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Insight News • August 26, 2024 - September 1, 2024 • Page 1
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Insight News
August 26, 2024 - September 1, 2024
Vol. 51 No. 35• The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com
AP Photo/Erin Hooley
Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and his wife Gwen Walz watch during the Democratic National Convention Monday, Aug. 19, 2024, in Chicago.
Vance and Walz are still relatively unknown, but the governor is better liked, an AP-NORC poll finds By Linley Sanders Associated Press Tim Walz and JD Vance have vaulted themselves out of national obscurity as they hustle to introduce themselves to the country, but the senator from Ohio has had a rockier start than the Minnesota governor. A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that Walz had a smoother launch as a running mate to Vice President Kamala Harris than Vance did for former President Donald Trump. About one-third of U.S. adults (36%) have a favorable view of Walz, who will introduce himself to his party when he speaks at the Democratic National
Convention on Wednesday. About one-quarter (27%) have a positive opinion of Vance. Significantly more adults also have an unfavorable view of Vance than Walz, 44% to 25%. Both are well-liked so far within their own parties, while independents are slightly more likely to have a positive view of Walz than Vance, but most don’t know enough about either one yet. Both VP candidates still need to work to become better known — about 4 in 10 Americans don’t know enough about Walz to have an opinion about him, and roughly 3 in 10 don’t know enough about Vance. Still, both are much better known than they were before they were selected as vice presidential nominees.
Democrats like Walz, but many key groups don’t know enough As Walz prepares to speak at the convention, about 6 in 10 Democrats said they have a favorable opinion of him, including about 4 in 10 whose opinions are “very favorable.” Roughly 3 in 10 don’t know him well enough to have an opinion. This is the first measure of Walz’s favorability in an AP-NORC poll, but other polls showed he was virtually unknown nationally before he was chosen. Many key Democratic coalitions still don’t know much about Walz. About 4 in 10 women don’t know enough to have an opinion of him, and about 4 in 10 young adults under age 45 say the same. About half
of Black adults and roughly 4 in 10 Hispanic adults don’t know enough to say whether they like him, either. Many lower-income adults and those without college degrees also don’t have a view of Walz. Data from AP VoteCast shows that when he ran for governor in 2022, Walz won with the support of women, young voters, union households, those living in the suburbs, and people in urban areas. He split the support of white voters and men — two groups where the Harris-Walz team will try to undercut Trump’s advantage. He lost rural voters in the state, as well as households with military veterans. Samantha Phillis, a 33-year-old home care nurse and mother of four from Mankato,
Minnesota, has known Walz for years. She attended Mankato West High School when Walz was a teacher there, and she was in the Gay-Straight Alliance when he was the faculty adviser. Since he became governor, she said, his policies have been “tremendous” for three of her children with disabilities. As a parent, she appreciated his program to provide free school meals for children. “He was a great asset to Mankato West, and we are huge fans of him. As far as Minnesota goes, he’s done great things for my family,” Phillis said. “I’m really encouraged to see what he could help Kamala Harris do as her vice president.” Phillis said she was always planning to vote for the Democratic candidate but has
been thrilled by the energy and momentum Walz added to the campaign. “Now that Gov. Walz is on the ticket, I’m all in.” Vance’s favorability has risen among Republicans The new APNORC polling shows that in the weeks since Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, Republicans have gotten to know him better and have developed a generally positive view. About 6 in 10 Republicans now have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of Vance, a sharp rise since a mid-July poll conducted before the Ohio senator was announced as Trump’s running mate. In that poll, only about 3 in 10 had
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Fannie Lou Hamer rattled the Democratic convention with her ‘Is this America?’ speech 60 years ago told of arbitrary tests that white
By Emily Wagster Pettus authorities imposed to prevent Associated Press Black people from voting and Vice President Kamala Harris is accepting the Democrats’ presidential nomination Thursday, exactly 60 years after another Black woman mesmerized the nation with a televised speech that challenged the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. The testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer to the credentials committee in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was vivid and blunt. She described how she was fired from her plantation job in retaliation for trying to register to vote and brutalized in jail for encouraging other Black people to assert their rights. She
other unconstitutional methods that kept white elites in power across the segregated South. “All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” Hamer told the committee. Whether every eligible citizen can vote and have their vote be counted is still an open question in this election, said U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who spoke Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, about how his late father never got to vote because of Jim Crow restrictions. Thompson got his first practical experience in democracy at Hamer’s urging in 1966, when he was a college student in Mississippi and she recruited
him to register other Black voters. Hamer has been the subject of appreciation this week during the convention. “Our challenge as Americans is to make sure that this experiment called democracy is not just for the the landed gentry or the wealthy, but it is for everybody,” said Thompson, who led the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. ‘Is this America?’ Hamer was raised in cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta and became a sharecropper. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped organize Freedom Summer, a campaign to educate and register Black voters. With Mississippi conducting
whites-only primaries, activists formed the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to confront leading Democrats on a national stage. “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the credentials committee. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to asleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” President Lyndon B. Johnson hastily called a news conference during Hamer’s testimony to try to divert attention from divisions that could alienate white voters in the South. TV cameras cut away, but networks showed her
speech later. Top Democrats said Hamer’s group could seat two delegates, but that was too little for the Freedom Democrats. And it was too much for the regular Mississippi delegation, which fled the convention without declaring loyalty to LBJ, and eventually left for good as conservative Democrats across the South, including segregationists, switched to the Republican party. Leslie-Burl McLemore was one of the Freedom delegates and recalls how determined they were. “I knew in my mind, because I’m 23 years old and I’m vice chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, I’m not going to accept that damn compromise,” the retired political science professor at Jackson State University said
AP Photo, File
Fannie Lou Hamer, a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, testifies before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., on Aug. 22, 1964, as her racially integrated group challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation. recently at the Mississippi Civil
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Bill Clinton returns to DNC to tear into Trump before the introduction of Tim Walz, Harris’ VP pick By Will Weissert and Jonathan J. Cooper Associated Press Former President Bill Clinton returned Wednesday to a place he knows well, the Democratic National Convention stage, to denounce Donald Trump as selfish and praise Kamala Harris as focused on the needs of Americans — firing up his party with his trademark off-the-cuff flourishes. Clinton was meant to add heft to a third DNC night headlined by vice presidential nominee Tim Walz ‘s introduction to a national
audience.
Trump.
“We’ve got a pretty clear choice it seems to me. Kamala Harris, for the people. And the other guy who has proved, even more than the first go-around, that he’s about me, myself and I,” Clinton said. Democrats gathered at Chicago’s United Center are hoping to build on the momentum Harris has brought since taking over the top of the party’s presidential ticket last month. They want to harness the Democratic exuberance that followed President Joe Biden stepped aside while also making clear to their supporters that they face a fierce battle with
The nation’s 42nd president and a veteran of his party’s political convention going back decades, Clinton was once declared the “secretary of explaining stuff” by Barack Obama, whose reelection bid in 2012 was bolstered by a Clinton stemwinder at that year’s DNC. Now 78 — the same age as Trump — Clinton’s delivery was sometimes halting, his movements slower and he mispronounced Harris’ first name twice. His left hand often shook when he wasn’t using it to grip the lectern. Still, he delivered several memorable, homespun
AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
Former President Bill Clinton speaks during the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago.
pronouncements including asking. “What does her opponent do with his voice? He mostly talks about himself. So the next time you hear him, don’t count the lies, count the I’s.” It was the kind of folksy touch that Walz, the Minnesota governor, has brought to the Democratic ticket. A Midwestern teacher, football coach and dad, Walz also been the target of Republican criticism over how he’s portrayed his National Guard service and his personal story. The night’s theme was “a fight for our freedoms,” with
the programming focusing on abortion access and other rights that Democrats want to center in their campaign against Trump. Speaker after speaker argued that their party wants to defend freedoms while Republicans want to take them away. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis used a prop that has become a convention staple, an oversized book meant to represent the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a sweeping set of goals to shrink government and push it to the right, if Trump wins. Polis even ripped a page from the
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