. If anyone can do it, it’s him.

And while operatives of all stripes agreed that Hogan is the only person who could make the race competitive, Democrats’ emphasis on the threat of Republicans who Marylanders are less familiar with and more aligned with former President Donald Trump could help Alsobrooks lean into her state’s existing partisan advantage, experts said.

“With the base energized in a presidential year, I find it implausible to think that there will be enough ticket splitters, and we’re reminding people every day what the stakes are,” said Ulman, who was the Democratic lieutenant governor nominee in 2014 when Hogan won his first term. “Nobody will take the former governor more seriously than me, having seen his success in the past, but it just makes the math very, very hard in a presidential year.”

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(CHICAGO) — With more than 50,000 people estimated to descend on Chicago next week for the Democratic National Convention, the city said it is prepared to make sure the week is a success, not just for visitors, but for city residents themselves.

“Our plan is to make sure we keep everyone within the city safe. We want this to be successful,” Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling told an audience at the City Club of Chicago.

While thousands of protestors are expected in Chicago, Snelling said the city is better prepared than it was in 2020, when street protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to arsons, looting, and rioting downtown.

Officers and police leadership have been engaged in extra training for more than a year to prepare for civil disobedience, he said. Hundreds of extra law enforcement from across the state will also be on hand, not just to strengthen security around the United Center on Chicago’s west side, but also to make sure 50 neighborhoods in the city are protected.

“We have a city to protect. The Chicago Police Department will be in every single neighborhood protecting the neighborhoods so we will not deplete resources from our neighborhoods,” he said.

Still, concerns remain among downtown business owners, some of which are boarding up office spaces and storefronts out of fear the convention will ignite looting sprees like those that spread throughout the business district during the 2020 summer.

“This city has a poor track record when it comes to protecting businesses,” Scott Shapiro, owner of menswear shop Syd Jerome, told ABC News affiliate WLS.

Meanwhile, activists have been battling the city of Chicago in federal court over permitting rights. The Coalition to March on the DNC, which represents 200 social justice organizations from throughout the Midwest, filed for permits in 2023, however, they sued the city for violating its First Amendment right to protest.

While permits for the coalition are approved, the organization said the city, citing safety reasons, is unfairly restricting them by preventing the organization from constructing stages, connecting sound equipment and having portable toilets at Union Park.

During an emergency hearing on Friday, however, the city agreed to allow for the stage and speaker system for both rallies. U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood also ruled last week that activists must follow a protest route outlined by the city which is shorter and a further distance from the United Center.

The first of two major protests next week starts at noon on Monday in Union Park, located about four blocks from the United Center. Buses arriving early Monday will bring “tens of thousands of people” from Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana to march, said Coalition spokesperson Hatem Abudayyeh. The coalition’s second march is 5 p.m. on Thursday.

A third march, scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, and approved by the city, is sponsored by the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine, a local organization representing Chicago area Muslim groups and mosques.

Abudayyeh said the coalition’s route, which stretches 2.4 miles, is safer because its length will accommodate the massive turnout of people expected to march whereas the city’s approved route, which stretches 1.1 miles, includes two sharp turns that will create bottlenecks which Abudayyeh said will leave people standing for up to 90 minutes. The standstill, Abudayyeh said, will encourage people to wander off the route and be subject to arrests.

“Our argument is, why does the city want to take a chance for that to happen?” he asked. He said his organization has years of experience designing protest marches that are safely executed and include trained security and legal observers.

Monday’s march will represent “the broadest and biggest march for Palestinian rights in the city of Chicago. That’s why we have the slogan ‘We keep us safe.’ We don’t need anyone else to do that. The only role and responsibility of the police and the feds is to not infringe on our First Amendment constitutional rights,” he said.

Snelling said his department is “prepared” for a quagmire should there be bottlenecks in the approved route.

“We have to be fluid. Things are ever-evolving, and we will make necessary adjustments to accommodate that,” he said. The scenario presented by the coalition is “not something I’m really worried about now. We knew didn’t want to tie up additional resources to prolong a protest of that nature. But we’ll make sure … we will protect them, and we will protect the neighbors.”

Another pressing issue for the city is neighborhood violence, which could spill into areas where delegates are staying or visiting — and it could also spill into the headlines, which for the Democratic Party, could tarnish the positive message of the convention.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, more than 100 people were shot in Chicago, with 19 people killed, according to police.

Snelling, who previously served as the department’s counterterrorism director and who led field force training for the 2012 Chicago NATO Summit, said the city has remained calm during recent summer events — Lollapalooza, the Chicago Air and Water Show and the Bud Billiken Parade on the South Side — were enjoyed by thousands of Chicagoans with minimal disruption, he said.

“That tells where we’re deploying our people has been helpful,” he said. “We’re ready to go.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Democrats and Republicans have proposed vastly different policies on education – and one key difference highlights a battle that has been happening on the ground in states across the country.

Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs, and school vouchers have spurred debates at the local level for years.

ESA programs allow families to divert a designated amount of per-student public school spending to pay for expenses for private schools, microschools and homeschooling — including tuition, books, tutoring, transportation and more.

School vouchers similarly use public funds to allow students to pay for tuition.

Arizona passed the country’s first ESA program in 2011, and at least eight other states have followed its lead: Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia.

Former President Donald Trump has expressed support for ESAs and has proposed a plan that will allow parents to spend up to $10,000 a year per child in taxpayer money, “completely tax-free,” on alternative education or homeschooling costs.

The Democratic 2025 platform opposes using private school vouchers and tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, “and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former public school teacher who is running for vice president on Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential ticket, has opposed private school vouchers in the past.

In opposition to a school voucher policy proposal from Republicans in his state amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Walz stated: “We are not going to defund our public schools at this time, when especially those hardest hit need them more than ever,” MPR News reported at the time.

The start of vouchers

Scholars trace the origins of school choice to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, where the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregating public school students based on race was unconstitutional.

Anti-segregation efforts led to state-funded school voucher programs in some states like Virginia and Georgia, offering financial assistance to white students to attend all-white private academies known as segregation academies.

However, the first modern private school voucher program started in Milwaukee in 1990, as some communities of color saw vouchers as a chance to help low-income students of color attend private schools.

Vouchers also have been geared toward disabled students; however, vouchers often force students with disabilities to forfeit some Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections because they are considered “parentally placed” in private schools.

These schools are not legally required to provide individualized or “appropriate” education to students and are not held to the same nondiscrimination standards as public schools.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, microschools, private schools, and homeschooling have seen a boom — and so has the availability for families to use vouchers or ESAs to fund tuition at these institutions or fund alternative forms of education and their expenses.

According to pro-ESA organization EdChoice, the number of students using ESAs has increased seven-fold between 2022 and 2024 to a total of more than 328,000 students.

As these programs continue to gain momentum, the debate about these policies continues.

 

The debate about ‘school choice’

How much ESA programs cost has varied from state to state — in Arizona, the ESA program has been estimated by the state governor’s office to cost the state $943,795,600 for the 2024 fiscal year for roughly 79,728 students. Meanwhile, in West Virginia, it could cost over $10 million for roughly 2,333 applicants to the 2022-2023 academic year of the program, according to the scholarship program report.

This has been one major source of contention around ESAs.

Critics of school choice, including West Virginia Education Association President Dale Lee, say that public schools are already under pressure due to underfunding and poor staffing. Shifting funds away from public schools will make it harder for them to thrive, Lee said.

“Because of the loss of funding, we’ve reduced the opportunities in the curriculum areas that they have,” said Lee, adding that vocational and technical schools have reduced the number of offerings they have and reduce the number of courses that secondary students have available.

In some cases, that includes the arts.

“As a high school teacher myself, the arts are one of the areas that for many students, that’s what drew them into the school, and that’s why they were continuing,” Lee said.

He said public education is supposed to be “the great equalizer” … “if you go back to the system of the haves and have nots, you eliminate that opportunity for students.”

Emily Kirkland, communications director at the Arizona Education Association, slammed some ESA programs for funding controversial purchases. These purchases have been dubbed “welfare for the wealthy” by critics, after a CNN analysis of state and federal data found that wealthy communities are disproportionately benefiting from these programs.

ABC affiliate KNXV-TV in Arizona analyzed ESA data for the 2022-2023 school year and found that some of the money was used for purposes that have been condemned by critics, including ski resort passes, trampoline parks and ninja warrior training centers, aeroponic indoor gardens, pianos and more.

Expenses in some states, like Arizona, are approved by program staffers.

Supporters of school choice, including president and CEO of pro-school choice EdChoice Robert Enlow, applauds the transparency, arguing that its more insight into specific expenditures than is publicly known from public schools. He adds that the expenses allow families to tailor their education to their individual needs.

“You can see in Arizona, every single minute of every single day where every single dollar is going in the ESA program, I challenge you to do that in public schools, right?” said Enlow. “You may not like where the dollars are going. There may be an issue of whether you like it, but the reality is, you know exactly where they’re going.”

Enlow adds that these programs allow students to take an individualized approach, noting that those who may have different needs based on disability, neurodiversity, and other needs can make adjustments based on those needs.

He adds that criticism over spending doesn’t take into account that, in some cases, families are buying what schools would buy: “It’s OK if a government system buys $1,000 per classroom Lego set, but it’s not OK if a family does it?”

It is unclear how successful alternative education like microschooling or homeschooling can be. Rules and regulations dictating microschool and homeschool requirements are determined by each state’s Department of Education. For example, the National Microschooling Center notes that some microschool educators do not need to be licensed teachers and some institutions do not need to follow state academic standards.

Enlow notes that as these kinds of educations become more popular, the question about what regulation should look like and how success is measured is being asked: “You can’t put a one-size-fits-all system of regulation on a system that is meant for families to have individual options and choices.”

“Successes are in children making progress towards what makes them a successful human being, a successful strategy for coping and for living and for being successful right in life,” Enlow said. “We believe, for example, that families want to have knowledge about how their kids are doing on a test, but we don’t think this is the only way to go.”

Critics are concerned about the lack of regulations and accountability about the quality of education, success of the institution and the stability of the institution.

“I called microschools the food trucks of the education industry, because they can open up, go wherever they want, and close down very quickly,” said Josh Cowen, author of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”

Cowen calls alternative education “a predatory environment where private schools and microschools are promising the world to each of these kids,” making it hard for families to know what the truth is because of the lack of oversight and measures of success.

He continued, “It could take months, if not years, for a parent to understand that they’ve gone to a school that has substantially altered their child’s academic trajectory. Or worse, it could take three or four years, and by then, it’s too late. And so that’s where you need oversight.”

In West Virginia, Lee argues that the school choice program has contributed to a teacher shortage, citing poor teacher pay, poor school funding and poor resources that contributes to low moral “when you’re seeing the dollars go to these microschools and learning pods where there’s no accountability.”

Enlow argues that adding more education paths for students could lead to improvements in public schools: “Who’s going to really buy a system where we’re just trying to let it continue the way it is without any kind of challenge?”

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