Even though we’re about three weeks away, midterm elections are starting to dominate news headlines.
This week, incumbent Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R) debated his Democratic challenger, Congressman Beto O’Rourke. O’Rourke’s campaign has garnered a lot of attention…and it’s not just because he was in a punk band. You might think that a Democrat can’t win in Texas. But recent polls put O’Rourke within four points of Cruz.
In Georgia, Secretary of State Brian Kemp — who is also running for governor — has come under fire for keeping more than 53,000 Georgia residents off voter registration rolls. Most of them are black.
From WABE:
Marsha Appling-Nunez was showing the college students she teaches how to check online if they’re registered to vote when she made a troubling discovery. Despite being an active Georgia voter who had cast ballots in recent elections, she was no longer registered.
“I was kind of shocked,” said Appling-Nunez, who moved from one Atlanta suburb to another in May and believed she had successfully changed her address on the voter rolls.
“I’ve always voted. I try to not miss any elections, including local ones,” Appling-Nunez said.
She tried re-registering, but with about one month left before a November election that will decide a governor’s race and some competitive U.S. House races, Appling-Nunez’s application is one of over 53,000 sitting on hold with Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office. And unlike Appling-Nunez, many people on that list — which is predominantly black, according to an analysis by The Associated Press — may not even know their voter registration has been held up.
How is access to the ballot box affecting midterm elections?
And one-time retail giant Sears filed for bankruptcy this week. On Twitter, historian Louis Hyman weighed in on what you may not know about the store’s legacy.
The stores were not self-service, so the black customers would have to wait. And then would have to ask the proprietor to give them goods (often on credit because…sharecropping). The landlord often owned the store. In every way shopping reinforced hierarchy. Until #Sears
— Louis Hyman (@louishyman) October 15, 2018
What caused the decline of Sears?
The death toll for Hurricane Michael rose to at least 29 people. And a new article in The Washington Post suggests that the storm did “what scientists could not,” and helped convince some Republican residents that climate change is real. But not everyone was convinced.
From the story:
Plenty of residents in North Carolina’s southeastern corner still reject the science, attributing changing weather patterns to God and the cycle of nature. A group of college students fishing off a pier on the barrier island of Wrightsville Beach last week called climate change a “load of crap.” A surfer taking advantage of Hurricane Michael’s turbulent waves dismissed it as “propaganda.” A sunburned construction worker said it’s not worth worrying about because “God takes care of it.”
Their sentiments echo [President] Trump’s skepticism. During a “60 Minutes” interview televised Sunday, Trump said he believes the climate is changing but that “it’ll change back.” While touring storm-ravaged communities this week he continued to question whether climate change is man-made.
The budget deficit is on track to reach a trillion dollars by 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke to Bloomberg News about it.
“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”
McConnell’s remarks came a day after the Treasury Department said the U.S. budget deficit grew to $779 billion in Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year as president, the result of the GOP’s tax cuts, bipartisan spending increases and rising interest payments on the national debt. That’s a 77 percent increase from the $439 billion deficit in fiscal 2015, when McConnell became majority leader.
We’re broadcasting live from New Hampshire Public Radio for the News Roundup this week so we’ll give you an update on the race for governor between incumbent governor Chris Sununu and Democrat Mary Kelly and other competitive races in the Granite State. What issues are compelling New Hampshire voters? Is the same true where you live?
GUESTS
Josh Rogers, Senior political correspondent, New Hampshire Public Radio;
@joshrogersNHPR
Alexandra Jaffe, Correspondent, VICE News Tonight on HBO; @ajjaffe
Franco Ordonez, White House correspondent, McClatchy, focusing on immigration and foreign affairs; @FrancoOrdonez
For more, visit https://the1a.org.
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