Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate who recently proved herself as a top fundraiser in the 2020 race, said this week she will not stop rejecting PAC money or avoiding closed-door, high-dollar fundraisers beyond the Democratic primary and into the general election if she becomes the party’s nominee.

Next year the American people must decide as a nation who we are and, perhaps even more importantly, who we want to be. I believe that we are so much better than who President Donald Trump thinks we are.

I still believe in the exceptional idea written into our founding documents: that all men and women are created equal. We’ve never lived up to it, but we’ve never abandoned it — and every generation has worked to make it real for more people.

The seismic events that shaped my youth — the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the 16th Street Church bombing and the Orangeburg massacre, the burning and subsequent occupation of my city, Wilmington, Del., by the National Guard — seared into me that the struggle against hate, injustice and institutional racism must be the unrelenting work of all our lives.....

The Department of Justice will once again protect the fundamental right to vote. And I’ll lead the fight to restore the Voting Rights Act and pass laws that make it easier for people to exercise their rights. But this work can only start once we kick Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.

We must resolve that 2020 will be the year that South Carolinians and Americans across the country stand up to continue the fight for equal rights and equal access to opportunity. I know we can do it, because I’ve seen what this nation can accomplish when we stand together and stand for our highest ideals.

Read more here: https://www.thestate.com/opinion/article238618648.html#storylink=cpy

So far, the electability primary has a clear winner: former Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden’s campaign hasn’t been inspiring or error-free — far from it. He’s clung to first place in national polls, with support from about 28% of Democratic voters, but he’s running behind other candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the first votes will be cast.

Nevertheless, when voters are asked who they think is most electable against Trump, Biden wins. Even some voters who prefer other candidates say Biden has the best shot.

In a CNN Poll released last week, 40% of Democrats nationwide said they believe Biden has the best chance of winning a general election, well ahead of his rivals. Other surveys have shown similar results....

Biden argues that Trump’s attacks on him prove that he’s the candidate the president fears most. In other words: electability.

The leading candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential race are assembling coalitions of support through the early primary polling that are reminiscent of the patterns that repeatedly shaped the struggles for the party's nomination in the last decades of the 20th century.

Like such predecessors as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, former Vice President Joe Biden is relying heavily on voters from what's been called the Democrats' "beer track": blue-collar, older and moderate whites, along with African Americans. …..

The poll also showed Biden consolidating the key components of the historic beer track. Among white Democrats without college degrees, he drew 26% (to 21% for Sanders and just 15% for Warren). His lead was even more commanding among African Americans, 42% of whom said they are supporting Biden, compared with just 12% for Sanders and 10% for Warren.

This reversion to the voter alignments that drove the party primaries during the late 20th century represents a back to the future moment for the Democrats. In 2008, Barack Obama scrambled this historic pattern and won the nomination by combining a strong performance among college-educated whites with a big advantage among African Americans; to an underappreciated extent, Hillary Clinton followed that model to beat back the unexpectedly strong challenge from Sanders in 2016.

During the 1964 Presidential Election, at Mary Bethune Elementary School in Phoenix, Arizona, a young lawyer named William Rehnquist led Operation Eagle Eye; a questionable and illegal voter suppression operation of the Republican Party. Rehnquist aggressively interrogated potential minority voters with questions about their residence and how long they had lived there. Rehnquist even proceeded to ask voters to interpret specific passages in the Constitution, and if they were unable to do so, were denied access to the polls. This measure taken by the G.O.P (Republican Party) alienated some of its own members who felt uncomfortable with some of the strategies led by Rehnquist and his Operation Eagle Eye cronies. (Roddy, “Just Our Bill”).

Unfazed, Rehnquist went about enacting "Operation Eagle Eye" as a tool to suppress heavily-Democratic ethnic minority votes.
In the 1964 election, Rehnquist so strenuously enforced Operation Eagle Eye that he ultimately engaged in a shoving match with Democratic Party poll watcher Lito Pena. Pena objected to Rehnquist's repeated efforts to prevent ethnic minority citizens from voting in South Phoenix because he knew they would vote Democratic.
Pena states, "He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman. He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they'd lived there -- every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people who spoke broken English were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote." (2)
As Pena recalls, by the time he arrived at Bethune, the voting line was a block long with people standing four abreast. A good number of would-be voters ultimately gave up and returned home. Outraged at this deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters, Pena told Rehnquist to leave. An argument ensued that soon turned physical. First, the two men engaged in shoving. Then, the tall "Anglo" raised a fist and threatened Pena. Undaunted, the smaller man replied, "If that's what you want, I'll get someone to take you out of here."

The National Ballot Security Task Force (BSTF) was a controversial group founded in 1981 in New Jersey by the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a means of intimidating voters and discouraging voter turnout among likely Democratic voters in the gubernatorial election. The group's activities prompted the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to bring a federal lawsuit, alleging a violation of the Voting Rights Act, illegal harassment, and voter intimidation. The RNC and New Jersey Republican State Committee entered into a consent decree in 1982, barring them from engaging in further such conduct until 2017. The RNC unsuccessfully tried to lift the consent decree early; these attempts were rejected by the federal courts each time. The consent decree was set to expire on December 1, 2017. Democrats sought an extension to it based on allegations of new conduct, but the request was denied in January 2018 and the decree expired.[1]

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE; NEW JERSEY REPUBLICAN STATE COMMITTEE; ALEX HURTADO; RONALD C. KAUFMAN; JOHN KELLY
This is an excerpt of a legal ruling shared below in full, which is the latest relevant legal decision in a Consent Decree agreed to by the Republican National Party and the Democratic National Party to limit the RNC’s “ballot security” activities aimed at “fighting voter fraud” and detailed below:
During the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial election, the DNC, the New Jersey Democratic State Committee (“DSC”), Virginia L. Peggins, and Lynette Monroe brought an action against the RNC, the New Jersey Republican State Committee (“RSC”), John A. Kelly, Ronald Kaufman, and Alex Hurtado, alleging that the RNC and RSC targeted minority voters in an effort to intimidate them in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“VRA”), 42 U.S.C. §§ 1971, 1973, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
The RNC also allegedly enlisted the help of off-duty sheriffs and police officers to intimidate voters by standing at polling places in minority precincts during voting with “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands. Some of the officers allegedly wore firearms in a visible manner. To settle the lawsuit, the RNC and RSC entered into the Consent Decree at issue here.

One of President Donald Trump’s top reelection advisers told influential Republicans in swing state Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states, according to an audio recording of a private event obtained by The Associated Press. The adviser said later that his remarks referred to frequent and false accusations that Republicans employ such tactics.

Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s reelection campaign, made the remarks on Nov. 21 as part of a wide-ranging discussion about strategies in the 2020 campaign, including more aggressive use of Election Day monitoring of polling places.

“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Clark said at the event. “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. ... Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

Valerie Biden Owens, the former vice president’s younger sister, says that one lasting impact of his childhood stutter is that it has given him more empathy and compassion for others’ trials, and it uniquely equips him to handle Trump’s taunts.

“Trump is a bully, and Joe has been standing up to bullies his entire life,” Owens said in an interview. “Joe’s stuttering, I think, is one of the principal reasons — a major, major, major reason — that he is the good and compassionate and kind man that he is.”

About 3 million Americans suffer from the speech impediment of stuttering, marked by involuntary repetition of sounds, syllables or words. According to the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders, most children outgrow their stutter, but for 25% of them, stuttering is a lifelong challenge.

Biden has overcome the serious stutter of his youth, but remnants of it resurface on occasions such as when he is very tired, he said in a 2016 speech. Experts on stuttering who follow him closely say they have noticed it on several occasions during the campaign, such as an interview on “The View” when he addressed complaints about his tendency to touch and hug women while campaigning, and an April speech in Pittsburgh launching his campaign, when he struggled with words.