NEG

Biden Win – Swing States

Biden is winning in 6 major swing states now
Cohn 7/25 2020 9 (Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times. He covers elections,
polling and demographics. In addition to writing for The Times, he has discussed politics on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and NPR,
and at major colleges and universities. Before joining The Times in 2013, Mr. Cohn worked as a staff writer for The New
Republic and as a research associate at The Henry L. Stimson Center https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/upshot/poll-2020-
biden-battlegrounds.html) LP
President Trump has lost significant ground in the six battleground states that clinched his Electoral College victory in 2016,
according to New York Times/Siena College surveys, with Joseph R. Biden Jr. opening double-digit leads in Michigan,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Mr. Trump’s once-commanding advantage among white voters has nearly vanished, a
development that would all but preclude the president’s re-election if it persisted. Mr. Biden now has a 21-point lead among white
college graduates, and the president is losing among white voters in the three Northern battleground states — not by much, but
he won them by nearly 10 points in 2016. Four years ago, Mr. Trump’s strength in the disproportionately white working-class
battleground states allowed him to win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The surveys indicate that the
president continues to fare better in these relatively white battleground states than he does nationwide. A separate Times/Siena
survey released on Wednesday found Mr. Biden leading by 14 points nationwide, 50 percent to 36 percent. Mr. Biden would win
the presidency with at least 333 electoral votes, far more than the 270 needed, if he won all six of the states surveyed and held
those won by Hillary Clinton four years ago. Most combinations of any three of the six states — which also include Florida,
Arizona and North Carolina — would suffice. With a little more than four months to go until the election, there is still time for the
president’s political standing to recover, just as it did on so many occasions four years ago. He maintains a substantial
advantage on the economy, which could become an even more central issue in what has already been a volatile election cycle.
And many of the undecided voters in these states lean Republican, and may end up returning to their party’s nominee. But for
now, the findings confirm that the president’s political standing has deteriorated sharply since October, when Times/Siena polls
found Mr. Biden ahead by just two percentage points across the same six states (the average gap is now nine points) . Since
then, the nation has faced a series of crises that would pose a grave political challenge to any president seeking re-election. The
polls suggest that battleground-state voters believe the president has struggled to meet the moment. Over all, 42 percent of
voters in the battleground states approve of how Mr. Trump is handling his job as president, while 54 percent disapprove . These
six states — with their mix of major cities, old industrial hubs, growing suburbs, and even farmland — together deliver a grim
judgment of Mr. Trump on recent issues that have shaken American life. His handling of the pandemic and the protests after the
death of George Floyd help explain his erosion across both old and new battlegrounds. A majority of voters, 63 percent, say they
would rather back a presidential candidate who focuses on the cause of protests, even when the protests go too far, while just 31
percent say they would prefer to support a candidate who says we need to be tough on demonstrations that go too far. Despite
double-digit unemployment, 55 percent of voters in these six states say the federal government’s priority should be to limit the
spread of the coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, while just 35 percent say the federal government’s priority should be to
restart the economy. Even the newly unemployed, who would seem to have the most to gain from a reopened economy, say
stopping the coronavirus should be the government’s priority. A high-profile clash with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan
encapsulates the president’s challenge. Mr. Trump sided with protesters who opposed her stay-at-home orders, but voters in the
state oppose the protests against social distancing restrictions by 57 percent to 37 percent. As of now, 59 percent of voters in
Michigan disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus , the highest level of disapproval in any battleground state polled.
And nearly 40 percent of registered voters there, including 11 percent of Republicans, say he has treated their state worse than
others in response to the pandemic.

Swing states suggest Biden is likely to win

Cole 6/20/20 (Brendan Cole is a multi-media journalist with a sound knowledge of international and UK news and am
experienced in interviewing, writing, editing and news gathering. He is currently senior reporter at Newsweek. Other posts in the
UK include Channel 4 News, ITN, the BBC and I have also worked as a writer and reporter in regional newspapers in both the
UK and New Zealand. https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-polls-donald-trump-election-2020-1512325) LP
In a further fillip to Joe Biden's election campaign, the former vice president is estimated as having an 86 percent chance of
beating President Donald Trump in November, according to a forecast. A model run by The Economist, which is updated every
day and combines state and national polls, as well as economic indicators, put Biden's chances on June 19 of winning the White
House at 86 percent. This is just shy of the 87 percent in the previous two days, the highest chance the model has given Biden
so far, as polling in several key swing states show Biden is either leading Trump or within the margin of error. Trump's chances,
on the other hand, are now at only 13 percent, a far cry from March 14 when, according to the model, he was ahead of Biden by
51 to 48 percent. The model also calculated that Biden would win 54 percent of the popular vote to Trump's 46 percent. Given
that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but still won the election, more significantly the survey shows Biden would get 339
electoral college votes compared with Trump's 199, a wide margin. It would put Biden comfortably ahead of the 270 threshold
needed to take the White House. The former Delaware Senator is gaining momentum in swing states as the country grapples
with protests against racism and the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. A CNBC/Change Research poll out on
Wednesday showed that Biden was ahead of Trump in what are considered to be the six battleground states in 2020. His biggest
lead in these key states was in Florida, where he was ahead by seven percentage points (50 to 43). He was also beyond the two
percent margin for error and ahead of Trump in Wisconsin (48 to 44) and Pennsylvania (49 to 46). However, Biden had narrower
leads within the margin for error in Michigan (47 to 45), North Carolina (47 to 45), and Arizona (45 to 44). The poll of 2,408 likely
voters took place June 12 to 14 across the six battleground states and has a 2 percent margin of error. "Battleground voters don't
just disapprove of the job Trump is doing, they increasingly prefer Biden and Democrats to Trump and Republicans when it
comes to handling key issues," the poll concluded. A majority (53 percent) of battleground voters disagreed that Trump has done
enough to help people through the current economic downturn. On Friday, Trump hit out at a Fox News poll that showed him
trailing Biden by 12 points in a head-to-head matchup, by 50 to 38 percent, which is an increase of four points from last mont h.
The Fox poll of 1,343 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide was conducted June 13 to 16 and had a margin of sampling
error of 2.5 percentage points either way. Trump dubbed the poll "phony" and said it had been "done by the same group of
haters that got it even more wrong in 2016." Daron Shaw, who conducted the Fox News Poll with Democrat Chris Anderson
issued a caveat to the results, saying: "Negative emotions like fear, anxiety, and anger, can be powerful motivators for political
participation. "The lack of enthusiasm for Biden, however, does create an opening for Trump to define him as out of touch and
not up to the task." Meanwhile, a national poll by Quinnipiac University put Biden ahead of Trump by eight points, 49 percent to
41 percent, well outside the survey's 2.7 percent margin of error. The survey of 1,332 self-identified registered voters took place
June 11 to 15.

Whoever wins more swing states will win the election

Epstein 20 (Rachel Epstein is the associate editor at Marie Claire, where she covers celeb and royals news, culture, lifestyle,
and politics. She also manages the site’s virtual book club, #ReadWithMC, and edits the daily shopping coverage.
https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a31142244/swing-states-2020-election/) LP
With the Democratic primaries happening across the country through June and the general election taking place on November 3, it can be difficult to pinpoint
where to focus our efforts during the 2020 election season. If we want to save our democracy and create a progressive America, not only will we need to remove
Donald Trump from office, but we'll also need to keep the House of Representatives blue and flip the Republican Senate. The former currently holds the most
diverse class of representatives our country has seen in the legislative body's 230-year history. The latter, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is
preventing us from passing bi-partisan laws, like H.R.8 requiring universal background checks, that will save American lives. With the help of Swing Left—
a national grassroots organization founded after the 2016 election—we can make a difference by paying attention to the 12
Super States, a.k.a. the swing states, that are comprised of mixed populations (urban, suburban, rural, etc.) and tend to flip
between red and blue each election cycle. This includes Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, North
Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. "Swing states are the most critical states in the upcoming election. They're
essentially the tipping point of who's going to win the electoral college, then win the presidency," explains Swing Left National Field
Director Marisa Kanof. "You look at the 50 states and you have the 15-20 that Democrats are going to win and the 15-20 that
Republicans are going to win. These states in the middle...you win enough of them and you win the presidency. " In addition to
engaging with voters, volunteering, and fundraising for campaigns in the swing states, record voter turnout is key. (You can register to vote here.) The first step,
though, is being aware of the states that will determine the fate of our country. Here, MarieClaire.com and Swing Left outline the swing states that we
should be targeting in the 2020 election cycle and beyond with specific goals for each of them.
 Biden Win – AT: U O/W
Biden has a clear lead now, but Trump could still pull ahead, empirics prove
Skelley 6/25 – Elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight (Geoffrey, “Biden Has A Historically Large Lead Over Trump, But It Could
Disappear”, 6/25/20, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/biden-has-a-historically-large-lead-over-trump-but-it-could-
disappear/)//GD
FiveThirtyEight’s general election polling averages debuted last week, showing that former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic
nominee, holds a big lead over President Trump in national surveys — about 10 percentage points as of 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday. So
how does Biden’s lead stack up to those in previous cycles ? We compared his standing at this point to previous presidential
elections by applying our polling average methodology to polls from past cycles . And as you can see in the chart below, both Biden’s average
support and margin over Trump are historically large — the largest of any contender since Bill Clinton in 1996. Of course, there are still four months to go
until Election Day, but the fact that Biden has such a sizable lead — already bigger than Hillary Clinton’s largest lead over Trump, which peaked
at 7.5 points in 2016 — is notable. Heck, even Barack Obama never led by more than 8 points in our 2008 national average, and that wound up being a
blowout. It’s not just Biden’s margin that stands out, either; he’s also only one of three candidates to crack the 50 percent mark at
this point in the cycle. (The other two were Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984, both of whom were incumbents who went on to win landslide
victories by 23 and 18 points, respectively.) It’s unlikely that Biden wins by that sort of margin , given our increasingly polarized politics, but it is a sign
that there are fewer undecided or third-party voters for Trump to pick up to help improve his position. It also doesn’t bode well for Trump that he is in the worst
position of any incumbent since Jimmy Carter in 1980. But before you declare Biden the winner, remember his lead is not insurmountable.
Polls closer to November could very well show a race that is tightening. At this point in the 1988 cycle, Michael Dukakis led
nationally by almost 5 points, and in 2000, George W. Bush was up by nearly 8 points. But Dukakis ended up losing by nearly 8
points in November while Bush narrowly lost the popular vote. (He still won the Electoral College, thanks to Florida.) So Trump still has
plenty of time to recover enough ground to win in the Electoral College even if he loses the national popular vote — after all, he did
it in 2016. That said, if Biden’s current national lead holds steady, it would almost certainly neutralize Trump’s potential edge in the Electoral College. But as
Dukakis and Bush show us, a lot can change between now and November.

Trump can lose popular vote and still win, 2016 proves
Brandus 7/4 – White House bureau chief for West Wing Reports (Paul, “Opinion: Don’t count Trump out yet – here’s how he
can still win in November”, 7/4/20, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dont-count-trump-out-yet-heres-how-he-can-still-win-in-
november-2020-06-30)//GD
This election is over. Trump is so far behind, he’s such a buffoon, he doesn’t have a chance. Sound familiar? It should, because
that’s what most people were saying back in the summer of 2016. How’d that work out? Now the New York/Washington/Left Coast elites
are at it again. Stick a fork in the Donald, they cackle — he’s done! Is it different this time? Or can Trump shock the world again? There are tons
of reasons why Trump should not win. He’s failed on most of his big promises. There’s no wall. The national debt, which he vowed to eliminate (through
trade deals) has exploded. Meantime, Iran and North Korea are more dangerous than ever. He’s the Mount Everest of dishonesty. Not only has he not drained
Washington’s swamp as promised, he’s made it swampier than ever. Numerous associates have been indicted, convicted, pled guilty, tossed in the can, abused
the public trust, and more. Trump said he only hires “the very best,” and this is what we get? ‘I really don’t care do U?’
But guess what? Millions of Americans don’t seem to care. They’ve always known that Trump was a stooge. Here are three takeaways from
2016 exit polls conducted by CNN:
• Just 1 in 3 thought Trump was honest and trustworthy
• Less than 2 in 5 had a favorable opinion of him
• Barely a third — 35% — said he had the right temperament for the job
And he still got 63 million votes! This says as much about the American electorate as it does about Trump. Lots of Trumpers know the president’s a jerk.
They know he’s rude, crude, and embarrasses himself on Twitter. And yet they say he gets stuff done. He got tax cuts, two Supreme Court justices, and (through
June 1) nearly 200 of his appointees have been put on the federal bench. Trump could lose in November but his mark on American society will endure well into
mid-century through these judges. Trump’s base loves him for these things, and most of them—but not all—will vote for him again .
Narrow path to re-election
As Trump and four other presidents have shown, you don’t have to win the popular vote to win the presidency. He won’t win it
this year, either. The question: Can he win the Electoral College? The president’s path has narrowed considerably . According to the
well-regarded Crystal Ball—put out by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics—Joe Biden, soon to be coronated as the Democratic nominee, has 268
“safe, likely, or leaning” electoral votes, while Trump has 204. There are only four states , the Crystal Ball says, that remain true toss
ups: Florida, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin. Together, they have 65 electoral votes. The current prediction for the 2020 presidential
election from Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball shows Democrat Joe Biden with a big but not insurmountable lead over President Donald Trump. CENTER FOR
POLITICS
Biden only needs one of these, and leads in all four by an average of 3.8 points (median 5.1) But Trump needs them all , the poker
equivalent of drawing an inside straight. Not impossible, but highly improbable. That would get him to 269, enough to win. There is also the oddity of
two states—Maine and Nebraska—which do not allocate their electoral votes in winner-take-all fashion. It’s too complicated to explain here, other than to say a
single electoral vote in say, Maine, could tip the entire election. Why can a candidate win with 269 and not 270? Because an Electoral College tie
(extremely unlikely) would be decided by the incoming House of Representatives , with each state delegation getting one vote. Right now, this
favors Republicans. Even though they have fewer House seats overall, the GOP controls 26 state delegations to the Democrats’ 23 (Pennsylvania is evenly
divided). So if it came down to a House vote, whichever party controlled the most state delegations in the new Congress would pick the president. The
Democrats would have to wrest control of at least three more state delegations, and they could do just that. Making all this even more bizarre: the Senate would
pick the vice president. Right now the GOP controls the Senate. What if one party picked the president and another the vice president? It simply doesn’t get any
stranger than this. But again, this is all quite unlikely. Biden appears to be in the driver’s seat as we approach the four-month mark. So what can Trump do to get
there?

Biden’s winning now because of poor coverage of Trump – but a change in the News Cycle could flip the
election for Trump
Nate Cohn 7/20, Domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times, Big Polling Leads Tend to Erode. Is Biden’s
Edge Different?, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/upshot/biden-trump-poll.html?
campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20200721&instance_id=20482&nl=the-
morning&regi_id=83131044&segment_id=33942&te=1&user_id=f08273543e887dee5d0119d909e7a9e9
Joe Biden’s commanding advantage in the race for the White House shows no sign of abating. He led by 15 percentage points in an ABC
News/Washington Post survey of registered voters on Sunday, and he has held a nearly double-digit lead in an average of polls for more than a month. The last
time a candidate sustained such a large advantage for so long was nearly 25 years ago, when Bill Clinton led Bob Dole in 1996. Biden’s Polling Lead Is the
Biggest of Any Candidate in Decades Colors indicate the party of the polling leader each month.New York Times analysis of polling data from FiveThirtyEight,
The Huffington Post and other sources. After a quarter-century of closely fought elections, it is easy to assume that wide leads are unsustainable in today's
deeply polarized country. Only Barack Obama in 2008 managed to win the national vote by more than 3.9 percentage points. The other big leads all proved
short-lived. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story But as Mr. Biden’s margin endures well into its second month, it becomes harder to assume that
it is just another fleeting shift in the polls. Perhaps the lead is not just different in size and length, but also in kind. It’s possible the nation’s political stalemate has
been broken, at least for now, by one issue: the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. With over three months to go, there’s still more
than enough time for the race to change in the president’s favor. The race has already shifted quite a bit over the last three. The
possibility that the president could enjoy a turnout advantage or a relative advantage in the battleground states may mean that it
wouldn’t take much to bring about a more competitive race. But the race might not inevitably revert to competitiveness, as it has so many
times since 1996, without deeper changes in the underlying dynamics of the contest. After all, Mr. Obama’s victory in 2008 was the exception
for a reason. It was underpinned by a huge change in the fundamentals of the race: the economic collapse resulting from the financial crisis. In other recent
races, polling shifts were usually the products of events, whether it was a successful convention, a cringe-worthy gaffe or a wave
of unflattering news coverage. Once the news environment returned to normal, so did the polls . Hillary Clinton, for instance, briefly
held fairly sizable leads, peaking at around seven percentage points in early August and mid-October 2016. In each case, she at once benefited from
favorable, event-driven news coverage — the Democratic convention and her perceived victories in the presidential debates — and a wave of
unfavorable, event-driven coverage for Donald J. Trump, who feuded with the family of a Gold Star soldier in late July and faced the “Access
Hollywood” revelations in early October. The news environment did not remain so favorable to Mrs. Clinton for long. Neither did the polls. She wasn’t able to
sustain more than a six-point lead for a full month of polling. It remains possible that President Trump’s current slump is just a larger and more protracted version
of the news-driven shift that we’ve seen many times in recent years. Mr. Biden’s lead has lasted long enough to cast some doubt on that interpretation, but not
necessarily so long to preclude it. The president has undoubtedly faced a steady stream of negative coverage, over issues like the Bible photo
op at Lafayette Park, his reluctance to wear a mask during the pandemic, his administration’s spat with Dr. Anthony Fauci. For the purpose of understanding the
president’s standing in the polls, perhaps there is some similarity between the Trump administration’s feud with Dr. Fauci and Mr. Trump’s attacks on Khizr Khan
or the former Miss Universe pageant contestant Alicia Machado four years ago. At the same time, Mr. Biden has avoided the limelight. If Mr.
Biden becomes the focal point of the race and the string of bad news for Mr. Trump comes to an end, perhaps the polls might
revert to where they were in April or May. The other possibility is that Mr. Biden’s lead is more like Mr. Obama’s in 2008. If so, it is not the result of the
vagaries of the news cycle. Instead, Mr. Biden’s lead might follow from a fundamental change in the underlying dynamics of American politics, much as the
financial crisis reshaped the race in 2008. This time, it wouldn’t be the economy, but the coronavirus.

Trump’s approval is close to 50 percent, any policy initiative could make him win the election
Cohn 19 (Nate; Correspondent for NYT, CNN, NPR and at many colleges and universaties ; 7-15-2019; “Huge Turnout Is
Expected in 2020. So Which Party Would Benefit?“; No Publication; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/upshot/2020-election-
turnout-analysis.html; Accessed 7-20-2020; ND)
The 2020 presidential election is poised to have the highest turnout in a century, with the potential to reshape the composition of the electorate
in a decisive way. But perhaps surprisingly, it is not obvious which party would benefit. There are opportunities and risks for both parties, based on an
Upshot analysis of voter registration files, the validated turnout of 50,000 respondents to The New York Times/Siena College pre-election surveys in 2018,
census data, and public polls of unregistered voters. It is commonly assumed that Democrats benefit from higher turnout because young
and nonwhite and low-income voters are overrepresented among nonvoters. And for decades, polls have shown that Democrats
do better among all adults than among all registered voters, and better among all registered voters than among all actual voters.
But this longstanding pattern has become more complicated in the Trump years . The president is strong among less educated
white voters, who are also overrepresented among nonvoters . And Democrats already banked many of the rewards of higher turnout in the
midterm elections, when the party out of power typically enjoys a turnout advantage and did so yet again, according to 2018 Times/Siena data. Nationwide,
the longstanding Republican edge in the gap between registered and actual voters all but vanished in 2018, even though young
and nonwhite voters continued to vote at lower rates than older and white voters. At the same time, the president’s white
working-class supporters from 2016 were relatively likely to stay home. Voters like these are likeliest to return to the electorate in
2020, and it could set back Democrats in crucial battleground states . Democrats have an opportunity to gain by tapping into another group: the
voters on the sidelines of American politics, who haven’t voted in recent elections or aren’t registered to vote at all. This group, by definition, does not usually
factor into electoral analysis, but a high enough turnout would draw many of them to vote. Analysts have speculated about a 70 percent turnout among eligible
voters next year, based on the very large 2018 turnout — the highest in a midterm since 1914 — and on polls showing unusually strong interest in the 2020
election. These adults on the periphery of American politics are probably more favorable to Democrats than registered voters are,
but the story here is complicated as well. They are not quite as favorable to Democrats as often assumed, in part because polls
of adults include noncitizens, who are ineligible to vote. A large increase in voter registration would do much more to hurt the
president in the national vote than in the Northern battleground states, where registration is generally high and where people who
aren’t registered are disproportionately whites without a college degree. The voters who stayed home in 2018 were not much
more or less likely to approve of the president than those who actually turned out, based on data from nearly 100 Times/Siena
surveys, linked to records indicating who did or did not vote. Over all, the president had a 47 percent approval rating among
Times/Siena respondents who voted, excluding those who did not offer an opinion about the president. But he had a higher
approval rating (48 percent) among all registered voters in the nearly 60 battleground districts and a handful of Senate contests
surveyed ahead of the midterms. The Republicans lost their typical midterm turnout advantage, even though they didn’t give up
some of their traditional demographic advantages. Young and nonwhite turnout was markedly higher than it had been in 2014, but still lower than
that of older and white voters. Registered Republicans were likelier to turn out than registered Democrats , according to data from L2, a
nonpartisan political data firm. These traditional Republican demographic advantages were canceled out, and in some cases reversed, by two new Democratic
advantages. The low turnout among whites without a college degree bolstered Democrats in much of the country, allowing college-educated whites to make up a
larger share of the electorate.

Biden Is ahead in key swing counties but Trump could win on various metrics
Monmouth University 7-15(Monmouth University Polling Institute; School in New Jersey ; 7-15-2020; “Biden Leads But
Many Anticipate Secret Trump Vote“; ; https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_pa_071520/; Accessed
7-20-2020; ND)
West Long Branch, NJ – Joe Biden holds a 13 point lead over Donald Trump among all registered voters in Pennsylvania according to the Monmouth (“Mon-
muth”) University Poll. Among likely voters, the Democrat has an edge of 7 to 10 points depending on the expected turnout level. Biden is also ahead in
key swing counties, which include the region of his birthplace. Despite the challenger’s poll lead, voters are evenly divided on
who they think will win the Keystone State’s electoral votes this year as a majority believe that their communities hold a number
of “secret Trump voters.” Other poll findings include a close margin on the generic congressional ballot and better reviews for the
commonwealth’s governor than for the president on handling the pandemic. Among all registered voters in Pennsylvania, Biden is
supported by 53% and Trump by 40%, with 3% saying they will vote for another candidate and 4% who are undecided. Biden is
in a relatively stronger position among his fellow Democrats (93% to 1%) than Trump is among Republican voters (84% to 12%).
Biden also enjoys a wide margin among independent voters (54% to 33%). Biden has the advantage among voters under 50
years old (60% to 29%) as well as voters age 65 and older (52% to 42%). Trump has an edge among voters between 50 and 64
years old (56% to 43%). White voters without a college degree also prefer the incumbent (55% to 39%) while the challenger
leads among white college graduates (61% to 34%) and voters who are Black , Hispanic, Asian or from other racial groups (76%
to 16%). Biden is doing especially well in ten counties where the vote margins were closest in the 2016 presidential election. The
Democrat currently holds a 54% to 35% lead among registered voters in these swing counties*, which are concentrated in a
swath that runs from the Philadelphia suburbs into the northeast region where the candidate grew up. The poll also finds that
Biden racks up a huge margin in four large counties that went solidly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (68% to 26%), while Trump leads in
the remaining counties that he won handily four years ago (55% to 40%). “Even taking into account any polling error from four years ago, Biden is clearly doing
well in swing areas. The Democrat has roots in this region which may be helping him, but there seems to be an overall erosion of support for Trump compared to
2016,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. Pennsylvania Biden Leads But Many Anticipate Secret Trump Vote
Wednesday, July 15, 2020 Democrat strong in swing counties; close House ballot West Long Branch, NJ – Joe Biden holds a 13 point lead over Donald Trump
among all registered voters in Pennsylvania according to the Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll. Among likely voters, the Democrat has an edge of 7 to 10
points depending on the expected turnout level. Biden is also ahead in key swing counties, which include the region of his birthplace. Despite the challenger’s
poll lead, voters are evenly divided on who they think will win the Keystone State’s electoral votes this year as a majority believe that their communities hold a
number of “secret Trump voters.” Other poll findings include a close margin on the generic congressional ballot and better reviews for the commonwealth’s
governor than for the president on handling the pandemic. Among all registered voters in Pennsylvania, Biden is supported by 53% and Trump by 40%, with 3%
saying they will vote for another candidate and 4% who are undecided. Biden is in a relatively stronger position among his fellow Democrats (93% to 1%) than
Trump is among Republican voters (84% to 12%). Biden also enjoys a wide margin among independent voters (54% to 33%). Biden has the advantage among
voters under 50 years old (60% to 29%) as well as voters age 65 and older (52% to 42%). Trump has an edge among voters between 50 and 64 years old (56%
to 43%). White voters without a college degree also prefer the incumbent (55% to 39%) while the challenger leads among white college graduates (61% to 34%)
and voters who are Black, Hispanic, Asian or from other racial groups (76% to 16%). Biden is doing especially well in ten counties where the vote margins were
closest in the 2016 presidential election. The Democrat currently holds a 54% to 35% lead among registered voters in these swing
counties*, which are concentrated in a swath that runs from the Philadelphia suburbs into the northeast region where the candidate grew up. The poll also finds
that Biden racks up a huge margin in four large counties that went solidly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (68% to 26%), while Trump leads in the remaining counties
that he won handily four years ago (55% to 40%). “Even taking into account any polling error from four years ago, Biden is clearly doing well in swing
areas. The Democrat has roots in this region which may be helping him, but there seems to be an overall erosion of support for
Trump compared to 2016,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. Biden’s lead
narrows when different likely voter models are applied. A model based on a somewhat higher level of turnout than 2016 gives
him a 10 point edge (52% to 42%) while one reflecting lower turnout puts his lead at 7 points (51% to 44%). Looking just at the
swing counties, the higher turnout model has Biden ahead there by 17 points (53% to 36%) and the lower turnout model gives
him a 13 point lead (51% to 38%). Four years ago, Clinton won the cumulative vote in these counties by just over one
percentage point. In four core Clinton counties, Biden holds a lead between 39 points (67% to 28% low turnout) and 42 points
(68% to 26% high turnout). In 53 core Trump counties, the incumbent holds a lead between 20 points (58% to 38% high turnout)
and 23 points (60% to 37% low turnout). Trump and Clinton won the cumulative vote in their respective core counties by 33 and
36 points in 2016. Comparing the current results to a Monmouth University Poll taken in August 2016, Biden’s likely voter position is similar to Clinton’s
summer standing in the swing counties, where she led Trump by 50% to 40%. Interestingly, Trump is doing slightly better now in core Clinton counties than four
years ago, when he was polling at 21% to 67% for Clinton. Biden, however, is currently stronger than Clinton was in the president’s base counties, where she
was polling at 27% to 60% for Trump. “The good news for Biden is that he hits the magic 50% mark in all the turnout models and far fewer voters are considering
a third party candidate than four years ago. This suggests somewhat more stability in the numbers, but there are also signs that Biden
has not pulled clearly ahead of Trump on some key metrics ,” said Murray. Among all registered voters, 45% say they are certain
to vote for Biden and 36% say the same for Trump. At the other end of the spectrum, 40% say they are not at all likely to vote for
the challenger and 49% say the same for incumbent. Using the poll’s lower turnout likely voter model, though, these gaps narrow
for both firm support (44% Biden and 41% Trump) and those who are not at all likely to support the candidate (44% Biden and
47% Trump). Most registered voters (54%) say they were surprised in 2016 when Trump ended up winning Pennsylvania’s
electoral votes. They are evenly divided on whether they expect Trump (46%) or Biden (45%) to win the commonwealth this time
around. One reason for this seems to be that most voters (57%) believe there are a number of so-called secret voters in their
communities who support Trump but won’t tell anyone about it. Less than half that number (27%) believe there are secret voters
for Biden. The suspicion that a secret Trump vote exists is slightly higher in swing counties (62%) and Clinton counties (61%)
than in Trump counties (51%). The belief in a secret Biden vote is somewhat more prevalent in Trump counties (32%) than
Clinton counties (23%) and swing counties (23%). “The media consistently reports that Biden is in the lead, but voters remember what happened in
2016. The specter of a secret Trump vote looms large in 2020,” said Murray. – Generic House ballot – The Monmouth University Poll also posed a generic ballot
test for the U.S. House of Representatives election, which shows 49% of registered voters currently supporting the Democratic candidate in their district and 45%
backing the Republican. Applying likely voter models to these results, high turnout puts the statewide vote choice at 48% Democrat and 46% Republican while
low turnout has it at 48% Republican and 47% Democrat. In the 2018 midterm election, Democrats won the cumulative house vote in Pennsylvania by 10 points,
although this statewide margin was inflated by two or three points because of the lack of a GOP challenger on the ballot in PA18. The decrease in the
Democratic margin this year seems to be the result of a shift toward the GOP in safe districts more than in the competitive districts. In 12 congressional districts
where the winning margin for either party was greater than 15 points, the Democrats held a cumulative 14 point edge in the final vote count in 2018. In the
current poll, they have a 3 point deficit (46% for the Democrats to 49% for the Republicans) in these seats using the low turnout model. In the six most
competitive districts, the Democrats held a narrow 4 point cumulative edge in 2018 and currently the race is about even here at 47% Democrat and 45%
Republican among likely voters in the low turnout model. Three of these seats were won by the GOP (PA01, PA10, PA16) by between 2 and 4 points and three
were won by Democrats (PA07, PA08, PA17) by between 9 and 12 points. “The overall generic House ballot looks dimmer for Democrats than two years ago,
but that is mainly in safe seats where this swing won’t affect the outcome. There has been a smaller shift in the more competitive districts, but since Democrats
had relatively larger victory margins there the overall outlook may be status quo. Vulnerable Republicans may have slightly more breathing room than two years
ago. Of course, we won’t know for sure until we see some district-specific polls,” said Murray. – Other results – A weak spot for the president is his handling of
the coronavirus outbreak. Just 42% of registered voters say he has done a good job while 56% say he has done a bad job. By contrast, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom
Wolf, a Democrat, earns praise on this issue – 67% say he has done a good job and just 29% say he has done a bad job. On the economic front, just 17% of
voters feel that it is harder for them to pay their household bills now than it was four years ago – including 23% of Democrats, 18% of independents, and 10% of
Republicans. Another 25% say paying bills is actually easier for them now – led by 46% of Republicans, but just 23% of independents and only 6% of
Democrats. Most voters (54%) say their household bill burden is about the same as four years ago – including 67% of Democrats, 53% of independents, and
42% of Republicans. Overall, 40% of Pennsylvania voters have a favorable opinion of Trump and 54% have an unfavorable one – including 47% very
unfavorable. His opponent, Biden, gets a 45% favorable to 47% unfavorable rating, including 32% very unfavorable. Republican voters (42%) are much more
likely than Democrats (18%) to say they are very optimistic about the 2020 presidential election, but more Democrats (53%) than Republicans (42%) say they
feel more enthusiastic about this contest compared to past elections. Among independent voters, 19% are very optimistic and 30% feel more enthusiastic about
November than past elections. The Monmouth University Poll was conducted by telephone from July 9 to 13, 2020 with 401 Pennsylvania registered voters. The
question results in this release have a margin of error of +/- 4.9 percentage points. The poll was conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute in West
Long Branch, NJ. * 2016 presidential margin by county groupings: Swing (26% of vote) – counties where the winning margin for either candidate was less than
10 points, with a cumulative vote of 48.6% Clinton and 47.4% Trump (Berks, Bucks, Centre, Chester, Dauphin, Erie, Lackawanna, Lehigh, Monroe,
Northampton). Clinton (34% of vote) – Clinton won these counties by more than 10 points, with a cumulative vote of 66.3% to 30.7% (Allegheny, Delaware,
Montgomery, Philadelphia). Trump (40% of vote) – Trump won these counties by more than 10 points, with a cumulative vote of 64.8% to 31.4% (remaining 53
counties).
 Biden Win – AT: Ground Game
Biden is winning on ground game
Rainey 7/9 (Rebecca Rainey is an employment and immigration reporter. Politico: “SEIU endorses Biden, boosting Democrat's
2020 ground game” published 7/9/20. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/09/joe-biden-seiu-endorsement-355387) AS
The Service Employees International Union, which represents 2 million workers in health care, property services and the public
sector, announced Thursday that it will throw its grassroots organizing power behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe
Biden in the 2020 presidential campaign. How does this change the race? By winning SEIU’s endorsement, Biden can tap into a
network of tens of thousands of volunteers and political organizers to boost his ground game . The union has announced plans to
invest $150 million in a voter engagement campaign targeting infrequent voters of color in several battleground states and has
urged Congress to expand voting access during the coronavirus pandemic. SEIU says its members have already reached out to
more than 3 million voters in Florida, California, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania through a text message campaign to
help them register and sign up to vote by mail. That gives Biden a small leg up on President Donald Trump, whose campaign
launched a multimillion-dollar legal effort to block expanded ballot access and has railed against mail-in voting. How does this
influence Biden’s policies? SEIU represents sectors of the workforce that have been acutely affected by the pandemic, including many essential workers like
airport and frontline health care employees. The union also backs the Fight for $15 campaign, which has organized fast food worker strikes across the country
over safety conditions and fair wages. SEIU President Mary Kay Henry serves on the Biden-Sanders unity task force on health care, helping shape the
Democratic platform. The coalition released its policy recommendations on Wednesday, which called for raising wages for health care workers to $15 an hour
and increasing diversity in the field. SEIU has also released a 2020 agenda that calls on candidates to expand workers’ access to unions, establish universal
health care, reform the immigration system and address climate change. What the union says about Biden: “He is meeting the moment by making it crystal clear
that investing in our nation's caregiving workforce is smart economics, as well as the morally right thing to do, because those jobs have been excluded historically
[from labor protections], they're done by women and people of color and immigrants,” Henry told POLITICO. “It's time to make an economy that includes people
of color, women and immigrants equally in the prosperity.” What’s next: Following the endorsement announcement, SEIU says it will launch
its multi-language, 40-state, “Essential for Joe” voter-turnout campaign, with hundreds of its members focusing on political
organizing full time. The campaign will be “digital first,” utilizing texting and social media on a larger scale to reach voters during
the pandemic. SEIU says it aims to reach more than 6 million voters before the election.

Trump’s got no ground game and it doesn’t matter

Last 16 (Jonathan V. Last is an American journalist and author and is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. Washington
Examiner: “Does Ground Game Matter?” published 9/12/16. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/does-
ground-game-matter-2004271) AS
Or at least that's one view. The other is that the effectiveness of GOTV operations and ground game has been fetishized by the
media and wildly exaggerated. "The bottom line is it's all bullshit," one Republican campaign consultant told me. "In a presidential
election you just have high turnout, period . And the GOTV stuff just gets lost." He went on: "The ugly little secret which deflates
all the consulting bullshit and the media narrative is that the Dems spend a lot of money in off-years trying to get their voters to
the polls. They fail, because off-year elections are tough for their voters. And then Republicans think they're geniuses at ground
game. Then in presidential years, the Dem voters show up, and suddenly the Democratic consultants become the ground-game
geniuses." This skeptical view makes a good deal of sense. You can see how GOTV efforts would make a big impact in a small-scale election, like the Iowa
caucuses. But in a large-scale presidential election, GOTV operations might be meaningless because whatever gains a campaign
makes will be (1) canceled out by the other side's operation and (2) swamped by the sheer statistical weight of a system with 150
million votes. It isn't just campaign consultants who are divided between the two views of ground game—there has been a good
deal of research on the question over the last 20 years from political scientists, too. In 2013, Donald Green, Mary McGrath, and
Peter Aronow tried to resolve the question with a giant survey of the literature and came to the conclusion that GOTV efforts
produced very marginal gains, with door-to-door canvassing increasing turnout by 1 percentage point, direct-mail by 0.7
percentage points, and phone calls by 0.4 percentage points. Which buttresses the "it's all BS" view. But earlier this year, another two
political scientists—Ryan Enos of Harvard and Anthony Fowler of the University of Chicago—looked at the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections to see if the
revolution in voter data profiling might have changed the effectiveness of GOTV programs. What they found was shocking. Enos and Fowler's study is well worth
reading because both the Romney and Obama campaigns cooperated with them and provided data on the number, timing, and instances of GOTV interventions.
When Enos and Fowler compared the data, they found that, as you'd expect, both campaigns concentrated their ground game efforts in the battleground states.
The researchers then compared individuals in the same TV market, but different states, where one state was competitive and the other was not. This allowed
them to establish a control group of people who saw the same media coverage but were not subjected to GOTV interventions. And then they compared this
control group with people in the same media environment who were being targeted by GOTV operations. Their findings contained three distinct surprises. First,
they found that a good GOTV effort increased the likelihood that a voter would turn out by 7 percentage points. Second, they found that GOTV interventions were
additive in their effectiveness. Which is to say that if you knocked on a voter's door a second time, the percentage chance that they would turn out for your
candidate increased again, by another 7 percentage points. Third, despite the media obsession with the failure of the Romney campaign's much-derided GOTV
effort, so-called Project Orca, Enos and Fowler found that it was roughly as effective as the Obama campaign's celebrated program. This being academia,
there's never a final word. Data scientist Aaron Strauss has produced research suggesting that the Obama campaign's ground game was much more effective
than Romney's. Political science professors John Sides and Lynn Vavreck detected a small Obama advantage. And others continue to argue that the election
was determined entirely by economic and demographic fundamentals, with GOTV operations mattering not a whit. It's all a bit confusing, but fortunately, Donald
Trump is here to help settle the debate, once and for all. Unlike every other major presidential campaign of the modern era, the Trump
operation has essentially no ground game. So when voters go to the polls eight weeks from now, we won't be contrasting the
effects of a "good" GOTV scheme against a "poor" one. We'll be able to see what happens when one side has a ground game
and the other does not. That will clarify the matter a great deal. If Trump is able to meet or exceed his final poll numbers in battleground states
such as Utah and Georgia—okay, that's a joke. Seriously: If Trump is able to match his final poll numbers in toss-up states where the Clinton
campaign has a robust GOTV effort—states such as North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Florida—then it will be a sign that the
fruits of the ground game are illusory. And campaign consultants everywhere will mourn the day their snake oil was exposed. But
if ground game does matter, then Clinton should overperform her final poll numbers in contested states as her campaign warps
the makeup of the electorate without any offsetting efforts from the Trump campaign. Either way, the Trump campaign is likely to
settle the ground-game question decisively.
 Biden Win – AT: Fundraising
Biden’s fundraising has topped Trump
Barrow 7/1 (Bill Barrow is national politics reporter covering the 2020 election. AP News: “Biden tops Trump in June, 2nd-
quarter cash; GOP still flush” published 7/1/20. https://apnews.com/4bb1150fd4342b51a89c2769201c2ce6) AS
Democratic presidential challenger Joe Biden outpaced President Donald Trump’s campaign fundraising juggernaut in June and
in the second quarter of this election year, continuing a stunning reversal of fortune from his threadbare primary campaign. The
joint GOP effort still has considerably more cash left to spend ahead of the Nov. 3 election, but Biden’s newfound fundraising muscle suggests Democrats will
have the resources to finance a strong operation across a wide footprint of battleground states. The former vice president’s spokesman said
Tuesday night that Biden and the Democratic National Committee raised $141 million in June, bringing their second-quarter total
to more than $282 million. Republicans announced earlier Tuesday that Trump and the national GOP had raised $131 million in
June and $266 million for the quarter. The president’s reelection effort still had nearly $300 million cash on hand at the end of June, the campaign said.
Biden’s campaign has not yet disclosed its cash-on-hand figure, though it will be well behind Trump’s figure. At the end of May, Democrats had about $122
million. Top Biden aides and allies have downplayed that gap in recent weeks, noting that Trump already has spent lavishly on advertising and
voter outreach, yet still finds himself trailing Biden in national and many battleground state polls.

Money does not determine elections

Koerth 18 (Maggie Koerth is a senior science writer for FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight: “How Money Affects Elections”
published 9/10/18. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/) AS
That’s not to say money is irrelevant to winning, said Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford who also
manages the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections. But decades of research suggest that money probably isn’t
the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents . Most of the research on this was done in
the last century, Bonica told me, and it generally found that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for
challengers was unclear. Even the studies that showed spending having the biggest effect , like one that found a more than 6
percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money causes wins. In fact, Bonica said, those gains from
spending likely translate to less of an advantage today , in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are
probably fewer and fewer people who are going to vote a split ticket because they liked your ad. Instead, he and Lau agreed, the
strong raw association between raising the most cash and winning probably has more to do with big donors who can tell (based
on polls or knowledge of the district or just gut-feeling woo-woo magic) that one candidate is more likely to win — and then they
give that person all their money. Advertising — even negative advertising — isn’t very effective This is a big reason why money doesn’t buy
political success. Turns out, advertising, the main thing campaigns spend their money on, doesn’t work all that well. This is a really
tough thing to study, Ridout said, and it’s only getting harder as media becomes more fragmented and it’s less clear who saw what ad how many times and in
what context. But it’s also something people have been studying for a long time. Driven by fears that attack ads might undermine democracy by reducing voter
turnout, researchers have been looking at the impacts of negative advertising since the 1990s. And, beginning around the mid-2000s, they began making serious
progress on understanding how ads actually affect whether people vote and who they vote for. The picture that’s emerged is … well … let’s just say it’s probably
rather disappointing to the campaigns that spend a great deal of time and effort raising all that money to begin with. Take, for example, the study that is probably
the nation’s only truly real-world political advertising field experiment. During Rick Perry’s 2006 re-election campaign for Texas governor, a team of researchers
convinced Perry’s campaign to run ads in randomly assigned markets and then tracked the effect of those ads over time using surveys. Advertising did produce a
pro-Perry response in the markets that received the treatment. But that bump fizzled fast. Within a week after ads stopped running, it was like no one had ever
seen them. What’s more, Ridout said, ads probably matter least in the races where campaigns spend the most on them — like
presidential elections. Partly, that’s because the bigger the election, the more we already know about the people running. It’s not
like anyone went into the 2016 presidential race confused about who Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were, for example. Also, partisan politics are just really
powerful: In 2016, about 7 in 10 voters identified as either a Democrat or Republican, according to exit polls; 89 percent of Democrats voted for Clinton and 90
percent of Republicans voted for Trump. Even in congressional races, most voters aren’t persuadable. Instead, when there’s a shift from one party to another, it’s
usually more about national waves than what is happening in individual districts, Bonica said. So the ad run by your would-be congressperson matters less than
the overall, national sense that this year is really going to swing for one party or another.
 Biden Win – AT: Voter Suppression
Voter suppression is a myth - midterms prove
WSJ 19 (The Wall Street Journal is an international, business-focused, daily newspaper based in New York
City. A division of News Corp and published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, the Journal is the most
widely circulated newspaper in the United States. It has printed continuously since it was founded by Charles Dow,
Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser on July 8, 1889. Daily editions of the newspaper are posted on its website,
which also includes Home, World, U.S., Politics, Economy, Business, Tech, Market, Arts, Life, Real Estate and
Opinion sections. Board, The Editorial. “Opinion | The Voter Suppression Myth.” The Wall Street
Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 3 May 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/the-voter-suppression-
myth-11556920484.) LN

Democrats accuse Republicans of suppressing the minority vote with laws to ensure ballot integrity. But
then how do they explain record minority turnout last November? If Republicans were trying to stop
minorities from voting, their schemes were inept. The number of Latino voters nearly doubled in last
year’s midterms compared to 2014 and came close to presidential year levels, according to a Pew
Research Center analysis of new Census Bureau data. The share of blacks who voted climbed 10.8
percentage points to 51.4%, which was similar to the increase in white turnout (11.7 points). Whites
made up 72.8% of the national electorate, down from 76.3% in 2014. The minority turnout surge
benefited Democrats who picked up 40 House seats, seven governorships and six legislative chambers.
But Democrats still blame their defeats in the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial races on voter
suppression. Census data show otherwise. Georgia law requires voters be removed from the rolls if they
haven’t cast a ballot in seven years and don’t respond to an inquiry in the mail to confirm their address.
Another law requires voter information in registration applications to mirror information on file at the
Georgia Department of Driver Services and Social Security Administration. About 1.4 million voters were
removed from Georgia’s rolls after 2012. Yet black voter registration increased to 68.4% last year from
62.3% in 2014. White voter registration increased by a mere 0.7 percentage points to 66.8%. Pruning the
rolls also didn’t reduce black turnout. Nearly 60% of blacks voted last fall—up from 43% in 2014—
compared to 56% of whites. Like Democrat Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Florida Democrat Andrew Gillum
blamed his loss for the governorship on GOP voter intimidation. “Voter disenfranchisement doesn’t just
show up when you put dogs on people or water hoses, or block entrances, that’s not the only form of
voter disenfranchisement,” Mr. Gillum told a Baptist church a week after the election. Yet black turnout
increased to 47.2% from 44% in 2014, though there was a bigger jump among Hispanics (eight
percentage points) and whites (10 percentage points). According to exit polls, Mr. Gillum
underperformed former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson among black women by nine points, perhaps
because of his vocal opposition to school choice. This may have cost him the election. Democrats also
claim that reducing early voting discriminates against minorities, but Hispanics were as likely as whites
to cast early ballots last fall. Blacks were most likely to vote on Election Day. Higher incomes and
education levels were associated with early voting. So was age. Limiting early voting inconveniences
folks who are more likely to be Republican. There’s also no evidence that voter ID requirements
suppressed minority turnout. After the 2016 election, Missouri and Iowa adopted such laws to prevent
voter fraud. Black turnout increased in both including by a stunning 21 percentage points in Iowa.
Democrats howl about voter suppression to portray Republicans as racist to stoke minority turnout for
Democrats. It’s a divisive form of politics. Their losses in Florida and Georgia suggest that inflaming racial
resentment may turn off voters they need to win.

And there will be no voter suppression in the 2020 election

Erickson 7/9 (Mr. Erickson is a talk-radio host and a former election lawyer in Georgia.
Erickson, Erick, and Dan McLaughlin. “The Voter-Suppression Myth.” National Review, 9 July
2020, www.nationalreview.com/author/erick-erickson/.) LN
Both parties engage in mythmaking to justify defeats or amplify wins. Since 2016, media dominated by the Left and
sympathetic to the Democrats have pushed myths as justification for failure. Russia stole the 2016 election. It
could not be that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate beaten by a man not very well liked outside a core group
of supporters. It had to be theft. Grievance increasingly fuels the American political landscape. Republicans
fundraise off toppled statues. Democrats fundraise off Donald Trump possibly beating their candidate. After 2018, grievance
combined with progressive white guilt has given rise to more mythology. Now, it is not just the president collaborating with
Vladimir Putin to steal elections. It is also Republicans suppressing the votes of minorities. The Democrats are not only
manufacturing the mythology but using a playbook to create problems they can then blame on Republicans as proof of their
claims. In 2018, the national media fawned over Beto O’Rourke in Texas. His supposedly Kennedyesque looks and
propensity for F-bombs gave him an absolute pass on being both a white man who drove a Hispanic Democrat
from office in a primary and one who attempted to flee the scene of a wreck he caused while drunk. The media
wanted nothing to do with those stories because he was trying to take out a Hispanic officeholder named “Ted
Cruz.” Meanwhile, Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams were running for governor in Florida and Georgia
respectively. They got no love from Vanity Fair and they had no Kennedy-like features to lure in the New York
Times. Both candidates campaigned in the shadow of the media’s swoon for O’Rourke, and both candidates
outperformed him. In the Senate race in Texas, O’Rourke won 48.3 percent of the vote in the general election. In
Georgia, Abrams won 48.8 percent of the vote. In Florida, Gillum won 49.19 percent of the vote. White reporters
for national outlets had not only fallen for the wrong candidate, but their excessive coverage of O’Rourke had
undoubtedly helped O’Rourke hoard cash at the expense of both Gillum and Abrams.  Unwilling to acknowledge
their biases, the media had to find explanations for their excessive coverage of Beto and for the Abrams and Gillum
losses. The myth was that their races were stolen by systemic Republican efforts to suppress the vote.  In 2014 and 2016,
Stacey Abrams, a state legislator in Georgia, had tried desperately to register new voters who might vote Democratic. National
Democrats poured money into her efforts, encouraged by polling in both years that showed statewide Democrats
tied with or ahead of Republicans. But in neither year did the surge of registrations matter. Though Abrams each
year outperformed the Republican in the effort to register voters, she failed to turn them out. In 2014, Georgia saw
50 percent of registered voters participate in its election. In 2018, 61 percent of registered voters participated.
Minority-voter participation set new records, and minority-voter registration set new records, too. On Election
Night in 2018, Abrams received more votes in Georgia than Hillary Clinton had received two years earlier. Abrams
had also registered close to 1 million new voters. But Abrams improved Clinton’s margin by only 45,000 votes. Only
around 100,000 of those newly registered voters showed up. Instead of accepting defeat and acknowledging that
her reputation as a vote-organizer was overrated, Abrams, the Democrats, and their media allies have screamed
“Voter suppression.” They point to Brian Kemp, as Georgia’s secretary of state, “purging” over 1.5 million names
from voter rolls. They ignore that Kemp did that because a state law passed by Democrats compelled him to
remove from the rolls anyone who had not voted in seven years. The number was so high because a group
affiliated with Abrams had sued in 2015 to prevent the 2014 and 2015 voter rolls from being cleaned. When they
lost in 2017, the law compelled Kemp to clean the rolls from 2014 to 2017. Democrats also point out that 53,000
voters had been placed in a “pending voter” file. The Associated Press ran a story about Marsha Appling-Nunez,
who had registered to vote and had her registration held up perhaps because of the hyphen in her name. Brian
Kemp, who was still the Georgia secretary of state, responded that she had been held up because she had already
registered to vote. In fact, when the Democrats made that claim, Kemp could show that 75 percent of the people
on the list had wrong Social Security numbers on their registration forms and 23 percent were voters whom
Abrams’s own New Georgia Project had registered using incomplete or wrong information. That last part is the
most telling. Since 2014, 11,024 voters have been listed as “pending” in Georgia while the state has tried to find
them. They have never shown up to vote and have not been found. The Georgia secretary of state disclosed the
information, and local media reported it. National media outlets failed to report the facts. Finally, Democrats
pointed out that in some counties in Georgia there were not enough electronic voting machines, and local polling
precincts were overwhelmed owing to the shortages. What the critics failed to point out is that Democrats had
filed a lawsuit about the voting machines, leading a federal judge to impound many of them, reducing the supply
for Election Day. They also failed to mention that Democrats controlled the boards of election in the counties that
had problems. In one telling instance, Democrats in Randolph County decided to close several precincts before the
2018 election. The precincts were not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the poor county in
which they were located did not have enough money to bring them into compliance. The precincts that would have
been closed — the Democrats eventually changed their minds — were precincts won by Donald Trump, but national Democrats,
led by Abrams and the American Civil Liberties Union, claimed that the plan was an effort at minority-voter suppression . The
grievances foreshadow the Democrats’ likely plan for 2020. Each of the Democrats’ grievances concerning voter suppression in
2018 was manufactured by them before the press amplified it. Democrats sued to withhold voting machines, which contributed to
long lines, which raised cries of voter suppression. Democrats tried to close polling precincts, which led to cries of voter
suppression. Democrats flooded the system with voter registrations that were incomplete or had bad information, which led to
cries of voter suppression. The national media reported each of the stories according to the Democrats’ perspective
and ignored any information that might have shown that voter suppression was not extant. After Abrams’s loss,
national reporters coming off their Beto high felt an almost religious need to repent for having ignored Abrams and
Gillum. They also now have a playbook to disrupt the 2020 election and scream voter suppression. In Georgia in
2018, among the 53,000 voters in the “pending voter” file was the daughter of the secretary of state, Brian Kemp.
She had registered to vote for her dad’s gubernatorial campaign but did not turn 18 until just before the November
election. On turning 18, her name moved into the active-voter file. That one fact could have illustrated the lack of sinister
motive in the existence of the pending-voter file, but it would have cut against the Democrats’ mythology.
 Biden Win – AT: Refuses to Leave
Trump will leave office if he loses
Oprysko 6/12 (Caitlin is a breaking news reporter for POLITICO. She joined POLITICO Before coming
to POLITICO, Caitlin worked on the social desk for ABC News’ D.C. Bureau, where she used social media
to monitor coverage areas, curated images and videos for broadcasts, pitched and reported out stories
and collaborated on breaking news. Caitlin is a graduate of the University of Georgia, where she covered
state and local news and worked for the student-run newscast Grady Newsource. Oprysko, Caitlin.
“Trump Says He'll Leave Office Peacefully If He Loses in November.” POLITICO, 12 June
2020, www.politico.com/news/2020/06/12/trump-says-will-leave-office-peacefully-if-he-loses-
315736. LN
President Donald Trump sought to brush aside fears he might not leave office willingly if November’s election doesn’t go his way.
“Certainly, if I don't win, I don't win,” he told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner in an interview that aired Friday. If he doesn’t win
the election, Trump continued, “you go on, do other things.” Though the president has never given any serious indication
that he might not leave office if he were to lose reelection, his comments aired Friday appear to be the first time he has publicly
committed to doing so. Still, he told Faulker that if he loses, “I think it would be a very bad thing for our country.”
Faulkner posed the query after former Vice President Joe Biden,
 AT: No Swing Voters
Swing voters do exist, and they’re crucial to candidates in the elections
Skelley ’20 [Geoffrey; Writer; 538 News; “Just How Many Swing Voters Are There?”; https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/just-
how-many-swing-voters-are-there/]
It’s a long time until the 2020 general election, but there’s a good chance it will be competitive. After all, we live in a politically
polarized era where most presidential elections are decided by relatively narrow margins (since 1988, in the single digits). Which
means if the margins are as slim as they were in 2016, the race could come down to swing voters, or voters that tend to switch
their support between the two major parties from year to year. So we were curious: Just how many swing voters are there? A
number of researchers have tried to tackle this question, and it turns out, there’s a pretty big range of answers. That’s because
defining who is and isn’t a swing voter isn’t easy, as it’s a small group. But estimates I previously made based on a couple of
data sets suggest that there were around 10 million voters who shifted from voting for one major party in 2012 to the other in
2016, which accounted for roughly 7 percent of all votes cast. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a lot of people, but these
voters probably did play a role in helping President Trump get elected because around three-quarters of those voters swung
toward him rather than Hillary Clinton..
 AT: Partisan Theory
Trump won the 2016 election because of the votes of independents and former democrats – policy led to
this, not partisan loyalty
Rosen 8/1/17 [Jill – John Hopkins University Senior Media Representative, “Study: Shift away from party loyalty
among working-class voters set stage for Trump's victory”, John Hopkins University Hub,
https://hub.jhu.edu/2017/08/01/party-affiliation-2016-election/]
On the cusp of last year's presidential election, many working-class voters who were once staunch Democrats had
gone independent, opening the door for a non-traditional Republican candidate, a new Johns Hopkins University
study concludes.
The report, which documents a decades-long shift away from traditional party affiliation within the working class, is
believed to be the first assessment of how social class affected political identity in the run up to the 2016 presidential
election. It will appear in this month's issue of the journal Sociological Science.
A graphic of working-class party identification from 1994-2016 shows that most identify as independents.
"A substantial proportion of eligible voters within the working class turned away from solid identification with either the
Democratic Party or the Republican Party during the Obama presidency," wrote lead author Stephen L. Morgan, a
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Education. "Even before the 2016 election cycle
commenced, conditions were uncharacteristically propitious for a Republican candidate who could appeal to
prospective voters in the working class, especially those who had not voted in recent presidential elections but could
be mobilized to vote."
Morgan and graduate student Jiwon Lee studied data from the 1994 through 2016 editions of the General Social
Survey, to model how party identification has evolved over the past 24 years.
They focused on more than 30,000 eligible voters. The survey asks respondents which political party they identify
with, as well as questions about their occupation and education, which allowed the researchers to determine how
working-class voters aligned themselves politically over time.
"We found substantial change in party identification across the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack
Obama, particularly during Obama's tenure," Morgan said. "Many eligible working-class voters were becoming less
attached to the Democratic Party, but their loyalties weren't shifting to the Republican Party."
Many of these voters—lower-paid, lower-skilled workers often in blue-collar jobs—had begun to consider themselves
independent, Morgan found.
This softening of party identification opened the door for a candidate like Donald Trump, who could appeal to former
Democrats who were uncomfortable with the Republican Party establishment.
The survey didn't explore why voters who changed party affiliation did so, but Morgan suspects a number of causes:
a slow economic recovery after the recession, a failure by those in office to prosecute the individuals responsible for
the collapse of financial institutions, and the continuing erosion of real wages for semi-skilled and unskilled workers.
Morgan estimates that between 6 and 10 percent of working-class voters shifted allegiances, not enough for the
Democratic Party to entirely lose its overall working-class advantage.
Meanwhile, Morgan found certain other Democrats became even more loyal to the party: white-collar professionals
and other higher-paid workers. With their relative affluence and stability, these Democrats were less affected by the
recession and more inclined to support what have become bread and butter issues for the Democratic Party—social
matters like climate change and same-sex marriage.
A silver lining for Democrats, Morgan said, is that some of these lost working-class voters didn't support a traditional
Republican, but someone who appealed to their economic interests.
 Demos – Young Voters – Key
Young voters key
Struck, 6-22 (Kathleen Struck is a Digital Managing Editor and Education Editor of Voice of America’s Student Union. 6-22-
2020, accessed on 7-12-2020, Voice of America, "Plenty of Signs Surging Youth Vote Will Play Major Role in 2020 US
Election  ", https://www.voanews.com/student-union/plenty-signs-surging-youth-vote-will-play-major-role-2020-us-election)
WASHINGTON - Millennials and GenZers have seen more than most generations in their young lifetimes:
a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in 2001, two economic crashes and record unemployment, extreme
weather events, divisive politics and a global pandemic. And most recently, social unrest in response to
the death of George Floyd, an African American man who died after being restrained by Minneapolis
police. “Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance,” economics journalist Annie Lowrey wrote for The Atlantic in
April. Yet there are plenty of signs that young Americans could play a major role in the 2020 election,
helping to determine the outcome of the race between Republican President Donald Trump and
Democratic challenger Joe Biden, as well as political control of Congress, and beyond. Their record
turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, signs of political activism, and a handful of issues being used as a
rallying cry, including soaring college debt, health care and climate change, stand as evidence. “Young
people can decide elections, and their participation is central to our politics. Expanding the electorate
and addressing inequities in youth voting is a crucial task for strengthening democracy,” according to
the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) based at Tufts
University in Massachusetts. While younger generations mimic their elders when they were young — by
not engaging at the voting booth — the 2018 midterms saw an upsurge in participation. Election
involvement Millennial voting nearly doubled between 2014 and 2018 — from 22% to 42% — according
to demographer Richard Fry at the Pew Research Center in Washington. Thirty percent of Gen Zers
eligible to vote turned out in the first midterm elections of their lives. And for the first time in a midterm
election, more than half of Gen Xers reported they had voted, Pew reported. “This 2020 election cycle is
particularly interesting because, for the first time in almost over 25 years, we’re moving from a
midterm election where young people’s participation dramatically increased,” Abby Kiesa, CIRCLE’s
director of impact, said. “Now there are 47 million 18- to 29-year-olds who are eligible to vote in the
2020 election, and 15 million of them have turned 18 since the last presidential election,” Kiesa said.
While young people — millennials born 1985-1995, GenZers born in 1996 onward — are casually viewed
as a homogeneous group of like-minded thinkers, research shows otherwise. In the 2018 midterm
elections, two-thirds of all young voters age 18-29 supported the Democratic candidate for Congress.
That’s the widest party gap in the past 25 years, CIRCLE said. And the 2020 election will happen amid a
huge demographic shift, said Jesse Barba, senior director of external affairs at Young Invincibles, a youth
voting and political advocacy group “to expand economic opportunity for our generation.” The U.S.
population is poised to move from majority white to majority minority, or mostly non-white voters, by
2045, according to Brookings Institution. “This would be the first time in history where nonwhite people
make up the largest electorate,” Barba said.
 Demos – Young Voters – AT: U O/W
Young voters are NOT locked in – reform policies can flip the election
Astor, 3-22 (Maggie Astor is a political reporter for The New York Times. She has a degree in political science from
Barnard College. 3-22-2020, accessed on 7-12-2020, The New York Times, "Young Voters Know What They Want. But They
Don’t See Anyone Offering It.", https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/politics/young-voters-biden-sanders.html)
The oldest of them were just out of college on 9/11; the youngest were not yet born. Over the two decades that followed, they
all came of age under storm clouds: of war, of recession, of mass shootings, wildfires and now a pandemic. The result is perhaps
the most profound generational gap since the 1960s: between the Generation X, baby boomer and Silent Generation voters
who remember one world, and the millennial and Generation Z voters for whom that world never existed. In November,
for the first time, the new generations will have enough electoral clout to seriously compete
with the old. But, with Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign barely clinging to life, many feel more disillusioned than empowered. In the
Democratic primary race, most millennial and Gen Z voters — meaning, roughly, people ages 18 to 39 — have supported Mr. Sanders, of
Vermont, or Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and few are enthusiastic about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. On the
Republican side, young voters are less likely than older ones to support President Trump, and some conservatives have left the party altogether.
Just when millennial and Gen Z voters have the most power to choose
The problem is circular and self-reinforcing.
their leaders, many feel no one is speaking to them. So many of them don’t vote. So many candidates
continue not to speak to them. So they get still more disillusioned. “I would love to see more emphasis
on listening to young people and talking to us instead of at us,” said Deana Ayers, 21, a senior at the
University of North Texas who voted for Mr. Sanders. “I’m the future of your party. You should be giving
me resources and training and listening to the way I want this party to look.” Within the Democratic Party, the
generational tension has played out most vividly through the contest between Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders. But it is fundamentally about young
voters’ sense that they are living in an entirely different world than their parents, and that politicians — or at least the ones winning elections
— aren’t acknowledging it. Millions of millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, cast their first votes for Barack Obama, and members of
Generation Z, born after 1996, began entering the electorate as Mr. Obama’s term was ending. For them, his administration is a reference point
“We grew up with a black president who ran on a platform of change,”
for who is electable and what is achievable.
said Michael May, 20, a student at the University of Toronto who voted for Ms. Warren in his home
state, California. “We think that more is possible than older generations do.” They also think more is
needed — and that, too, is a function of experience. Older generations “had a lot more economic
stability when they were growing up and a lot less of this existential looming threat of the next big
political or global crisis,” said Lucas Ryan, 23, a student at Washburn University in Kansas who supported Ms. Warren. “It feels like we
just never stopped living in some crisis or another.” Those crises, especially the Great Recession, stunted millennials’ professional and financial
growth in ways that did not resolve after the recession ended. Now, the coronavirus threatens to once again upend any gains they have made.
BreAnna Caslake of Arizona said that at 34, she still owed $23,000 in student loans, and that she and her husband were struggling to pay their
water bill. Tom Kilian, 28, of Jacksonville, Fla., said he and his wife had been delaying having a child because of financial instability, health care
Ms. Caslake said she was unlikely to vote for Mr.
costs and climate change. Both he and Ms. Caslake voted for Mr. Sanders.
Biden in November. Mr. Kilian said he would, but reluctantly. “I am very aware of the contempt that
conservative Democrats hold my generation in,” he said. “And the feeling is definitely mutual.”
Millennials and Gen Z lean left, and they largely oppose Mr. Trump: His approval rating in a Gallup poll
this month was 36 percent among 18- to 34-year-olds, compared with 44 percent over all. But many of
them also oppose what they see as an outdated Democratic establishment. And they don’t necessarily
think replacing Mr. Trump will make their lives better. “Beating Trump is important to me, but that is not the primary issue
of this campaign,” said Adam Miller, 24, who lives in Chicago and voted for Mr. Sanders. “When I hear Bernie speak about the bold action he
wants to take against climate change, I see a future where I can consider starting a family again. When he talks about canceling student debt,
medical debt and recognizing health care as a human right, I see a life for myself where I can live without these financial burdens.” Young
conservatives, of course, do not want the same policies as young liberals — but many of them express the same disillusionment with their
that neither party is addressing their needs. In particular, young Republicans tend
leaders, and the same sense
to be more liberal than older ones on issues of gender, sexual orientation, race and multiculturalism. “The
older people in my party are more wedded to preserving culture than preserving liberty,” said Natalia Castro, 23, who grew up in rural Florida
and now works in Washington. “A lot of older conservatives are a lot slower to advocate for legal immigration because they’re concerned with
Climate change is also a big issue for young
what they see as the American identity, and I think that’s problematic.”
Republicans, just as it is for young Democrats. They don’t necessarily support proposals like the Green New Deal. But they do want the government to take urgent action, and
the resistance at the top of their party has been alienating. Blair Egan, 22, said she had argued over climate change with older Republicans, including her father, who she said “isn’t thinking about what the world’s going to look like

50 years down the line because it honestly doesn’t impact him.” Ms. Egan, a graduate student at the University of Illinois Springfield, also wants the government to address the student debt crisis and the cost of higher education,

even if she doesn’t support the sweeping loan forgiveness some Democrats have proposed. She recently graduated from Ohio University with $30,000 in debt despite academic scholarships, and was able to enroll in a master’s

program only because of a tuition waiver. Both she and Ms. Castro are loath to vote for Mr. Trump — who Ms. Egan argued used conservative ideas “as a smoke screen for a message and platform that’s based in anxiety, fear,

suspicion and conspiracy” — but are deeply frustrated that their choice is him or a Democrat with whom they disagree on important policies. Ms. Castro said that she would never vote for a Democrat who supported gun control —

her one nonnegotiable issue — but that she wouldn’t vote for Mr. Trump either. She said she wished Representative Justin Amash, the Michigan libertarian who left the Republican Party last year, would run third-party. More likely,

she will cast a write-in vote. Much like young Democrats, many young Republicans say they are frustrated at the degree to which their views isolate them within the party. “I’ve been called a RINO more times than I can count,

which I don’t appreciate, because that’s their way of questioning my integrity and my principles,” Ms. Egan said. “There are plenty of other young Republicans, even if they’re not saying it, who feel alienated or ostracized because

they’re being asked to support an ideology they didn’t sign up for.” Their elders may say much of what is true now was also true decades ago. Boomers grew up with the threat of nuclear extinction and the view that previous

generations had made a mess of everything from war and peace to sex. Many young Democrats were alienated from the party establishment and bitter when their favored candidates lost to more conventional ones. Rare
is the political moment when the choices of the young trump those of older generations. Still, in
dozens of interviews, young voters on both sides of the aisle said that they felt their generation had
been left to clean up after older ones, and that they resented what they saw as a choice by leaders in
both parties not to prioritize the issues they cared about . “I still feel like I relate more to Republicans than Democrats,”
said Hannah Daniel, 21, a student at Union University in Tennessee. “But I really do feel a bit politically homeless.” Their open
frustration is really exhaustion, some said: at educating themselves, explaining themselves and still feeling ignored or patronized. The outright
“We are quite literally fighting for our lives, for our survival,
anger comes because they see the stakes as life and death.
when it comes to issues of gun safety, when it comes to the climate crisis, when it comes to treating
people with dignity and respect,” said Evan Feldberg-Bannatyne, 21, a student at Earlham College in
Indiana who supports Mr. Sanders. “It strikes me as almost tragic that the world has gotten to a place
where I feel like my childhood was ended abruptly,” he continued, “and I was forced into a position
where I had to fight.”
 Demos – Young Voters – AT: N/U
Biden’s winning young voters now and they’re key
Schwartz, 6-6 (Brian Schwartz is a political finance reporter for CNBC. 6-6-2020, accessed on 7-12-
2020, CNBC, "George Floyd protests created a surge in voter registrations, groups say",
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/george-floyd-protests-created-surge-in-voter-registrations-groups-
say.html)

Voter registrations, volunteer activity and donations for groups linked to Democratic causes are
surging in the midst of protests following the death of George Floyd , according to voting advocacy
groups. This surge in registrations could end up being one of the factors that helps tip the election
between apparent Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. The efforts are by
groups including Latino voter registration organizations, Rock the Vote and one co-chaired by former
first lady Michelle Obama. Latino voter registration groups in recent weeks have noticed an uptick in
their communities mobilization to vote, particularly from younger voters. The leaders of these
organizations said that many are registering after nationwide outrage directed at police brutality and the
spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has left over 100,000 dead and tens of millions jobless in the
United States. Unemployment rates for Hispanic and black workers remained high at 17.6% and 16.8%,
respectively, even after the nation added 2.5 million jobs last month. Latino voters are a key voting bloc for whom Biden and Trump are
competing. Yet polls show that Trump has largely been out of favor with the majority of the Latino community, in the wake of his
administration's efforts to cut off funding to young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally and to build a border wall across the
Mexican border. A recent survey shows 62% of registered Latino voters would back Biden over Trump. Floyd died last week while being
subdued by a white Minneapolis police officer. The four officers involved in the arrest of the black man have been charged in his death, which
sparked nationwide protests. Many young Latino voters, leaders of these groups said, are showing solidarity with members of the black
Voto Latino, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that is looking to help Democrats
community in their opposition to Trump.
overtake Trump by registering a record number of Latinos to vote, said it has seen a massive upswing of
registrations since protests began over a week ago. Maria Teresa Kumar, CEO of the organization, told
CNBC the group has already surpassed its June goal of registering 20,000 people, including in the key
states of Arizona and Texas, and is expected to have 50,000 Latino youth registered by Sunday. She said
they've done extensive digital test ads in states across the country tying the need to vote to what
Latinos are witnessing in the protests. She said the group has leaped over its June target of spending
$140,000 in those two Southwest states, where polls show a tight race between Trump and Biden. Now,
the group is preparing to invest another $300,000 as a result of the gains. Kumar has previously told
CNBC that she is aiming to register at least 500,000 young Latinos by Election Day. The group's website
reflects how Voto Latino is encouraging Latino voters to register for the election, noting that policing,
mayors and prosecutors are often determined by local elections. "There are many ways to get involved
to end police brutality and racist policing," the website says. "Be sure to vote all the way down the ballot
for leaders who will listen to us and who care about the safety and lives of our Black and brown
communities." The demonstrations have ignited a larger push, particularly by Democratic leaders, to
persuade people to organize and vote in addition to peacefully protest. "This is not an 'either or.' This is
both, and to bring about real change, we both have to highlight a problem and make people in power
uncomfortable, but we also have to translate that into practical solutions and laws that can be
implemented and we can monitor and make sure we're following up on," former President Barack
Obama said in a recent online address. In other cases, voter registration groups such as When We All
Vote, an organization co-chaired by Michelle Obama, are seeing big jumps in support at the financial and
volunteer levels. The group has raised over $55,000 since last week, on an increase of 70% of online
donations. Over that same period, it signed up 1,500 new volunteers. In two days, it trained 700 people
to become voting squad captains who lead voter registration and engagement in their communities.
Rock the Vote, a nonprofit dedicated to registering voters that was founded by music executive Jeff
Ayeroff, has seen historic results in just the past week. Carolyn DeWitt, the group's CEO, told CNBC that
since Monday, it has seen over 50,000 new voters. She said it's the most registrations in a single week
during the 2020 election cycle. Part of that success comes on the heels of the group recently seeing 1.4
million impressions on its social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.
Although the group can't make a direct link in the surge of registrations to the protests, DeWitt said it
suggests that voters are looking for extensive changes to their government. "While we don't
necessarily have evidence right now until we dig into the motivations of registering at this moment, I
think the urgency raised awareness that people believe change needs to happen," DeWitt said. Rock the
Vote's online voter registration platform is used by over 1,000 partners, including Voto Latino.
Demographics of voters who were registered by Rock the Vote's own efforts this week shows 70% were
under age 30, 76% were women and 39% said they were people of color. Forty-two percent of the
under-30 group were people of color. Mi Familia Vota, a civic engagement nonprofit, has registered up
to 3,000 new voters this week throughout the states where it is based, including Arizona, California,
Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Texas. Its CEO, Hector Sanchez Barba, said he believes it is due to the
protests that have taken place in the wake of Floyd's death. "We have seen solidarity with our African
American brothers and sisters," Barba said. "It's unacceptable that we see all this racism and violence,
and we are going to stand with the African American community because an attack on one is an attack
on all of us."
 Demos – Black Voters – AT: U O/W
Young black voters are on the fence about Biden—they can flip the election
Hoskin, 6-30 (Dr. Maia Hoskin is a professor, race scholar, activist, therapist, freelance writer,
keynote speaker, and consultant. 6-30-2020, accessed on 7-12-2020, Forbes, "Not So Fast Democrats.
Young Black Voters Are Still Not Fully Convinced And It Might Cost Joe Biden The Election",
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maiahoskin/2020/06/30/not-so-fast-democrats-young-black-voters-are-
still-not-fully-convinced-and-it-might-cost-joe-biden-the-election/#b4f65bb6f460)

Joe Biden’s interview with “The Breakfast Club” a few months ago did not bode well with the Black
community and almost two months later it might still be telling of the relationship between Blacks
and the Democratic Party that some argue is riddled with neglect and exploitation. Some accused
Biden of appearing arrogant and entitled during the interview, and although he quickly apologized for
his comments, many argue that Biden’s behavior is symptomatic of the party feeling as though they
own the Black vote as opposed to having to earn the Black vote. Gone are the days of Blacks voting
solely based on an allegiance to the Democratic Party and in gratitude for the right to vote. Voting
should be held as sacred. However, many young Black voters are no longer satisfied with having to
choose between “the lesser of two evils” and are demanding the same contentious campaign efforts
that are directed toward other voter groups. Biden’s recent interview only fanned the flames of
existing frustrations. Toward the end of the interview, Charlemagne asked Biden to return to the show
before November, and Biden replied, “You’ve got more questions? Well, I tell you what, if you have a
problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” Charlemagne then
explained to Biden that his questions had nothing to do with Trump. “It has to do with the fact [that] I
want something for my community,” he said. Biden went on to defend his history of involvement in civil
rights and emphasized being endorsed by the NAACP. Social media immediately erupted, and
conservatives quickly pounced on the opportunity to criticize Biden and the Democratic Party — even
going as far as the Trump campaign selling #YouAintBlack t-shirts on their website. But they were not
alone. Black public figures such as Sean Diddy Combs commented on Twitter, reminding Biden that the
Black vote isn’t free. Even Derrick Johnson, NAACP President and CEO who has openly supported Biden,
expressed concern over the comment. After what some considered as yet another Biden “gaffe,”
nationwide demonstrations in response to the death of George Floyd presented the Democratic Party
with a potential inflection point to engage young Black voters and to begin to build their trust. Some
argue that Biden provided an empathetic and social justice driven response to the killing of George
Floyd and the protests that followed, but it remains to be seen if his response and declaration of
support to the Black community was enough for it to be a milestone in earning the support of young
Black voters. At the beginning of the year, Black Lives Matter sought to better understand why young
Black voters were no longer excited about voting after Barak Obama left office. In doing so, they
commissioned eight focus groups of young Black voters who expressed various feelings of frustration
and alienation from both the Democratic Party and the electoral process overall. Several participants
expressed disappointment with not seeing tangible improvements in their communities despite the
continued longstanding support that the Black community has given to Democrats. Since the study,
the Black community has been hit with a pandemic which continues to disproportionately ravage
people of color, an economic recession that’s left millions unemployed, and ongoing challenges with
Blacks being the target of police brutality. Democrats have encouraged the Black community to take
their frustrations to the polls in November. But for young Black voters, that requires trust in a system
that they feel has been exploitative and has done very little for them and their communities. Many
young Black voters have taken issue with Biden’s support of the 1994 crime bill and his
opposition to the federal government’s involvement in desegregation and busing. During a
2019 democratic debate, Biden explained that he felt the decision to desegregate schools should’ve
been made at the local level — a defense that conservatives also often used to challenge statewide and
federal desegregation programs. Political strategists argue that for Biden to gain the trust of young Black
voters, Biden must first acknowledge his past yet questionable position with desegregation as well as his
past support for strict law enforcement policies and a criminal justice system that’s historically
discriminated against people of color. Trying to pull the wool over the eyes of young
Black voters is a futile effort. A small dose of accountability and transparency may prove to go a
long way in Biden winning the support of this group. Black millennial and gen z voters have also
expressed interest in more ambitious policies than what Biden has championed. Unlike some
older Black voters, they do not view the work that he has done with former President Barak Obama as a
justification by itself to earn their vote. “I think there’s a generational gap between younger African
Americans and older African Americans,” South Carolina state Rep. Kambrell Garvin said “Younger
African Americans like Joe Biden, but a lot of us aren’t supportive of Joe Biden because we want a
change in policies. We aren’t looking to tinker around the edges.” In states such as South Carolina, Biden
won 61% of the Black vote during the 2020 primaries and some argue that Black voters ultimately
helped him beat Bernie Sanders. That said, young people did not support Biden in the primaries.
Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic pollster who conducted the focus groups for Black Lives Matter
earlier this year argues that the same young people who have raged against antiblack
racism and who are currently demanding for police reform are the same group
of disenfranchised and disillusioned voters who are holding Biden accountable
for his past political record. “There is some atonement that needs to happen there,” Woodbury
told Politico. In 2016 the Black voter turnout for a presidential election declined for the first time in 20
years — dropping to 59.6% after a record-high (66.6%) in 2012. This decline led to a less than desired
outcome for Democrats and further illustrated the power of the Black vote. Looking ahead, Black millennials and
gen z voters could largely shape the direction of the Black vote. In 2016, millennials across race and ethnicity had a 50.8% voter turnout rate
compared to 46.4% in 2012. However, Black millennials saw a decline in voter turn-out in the last presidential election with 50.6% in 2016
compared with 55% in 2012. These numbers reflect frustration among many young Black voters who are tired of feeling invisible and not
connected to the electoral process. Biden’s mishaps and highly criticized political past in policy are not new for the Democratic Party. Hillary
Clinton received feedback from young Black voters in 2016 about concerns they had over her past support of the same 1994 crime bill that has
Perhaps, racial privilege might be at the
proven to be Biden’s Achilles’ heel. Yet, she did little to directly address those concerns.
core of this issue. Many feel that Joe Biden’s behavior during his interview on “The Breakfast Club”
appeared to draw from a sense of racial privilege and neglect. When it comes to young Black voters,
some argue that Biden is not running against Donald Trump. He is running against himself. He is running
against his past and his privilege as a white man who dared to assign Blackness to Black Americans on a
nationally syndicated radio show. Most members of the Black community have already developed a
strong opinion either in favor or not in favor of Donald Trump. That said, Blacks are not obligated to vote
Democrat or to vote at all. For many Blacks, this is not a Trump versus Biden issue. It’s about how the
former vice president will address current antiblack systems of oppression that impact the Black
community. Biden will undoubtedly win a large majority of Black votes, but the question remains will
it be enough. Young Black voters have expressed their outrage over what they feel is an egregious
neglect when it comes to earning the Black vote and their weariness of the expectation that having the
right to vote in and of itself should be sufficient cause for Blacks to be satisfied with supporting
Democratic candidates by default. Partisanship aside, voters want to feel valued and heard. That is not
going to happen collectively for the Democratic Party until white Democrats examine and address
their racial privilege and inherent biases. Fast apologies are no longer sufficient. Black voters are
demanding more. Until serious changes are made, some argue that Democrats will continue to
experience these awkward blunders and will continue to lament over painful electoral defeats. Although
Democratic pollsters encourage Blacks to show up at the polls in November, they also implore
Democrats to give the Black community a reason to give them their vote, other than Biden not being Trump. I am
a writer, activist, and college professor who teaches graduate-level courses in counseling. I earned my Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Clinical
Supervision and I I am a writer, activist, and college professor who teaches graduate-level courses in counseling. I earned my Ph.D. in Counselor
Education and Clinical Supervision and I give keynote speeches and facilitate cultural consciousness seminars and training to staff, students, and
faculty at both private and public businesses, K-12 schools, and universities on topics related to oppression, difference, and mental health. The
roles that I cherish most are being a wife and mother who fancies online shopping, ice cream, Spike Lee movies, and 90’s music.
 Impact – Biden Solves New Start
Biden solves New Start
Joe Biden 2020, AMERICAN LEADERSHIP, The Power of America’s Example: The Biden Plan for Leading the Democratic
World to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century, Joe Biden.com, https://joebiden.com/americanleadership/
Renew our Commitment to Arms Control for a New Era:
The historic Iran nuclear deal, negotiated by the Obama-Biden administration alongside our allies and other world powers,
blocked Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Yet Trump decided to cast it aside, prompting Iran to restart its nuclear program and
become more provocative, bringing the region to the cusp of another disastrous war. If Tehran returns to compliance with the
deal, President Biden would re-enter the agreement, using hard-nosed diplomacy and support from our allies to strengthen and
extend it, while more effectively pushing back against Iran’s other destabilizing activities.
In North Korea, President Biden will empower our negotiators and jump start a sustained, coordinated campaign with our allies
and others, including China, to advance our shared objective of a denuclearized North Korea.
As president, Biden will pursue an extension of the New START Treaty, an anchor of strategic stability between the U nited
States and Russia, and use that as a foundation for new arms control arrangements.
President Biden would take other steps to demonstrate our commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons. As he said in
2017, Biden believes the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and if necessary, retaliating against—a
nuclear attack. As president, he will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.
 Impact – Biden Solves Climate Change
Biden rejoins the Paris Accords
Joe Biden 2020, AMERICAN LEADERSHIP, The Power of America’s Example: The Biden Plan for Leading the Democratic
World to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century, Joe Biden.com, https://joebiden.com/americanleadership/
Rally the World to Address the Existential Climate Crisis: The Biden administration will rejoin the Paris Climate Accord on day
one and lead a major diplomatic push to raise the ambitions of countries’ climate targets. To catalyze this effort and demonstrate
concrete actions at home to achieve a clean-energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050 , President Biden – as outlined in
his comprehensive plan – will in his first 100 days in office:
Convene a climate world summit to directly engage the leaders of the major carbon-emitting nations of the world to persuade
them to join the United States in making more ambitious national pledges, above and beyond the commitments they have
already made.
Lock in enforceable commitments that will reduce emissions in global shipping and aviation—and pursue strong measures to
make sure other nations can’t undercut us economically as we meet our own commitments. This includes pressuring China—the
world’s largest emitter of carbon—to stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing their pollution to other countries by financing
billions of dollars of dirty fossil-fuel energy projects through their Belt and Road Initiative.
 Impact – AT: Biden = Fossil Fuels
Biden solves climate change – their evidence doesn’t account for new proposals
Matt Viser and Dino Grandoni, 7/14, 2020, “Biden, in new climate plan, embraces more aggressive steps”, Washington
Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-set-to-offer-newly-ambitious-climate-goals/2020/07/14/39ced8b8-c578-
11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html
Biden would reverse 100 Trump administration public health and environmental rollbacks Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made his pitch to combat the climate
Biden unveiled a proposal Tuesday to transform the nation’s
crisis in a speech on July 14, targeting President Trump’s rollbacks. (The Washington Post) Joe
energy industry, pledging to eliminate carbon pollution from power plants by 2035 and spend $2 trillion to turbocharge the clean
energy economy. The plan would significantly reduce the United States’ reliance on fossil fuels, and the 15-year timeline for a 100
percent clean electricity standard is far more ambitious than anything Biden has previously proposed. It was Biden’s latest attempt to
channel the liberal energy in his party, as well as a response to calls for sweeping plans to lift a struggling economy. The blueprint was quickly
hailed by environmentalists and liberals as a big step forward in the climate effort, and just as quickly denounced by Republicans as an unwieldy plan that would raise energy costs.
“We’re not just going to tinker around the edges,” Biden said in a speech in Wilmington, Del. “We’re going to make historic investments and seize the opportunity and meet this moment
upgrading 4 million
in history.” Former vice president Joe Biden speaks at a recent campaign event in Delaware. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee proposed
buildings and weatherizing 2 million homes over four years, which his campaign estimates would create 1 million jobs. Homeown ers would be given
cash rebates to upgrade home appliances and install more efficient windows. Car owners would receive rebates to swap their
old, less efficient cars for newer ones that release fewer pollutants. Biden also said he would create a new “Environmental and
Climate Justice Division” within the Justice Department to prosecute anti-pollution cases. “These aren’t pie-in-the-sky dreams,”
he said. “These are actionable policies that we can get to work on right away.” Many of Biden’s proposals build on the recommendations of a task
force made up jointly of allies of Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Those recommendations include plans to dramatically expand solar and wind energy ,
including the installation of 500 million solar panels and 60,000 wind turbines. Biden’s plan is likely to trigger a vigorous debate with President Trump, who has a much different
approach to the country’s energy sector and climate policy. Trump, a strong backer of fossil fuels, has sought to roll back Obama-era policies aimed at decreasing carbon dioxide
emissions and setting new standards for household items such as lightbulbs. He has also downplayed the science behind climate change, and in 2017 he pledged to pull the United
States out of the Paris climate pact. Trump’s embrace of the coal industry was one of his signature issues in 2016, part of his portrait of Hillary Clinton as disdainful of the country’s
industrial workers. It’s not clear whether Trump can successfully level similar attacks against Biden, or whether the political landscape has shifted to make that difficult. In 2016,
Republicans attacked Clinton for her comment that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” though Clinton was suggesting this would happen
because of market forces, not as part of her plan. Trump, meanwhile, pledged to revive the ailing coal industry, telling miners in West Virginia that “we are going to get those mines
open” if he were elected. But the coal industry has continued to struggle under Trump, largely because of competition from natural gas and renewable energy. The Trump campaign
was quick to go after Biden’s proposal Tuesday. “His plan is more like a socialist manifesto that promises to massively raise taxes, eliminate jobs in the coal, oil or natural gas
industries, and crush the middle class,” said Hogan Gidley, the campaign’s national press secretary. “He’s pushing extreme policies that would smother the economy just when it’s
showing signs of roaring back.” Biden, in pledging Tuesday to achieve 100 percent clean electricity by 2035, embraced a more direct approach than President Barack Obama, his boss
at the time, took a decade ago during his own efforts to rein in emissions from the power sector. During his first year in office, Obama worked with congressional Democrats on a cap-
and-trade system, in which companies buy and sell credits permitting them to release carbon into the atmosphere. But the measure proved politically toxic. It passed the House but was
never given a vote in the Senate. Instead, Biden
wants to require electric utilities to get more of their power from carbon-free sources —
including wind, solar, nuclear and hydroelectric — and to improve the energy efficiency of their systems or face penalties. While
some changes could be made through executive actions, a sweeping plan like Biden’s could face resistance in Congress — one reason the campaign is framing it as an economic
package and not solely an environmental initiative. If Biden wins, its fate may depend on whether Democrats retake the Senate, but the plan’s supporters say it has more appeal than a
cap-and-trade system. “It’s built on a smart approach that’s already been tested in the states,” said Dan Reicher, a former Energy Department official who co-founded Clean Energy for
Biden, which is fundraising for the campaign. “It will be less controversial than a national cap-and-trade system or carbon tax, with real prospects for bipartisan support.”
Similar standards have proved to be politically viable at the state level. A majority of states — including several conservative ones such as Montana, Iowa and Texas — have imposed
their own renewable energy requirements on local utilities. But no standard exists at the federal level. The ratcheted-up targets came after Biden faced pressure from young left-leaning
activists and major environmental groups to do more to address what they see as a generational crisis. Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs at the League of
Conservation Voters, praised the Biden campaign’s announcement for going “further than the strong plan he put out last summer,” saying public polling shows voters have an appetite
for action. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the federal government should act more aggressively against climate change, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center.
The big-spending League of Conservation Voters, which pumped more than $80 million into the 2018 election, endorsed Biden in April only after he promised to toughen his climate
plan. Biden said Tuesday that the proposal was aimed at twin goals of rebuilding the economy and fighting climate change. Much of the spending, he said, would go toward repairing
bridges and roads and improving public transportation systems. AD He claimed that his proposal was doing what Trump has not, in what became a running joke as the White House
week after week said the president would focus on repairing the country’s infrastructure, only to digress into other subjects. “It seems like every few weeks when he needs a distraction
from the latest charges of corruption . . . the White House announces, quote, it’s infrastructure week,” Biden said. “But he’s never delivered. He’s never even really tried.” Biden’s
proposal says all American-built buses should emit zero greenhouse gases by 2030, and it would also aim to convert the country’s 500,000 school buses, including those running on
To tackle climate-warming
diesel fuel, to zero emissions. As Biden has promised previously, he would also aim to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.
pollution from the transportation sector, the nation’s biggest greenhouse gas source, Biden is endorsing a bill from Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
that would pay people to trade in gas-guzzling cars for electric and other low-emissions vehicles — essentially a “cash for clunkers”
program on steroids. While comparing his proposals to what the Obama administration did during the 2009 stimulus, Biden said, “We’ll do it again. But this time bigger and
faster and smarter.” Biden also said he would use the government’s purchasing power to convert 3 million vehicles in the federal fleet to clean cars, giving
the auto industry an incentive to produce more environmentally friendly cars, trucks and postal vehicles. Biden’s campaign declined to
describe exactly how he would pay for the new spending. Some of it, advisers said, would be through stimulus funding, which could add to the ballooning federal deficit. It could also be
offset by rescinding the tax cuts pushed by Trump and approved by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2017, or by “asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share,” the
advisers said. The campaign intends to more fully describe how its plans would be funded in the coming weeks, after Biden outlines more of his spending plans, aides said. The climate
proposal does not go into detail about what would happen to areas of the country that are heavily reliant on the fossil fuel industry, although one part of Biden’s plan aims to create
250,000 jobs plugging abandoned oil and natural gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hard-rock and uranium mines. Biden is also calling for the creation of a “civilian climate
corps,” an idea that was promoted during the Democratic primary by Gov. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps established by President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Biden has spoken with Inslee, who ran against him in the Democratic primary with a campaign focused sharply on climate change, and
former Inslee advisers have been working with Biden’s campaign to craft his energy policy. “This
is the single most comprehensive and ambitious climate
plan ever advanced by a major presidential nominee,” said Sam Ricketts, who co-authored Inslee’s climate plan and co-founded Evergreen Action, a group
pushing to implement the Inslee plan. Biden is also calling for several environmental justice provisions, including a proposal that some 40 percent of the money he wants to spend on
clean energy would go to historically disadvantaged communities. Biden held a fundraiser Monday with about 140 executives where he spoke about his focus on clean energy. “I don’t
have to be Pollyannaish about this: Donald Trump has ignored the warning, refused to prepare,” he said of the climate crisis. The former vice president also said he would take swift
action and set a more urgent timeline than his earlier proposal, which would have sought to eliminate carbon emissions from power plants by 2050. That 2050 deadline, he said, “is a
million years from now [for] most people. My plan is focused on taking action — now. God willing I win and even if I serve eight years, I want to make sure we put down such a marker
that it’s impossible for the next president to turn it around.” Election 2020: What to know Updated July 24, 2020 More Americans can vote by mail in November than before the
pandemic; find out which states have changed rules. Barring a landslide, we may not have a result in the presidential election on Nov. 3. See what elections are coming up and which
have moved. President Trump abruptly canceled the Republican National Convention celebrations scheduled for next month in Jacksonville, Fla. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe
Biden has a double-digit lead over President Trump in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, and the election seems like it will be a referendum on Trump.
 Biden Solves – General
Biden will reform the criminal justice reform
Joe Biden for President No Date (Joe Biden for President; Joe Biden’s campaign website; No Date; “Joe Biden's Criminal
Justice Policy“; https://joebiden.com/justice/; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
The Biden Plan for Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice Equality, equity, justice – these ideas form the American creed. We have never lived up to it
and we haven’t always gotten it right, but we’ve never stopped trying. This is especially true when it comes to our criminal justice system. Today, too many
people are incarcerated in the United States – and too many of them are black and brown. To build safe and healthy communities, we need to rethink who we’re
sending to jail, how we treat those in jail, and how we help them get the health care, education, jobs, and housing they need to successfully rejoin society after
they serve their time. As president, Joe Biden will strengthen America’s commitment to justice and reform our criminal justice system.
The Biden Plan for Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice is based on several core principles: We can and must reduce the number of people
incarcerated in this country while also reducing crime. No one should be incarcerated for drug use alone. Instead, they should be diverted to drug courts and
treatment. Reducing the number of incarcerated individuals will reduce federal spending on incarceration. These savings should be reinvested in the
communities impacted by mass incarceration. Our criminal justice system cannot be just unless we root out the racial, gender, and
income-based disparities in the system. Black mothers and fathers should feel confident that their children are safe walking the streets of America. And,
when a police officer pins on that shield and walks out the door, the officer’s family should know they’ll come home at the end of the day. Additionally, women
and children are uniquely impacted by the criminal justice system, and the system needs to address their unique needs. Our criminal justice system must
be focused on redemption and rehabilitation. Making sure formerly incarcerated individuals have the opportunity to be productive members of our society is not only the right thing to do, it will also grow our
economy. No one should be profiteering off of our criminal justice system. Biden calls for the immediate passage of Congressman Bobby Scott’s SAFE Justice Act, an evidence-based, comprehensive bill to reform our criminal justice system “from front-end
sentencing reform to back-end release policies.” The Biden Plan will also go further. Biden will take bold action to reduce our prison population, create a more just society, and make our communities safer, by: Preventing crime and providing opportunities for
all. Eliminating racial disparities and ensuring fair sentences. Offering second chances. Reducing violence in our communities and supporting survivors of violence. PREVENTING CRIME AND PROVIDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL Preventing crime is the
best way to make our communities safer and reduce incarceration. Evidence tell us that certain life experiences are strongly correlated with an increased likelihood of future incarceration. The percentage of girls in our juvenile justice system who have a
history of physical or sexual abuse could be as high as 80 or 90%. Roughly 1 out of every 4 children in foster care will interact with the criminal justice system just two years after exiting foster care. Incarcerated individuals have lower literacy levels than
individuals not involved in the criminal justice system. Too many people with mental health or substance use disorders end up incarcerated. We have to address these underlying factors to provide opportunities for all and prevent crime and incarceration.
Focusing on addressing these underlying factors is not just the right thing to do, it is also good for our communities and our economy. It costs the federal government about $100 per day to hold someone in federal prison. And that dollar amount doesn’t begin
to capture “the true cost of incarceration” – emotional and financial – on families whose loved ones are incarcerated. This dollar amount doesn’t capture the ways in which mass incarceration can tear apart the fabric of a community. And, it doesn’t capture the
economic impact of removing incarcerated individuals from the labor force. The Biden Plan will shift our country’s focus from incarceration to prevention. As president, Biden will: Create a new $20 billion competitive grant program to spur states to shift from
incarceration to prevention. To accelerate criminal justice reform at the state and local levels, Biden will create a new grant program inspired by a proposal by the Brennan Center. States, counties, and cities will receive funding to invest in efforts proven to
reduce crime and incarceration, including efforts to address some of the factors like illiteracy and child abuse that are correlated with incarceration. In order to receive this funding, states will have to eliminate mandatory minimums for non-violent crimes,
institute earned credit programs, and take other steps to reduce incarceration rates without impacting public safety. Invest in educational opportunity for all. To truly create opportunity and address one of the key underlying drivers of crime, President Biden will
ensure that no child’s future is determined by their zip code, parents’ income, race, or disability. He’ll start by making pre-K available to every three- and four-year-old. He’ll triple funding for Title I, the federal program funding schools with a high percentage of
students from low-income families. This will eliminate the funding gap between white and non-white districts, and rich and poor districts. Biden will also make sure every high school student graduates with either advanced credits or an industry credential in
their pocket. And, he’ll make community college free for all qualified students. Read Joe Biden’s full Plan for Educators, Students, and our Future. Expand federal funding for mental health and substance use disorder services and research. People
experiencing mental health problems and substance use disorders should have access to affordable, quality care long before their situations escalate and they interact with the criminal justice system. The Biden Plan will expand health insurance coverage so
more Americans have access to treatment, ensure enforcement of mental health parity laws, and expand funding for mental health services. In addition, Biden will double the number of psychologists, guidance counselors, nurses, social workers, and other
health professionals in our schools so our kids get the mental health care they need. Get people who should be supported with social services – instead of in our prisons – connected to the help they need. Too often, those in need of mental health care or
rehabilitation for a substance use disorder do not get the care that they need. Instead, they end up having interactions with law enforcement that lead to incarceration. The same is true for homeless individuals. That’s not fair to those individuals, and it’s not
fair to police officers. To change the nature of these interactions, the Biden Administration will fund initiatives to partner mental health and substance use disorder experts, social workers, and disability advocates with police departments. These service
providers will train police officers to better de-escalate interactions with people in severe emotional distress before they become violent. They’ll also help police officers learn how to better approach individuals with certain disabilities, like those with autism or
who are deaf, so misunderstanding does not lead to incarceration. And, these service providers will respond to calls with police officers so individuals who should not be in the criminal justice system are diverted to treatment for addiction or mental health
problems, or are provided with the housing or other social services they may need. ELIMINATING RACIAL DISPARITIES AND ENSURING FAIR SENTENCES We need to confront racial and income-based disparities in our justice system and eliminate

As president, Biden will: Expand and use the power of the U.S. Justice Department to address systemic
overly harsh sentencing for non-violent crimes.

misconduct in police departments and prosecutors’ offices. Using authority in legislation spearheaded by Biden as senator, the Obama-Biden
Justice Department used pattern-or-practice investigations and consent decrees to address circumstances of “systemic police misconduct” and to
“restore trust between police and communities” in cities such as Ferguson. Yet, the Trump Administration’s Justice Department has
limited the use of this tool. For example, under the Trump Administration, consent decrees between the Justice Department and police
departments must now be signed off on by a political appointee from the Department . And, the Justice Department has set an arbitrary limit
on how long such consent decrees can remain in place regardless of whether an end to the agreement is warranted. Under the Biden Administration, the
Justice Department will again use its authority to root out unconstitutional or unlawful policing . The Biden Administration will reverse the
limitations put in place under President Trump, and Biden will appoint Justice Department leadership who will prioritize the role of using
pattern-or-practice investigations to strengthen our justice system. In addition, Biden will push for legislation to clarify that this pattern-or-
practice investigation authority can also be used to address systemic misconduct by prosecutors’ offices . Establish an independent
Task Force on Prosecutorial Discretion. Law enforcement officials’ decisions regarding when to arrest, when to charge, and what charges to bring are
critical decision-points in our criminal justice system. The charges, for example, can dramatically impact not only what sentence someone ends up with but also
whether they are compelled to take a plea bargain. The Biden Administration will create a new task force, placed outside of the U.S. Department
of Justice, to make recommendations for tackling discrimination and other problems in our justice system that results from arrest and
charging decisions. Invest in public defenders’ offices to ensure defendants’ access to quality counsel. To create a fairer criminal justice system, we
must ensure that individuals who cannot afford counsel have quality representation. And, access to counsel should be available starting at the moment someone
appears before a judge. But, right now, defenders’ resources and support are too decentralized and too hard to access. And, as Vice President Biden knows
from his own experience leaving a law firm to be a public defender, the wage disparity for prosecutors and defenders limits the ability of defenders’ offices to
recruit the best and brightest. As president, Biden will expand the Obama-Biden effort to expand resources for public defenders’ offices. Eliminate
mandatory minimums. Biden supports an end to mandatory minimums . As president, he will work for the passage of legislation to
repeal mandatory minimums at the federal level. And, he will give states incentives to repeal their mandatory minimums. End, once
and for all, the federal crack and powder cocaine disparity . The Obama-Biden Administration successfully narrowed the unjustified disparity between
crack and powder cocaine sentences. The Biden Administration will eliminate this disparity completely, as then-Senator Biden proposed in 2007. And,
Biden will ensure that this change is applied retroactively. Decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions.
Biden believes no one should be in jail because of cannabis use . As president, he will decriminalize cannabis use and
automatically expunge prior convictions. And, he will support the legalization of cannabis for medical purposes, leave decisions
regarding legalization for recreational use up to the states, and reschedule cannabis as a schedule II drug so researchers can
study its positive and negative impacts. End all incarceration for drug use alone and instead divert individuals to drug courts and treatment. Biden
believes that no one should be imprisoned for the use of illegal drugs alone . Instead, Biden will require federal courts to divert these
individuals to drug courts so they receive treatment to address their substance use disorder. He’ll incentivize states to put the same
requirements in place. And, he’ll expand funding for federal, state, and local drug courts. Expand other effective alternatives to detention. The
Biden Administration will also take an evidence-based approach to increase federal funding for other alternatives-to-detention courts and related
programs for individuals convicted of non-violent crimes, such as veterans courts and youthful offender courts. Eliminate the death penalty. Over 160 individuals
who’ve been sentenced to death in this country since 1973 have later been exonerated. Because we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time,
Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal
government’s example. These individuals should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole. Use the president’s clemency power
to secure the release of individuals facing unduly long sentences for certain non-violent and drug crimes. President Obama used his clemency power more than
any of the 10 prior presidents. Biden will continue this tradition and broadly use his clemency power for certain non-violent and drug crimes . End
the criminalization of poverty. End cash bail: Cash bail is the modern-day debtors’ prison. The cash bail system incarcerates people who are presumed innocent. And, it disproportionately harms low-income individuals. Biden will lead a national effort to end
cash bail and reform our pretrial system by putting in place, instead, a system that is fair and does not inject further discrimination or bias into the process. Stop jailing people for being too poor to pay fines and fees: Some people end up unable to escape our
justice system because of the very fines and fees that the system levies. Biden will use the grantmaking power of the federal government to incentivize the end of policies that incarcerate people for failing to pay fines and fees. He’ll also target policies to
revoke driver’s licenses for unpaid parking or speeding tickets. And, he’ll help individuals incarcerated for six months or longer get a true fresh start by incentivizing states to wipe clean any outstanding traffic fines or fees that would prevent them from
obtaining a license. These license-related reforms will not apply to licenses revoked for driving while intoxicated, reckless driving, or other serious driving violations. Stop corporations from profiteering off of incarceration. Biden will end the federal
government’s use of private prisons, building off an Obama-Biden Administration’s policy rescinded by the Trump Administration. And, he will make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of
undocumented immigrants. Biden will also make eliminating private prisons and all other methods of profiteering off of incarceration – including diversion programs, commercial bail, and electronic monitoring – a requirement for his new state and local
prevention grant program. Finally, Biden will support the passage of legislation to crack down on the practice of private companies charging incarcerated individuals and their families outrageously high fees to make calls. Provide for the unique needs of
incarcerated women. Women inherently have different basic health care needs than incarcerated men. Biden will condition receipt of federal criminal justice grants on adequate provision of primary care and gynecological care for women, including care for
pregnant women. The Biden Administration will also review the efficacy of programs that allow non-violent offenders who are primary care providers for their children to serve their sentences through in-home monitoring. Ensure humane prison conditions.

, Biden will call for an overhaul of inhumane prison practices. He’ll start by ending
Biden believes no act can justify the inhumane treatment of an individual in the hands of the government. As president

the practice of solitary confinement, with very limited exceptions such as protecting the life of an imprisoned person . And, he’ll
require states to fix environmental health problems in prisons, such as a lack of clean water and clean air . Encourage states to collect
sufficient data so we can make evidence-based criminal justice policies and eliminate disparities. Data is a powerful tool to shine light on and spur action to
address biases in our criminal justice system, but we have insufficient data to fully understand these biases. For example, the vast majority of states do not
collect and report information regarding the ethnicity of individuals who interact with the criminal justice system. This leads to a lack of information regarding how
Latinx are impacted by the system. The Biden Administration will encourage states to add information regarding ethnicity to their criminal
justice data collection.
 Biden Solves – Marijuana
Biden will decriminalize marijuana.
Lopez ‘5/18 (German Lopez; senior correspondent at Vox, specializes in marijuana policy in America; 5-18-2020; “Biden’s
opposition to marijuana legalization is at odds with most Americans’ views“; Vox; https://www.vox.com/2020/5/18/21260228/joe-
biden-marijuana-legalization-donald-trump-president; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, still opposes federal marijuana legalization — putting him at
odds not just with the majority of Democrats but also Americans overall. In debates, in his criminal justice reform plan, and in his “Plan for Black
America,” Biden has said he supports the federal decriminalization of marijuana, which would maintain fines but do away with prison or jail time
for possession. But he remains opposed to full legalization , which would remove all penalties and, typically, allow sales for
recreational purposes. The position is more reform-friendly than that of President Donald Trump, who opposes both legalization and
decriminalization. But it’s still out-of-step with the views of US voters, especially Democrats. Based on surveys by Gallup and the Pew
Research Center, roughly two-thirds of US adults support marijuana legalization . Support for legalization has increased steadily
over the years, up from about 12 percent when Gallup first started polling on the question in 1969. A chart showing increasing support for marijuana
legalization steadily increasing since 1969. Gallup When US adults are asked about their support for marijuana legalization in greater detail, only 8 percent
say it shouldn’t be legal at all, according to Pew; 59 percent say it should be legal for medical and recreational use , while 32 percent
say it should be legal for medical use only. Democrats are even more in favor of legalization, with average support of 78 percent across
four generations, according to Gallup and Pew’s surveys, though a majority of Republicans also support it. Based on Pew’s findings, every
generation of Democrats surveyed support marijuana legalization . A chart showing support for marijuana legalization by political party and
generation. Pew Research Center In other words, Biden is out of step not just with other Democrats, but also a majority of Democrats in his own generation. The
Biden campaign did not respond on the record to Vox’s request for comment. Supporters of legalization argue it eliminates the harms of marijuana prohibition:
the hundreds of thousands of arrests around the US, the racial disparities behind those arrests, and the billions of dollars that flow from the black market for illicit
marijuana to drug cartels that then use the money for violent operations around the world. All of this, legalization advocates say, outweigh any potential
downsides — such as increased cannabis use — that may come with legalization. Opponents, however, claim legalization will enable a huge marijuana industry
that would market the drug irresponsibly. They point to America’s experiences with the alcohol and tobacco industries in particular, which have built their financial
empires in large part on some of the heaviest consumers of their products. This could result in more people using pot, even if it leads to negative health
consequences. Throughout the primary campaign, other Democratic candidates took far more aggressive positions on marijuana reform. Before he joined the
presidential race, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) released a marijuana legalization plan, which would not only legalize marijuana at the federal level but also
encourage states to legalize it. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released a detailed plan to legalize and regulate marijuana — at 4:20 pm, because humor is alive and
well. In fact, Biden was alone among the top-polling Democratic campaigns in his opposition to federal marijuana legalization. Biden’s position led to a
particularly colorful exchange at the Democratic debate in November — at which Booker, commenting on Biden saying he opposes federal legalization,
remarked, “I thought you might’ve been high when you said it.”

Biden has included decriminalization in his policy proposals

Jaeger ‘5/6 (Kyle Jaeger; is Marijuana Moment's Los Angeles-based associate editor. His work has also appeared in High
Times, VICE; 5-6-2020; “Joe Biden includes marijuana decriminalization in new ‘Plan for Black America’“; BostonGlobe;
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/06/marijuana/joe-biden-includes-marijuana-decriminalization-new-plan-black-america/;
Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
Former Vice President Joe Biden released a new plan on racial justice this week, utilizing it to also tout his modest marijuana reform proposals.
The presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee said he would “decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically
expunge all prior cannabis use convictions” as part of a “Plan for Black America” his campaign released Monday. He also talked about
changing broader criminal justice policies , including ending the crack-versus-cocaine sentencing disparity, repealing mandatory
minimums, abolishing the death penalty, and diverting people with minor drug convictions to treatment instead of prisons . While
advocates generally welcomed the proposals, many argued that they do not go far enough to fully address racial equity. Notably absent from his plan is
legalizing marijuana for adult use — something activists say is critical to ensure equity and restorative justice. “Considering the long violent history of the
United States war on communities color, this plan is a half measure at best,” said Jason Ortiz, president of the Minority Cannabis Business Association. “True
equity for our communities would include an admission that our federal government committed a massive crime through the war on drugs, and a plan to undue
that damage and make our communities whole.” “True equity must include a release of all cannabis prisoners, massive community investment and a legal
cannabis marketplace owned and operated primarily by people of color,” he added. “I’m not convinced Biden is there yet, but we must all continue to push him for
the sake our communities.” While activists generally agree that Biden’s proposal regarding the treatment of substance misuse is viewed as superior to
incarceration, many also oppose forcing individuals into treatment as a mandate from drug courts, saying the courts continue to handle a health issue through
a criminal justice lens. Drug policy reform advocates have widely criticized Biden’s record as a senator, condemning his role in authoring and promoting punitive
anti-drug laws that contributed to mass incarceration. “Biden’s plan calls for the decriminalization of cannabis and the end of all incarceration for
drug abuse,” Ortiz said. “While that flies in stark contrast to the vice president’s record, it is a promising sign that more modern approaches to criminal justice are
being discussed and taken seriously by his campaign.” “Now it’s up to the movement for cannabis justice to force him to put his proposed policies into action
immediately.” By comparison, US Senator Bernie Sanders, who was also a top contender as a presidential candidate before dropping out and endorsing Biden
last month, has been a strong champion of comprehensive reform, pledging to legalize marijuana in all 50 states on his first day in office through executive
action. While Biden has thus far refused to embrace federal legalization, he and Sanders did announce the formation of a joint criminal justice
working group comprised of individuals who’ve worked with both of them, and it stands to reason that cannabis policy could be one area of
discussion. That said, asked last month what issues he thinks Biden will come around on that he campaigned on, Sanders declined to include marijuana
legalization in that list. The former vice president’s new racial justice plan doesn’t feature any new drug policy proposals; rather, it highlights previous measures
that have particular relevance to minority communities. “Today, too many people are incarcerated in the United States — and too many of them are African
American,” the plan states. “To build safe and healthy communities, we need to rethink who we’re sending to prison, how we treat those in prison, and how we
help them get the health care, education, jobs, and housing they need to successfully rejoin society after they serve their time. As President, Biden will
strengthen America’s commitment to justice and reform our criminal justice system.”

Biden in favor of federal decriminalization of marijuana

Lopez 5/18 German Lopez is a senior correspondent and focuses on criminal justice and public health [“Biden’s Opposition
to Marijuana legalization is at odds with most American views”, Vox, May 18, 2020,
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/18/21260228/joe-biden-marijuana-legalization-donald-trump-president] //TX

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, still opposes federal
marijuana legalization — putting him at odds not just with the majority of Democrats but also Americans overall . In debates,
in his criminal justice reform plan, and in his “Plan for Black America,” Biden has said he supports the federal
decriminalization of marijuana, which would maintain fines but do away with prison or jail time for possession. But
he remains opposed to full legalization, which would remove all penalties and, typically, allow sales for recreational
purposes. The position is more reform-friendly than that of President Donald Trump, who opposes both legalization and
decriminalization. But it’s still out-of-step with the views of US voters, especially Democrats. Based on surveys by Gallup and
the Pew Research Center, roughly two-thirds of US adults support marijuana legalization. Support for legalization has increased
steadily over the years, up from about 12 percent when Gallup first started polling on the question in 1969. [chart emitted] When
US adults are asked about their support for marijuana legalization in greater detail, only 8 percent say it shouldn’t be
legal at all, according to Pew; 59 percent say it should be legal for medical and recreational use, while 32 percent
say it should be legal for medical use only. Democrats are even more in favor of legalization, with average support of 78
percent across four generations, according to Gallup and Pew’s surveys, though a majority of Republicans also support it. Based
on Pew’s findings, every generation of Democrats surveyed support marijuana legalization. [chart emitted] In other words, Biden
is out of step not just with other Democrats, but also a majority of Democrats in his own generation. The Biden campaign did not
respond on the record to Vox’s request for comment. Supporters of legalization argue it eliminates the harms of marijuana
prohibition: the hundreds of thousands of arrests around the US, the racial disparities behind those arrests, and the billions of
dollars that flow from the black market for illicit marijuana to drug cartels that then use the money for violent operations around
the world. All of this, legalization advocates say, outweigh any potential downsides — such as increased cannabis use — that
may come with legalization. Opponents, however, claim legalization will enable a huge marijuana industry that would market the
drug irresponsibly. They point to America’s experiences with the alcohol and tobacco industries in particular, which have built
their financial empires in large part on some of the heaviest consumers of their products. This could result in more people using
pot, even if it leads to negative health consequences. Throughout the primary campaign, other Democratic candidates took far
more aggressive positions on marijuana reform. Before he joined the presidential race, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) released a
marijuana legalization plan, which would not only legalize marijuana at the federal level but also encourage states to legalize it.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released a detailed plan to legalize and regulate marijuana — at 4:20 pm, because humor is alive and
well. In fact, Biden was alone among the top-polling Democratic campaigns in his opposition to federal marijuana
legalization. Biden’s position led to a particularly colorful exchange at the Democratic debate in November — at
which Booker, commenting on Biden saying he opposes federal legalization, remarked, “I thought you might’ve
been high when you said it.” But despite the support for legalization among Democrats and Americans overall, the
issue, apparently, wasn’t a major priority for Democratic voters during the primary. Biden still walked away with
the most delegates to became the presumptive nominee. With a coronavirus pandemic and recession still underway,
perhaps Biden is hoping the same will hold up in the general election too
.
 Biden Solves – Death Penalty
The plan is inevitable – Biden eliminates the death penalty
Krawczyk 19 Kathryn Krawczyk is a graduate of Syracuse majoring in journalism and information technology [“Every top
2020 Democrat now supports ending the death penalty”, The Week, July 23, 2019,
https://theweek.com/speedreads/854418/every-2020-democrat-now-supports-ending-death-penalty] // TX

Joe Biden has reversed a major sticking point from his time in the Senate. The former vice president has joined up
with nearly every Democrat running for president, revealing that he supports ending the death penalty nationwide.
Biden previously supported the death penalty, but in his criminal justice plan unveiled Tuesday, he said he'll work to
abolish the death penalty at both the state and federal levels. Biden unveiled a sweeping criminal justice platform on
Tuesday, which acknowledges that "too many people are incarcerated in the United States — and too many of them
are black and brown." So he's pledged to "root out the racial, gender, and income-based disparities in the system"
while rerouting criminal justice toward "redemption and rehabilitation." Part of that plan includes eliminating the
death penalty because "over 160 individuals who’ve been sentenced to death in this country since 1973 have later
been exonerated," Biden's website reads. So if he's elected, Biden says he'll "work to pass legislation to eliminate the
death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government's example." That plan puts
Biden in line with Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and pretty
much every other 2020 Democrat. Biden had advocated for capital punishment while in the Senate , but appeared to
be dropping that stance over the past few months.

bolishing the death penalty is apart of Biden’s CJR plan to undo his legacy
Kim 19 Catherine Kim writes about politics/polies and the criminal justice [“A 1994 law Biden wrote put these 4 men on
death row”, Vox, July 26, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/7/26/8931612/joe-biden-death-penalty-tough-on-crime ] // TX
A few hours after the Trump administration announced it was bringing back federal executions, former vice
president and 2020 candidate Joe Biden had a single message: abolish the death penalty. “Because we can’t ensure
that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty,” he tweeted. In criticizing these
federal executions, Biden is fighting a monster he helped create. On Thursday, US Attorney General William Barr
announced that the federal government would resume executions for the first time in nearly two decades, scheduling execution
dates for five inmates who have been convicted of murder and other crimes. Several 2020 candidates swiftly criticized the
government for its decision, which isn’t surprising considering all candidates but Montana Gov. Steve Bullock are opposed to the
death penalty. Biden, too, joined the crowd to call for the abolishment of the death penalty. Four of the five prisoners are
eligible for federal executions because of the 1994 crime law Biden wrote and shepherded to passage while he was
the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The federal death penalty was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme
Court in Furman v. Georgia in 1972. When it was reinstated in 1988, only those convicted of murder in federal court
while engaging in containing criminal enterprise were eligible for the death penalty. The 1994 crime law changed
that. Among the law’s many provisions was the Federal Death Penalty Act, which expanded federal law to make 60
crimes, including drug crimes that do not involve homicide, eligible for the death penalty. Crimes could fall under
three broad categories: homicide offenses, espionage and treason, and non-homicidal narcotics offenses. Because the
four prisoners were convicted after 1994, they received the death penalty under the updated crime law These four
prisoners, all of whom were convicted after 1994, were not convicted of murder while engaged in a criminal
enterprise — therefore, they would not have been eligible for the death penalty if not for the 1994 anti-crime bill.
The 1994 crime law was an attempt to establish Democrats as the “tough on crime” party at a time when crime was
high. “Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” Biden had said at the time. “The liberal wing of the
Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties.” Biden’s campaign highlighted that he also supported funding
for prevention programs in the bill, which was necessary to tackle the root of the problem, though not as popular
among Republicans. Yet the bill is not remembered kindly by criminal justice activists, who say it was ineffective
and unfairly targeted black and brown men. As criticism has mounted, Biden, too, has acknowledged that his 1994
bill wasn’t perfect. “I haven’t always been right,” he said in January of his criminal justice record. “I know we
haven’t always gotten things right, but I’ve always tried.” Now Biden is trying to undo his legacy. On Tuesday, the
presidential candidate revealed his criminal justice reform plan — one of the most comprehensive ones to come out
of the 2020 cycle so far. He tackles multiple issues, such as decriminalizing marijuana, reforming the police, and
establishing a $20 billion grant to encourage states to reduce incarceration and crime. Most notable may be his
change of heart on the death penalty: Despite his long support of capital punishment, Biden said on Tuesday that he
would abolish the death penalty at the federal level and incentivize states to follow suit. As Vox’s German Lopez
notes, this is an opportunity for Biden to show voters he can change with time: For Biden, then, his criminal justice
plan isn’t just a chance to line up with the preferences of most Democratic voters. It’s also an opportunity to try to
make up for the mistakes of his past.

Biden flip-flops his stance on the death penalty

Dunleavy 19 Jerry Dunleavy is Justice Department Reporter for the Washington Examiner [“Former death penalty
proponent Biden flip-flops as Federal cases advance”, Washington Examiner, July 29, 2019,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-death-penalty-proponent-biden-flip-flops-as-federal-cases-move-forward]//
TX
Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden flip-flopped on the death penalty last week, calling for its end
despite being among the Senate’s most vocal supporters, bragging that in one of his proposals “we do everything but
hang people for jaywalking.” Biden’s reversal came as Attorney General William Barr ordered on Thursday the
death sentences of five child convicted murderers to move forward. These will be the first federal executions since
2003. In response, Biden tweeted, “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must
eliminate the death penalty.” Many Democratic presidential candidates echoed the same message. Biden officially
reversed his decades-long position earlier last week, under pressure from his progressive base and his rivals, he
released a criminal justice reform plan repudiating his signature 1994 crime bill and calling for the “elimination” of
the death penalty nationally. With 2020 looming, Biden telegraphed this flip-flop for a while, telling a New
Hampshire crowd in June “congratulations on ending the death penalty” at the state level. The Democrats running
for president told the New York Times in June that they were almost unanimously opposed to the death penalty.
Biden, however, declined to be interviewed and only Montana Gov. Steve Bullock expressed support, saying he favored it in
extreme cases “like terrorism.” But for decades, Biden advocated for the expansion of the death penalty. As recently as 2000,
Biden claimed credit for passing “the first federal death penalty” following the Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling which voided capital
punishment laws, with Biden saying executions were nationalized through “a bill written by me" in 1988 and that his 1994 crime
bill “had the death penalty at the federal level” too. Biden introduced a crime bill in March 1991, proposing 44 crimes punishable
by death. The Republicans introduced their own version a day later, increasing that number to 46. Biden one-upped President
George H.W. Bush’s supporters that June by raising it to 51. Biden said in 1991 that he should get credit for the fact that drug
dealers would “go to death" if their crimes resulted in killings. And Biden pushed back against the idea that Democrats weren’t as
tough on crime as Republicans. “A wag in the newspaper recently wrote something to the effect that Biden has made it a death
penalty offense for everything but jaywalking,” Biden said approvingly. “I am a supporter of the death penalty without the racial
justice provision in it,” Biden said. “I think it’s better with it, but I’m supportive without it in it as well.” Biden said that his bill
should pass because it “provides for more penalties for death for offenses than the president’s bill.” As the crime bill debate
continued in 1992, Biden responded to criticisms of his proposal. “Let me tell you what is in the bill, and I’ll let you all decide
whether or not this is weak,” Biden said, highlighting the number of death penalty offenses. The 53 death penalty offenses
included in a later version of his bill, he said, were “the single largest expansion of the federal death penalty in the history of the
Congress.” The number of death-penalty-eligible crimes in Biden’s bill kept rising. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is
now for 60 new death penalties," Biden said in 1994. Biden’s crime bill finally passed that year, creating 60 new death penalty
offenses. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2000, Biden said “I support the death penalty” but hedged his support.
“Let me put it this way: I don’t oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, but I have been fastidious at arguing … that if you
are going to have a death penalty, you had better go out of your way to make sure you don’t execute an innocent person,” Biden
claimed. Biden at the time framed his position as a middle ground. “You’ve got those who want to hang ‘em high and those who
suggest no one should be hung," Biden said.

Biden supports abolishing the death penalty.

The Crime Report 19 (Tcr Staff; a nonprofit multimedia information and networking resource based at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice in New York. Published daily online, Monday through Friday, our award-winning site is staffed by working journalists in New York,
Washington and Los Angeles; and provides comprehensive reporting, informed commentary, and analysis of criminal justice news and
research in the U.S. and abroad. non-partisan, collaborative effort by two national organizations that focus on quality criminal justice journalism:
The Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College, the nation’s leading practice-oriented think tank on crime and justice reporting,
and Criminal Justice Journalists,; 7-23-2019; “Biden: I'll Scrap Federal Death Penalty“; Crime Report;
https://thecrimereport.org/2019/07/23/biden-ill-scrap-federal-death-penalty/; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden answered critics of his support for the 1994 federal crime law by proposing elimination of the federal
death penalty and other changes at odds with the earlier legislation, the Washington Post reports. Biden’s plan would also offer states
incentives to abolish the death penalty, with death row prisoners receiving life-without-parole sentences instead. Other provisions in
Biden’s new policy proposal: decriminalize marijuana and expunge past cannabis-related convictions; end the disparity between sentences for powder and crack
cocaine; do away with all incarceration for drug use alone; end cash bail; terminate the federal government’s use of private prisons. It includes a provision to
ensure that people who are imprisoned are treated humanely and that women in custody are provided health-care protections. The plan would invest $1 billion
annually in juvenile justice reform, give states incentives to stop incarcerating minors, and create a $20 billion grant program to spur states to move from
incarceration to crime prevention and eliminate mandatory-minimum sentences. The release of Biden’s criminal justice plan comes about a week before the next
round of televised Democratic primary debates, when his record is expected to come under renewed scrutiny. His support for the 1994 crime bill has been
criticized by both Republicans and Democrats, who argue that it led to mass incarceration and tilted the system unfairly against African Americans. He
telegraphed earlier this month that he was reconsidering his support for capital punishment over his three decades in the Senate, telling a New
Hampshire audience, “By the way, congratulations to y’all ending the death penalty here.”
 Biden Solves – Police Militarization
Biden will end militarization
Boehm 6/2 [“Joe Biden Basically Admits Libertarians Were Right All Along: Cops Shouldn't Have Military Gear”, Reason,
June 2, 2020, https://reason.com/2020/06/02/joe-biden-basically-admits-libertarians-were-right-all-along-cops-shouldnt-have-
military-gear/] //TX
In a Tuesday speech addressing the recent civic unrest that has roiled America since the killing of George Floyd, former Vice
President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass a series of reforms aimed at improving "oversight and accountability"
in the nation's police departments. Among those ideas is a proposal "to stop transferring weapons of war to police
forces," Biden said in Philadelphia. That's a good idea. Indeed, Biden is echoing something that libertarians have been saying
for years. Still, Biden is an awkward avatar for police reform. Back in 1997, the then-senator from Delaware voted in favor of the
bill that expanded the Pentagon's role in handing off surplus gear to local cops. It was that year's National Defense Authorization
Act that created the 1033 program, a vastly expanded version of previous military surplus programs that entitled "all law
enforcement agencies to acquire property for bona fide law enforcement purposes that assist in their arrest and apprehension
mission." Like so many other bad ideas from the 1990s, this one was wrapped up in the war on drugs. The 1033 program gave
preference to departments that sought military gear for counter-drug operations. That makes the program a double-whammy of
bad ideas: It gave local police an incentive to more vigorously prosecute drug users in order to score free toys from the Pentagon.
The result was exactly what you'd predict. It's no longer unusual for local police departments to own mine-resistant vehicles,
grenade launchers, and even tanks. These weapons of war have never been appropriate for police work, but billions of dollars'
worth of them have been distributed to departments around the country—in part because Biden voted for the original legislation.
In his speech on Tuesday, Biden did not grapple with that unfortunate bit of his legislative history. Hopefully he will be asked
about it soon. In the meantime, some members of Congress are already getting to work. The New York Times reported Tuesday
that a bipartisan group of lawmakers have launched an effort to shut down the Pentagon's transfer of military gear to cops. "It is
clear that many police departments are being outfitted as if they are going to war, and it is not working in terms of maintaining
the peace," Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii)—who previously worked with Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) on an ill-fated attempt to end
the practice—told the Times. "Just because the Department of Defense has excess weaponry doesn't mean it will be put to good
use." As for Biden, his change of heart regarding military gear for cops fits nicely alongside the rest of his biography.
As one of the most powerful members of the Senate in the 1980s and 1990s, Biden played a major role in passing several
tough-on-crime policies that helped amplify the horrors of the drug war and filled America's prisons to the brim. He's had to
reckon with that during his campaign for president. Biden is, as Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch has observed,
something of a rusty weather vane for the Democratic Party consensus. When the party was gung-ho about locking up criminal
and throwing away the key, Biden was there to write the bills that President Bill Clinton signed. Now that the Democratic
constituency is finally paying attention to criminal justice reform and police accountability, he's trying to undo some
of the very measures he once drafted. But it's still better to look like a hypocrite than to continue being wrong.
Biden's evolution from a drug warrior who approved of arming cops with military gear to a critic of the drug war
who wants to end abusive policing is perhaps a silver lining to this week's awfulness. He's a presidential candidate
who is the embodiment of the Overton window, and it appears he has been shifted.

Biden will recreate Obama-era restrictions on 1033

Hohmann 6/9 (James Hohmann; Stanford University, B.A. in History James Hohmann is a national political correspondent for The Washington Post. He is the author
of The Daily 202, The Post's flagship political newsletter, and the voice of its affiliated Big Idea audio briefing. Hohmann covered local news for The Post in the aughts and returned in
2015 after six years at Politico. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News and San Jose Mercury News. A historian by training, Hohmann grew up in Apple
Valley, Minn., and graduated with honors from Stanford University. Webby Award for Best Email Newsletter, 2017 ;
6-9-2020; “The Daily 202: ‘Demilitarizing’ the
police could be a more fruitful rallying cry for reformers than ‘defunding’“; Washington Post;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2020/06/09/daily-202-demilitarizing-the-police-could-be-a-more-fruitful-rallying-cry-for-
reformers-than-defunding/5edf0e54602ff12947e87c9e/ ; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
The civil unrest that erupted in the summer of 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., drew attention to the heavy militarization of local police departments. The police officer who
fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, was never charged with any crime. But one consequence of the conflagration was an
executive order by then-President Barack Obama to significantly curtail a Pentagon program that had transferred billions of dollars'
worth of equipment originally intended for overseas combat to local law enforcement agencies. "We've seen how militarized gear sometimes gives
people a feeling like they are an occupying force as opposed to a part of the community there to protect them," Obama said as he announced the changes in
May 2015, following the recommendations of a working group he appointed after the fires went out in Ferguson. "Some equipment made for the battlefield is not
appropriate for local police departments." President Trump signed an executive order in August 2017 to rescind Obama's restrictions on what is
known as the 1033 program, allowing once again for the military to provide bayonets, grenade launchers, .50-caliber ammunition and other equipment to local law enforcement agencies. Police
unions widely praised the move, which was championed by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. This helps explain the ubiquitous images of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, also known as MRAPs,
deployed during nationwide protests of police brutality after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody on Memorial Day. These tactical vehicles, designed amid the Iraqi insurgency 15 years ago to
withstand IED attacks, have been cruising around American cities, often accompanied by officers who are armed in ways that even infantry veterans of the global war on terrorism find themselves taken aback by.
Stopping the steady stream of battlefield equipment into American cities will not solve systemic racism, but many criminal justice reformers see demilitarizing local departments as both an essential first step to
restoring public trust and a far more realistic goal than the rallying cry among some protesters to "defund the police." Many Democratic strategists worry that calls for defunding the police will create political
headaches, especially in swing states and the suburbs. "What police departments need are techniques and training for deescalation. Giving them increasingly dangerous and powerful weapons of war moves us in
the opposite direction," Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview last week. "There is no evidence at all that the police in any of these situations have been outgunned. The idea that the solution to what's
happening across the country is to arm ourselves to the hilt, and then essentially point those weapons in the direction of citizens, is preposterous." Schatz tried last year to recalibrate the 1033 program, partnering
unsuccessfully with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to insert an amendment into the annual National Defense Authorization Act. They plan to try again this year. The Justice in Policing Act, unveiled by congressional
Democrats on Monday with more than 200 co-sponsors, would ban chokeholds, establish a national database to track police misconduct, prohibit certain no-knock warrants and scale back liability shields for police
officers in civil and criminal court. The 134-page measure would also ban the Defense Department from transferring military-grade weapons to law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels. The
Democratic proposal also bans
measure would specifically stop the Pentagon from providing bayonets, silencers, grenade launchers, grenades (including flash bangs) and other explosives. The
the military from giving MRAPs to domestic law enforcement agencies, as well as armored or weaponized drones and long-range
acoustic devices designed to disorient enemy combatants. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a Marine veteran who sits on the House Armed Services
Committee, considers this "one of the most absurd programs in the United States government" and he's pushing to abolish it in any criminal justice package. "It
pains me when I see police acting as if they are soldiers," said Gallego, who represents the Phoenix area. "They must be seen as interwoven into the fabric of
our communities — not as a foreign force — but that is the only image I see when they roll through our streets with more armor than I, and those I served with,
had in Iraq." Former vice president Joe Biden has signaled that he would restore Obama's restrictions on the 1033 program if he is
elected in November. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said that a law should be passed by the end of this month "to
stop transferring weapons of war to police forces." Speaking in Philadelphia last week, Biden said: "No more excuses. No more delays."
 Biden Solves – Policing
Biden supports defunding the police and investing in community policing.
Phillips 7/8 (Morgan Phillips; Politics Reporter at FoxNews.com, specializes in policy; 7-8-2020; “Biden says some funding
should 'absolutely' be redirected from police“; Fox News; https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-says-some-funding-should-
absolutely-be-redirected-from-police; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
Joe Biden said in an interview Wednesday that some funding should “absolutely” be redirected from police, amid calls from some in his
party to "defund the police" in the wake of the protests across the country. Biden's campaign has said he does not support defunding the police. But in a
Now This interview with activist Ady Barkan, the presumptive Democratic nominee said that police forces don’t need surplus military
equipment, saying this is what leads them to “become the enemy” in a community. “But do we agree that we can redirect some of the [police]
funding?” Barkan asked Biden. “Yes, absolutely,” said the former vice president. Biden went on to call for police reforms . "One of the
things that we also need to be doing is fundamentally changing way we deal with our prison system," he said. "It should be a rehabilitation system, not
a punishment system. We’re going to make sure you're qualified for every single right you had before you went to prison if you served your time." Biden
comes out against defunding police In early June, the Biden campaign said that Biden does not believe that police should be defunded. “As his criminal justice
proposal made clear months ago, Vice President Biden does not believe that police should be defunded,” Biden campaign Rapid Response Director Andrew
Bates said at the time. “He hears and shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change, and is driven to ensure that justice is done and that we
put a stop to this terrible pain.” Bates added that Biden supports “the urgent need for reform,” which he said includes “funding for public schools, summer
programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment separate from funding for policing — so that officers can focus on the job of policing.” The Biden
campaign has pointed to the former vice president’s criminal justice plan, which proposes an additional $300 million for community policing . Bates
said that the funding would “improve relationships between officers and residents” and would “provide the training that is needed to avert tragic,
unjustifiable deaths.” “This funding would also go toward diversifying police departments so that they resemble the communities in which they
serve,” Bates added, noting that there is need for “additional funding for body-worn cameras.” In response to Biden's new comments, Trump 2020
campaign rapid response director Andrew Clark wrote on Twitter it looked like Biden had “changed his position” on defunding police, adding a clip from the Now
This interview. But Biden's campaign denied it signaled a change in his position. “I'd like to thank Donald Trump - for hiring an illiterate comms staff. Biden is
running on *more* COPS funding for community policing,” Bates, Biden’s director of rapid response, shot back. “The same sentiment you're taking out of context
RE: local budgets is *in* the articles about him opposing defunding.” Biden in the interview also said he believes it is the job of the federal government to "go in"
and "systemically change what's going on." He specifically called for banning no-knock warrants and improving police transparency. "This whole idea of no-knock
warrants in drug cases is bizarre, it just invites trouble," Biden said. "There's a fundamental need for transparency and access to police records when they have
misconduct charges against them.
AFF
 Thumper – COVID
COVID thumps – prefer our evidence – it takes into account changes in the News Cycle like the plan
Nate Cohn 7/20, Domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times, Big Polling Leads Tend to Erode. Is Biden’s
Edge Different?, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/upshot/biden-trump-poll.html?
campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20200721&instance_id=20482&nl=the-
morning&regi_id=83131044&segment_id=33942&te=1&user_id=f08273543e887dee5d0119d909e7a9e9
Even more than the economy in 2008, coronavirus is the dominant issue in American life today. It poses an immediate health risk to
Americans, and the effort to contain it has profound consequences for the course of the American economy. It is the rare issue
that takes precedence over the economy for voters, who have told pollsters they would rather address the coronavirus, even at
the risk of hurting the economy, than reopen the economy at the risk of public health. In this sense, the fight against coronavirus has the potential to
define American politics the way an armed conflict might: It poses a threat to the health and safety of the public, and voters support the effort to defeat it even at a significant economic
cost. Unlike a recession — but again somewhat like a crisis or war — the emergence of coronavirus was not necessarily bad news for Mr. Trump. It offered an opportunity for
nonpartisan, presidential leadership on a pressing issue that transcends traditional political divisions. Not even a high death toll was necessarily a problem for the president’s political
fortunes. Gov. Andrew Cuomo seems to have emerged with stronger ratings in New York despite tens of thousands of deaths, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush
emerged stronger after the catastrophic Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 attacks. Winston Churchill presided over his troops’ defeat in France in 1940 and still claimed his place as a
prominent figure in world history in the very same month. For the same reasons, crisis, war and coronavirus offer as much downside as upside for elected officials. They eclipse the
usual political fights, and if voters lose confidence in their leaders during crisis, it can be the end of their careers, whether it be Lyndon Johnson or Neville Chamberlain. The coronavirus
is not war. Many Americans, including the White House, dispute the pandemic’s severity. But the politics of coronavirus nonetheless seem simple: It has
become the dominant issue in American life, and voters have reached an overwhelmingly negative view of how the president has
handled it. Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump’s standing has suffered. His approval rating has fallen to around 40 percent among registered voters. His position against Mr. Biden has
deteriorated at a similar pace. As Harry Enten of CNN has pointed out, poll after poll shows a tight relationship between presidential vote choice, approval of the president’s handling of
the coronavirus, and judgments on which candidate would do a better job on the issue. The relationship between attitudes about coronavirus and the presidential race is clearer than for
any issue in recent memory. If the coronavirus is the problem for Mr. Trump, then his challenge is straightforward: His numbers could suffer so long as coronavirus remains the
dominant issue, and so long as voters believe he has handled it poorly. A
change in media coverage might not only be insufficient, but also less likely,
since the recent wave of bad news is a reflection of the underlying state of the country. Instead, the president’s prospects for a
comeback seem to hinge on a more favorable judgment from voters on his handling of coronavirus, or on the virus’s becoming a
less important issue to voters. Whether it’s realistic to expect the public to revisit its attitude about the president’s handling of coronavirus at this stage is an open question.
Whether the coronavirus eventually becomes less salient to voters is probably a question for epidemiologists as much as any political analyst.
 Trump Win – Ground Game
Ground game matters and Trump is winning
Miller 7/13 (Zeke Miller is an American journalist who is a White House reporter for the Associated Press. Madison.com:
“Trump's reelection operation hires 1,500 field staffers” published 7/13/20. https://madison.com/news/national/govt-and-
politics/trumps-reelection-operation-hires-1-500-field-staffers/article_d44a0f0b-aa32-55d4-bc87-2435c64e7874.html) AS
The Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s campaign say they have now hired 1,500 field staffers ,
aiming to convert their financial advantage over Democrats into votes in November. Trump Victory, the joint field effort of the two
organizations, announced Monday the hiring of an additional 300 staffers set to hit 20 target states by Wednesday in the largest
field operation ever mounted by a Republican. The goal is to turn out votes on behalf of Republicans up and down the ticket this
fall. The Trump team says it is on pace to eclipse the 2.2 million volunteer total that helped reelect President Barack Obama in
2012. The announcement comes as public and private polls show Trump trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden
across key battleground states and nationally. The president’s team argues that polls also showed Trump down in 2016 but he
nonetheless pulled off a win. RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said the staff and volunteers are looking to use the RNC’s vast data
trove and voter scores to reach a dwindling swath of swing voters and the far larger universe of low-propensity voters — many of
whom already like Trump but are unlikely to vote. A field program alone doesn’t win elections — and four years ago it was
Trump’s ground game that lagged Hillary Clinton’s — but in a close election, the GOP argues, it can spell the difference between
victory and defeat. “In an election like this, where it’s going to come down to a few thousand votes in a couple of states , that’s
when your ground game matters,” McDaniel said. Republicans are quick to note that their staffer count in the field is more than
double that of Biden, whose goal was 600 field staffers by the end of June. Additionally, the RNC staffers have been on the
ground for years in some cases, while Biden has only just recently begun rolling out his roster of battleground state directors. And
while Biden’s campaign has out-raised Trump in recent months, Trump’s team believes its cash-on-hand advantage and hiring head start give it an
insurmountable edge in reaching out to voters. Both the Trump and Biden field operations went virtual largely overnight in mid-March as the coronavirus
pandemic hit. Trump’s has begun resuming some in-person campaign activities as states have lifted some virus restrictions. “We have the biggest and
best ground game operation ever seen,” said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. “We’ve built lasting
relationships with voters on the ground that will power President Trump to victory in November. Joe Biden scarcely emerges from
his basement, is woefully behind in state organizations and lacks any enthusiasm behind his candidacy.”

Good ground game causes significant increases in vote turnout

Blanding 16 (Michael Blanding is an author and journalist with more than fifteen years of experience writing long-form narrative
and investigative journalism. Forbes: “Why People Don't Vote -- And How A Good Ground Game Helps” published 5/2/16.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2016/05/02/why-people-dont-vote-and-how-a-good-ground-game-
helps/#5939d34462b0) AS
Despite the fever pitch over presidential primaries this year, the truth is there are few people actually voting. Before the most
recent round of voting, only some 11% of eligible Democrats voted in the primaries , and the record numbers of Republicans still
only translates to about 17% of those eligible. Even the general elections of 2008 and 2012 only saw about half of eligible voters
casting a ballot. Nor is voter apathy strictly an American phenomenon. “Voter turnout has been declining in many Western democracies
over the past decades,” says Vincent Pons, 5/2/16assistant professor at Harvard Business School in the Business, Government, and the International
Economy Unit. “Less than half of eligible citizens are voting in a growing number of elections, and that is a cause for concern.” Fewer
voters means less people having a stake in what government does, eroding trust of the governed—particularly by younger, poorer, and less educated citizens,
who tend to stay home from the polls in larger numbers. “Not only is turnout low, but it is also unequal,” says Pons. “Many citizens are disengaging in
participation in society. That may decrease the legitimacy of elected governments overall.” In four recent studies conducted in Italy and France, Pons and
coauthors investigate the phenomenon of why people aren’t voting—and what can be done to reverse that trend. In doing so, they take aim at some
misconceptions about what keeps voters home, and show the surprising effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing at getting more people to the polls. Voting Is
Not Easy In the first study, Voter Registration Costs and Disenfranchisement: Experimental Evidence from France, conducted with French professors Céline
Braconnier and Jean-Yves Dormagen, the researchers examined the difficulties citizens had in registering to vote in the French presidential election of 2012.
“There is the cost of taking the time to register, walking to the town hall, gathering the paperwork…” says Pons. While those might not seem like difficult tasks in
themselves, they don’t provide any immediate gratification, so they are easy to put off until it is too late. The researchers recruited volunteers to
perform some 20,000 direct door-to-door visits to random households. They found that just providing information on how to
register wound up increasing registration rates from 18 to 21%. That percentage increased even higher, to 29%, when citizens
were allowed to register at home and received two volunteer visits. Even more impressively, 93% of the people that registered
eventually voted in at least one election in 2012 —directly contradicting the supposition that unregistered voters aren’t voting
because they aren’t interested. “It’s simply that it was too costly for them to do so,” says Pons. Lowering the barriers even slightly
had a dramatic impact on voter turnout and engagement . What’s more, a post-election survey administered by the researchers
found that new registrants were significantly better informed politically and had more political discussions with their neighbors
during the electoral campaign, making them more civically engaged overall. Increasing The Immigrant Vote In the second study Pons
performed, particularly strong results were found for parts of the electorate that are traditionally disenfranchised. For this study, "Increasing the Electoral
Participation of Immigrants: Experimental Evidence from France," co-written with Guillaume Liegey, the researchers canvassed eight cities in the suburbs of
Paris heavily populated by recent immigrants, particularly from Sub-Saharan Africa and Maghreb. “Often times you see these immigrants are not always
completely integrated into society,” says Pons. “Objectively, they have lower salaries and lower education, but more subjectively, when you ask them about their
sense of national belonging, they don’t say that they feel 100% French.” Hypothesizing that this lack of personal investment in the country
depressed their tendency to vote on issues, the researchers recruited activists with the Socialist Party to knock on doors in
advance of the 2010 regional elections. The activists gave citizens information about the candidates and the elections—but,
importantly, did not specifically emphasize immigration, education, or other issues that might be of particular interest to immigrant
groups. “You could make the argument that if you want to motivate immigrants you need a more targeted campaign—that’s often the way it’s done in the
United States for example with Latinos, but in France it’s not possible to do this,” explains Pons. “It would reflect badly on a candidate to say, ‘I am doing a
campaign to target Arab people.’” Even the concept of a systematic large scale, door-to-door, get-out-the-vote campaign is new in France. When the
researchers looked at the results, however, they found a significant effect on voter turnout for immigrant households—increasing
3.4 percentage points in the first round of voting, and 2.8 percentage points in the second. The visits, by contrast, had no effect
on non-immigrant households. “The finding is unexpected and very surprising,” says Pons, who surmises that the results partly may have come just from
providing some information, since immigrants tend to be less informed overall than native-born citizens. Another explanation, however, is that the visits simply
sent a message that these voters’ opinions mattered. “They sent a very different signal than the interactions immigrants have with most rooted French,” says
Pons. “Instead of being seen as second-class citizens, the immigrants saw that these visitors fully considered them participants and counted on their votes.” Do
Candidates Encourage Turnout? One visitor who, it turns out, does not help increase election turnout is the candidate himself. In a third study, "Do Interactions
With Candidates Increase Voter Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy," Pons and MIT PhD candidate Enrico Cantoni tested the impact of door-to-door
candidate visits during 2014 municipal elections in Italy. “The motivation for the project,” Pons says, “is that in many surveys we find that not only are voters
participating less, but also that they are distrustful of politicians. We thought that perhaps a way to fix this is to have politicians speak directly to voters.” In
some 26,000 house visits, households were randomly assigned to be visited by a city council candidate or a student canvasser
from the candidate’s party. While the canvasser visits increased voter participation by 1.8 percentage points , the candidate visits
had no effect. That effect was the opposite of what Pons and Cantoni anticipated. “We were expecting the students to have some effect, and
a larger effect from the candidates,” he says. When they looked more closely at the data, they realized that candidates were spending more time in areas
characterized by high past turnout. The researchers surmise that the politicians were wasting time and effort trying unsuccessfully to convince voters who didn’t
support them, rather than motivating those who already did support them to go out and vote.
 Trump Win - Fundraising
Trump has more cash on hand
Mcminn and Hurt 6/20 (Sean McMinn is the data editor on NPR's News Apps team. Alyson Hurt is a senior graphics editor.
Npr: “Money Tracker: How Much Trump And Biden Have Raised In The 2020 Election” published 6/20/20.
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/20/858347477/money-tracker-how-much-trump-and-biden-have-raised-in-the-2020-election) AS
Here's how much money the campaigns of President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have raised so far, according
to their Federal Election Commission filings. (Keep in mind that Trump's reelection campaign had a fundraising head start.) This
tracker will be updated with each monthly report, prior to the general election.
Fundraising is vital to being elected
Bryant 07 (Charles W. Bryant is a producer and writer for HowStuffWorks. HowStuffWorks: “How Campaign Finance Works”
published 11/7/07. https://money.howstuffworks.com/campaign-finance1.htm) AS
In the United States, fundraising plays a large role in getting a candidate elected to public office. Without large sums of money, a
candidate has virtually no chance of achieving his goal. This doesn't mean that the person who raises and spends the most wins
every time, but it's close. In the 2004 general elections, 95 percent of House races and 91 percent of Senate races were won by
the candidate who spent the most on his campaign . It's also easier to stay in office than to get into office. Incumbents are
generally able to raise more money than their opponents, which often results in elections with no financial opposition. In 2004,
nearly one-third of the House races involved candidates with little or no opposition [source: Open Secrets].
 Trump Win – Voter Suppression
Voter suppression now
Levine 6/12 (Sam Levine is a reporter at HuffPost covering voting rights. He graduated from
the University of Chicago. I am a national reporter covering voting rights in the United States at
the Guardian. I write about issues such as voter ID, partisan gerrymandering, voter purging,
felon disenfranchisement and the 2020 census. I have cultivated a significant audience and
have a proven track record of developing high-profile sources, using multimedia techniques,
and breaking exclusive scoops. Levine, Sam. “'We're Going to Have a Catastrophe': US Faces
November Election Fiasco.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 12 June 2020,
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/12/us-presidential-election-fiasco-voter-suppression.)
LN
The alarm bells have been going off for months, but the election fiasco in Georgia on Tuesday made it clear:
America is ill-prepared to hold a fair presidential vote in November, and is dangerously close to having an election
disaster. The Georgia contest offered the most alarming preview to date of what could happen in
November without major overhauls, training and planning. Voters stood in line to vote for upwards of four
hours, saying they never received mail-in ballots requested weeks ago. Local officials, forced to consolidate polling
locations because of Covid-19, were unable to manage the influx of voters and struggled to operate new voting
equipment. Experts worry that poll worker shortages, long lines and other delays in processing requests for absentee
ballots will only get worse in November, when there will be more voters. Since March, voting advocates have
been calling on states to prepare for an election like no other, and quickly implement plans that
accommodate a surge in voters casting their ballots by mail for the first time as well as robust turnout at
the polls. One estimate places the cost of upgrading vote-by-mail systems across the country at $4bn. “We’re just
going to have a catastrophe in November,” said Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who
studies elections. “We’ve already passed the point of catastrophic failure. It doesn’t get any better if we have two to
three times the number of people who are trying to vote in these polling locations.” Not every primary in the Covid-
19 era has been a disaster, and there has been strong turnout in many states as Americans have embraced voting by
mail at unprecedented levels. But Georgia was far from the only place where there have been serious
election problems. Voters in Nevada waited hours in line to vote in the state’s primary on Tuesday, even
after the state moved to conduct its election largely by mail. Earlier this month, election officials
in Pennsylvania and Washington DC struggled to meet the crush of requests for absentee ballots and
voters in the nation’s capital waited hours to vote. Voters in Baltimore, Maryland, didn’t get ballots and faced
long lines. In April, voters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, waited hours to vote in the state’s primary as the city was
forced to condense its usual 180 polling places into just five.  Most glaring, voting groups say, has been the
disproportionate impact the election failures have had on communities of color. LaTosha Brown, a co-
founder of Black Voters Matter, told Politico it took her three hours to vote in her majority African American
precinct in Atlanta on Tuesday, but she saw no line at a polling place in a predominantly white area later in the day.
State officials have launched an investigation into what went wrong in Fulton county, which includes
Atlanta. “Black voters in particular appear especially hard-hit,” said Kristen Clarke, president and
executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has closely monitored
the primaries. “In some parts of the country, it feels like officials are making reckless decisions that are a
recipe for disaster.”  Social distancing is ignored as voters wait in an hours long line to vote at Fulton
county’s Park Tavern precinct in the coronavirus-delayed Georgia presidential primary election in
Atlanta, Georgia. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA Even before Covid-19, there were concerns about mass
disenfranchisement in November; the pandemic has only exacerbated them. Donald Trump is
already making repeated baseless accusations of voter fraud in what appears to be an effort to lay the foundation for
contesting the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Activists were already deeply concerned about the mass closure of
polling places and the Covid-19 pandemic has given election officials justification for doing so. More than 1,600
polling places in jurisdictions previously covered by the Voting Rights Act were closed between 2012 and
2018, according to a report by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. That includes  214 polling
places in Georgia. Democrats and voting rights groups are also pushing states across the country to extend
the deadline by which absentee ballots need to arrive to be counted. Many states require the ballots to
arrive by election night, a cutoff that could leave eligible voters disenfranchised. In
Wisconsin, Democrats secured a court order requiring the state to count ballots as long as they were
postmarked before election day and arrived within six days of the election. More than 79,000 ballots that
normally would have been thrown out were counted during the extension (Trump won the state in 2016
by just under 23,000 votes).  There is also growing concern about plummeting voter registration in recent
months and an unprecedented Republican effort to monitor the polls and challenge the eligibility of voters
who appear, something that could result in voter intimidation. The Republican National Committee, freed
from a decades-old court order prohibiting them from such activity, is seeking to recruit up to 50,000
volunteers. The window for states to understand the problems from their primaries and implement
solutions for November is rapidly closing. Recommended deadlines for purchasing necessary equipment
and other measures are approaching and in some cases have already passed. Republicans in Congress
have also scaled back funding to help states run elections, allocating just $400m so far, a small fraction of
the billions experts say is needed. The Republican National Committee also plans to spend at least $20m
to oppose efforts to expand vote by mail. “If no one, legislators/advocates/voters/election officials, listens
to what is being said it will be a debacle in November,” Tammy Patrick, who works on election
administration at the Democracy Fund, said in an email. “The primaries have been the canary in the
coalmine.”  New state-issued voting machines proved problematic in a number of locations in Georgia’s
primary. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA Meanwhile, there have been some encouraging signs. After
Wisconsin’s chaotic April primary, the state’s bipartisan election commission released a detailed
analysis of what went wrong and unanimously voted to send an absentee ballot application to all voters
who hadn’t requested one for November. The commission also moved to give local clerks – who were
overwhelmed by ballot requests during the primary – more help. California announced in May  it would
send a ballot to all registered voters. Michigan – which saw long lines at some election offices during its
March primary – is also sending an absentee ballot application to all voters.  But other signs suggest states
may move in the opposite direction. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, refused to
acknowledge systemic problems in the way the election was run this week, instead blaming local election officials.
In Iowa, Republicans are considering legislation that would prohibit the secretary of state, Paul Pate, from sending
absentee ballot applications to all voters, something Pate, a Republican, did ahead of the state’s June primary when
there was record turnout. Ohio Republicans are also considering legislation that would bar the state’s top election
official from paying for postage on absentee ballot requests and the ballots themselves. “On the one hand, it’s
very concerning,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, which
is advising election officials on how to prepare for November. “On the other, what I would say is that this
is a wake-up call.”  Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic nominee in Georgia who put voting rights at the
core of her campaign, said some states were better positioned for November “because those states have an
intention of actually letting every person vote”.“It is not that we don’t know the answer. It is that the
Republican party in particular has been resistant to solving the problem and that will put our elections in jeopardy,”
she said.

Voter suppression will allow Trump to get re-elected

Sattler 6/6 Jason Sattler is the Executive Editor of National Memo, opinion columnist, Sattler,
Jason. “Don't Gorge on Polls That Show Biden Ahead. COVID and Voter Suppression Boost
Trump's Odds.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 6 July 2020,
www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/06/biden-leads-but-voter-suppression-covid-boost-
trump-odds-column/5380244002/.) LN
Soon many Americans will begin wearing out the refresh buttons on their browsers, hoping that an overdose of polls, voter data
and the mystical models that interpret them will grant us some certainty about what will happen in the Nov. 3 election. And every
click will be a waste of bandwidth. You’d be better off washing your hands for the trillionth time. No matter
how promising the outlook may occasionally look for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden,
remember that President Donald Trump doesn’t even need to win in
order to win. He just needs to keep enough voters from casting a ballot to slip through the Electoral College, again .
This election is too important to bet it on America’s limited ability to grok statistics. Here’s why anyone
who cares about trouncing Trump should pretend the presidential polls and models have all been
canceled: No poll can account for the toxic mix of voter suppression, COVID-19 and a president of the United States willing to
use every power at his disposal to prevent Americans from voting . The pandemic sending the U.S. economy back into
a medical coma for the second time in months has already crushed voter registration. Despite the White
House admitting that we’re likely to face a potentially worse second wave in the fall, Trump has declared a
holy war on his favorite method of casting a ballot: mail-in voting, which he has called his “biggest risk” to getting reelected.
Though voting by mail is even more secure than voting in person, Trump is desperate to get voters to have to wait in lines to
vote. Why? “Trump’s reelection strategy appears to depend on cutting off channels for voters to have polling places and then
sending operatives and right-wingers to intimidate and suppress voters in person,” says Ben Wikler, chair of the
Wisconsin Democratic Party. And with a deadly virus raging and new voter suppression tools at his disposal that the GOP
hasn’t had in decades, Trump’s strategy makes a lot more sense than anyone who loves democracy would like to admit. Trump
will lie, cheat and steal in order to keep the one job that prevents him from being indicted — and his party will help him. Since
this year has already been the longest decade of our lifetime, it’s easy to forget that this president was
recently impeached for trying to extort a foreign government into wrecking Biden's candidacy. And every
Republican in the Senate, except Utah's Mitt Romney, gave him a license to do the same thing again . It isn’t
just the quislings in the Senate inviting Trump to use the nearly unlimited power of the presidency to win in November .
Attorney General William Barr — aka the Cover-Up General — has done his best to establish a kingly
immunity for Trump. Trump will never stop using his favorite strategy: strategic racism.   Why is Trump
defending the Confederacy more vigorously than the state of Mississippi? He recognizes that if he can
keep dividing America based on race, he can still win. While the Black lives matter movement is reaching
new heights of popularity and America is more diverse than ever, white people made up the vast majority
of voters in 2016 and surely will in 2020. “Dividing the races has been the principal weapon of the rich in
the class war they are winning,” says Ian Haney López, author of "Dog Whistle Politics." And there’s
nothing — except, perhaps, golf — that Trump is more dedicated to than tickling America’s overly
developed racism bone. Trump has recaptured his greatest advantage from the last presidential election — people don’t
think he can win. 
 Trump Win – Refuses to Leave
Trump will refuse to leave office
Graziosi 20 ( Graig Graziosi is a freelance writer from Youngstown, Ohio, now based in Washington, DC. He
previously worked as a reporter at the Youngstown Vindicator.

Graziosi, Graig. “Trump Has a Plan to Stay in the White House If He Loses Election, Former Senator Says.”
The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 3 July 2020,
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-2020-us-election-third-term-
tim-wirth-white-house-a9600486.html.) LN

President Donald Trump is scheming to retain power in the event of a n electoral loss in November, according to a former
Senator from Colorado. Tim Wirth published an op-ed in Newsweek where he lays out his theory,
apparently inspired in-part by HBO's adaptation of the Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America.
The former Democratic senator begins with an allegation that Mr Trump will attempt to retain
power through voter suppression. Mr Wirth alleges there is a strategy to suppress voter turnout by purging voters -
especially inner-city voters - from registration rolls and to suppress mail-in voting. He also believes physical polling
locations will be limited, especially in urban areas, in an effort to create long lines on Election Day
and discourage voting. Mr Wirth's allegations that there has been an effort in Republican-led
states to remove people from the voter-roll is accurate. According to data compiled by Mother
Jones, between 2016 and 2018, more than 17 million names have been removed from the voter
rolls. While names are removed from voter rolls every year due to deaths or citizens leaving the
state, the number of voters removed from the rolls since 2016 has significantly increased.
Between 2016 and 2018, states on average removed 7.6 per cent of their voters from the rolls.
However, the purge in some states went much further. Indiana purged the greatest number of
voters, removing 22.3 per cent of the state's voters from its rolls. Both Virginia and Wisconsin
removed 14 per cent, and Maine, Oklahoma and Massachusetts removed between 11 and 12.1
per cent. Mr Wirth's theory about Mr Trump trying to retain power following the 2020 US election doesn't end at the ballot box,
however. He believes that - should the president lose - he will claim the vote was rigged and rely on a complicated gambit
involving emergency powers and the compliance of Republican legislators to stay in the White House. According to Mr Wirth,
should Mr Trump lose in a scenario where challenger Joe Biden beats him by "decent but not overwhelming" margins in the
swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Mr Trump will declare that the vote was rigged. He will
supposedly blame mail-in ballots and Chinese election interference for the loss and invoke emergency powers to launch a
Justice Department investigation into alleged "election hacking" in the swing states.
Bottom of Form From there, Mr
Wirth claims Mr Trump will stall until 14 December, which is the date when states must appoint
their US Electoral College electors. Because the swing states are each controlled by Republicans,
Mr Wirth believes the state legislatures will refuse to certify their electors until the election
hacking investigation is finished. He then claims the Democrats will challenge the investigation
and the challenge to the election, which will eventually be taken to the US Supreme Court. Mr Wirth
believes the Supreme Court will rule against the Republicans, but will concede that Mr Trump's emergency powers authorise him
to continue his investigation. The Supreme Court will also maintain that should the swing states not be able to certify their
selectors by 14 December - for any reason - then the Electoral College will have to meet and vote for the president without the
swing states included. Under Mr Wirth's theory, the Electoral College will then meet without the swing states under investigation,
According to Mr Wirth, the contested
and neither candidate will receive enough votes to secure the presidency .
election would then move to the House of Representatives, where each delegation gets to cast one
vote towards the presidency. Since there are more Republican controlled House delegations than
Democratic controlled delegations - 26 Republican to 23 Democrats - the Republicans will be the victors
of the vote and Mr Trump will remain in office.
 Trump Win – Hacking
Covid 19 makes altering votes online easier, especially for Trump
Eric Lutz, 6-8-2020, "Hackers Are Already Screwing With the 2020 Election," Vanity Fair,
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/hackers-are-already-screwing-with-the-2020-election (JC)
In a study released Sunday, Halderman and his colleagues found that OmniBallot, a platform used to facilitate internet voting,
could be hacked to alter votes without detection. “Some voters, including those with certain disabilities and some overseas servicemembers, have
long faced significant obstacles to participation. Now, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, all voters may need better options
for voting safely,” the study read. “On the other hand...online ballot return represents a severe danger to election integrity and
voter privacy that no available technology can adequately mitigate.” Russia is not believed to have changed votes last cycle —
their meddling consisted of hacking and the spread of disinformation—but United States officials believe that they could attempt
to do so this time around. Already, there have been other attempts at hacking : Chinese hackers have targeted members of the
Biden campaign, and Iran has targeted Trump’s team, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group. The Department of Homeland
Security has said it is working to buttress voting systems to make them less vulnerable to outside interference, but Trump—who has dismissed the
intelligence community’s assessment that Russia meddled to help him win last time around—has given little attention to the
matter and, with his allies, has stood in the way of legislation to further protect the integrity of American elections . Instead, he has
worked to sow further doubt in the American election system. Expanding access to the ballot will be necessary this cycle, as officials scramble to hold an election
against the backdrop of a pandemic. But the security vulnerabilities they present are almost certain to be exploited by the president and
his allies.

Russian hackers help Trump win the election

Jim Acosta, Zachary Cohen, Dana Bash and Jeremy Herb, Cnn, 2-21-2020, "Russia is looking to help Trump win in 2020,
election security official told lawmakers," CNN, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/20/politics/trump-russia-intelligence-
2020/index.html (JC)
Washington (CNN)The intelligence community's top election security official delivered a briefing to lawmakers last week warning
them that the intelligence community believes Russia is already taking steps to interfere in the 2020 election with the goal of
helping President Donald Trump win, three sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. Last week's briefing, led by election security official Shelby Pierson
and first reported by The New York Times, addressed the overall picture of Russia's efforts, including hacking, weaponizing social media and attacks on election
infrastructure, one of the sources said. The briefers said Russia does favor Trump, but that helping Trump wasn't the only thing they
were trying to do as it was also designed to raise questions about the integrity of the elections process, the source added.
Sponsor content by Thailand Board of Investment The pro-business support attracting investors to Thailand Thailand’s resilient supply
chain and gateway status to ASEAN make it an attractive place to do business for global investors. Trump became irate in a meeting with outgoing acting
Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire last week for allowing the information about Russia's meddling efforts to be included in the briefing, a White
House official said. Russia's interference in the 2016 election -- which the US intelligence community believes was aimed at boosting
Trump's candidacy and hurting his opponent, Hillary Clinton -- led to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. The prospect
of interference in 2020 will further test US defenses against foreign meddling, which Trump has repeatedly downplayed as he
has dismissed any suggestion that Kremlin influence played a role in his election. A national security official in the Trump administration told
CNN that Pierson may have mischaracterized the intelligence that Russia has developed a preference for Trump. "A more reasonable interpretation of the
intelligence is not that they have a preference, it's a step short of that. It's more that they understand the President is someone they can work
with, he's a dealmaker.
 AT: Swing Voters
Swing voters don’t exist – their ev misreads sampling error
Gelman, et al ’16 [Andrew Gelman, Sharad Goel, Douglas Rivers, and David Rothschild; Writers; Columbia University,
Stanford University, Microsoft Research; “The Mythical Swing Voter”;
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/swing_voters.pdf]
We shall argue that, in this case, apparent swings in vote intention represent mostly changes in sample composition, not actual
swings. These are phantom swings arising from sample selection bias in survey participation. Previous studies have tended to
assume that campaign events cause changes in vote intentions, while ignoring the possibility that they may cause changes in
survey participation. We will show that in 2012, campaign events more strongly correlated with changes in survey participation
than vote intentions. As a consequence, aggregate changes involve invalid sample comparisons, similar to uncontrolled
differences between treatment groups
 AT: Swing Voters – Turnout O/W
Turnout, not swing voters, are key
Creamer 3/5/20 [Robert – political strategist and organizer, 50 years of work in electoral, issue, and the past 3
presidential campaigns, “Why 2020 is a Turnout Election”, The American Prospect, https://prospect.org/politics/why-
2020-is-a-turnout-election/]
These researchers think that is improbable. In fact, increasing turnout is the most likely path to Democratic victory.
That is true whoever is the ultimate Democratic nominee.
Election campaigns are all about one thing: changing the behavior of voters to increase the odds they will elect the
campaign’s candidate. After all, if the idea were to get voters to do what they would do in the absence of a campaign,
everyone involved should simply go to the beach.
There are only two groups of people whose electoral behavior can in fact be changed by a campaign—swing voters
and nonvoters.
The ones we think about most are persuadable voters. These are voters who might vote Republican in one election
and Democratic in another. In general elections, there are very few actual persuadable voters, since most people
regularly vote either for Democrats or Republicans. In primaries, on the other hand, almost every voter can often be
considered persuadable, since there are rarely hard-and-fast historic loyalties that guarantee that voters will vote one
way or another.
In this fall’s general election, there is a maximum of 10 percent of the electorate in battleground states who are truly
persuadable. And the number likely to actually be persuaded is much lower still.
In the 2016 general election, 3.6 percent of the electorate moved from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to vote for
Trump in 2016. And 1.9 percent of the electorate moved from voting for Romney in 2012 to Clinton in 2016. That is a
total of 5.5 percent of the electorate who were actually persuaded to change their behavior in 2016. And note that
through those exchanges of persuadable voters, Democrats lost only a net of 1.7 percent of the electorate to Trump
because they were persuaded to switch parties.
In general elections, there are very few actual persuadable voters. In primaries, on the other hand, almost every voter
can often be considered persuadable.
From a campaign’s point of view, true persuadable voters have two characteristics: 1) They generally vote, and 2)
They are undecided. Voters who are both undecided and not likely to vote are not of interest to most campaigns,
because campaigns do not want to waste energy to persuade them if they won’t vote anyway and don’t want to try to
mobilize them to vote if they might vote the wrong way.
Even though the percentage of the electorate that is persuadable is a tiny slice, it generally receives the lion’s share
of campaign effort, TV ads, mail, and media attention.
The second group whose behavior can be changed are mobilizable voters. These are voters who would likely vote to
support our candidate or party but are unlikely to vote unless they are mobilized. In American politics, there is a
massive number of mobilizable voters who for one reason or another don’t go to the polls in general elections. In fact,
in 2016, fully 43 percent of eligible voters did not bother to vote. Of the 232 million eligible voters, only about 132
million actually cast a ballot.
Of this number, a disproportionate percentage would vote Democratic if they actually went to the polls. Often, they
are people who are younger, lower-income, and feel less empowered than society in general. In addition to the vast
number who rarely ever vote, in the last election 4.3 percent of the electorate who had actually gone to the polls and
voted for Barack Obama in 2012 either failed to vote at all or voted for a third-party protest candidate in 2016.
In 2018, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives because there was a substantial increase in turnout
among mobilizable voters—and especially young mobilizable voters. In fact, the Census Bureau found that 36
percent of citizens aged 18-29 reported voting in the 2018 midterms, compared to only 20 percent in the previous
midterm election in 2014—a 16 percent increase. Turnout was also up by 13 percent among those aged 30-44. In
fact, youth turnout in 2018 was the highest in any midterm since 1980.
The Washington Post also reported that the Census Bureau found that while Hispanic and Asian citizens have
historically voted at far lower rates than whites and blacks, turnout grew in 2018 to record midterm highs for both
groups. Hispanic turnout rose from 27 percent in 2014 to 40 percent last year, while Asian turnout increased from 27
percent to 41 percent.
A number of swing voters in suburban districts also moved from voting Republican to voting for a Democratic
congressional candidate. However, Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats would not likely have won a majority without the
massive increase in turnout.
According to the Post, “The largest turnout shifts were among groups that favored Democratic congressional
candidates as a whole, fueling the party’s 8.6-point victory in overall congressional support.”
Of course, most good campaigns focus both on convincing persuadable voters to support their candidate and on
turning out low-propensity voters who would vote Democratic but need to be mobilized to vote. But even in the best
campaigns, the elements of the campaign aimed at voter mobilization often get the short end of the resource stick.
That is particularly true because polling tracks persuasion but not potential mobilization—which also explains why the
polls failed to project the correct winner in 2016.
The 2020 election is a turnout election.
 AT: Swing Voters – Partisan Theory
Americans vote based on party – policy isn’t important and won’t change their votes
Taub 8/12/17 [Amanda – writer for New York Times, “Why Americans Vote ‘Against Their Interest’: Partisanship”,
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/upshot/why-americans-vote-against-their-interest-
partisanship.html]
Working-class Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump continue to approve of him as president, even though he supported a
health care bill that would disproportionately hurt them.
Highly educated professionals tend to lean Democratic, even though Republican tax policies would probably leave more money
in their pockets.
Why do people vote against their economic interests?
The answer, experts say, is partisanship. Party affiliation has become an all-encompassing identity that outweighs the details of
specific policies.
“Partisan identification is bigger than anything the party does,” said Frances Lee, a professor at the University of Maryland who
wrote a book on partisan polarization. Rather, it stems from something much more fundamental: people’s idea of who they are.
For American voters, party affiliation is a way to express a bundle of identities.
“It more or less boils down to how you see the conflicts in American society, and which groups you see as representing you,” Ms.
Lee said. “That often means race, and religion, and ethnicity — those are the social groups that underlie party identification.”
That process is not necessarily conscious. “There’s sort of an embarrassment about being a partisan,” Ms. Lee said. “It’s seen as
admitting to a bias.” That often leads people to say that they are independent, she said, but in fact most voters consistently lean
toward one of the parties.
As partisanship grows, switching parties has become rare for voters. So has ticket-splitting, in which voters support different
parties in presidential and down-ballot races.
But when people do switch, it is often because they feel that the other party has become a better representative of the groups
that they identify with. Preliminary data suggests that is what happened with the Democratic voters who voted for Mr. Trump in
2016, said Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies partisanship.
“Older voters who scored high on racial resentment were much more likely to switch from Obama to Trump,” Ms. Mason said.
She believes that he successfully made a pitch to what she calls “white male identity politics,” convincing older, less-educated
white voters that he would represent their interests.
Economic status, it turns out, is not so important in partisanship. “Class in American politics, rich vs. poor, is just not a very good
predictor of party identification,” Ms. Lee said. For both rich and poor Americans, other identities take precedence.
“There are plenty of rich Democrats,” Ms. Lee pointed out. “There are plenty of Republican politicians who represent poor
districts.”
That’s not to say that the parties don’t have major differences on economic matters. But, experts say, those differences matter
more to elites than to rank-and-file voters.
That is why, for instance, Mr. Trump was able to win the G.O.P. nomination even though he broke with Republican ideology on
economic matters like trade protectionism. His arguments played to white working-class voter identity, and that turned out to be a
successful strategy even though it alienated many of the party’s leaders.
But how voters choose their party is only one element of the story. The overlapping identities that underlie partisanship are also
driving a form of polarization so strong that it is now essentially impossible for politicians, or the public, to avoid its influence.
In 2009, when Ms. Mason was still a graduate student, she had a “eureka” moment about American politics. “I stumbled across
this social psychology article from 2002 that talked about what happens when multiple identities line up together,” she said in an
interview. “There was all this social psychology literature about how it increases bias.”
The same, she realized, was true of partisan identity. Everyone has multiple identities: racial, religious, professional, ideological
and more. But while those multiple identities might once have pushed people in different partisan directions — think of the
conservative Democrats of old in the South or all the liberal Republicans in the Northeast — today it’s more common to line up
behind one party. A white conservative who lives in a rural area and is an evangelical Christian is likely to feel that the
Republican Party is the best representative of all of those separate identities, for instance. An African-American liberal who lives
in a city and works in a professional job is likely to feel the same way about the Democratic Party.
Can this explain why American politics have become so polarized over the last several decades? Starting in 1980, the National
Election Study, a long-running survey that tracks Americans’ political preferences, showed that Republicans and Democrats
were growing apart: Each reported increasingly negative opinions of the opposing party. And other data showed that polarization
was seeping into nonpolitical arenas, making Republicans and Democrats less likely to marry or be friends.
Ms. Mason decided to make that the focus of her doctoral thesis, and found much to support her hypothesis: Americans’
overlapping political identities were driving extreme polarization.
When multiple identities line up together, all pushing people toward the same party, partisan identity becomes a kind of umbrella
for many different characteristics that people feel are important to them. That magnifies people’s attachment to their team.
And that, in turn, raises the stakes of conflict with the opposing “team,” Ms. Mason found. In every electoral contest or partisan
disagreement, she explained, people now feel that they are fighting for many elements of who they are: their racial identity,
professional identity, religious identity, even geographical identity.
“The way I think of it is, imagine that the World Series also affected the N.C.A.A. and the Super Bowl and every other team you
care about,” she said. “So as our identities line up with party identity, politics becomes more and more consequential.”
That may have been the key to Mr. Trump’s success in the 2016 election, she believes. “With Trump, if you can point to one
brilliant thing he did, it’s that he as a politician, kind of for the first time, said ‘we’re losers.’ ” Social psychology research has
shown that the best way to get people to defend their identity is to threaten it. By saying “we don’t win anymore — we’re losers
— and I’m going to make us win again,” Ms. Mason said, Mr. Trump’s pitch to voters both created the sense of threat and
promised a defense: a winning political strategy for the age of identity politics.
Wanting a Partisan Win, but Not a Policy One
The result of those overlapping, powerful identities is that Americans have become more willing to defend their party against any
perceived threat, and to demand that their politicians take uncompromisingly partisan stands.
But while those demands can affect policy, they are rooted in emotional attachments, not policy goals. “When we talk about
being a sports fan, there’s no policy content related to that,” Ms. Mason said. “It’s just this sense of connection. And that’s
powerful! It makes people cry. It makes people riot. There doesn’t really have to be any policy content for people to get riled up,
and to be extremely committed.”
Ms. Mason, along with Leonie Huddy, a professor at Stony Brook University, and Lene Aaroe of Aarhus University in Denmark,
conducted an experiment to test the importance of policy. They found that people responded much more strongly to threats or
support to their party than to particular issues. They became angry at perceived threats to their party, and enthusiastic about its
perceived successes. Their responses to policy gains and losses, by contrast, were much more muted.
That helps explain why Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters remains quite high, even though the first few months of
his presidency have been plagued by scandals and political setbacks, and even though his overall national approval ratings are
now very low. He has been careful to recast every potential scandal and policy struggle as a battle against the Democrats and
other outside groups.
Mr. Trump has insisted, for instance, that the F.B.I. investigation into his campaign staffers’ contacts with Russia is meaningless
“fake news,” and that the real issue is whether President Obama wiretapped him before the election. (There is no evidence thus
far that any such wiretapping took place.) And when the Republican health care bill failed despite Mr. Trump’s support, he at first
blamed Democrats.
Republican voters may not be happy with everything the president does — many, for instance, have told reporters that they
would prefer him to tweet less often, and others worry about how his health care plans will affect their families — but he is still
the captain of their “team.” Abandoning him would mean betraying tribal allegiance, and all of the identities that underlie it.
 AT: Biden Solves – Immigration Detention Centers
Biden won’t repeal Section 1325.
Campbell 19 (Alexia Fernández Campbell; tenured policy/politics reporter for Vox, specializing in labor and workers; 7-31-
2019; “What Biden doesn’t get about immigration“; Vox; https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2019/7/31/20749563/democratic-debate-biden-immigration; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
Former Vice President Joe Biden wants illegal immigration to stay illegal. That’s what he said during the second Democratic primary
debate, and it reveals just how little he understands about the nuances of immigration policy. Debate moderators had just questioned former HUD Secretary
Julián Castro about his plan to decriminalize immigration, which would repeal Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under Castro’s plan,
it would still be illegal to enter the United States without a visa, but it would be a civil violation, not a criminal one. That simple change would drastically alter US
immigration enforcement, because no one can be jailed for a civil infraction under federal law. That change could singlehandedly end much of the cruelty of an
immigration enforcement system that has allowed President Donald Trump to separate families and put children in cages and internment camps. Biden clearly
doesn't understand this. When moderators questioned him about the rise of deportation under President Barack Obama, Biden pivoted. Instead, he
suggested that decriminalizing immigration means Democrats want open borders. Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President
Joe Biden (center) speaks while Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) listen during the Democratic Presidential Debate on July 31, 2019.
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden (center) speaks while Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) listen during
the Democratic presidential debate on July 31, 2019. Scott Olson/Getty Images “If you say you can just cross the border, what do you say to all of those people
around the world who want the same thing — to come to the United States and make their case — that they have to wait in line. The fact of the matter is ... if you
cross the border illegally, you should be able to be sent back. It’s a crime,” he said. Biden was either intentionally misrepresenting the plan or just showed
how little he knows about immigration policy. Either one is a bad look for him. But he stood by his nonsensical argument, repeating it a few
minutes later. “I have guts enough to say [Castro’s] plan doesn’t make sense . The fact of the matter is, when people cross the border illegally, it is
illegal to do it unless they’re seeking asylum,” he added. “People should have to get in line. That’s the problem.” That’s not the problem. The problem is that
current immigration laws allow the president to detain immigrants for months (even years) on a misdemeanor immigration charge while their cases go through
court. This happened under the Obama administration. It happened under George W. Bush. The only difference now is that Trump is amping up the cruelty by
keeping migrant children and families detained in awful, unsafe conditions. Decriminalizing immigration would stop this. And no one explained it better than Sen.
Cory Booker (D-NJ). “No, Mr. Vice President, we are not going to let people cross the border,” Booker said. “An unlawful crossing is an unlawful crossing if you
do it in the civil courts or the criminal courts. The criminal courts are giving Donald Trump the ability to violate the human rights of people coming to our country.
They’re human rights. And so doing it through the civil courts means you won’t need these awful detention facilities that I’ve been to, seeing children sleeping on
pavement, people being put in cages, nursing mothers, small children. This is not necessary. We have seen, using the civil system, pilot programs that have 100
percent compliance with the civil courts where people are evaluated. If they have no reason to be here, they are returned.” Booker isn’t the only candidate who
supports Castro’s plan. So does Elizabeth Warren. It’s one of several issues that have pushed the Democratic primary further to the left. But it also
makes sense. How criminalizing immigration led to children in cages Illegal entry has been a crime for 90 years, but only recently has prosecution for it become
common. Decriminalizing illegal immigration is not open borders . People coming to the US without papers could still be deported if they were
caught and brought before an immigration judge. But it would make unauthorized immigration purely a civil offense, instead of a criminal
one. As Vox’s former immigration writer Dara Lind explains, this distinction matters a lot: Criminal prosecution of illegal entry was what gave the Trump
administration the power to separate thousands of families in 2018. It referred thousands of parents for criminal prosecution for illegal entry — advertised as a
“zero tolerance” approach — and thus separated them from their children to send them to criminal custody. Right now, it’s already a civil violation — not a crime
— to be in the US illegally. If someone is arrested in the US and can’t prove their legal status, they can be deported. But if border agents catch someone crossing
the border between ports of entry without papers, that’s a federal misdemeanor. It’s called “illegal entry,” and immigration judges can jail immigrants and fine
them, in addition to deporting them. The crime has been on the books since 1929, but for most of the 20th century, it didn’t really matter. Immigration agents
didn’t track down and deport people who came to the US without papers. Most presidents didn’t think it was worth US attorneys’ time to prosecute loads of
misdemeanor immigration cases. Those who were caught crossing the border were generally informally returned. “Under the Bush administration, however, as
an independent immigration enforcement system began to develop and mature, both civil immigration cases (in separate immigration courts) and widespread
criminal illegal entry prosecutions became common,” Lind writes. The result swamped federal criminal courts along the border. For the past several years,
immigration offenses — illegal entry and reentry — have been the most common crimes for which people are convicted in US federal criminal courts. (In fiscal
year 2016, immigration offenses made up a majority of all federal criminal prosecutions.) And the courts along the border where entrants are prosecuted are
routinely the busiest in the country. More recently, the Trump administration’s attempts at “zero tolerance” prosecution of illegal entry were the legal basis for its
widespread separation of families in 2018: Children were separated because their parents were being transferred to criminal custody for prosecution. That would
end under Castro’s immigration plan. Crossing the border without papers would be treated like the civil violation of being in the US illegally. It’s a far cry from
“open borders,” as Biden suggests.

Biden thinks Section 1325 is necessary.

Semotiuk 19 (Andy J. Semotiuk; U.S. immigration lawyer, writer for Forbes; 8-30-2019; “Repealing Section 1325 Overlooks
What Is Really Needed In U.S. Immigration Reform“; Forbes; https://www.forbes.com/sites/andyjsemotiuk/2019/08/30/how-
changing-one-section-in-us-immigration-law-will-not-fix-everything/#5cc2e9b9127a; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
In the U.S. immigration debate, there has been a lot of controversy over “ Section 1325” and decriminalizing unlawful entry to the United States at
the Mexican border. This section of the U.S. Code dealing with unlawful entry and imprisonment of illegal immigrants and its
consequences is complicated. Some presidential candidates, including Julián Castro, a former housing secretary under President Barack
Obama; Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind. contend that President Trump is using
this section to separate families and penalize them. Others, like former Vice President Joe Biden and Congressman Beto O'Rourke, argue the
section is needed and not the real problem. What is Section 1325 of the U.S. Code This section of the federal law criminalizes illegal entry
into the U.S. The result is that the section is one of the most used sections to prosecute federal criminal offenses.
 AT: Biden Solves – Death Penalty
Biden has supported the death penalty; he only changed his position to get votes.
Dunleavy 19 (Jerry Dunleavy; Justice Department reporter for the Washington Examiner; 7/29/19; “Former death penalty
proponent Biden flip-flops as federal cases advance“; Washington Examiner;
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-death-penalty-proponent-biden-flip-flops-as-federal-cases-move-forward;
Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden flip-flopped on the death penalty last week, calling for its end despite being among the
Senate’s most vocal supporters, bragging that in one of his proposals “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.” Biden’s
reversal came as Attorney General William Barr ordered on Thursday the death sentences of five child convicted murderers to move forward. These will be the
first federal executions since 2003. In response, Biden tweeted, “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death
penalty.” Many Democratic presidential candidates echoed the same message. Biden officially reversed his decades-long position earlier last
week, under pressure from his progressive base and his rivals, he released a criminal justice reform plan repudiating his signature 1994 crime bill
and calling for the “elimination” of the death penalty nationally. With 2020 looming, Biden telegraphed this flip-flop for a while , telling a New
Hampshire crowd in June “congratulations on ending the death penalty” at the state level. The Democrats running for president told the New York
Times in June that they were almost unanimously opposed to the death penalty. Biden, however, declined to be interviewed and only Montana Gov.
Steve Bullock expressed support, saying he favored it in extreme cases “like terrorism.” But for decades, Biden advocated for the expansion of the
death penalty. As recently as 2000, Biden claimed credit for passing “the first federal death penalty” following the Supreme Court’s 1972
ruling which voided capital punishment laws, with Biden saying executions were nationalized through “a bill written by me" in 1988 and
that his 1994 crime bill “had the death penalty at the federal level” too . Biden introduced a crime bill in March 1991, proposing 44
crimes punishable by death. The Republicans introduced their own version a day later, increasing that number to 46. Biden one-upped
President George H.W. Bush’s supporters that June by raising it to 51. Biden said in 1991 that he should get credit for the fact that drug dealers
would “go to death" if their crimes resulted in killings. And Biden pushed back against the idea that Democrats weren’t as tough on crime as
Republicans. “A wag in the newspaper recently wrote something to the effect that Biden has made it a death penalty offense for everything but
jaywalking,” Biden said approvingly. “I am a supporter of the death penalty without the racial justice provision in it ,” Biden said. “I think it’s
better with it, but I’m supportive without it in it as well .” Biden said that his bill should pass because it “provides for more penalties for death for offenses
than the president’s bill.” As the crime bill debate continued in 1992, Biden responded to criticisms of his proposal. “Let me tell you what is in the bill, and I’ll let
you all decide whether or not this is weak,” Biden said, highlighting the number of death penalty offenses. The 53 death penalty offenses included in a
later version of his bill, he said, were “the single largest expansion of the federal death penalty in the history of the Congress.” The
number of death-penalty-eligible crimes in Biden’s bill kept rising . “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death
penalties," Biden said in 1994. Biden’s crime bill finally passed that year, creating 60 new death penalty offenses. During a Senate Judiciary
Committee hearing in 2000, Biden said “I support the death penalty” but hedged his support. “Let me put it this way: I don’t oppose the death penalty
on moral grounds, but I have been fastidious at arguing … that if you are going to have a death penalty, you had better go out of your way to make sure you don’t
execute an innocent person,” Biden claimed. Biden at the time framed his position as a middle ground. “You’ve got those who want to hang ‘em high and those
who suggest no one should be hung," Biden said.
 AT: Biden Solves – Policing
Biden said he won’t defund.
Beer 6/10 (Tommy Beer; a New York-based news desk reporter for Forbes covering sports, politics and business; 6-10-2020;
“Joe Biden Declares Definitively, "I Do Not Support Defunding Police"“; Forbes;
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/06/10/joe-biden-declares-definitively-i-do-not-support-defunding-
police/#259407bbaeab; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
TOPLINE Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden definitively declared "I do not support defunding police," in an op-ed Wednesday,
as protesters around the country increase their calls for overhauling the criminal justice system and President Trump attempts to tie Biden to the "Defund the
police" movement. US-POLITICS-RACE-UNREST-BIDEN KEY FACTS Trump, who continually declares himself the "Law and Order"
candidate, has frequently tried to tie Biden to the far-left wing of the Democratic party, with respect to police defunding. On
Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted, "This Radical Left agenda is not going to happen. Sleepy Joe Biden will be (already is) pulled all the way
Left. Many, like Minneapolis, want to close their Police Departments. Crazy!" Biden has also faced some criticism from progressives within his own party amid a
rising tide of outrage aimed at police brutality and systemic racism. The defunding of police departments, a rallying cry among some protesters in recent
demonstrations, has become a hot-button issue in the U.S. and has led to some division within the Democratic party. During an interview Tuesday night, Biden
said there is "absolutely" systemic racism in law enforcement, arguing that he believes the problem exists "across the board." Yet, in an op-ed published
Wednesday morning in The USA Today, Biden declared definitively, "I do not support defunding police." He then stated he is proposing an additional $300 million
to reinvigorate community policing in America. CRITICAL QUOTE: "I've long been a firm believer in the power of community policing —getting
cops out of their cruisers and building relationships with the people and the communities they are there to serve and protect,"
wrote Biden. "Every single police department should have the money they need to institute real reforms like adopting a national use
of force standard, buying body cameras, and recruiting more diverse police officers." KEY BACKGROUND: Calls to "defund the police" have
picked up considerable steam among progressives in the wake of nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd. On Sunday, the Minneapolis City
Council voted to disband its police department and invest in community-based public safety programs following calls from activists. Similarly, political pressure to
hold officers accountable for perceived misconduct has been ratcheted up in recent days. On Tuesday, a New York City police officer was charged with
misdemeanor assault after being recorded on video shoving a 20-year-old woman to the ground and cursing at her during a protest against police brutality in
Brooklyn. On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged for the first time to cut the city's police funding.

Biden is even increasing funding for police

Bradner et al. 6/8 (Eric Bradner, Sarah Mucha and Donald Judd, CNN; writers for CNN specializing in politics and 2020
election; 6-8-2020; “Biden says he doesn't support defunding police“; CNN; https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/joe-biden-
defund-the-police/index.html; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD)
(CNN) Joe Biden said Monday that he does not support some calls to "defund the police." "No, I don't support defunding the
police," the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview with CBS while in Houston to meet with the family of George Floyd,
whose death last month as a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck set off nationwide protests. "I support conditioning federal aid to police
based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness . And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can
protect the community and everybody in the community." Biden's campaign had said earlier Monday that he backs advocates' calls to increase
spending on social programs separate from local police budgets , but he also wants more funding for police reforms such as body
cameras and training on community policing approaches. "Vice President Biden does not believe that police should be defunded," campaign
spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. "He hears and shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change, and is driven to ensure that
justice is done and that we put a stop to this terrible pain." Content by CNN Underscored Everything you need to make ice cream in a Mason jar Did you know
that with just two ingredients and a Mason jar, you can create your own ice cream? The comments came as President Donald Trump and his campaign sought to
tie Biden to calls to "defund the police," which have emerged in recent days at protests over police brutality and the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis
police officer. "Defund the Police" has emerged as a rallying cry for some protesters. It generally refers to shrinking the scope of police responsibilities to public
safety and changing the tactics police officers and departments use, while redirecting some funding to other entities -- especially in marginalized communities --
such as social services and counselors instead of police officers in schools. Biden's campaign rejected the phrase "defund the police" and called
for more funding for police departments to implement policy changes. But the former vice president also supports some of the principles the phrase's
advocates champion. In the statement, Bates said that Biden supports "the urgent need for reform -- including funding for public schools, summer programs, and
mental health and substance abuse treatment separate from funding for policing -- so that officers can focus on the job of policing." Biden is calling for
more funding for training, community policing programs, hiring more diverse police forces and body cameras for police officers. "There are many police
departments across the country who are seeking to realize these kinds of changes, but haven't had the resources to -- and the Trump administration has in fact
made obtaining those resources more difficult," Bates said. "This is at the core of Joe Biden's plan to bring transformative change to our criminal justice system."
Biden has called for an additional $300 million in funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services program, which would allow more police officers to be
hired and pay for training on community policing approaches. The Trump attacks on Biden over the phrase "defund the police" are the latest iteration of tactics
Trump has used for decades -- and in his political campaigns. He declared himself the "law and order" candidate in 2016. But since then, the tactic has not
always translated to electoral success. In 2017, he and other Republicans warned during the Virginia governor's race of the threat of the MS-13 gang. And in the
2018 midterm elections, Trump and Republicans lambasted progressives' calls to "abolish ICE." Both times, Democrats won. Trump, whose administration last
week oversaw the use of tear gas on peaceful protesters outside the White House in order to clear a path for a Trump photo outside a church, has tweeted
attacks seeking to latch Biden to calls to defund the police. "I want great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT. I want LAW & ORDER!" Trump tweeted Monday.
Trump's campaign repeated the attacks on Biden during a Monday call. "Biden has made only a passing reference to the violence in our cities and has barely
mentioned the attacks on police at all," Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told reporters. "As the protesters like to say, 'silence is agreement.' By his
silence, Joe Biden is endorsing defunding the police."
 AT: Biden Solves – Marijuana
Biden refuses to deschedule marijuana.
Dovere 7/6 (Edward-Isaac Dovere; writer for the Atlantic, and former Chief Washington Correspondent for Politico., educated
from John Hopkins University and University of Chicago; 7/6/20; “The Marijuana Superweapon Biden Refuses to Use”; The
Atlantic; https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/biden-marijuana-pot-legalize/613777/; Accessed 7/12/20; RD)
Democratic political consultants dream of issues like marijuana legalization. Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of it, polls show. So are independents. A majority of Republicans favor it now too. It motivates
progressives, young people, and Black Americans to vote. Put it on the ballot, and it’s proved a sure way to boost turnout for supportive politicians. It’s popular in key presidential-election states, including Michigan,
Pennsylvania, Colorado, Florida, Arizona, and Virginia. There’s no clear political downside—although marijuana legalization motivates its supporters, it doesn’t motivate its opponents. For the Democratic presidential
Joe
nominee, the upsides of supporting it would include energizing a very committed group of single-issue voters and making a major move toward criminal-justice reform and the Bernie Sanders agenda.
Biden won’t inhale. Democrats eager for Biden to support legalization have theories about why he won’t. His aides insist they’re all wrong. It’s not, they say, because he’s from a generation scared by
Reefer Madness. It’s not, they say, because he spent a career in Washington pushing for mandatory minimum sentencing and other changes to drug laws. It’s definitely not, according to people who have discussed
the policy with him, because he’s a teetotaler whose father battled alcoholism and whose son has fought addiction, and who’s had gateway-drug anxieties drilled into him. With legalization seeming such an obvious
political win, all that’s stopping Biden, current and former aides say, is public health. He’s read the studies, or at least, summaries of the studies (campaign aides pointed me to this one). He wants to see more. He’s
looking for something definitive to assure him that legalizing won’t lead to serious mental or physical problems, in teens or adults. America appears to be moving on without him , and so
are the future leaders of his party. If Biden really has his eyes on public health, he should think about how many Black people end up in jail for marijuana sale and possession, argues Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor
Chokwe Lumumba—a young Black progressive who oversaw local decriminalization in his city in 2018. Biden should also think about how an illicit, unregulated market is leading to the drug being laced with other
chemicals, and the health effects of that, Lumumba told me. If Biden thinks marijuana is addictive, he said, then he should explain what makes it worse than alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. Legalization is a necessary
part of criminal-justice reform, Lumumba said. “I would encourage him and his campaign more broadly to do more research on some of the finer points,” he added. Alternatively, John Fetterman, the lieutenant
governor of Pennsylvania, says Biden should think about how legalization could raise tax revenue in the post-pandemic economy of state budget deficits. “What better time than now to have that conversation?”
Fetterman told me. Before the coronavirus outbreak, Fetterman spent a year traveling his state, including areas that mostly voted for Trump in 2016, proselytizing “commonsense” legalization. There’s even more
reason to agree with him now, he said. “It’s the ultimate policy and financial low-hanging fruit,” he said. “If you’re not moved by the gross racial disparities, what state doesn’t need a couple hundred million more in
revenue at this point?” Read: America’s invisible pot addicts Amid the criticism that Biden hasn’t taken a definitive stance on legalization, it’s easy to lose track of how far ahead he is of any other major-party
presidential nominee in history in terms of changing marijuana policy. He’d decriminalize use, which would mean fines instead of jail time, and move to expunge records for using. He’d remove federal enforcement in
Biden would move marijuana off as a Schedule 1 narcotic, the
states that have legalized the drug. That’s further, by far, than Donald Trump, or Barack Obama, has gone.
same category as heroin, but would not take it off the illegal-drugs schedule entirely, so that federal law would treat it the way it
does alcohol or nicotine. John Morgan, a Florida Biden donor and a major proponent of legalization in his state, is a proud user of marijuana, and told me he knows many Democrats and Republicans
who are too. He’s been able to get Ron DeSantis, his state’s Republican governor and a big Trump ally, on board with legalization. Morgan said that when he broached the issue briefly with Biden last year ahead of
hosting a fundraiser for him, the candidate responded, “‘I know where you are on this.’ I just took it to be as You know where I am on this.” Erik Altieri, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform
of Marijuana Laws, a pro-legalization lobbying group, told me that although his organization heard from several of the other leading Democratic presidential campaigns last year, it never got a call from the Biden
team. Biden’s resistance is particularly frustrating for those who remember how he was a pioneer in standing up for legalizing same-sex marriage, the biggest recent issue on which laws
suddenly flipped to catch up to changing views. Maybe, one person who’s spoken with Biden theorized, the difference is that he knew gay people, but believes—almost certainly falsely—that he doesn’t know people
who regularly use marijuana. That’s a bad guess too, Biden aides told me. “As science ends up with more conclusive evidence regarding the impact of marijuana, I think he would look at that data. But he’s being
asked to make a decision right now. This is where the science guides him,” Stef Feldman, Biden’s policy director, explained to me. “When he looked to put down his position on marijuana in writing for the purposes of
the campaign, he asked for an update on where science was today. He didn’t ask for an update on what views and science said 20 years ago. He wanted to know what was the best information we know now. And
that is what he made his decision on.” Read: What Americans don’t know about Joe Biden This can seem both perfectly reasonable and a ridiculous excuse. There isn’t some conclusive study about health effects
that Biden is ignoring, but one is also not likely to emerge anytime soon. And though they insist this is all about health, other ripples from legalization are on the minds of institutionalists like Biden and his close
advisers: trade deals that require both sides to keep marijuana illegal would have to be rewritten, half a century of American pressure on other countries about their drug policies would be reversed, and hard-line
marijuana isn’t a priority right now for the campaign . Legalization is at
police unions would have to be convinced that he wasn’t just giving in to stoners. Realistically,
once too small an issue for Biden’s tiny team to focus on and too large an issue to take a stand on without fuller vetting. And it comes with a frustration among people close to
Biden, who point out that liberals talk about trusting science on everything from climate change to wearing masks—and, notably, wanted vaping restricted because the health effects were unclear—but are willing to
Biden’s compromise: going right to the edge of legalization, while appointing a criminal-
let that standard slide here because they want marijuana to be legal.
justice task force for his campaign whose members have each supported at least some approach to legalization . But that sort of signaling
doesn’t get people to the polls. “Being cute is fine. Being bold is motivating,” Ben Wessel, the director of NextGen America, a group focused on boosting political involvement among younger voters, told me. “If Biden
said he wants to legalize marijuana tomorrow, it would help him get reluctant young voters off the fence and come home to vote for Biden—especially Bernie [Sanders] supporters, especially young people of color
who have been screwed by a criminal-justice system that treats them unfairly on marijuana issues,” Wessel told me. Publicly supporting marijuana legalization would be an easy, attention-grabbing move, and might
help many Sanders diehards get past the fact that he’s not where they want him to be on the rest of their candidate’s democratic-socialist agenda. Altieri, the pro-marijuana lobbyist, said coming up with a legalization
policy wouldn’t take much work: Sanders had one, as did Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Andrew Yang. Or Biden could check in with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who wrote a legalization
“Where he’s at now would have
bill based on the argument that legalization is essential to the criminal-justice-reform conversation. Altieri is not impressed with how little Biden has moved so far.
been maybe a bold stance in 1988. It’s not much of one in 2020, ” he told me. In 2018, top Democrats credited a legalization ballot initiative in Michigan with boosting turnout
and producing the biggest blue wave in the country—winning races for governor, Senate, attorney general, and secretary of state, along with flipping two congressional seats and multiple state-legislature seats. A
Anyone who believes—hopefully, or out of cynical political calculation—that
ballot initiative is expected for the fall in Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota, and possibly Montana.
Biden will announce some big change in his thinking , aides told me, will be disappointed. Just do it, Fetterman said: Do it, if only to secure
Pennsylvania’s electoral votes and get that much closer to the White House. “If Joe Biden’s account tweeted out ‘Legal. Weed.,’ it would get a million likes in the
first two hours. I guarantee it. And no one’s going to accuse Uncle Joe of being a pothead,” Fetterman told me. “If you think weed is the devil’s tobacco, you ain’t
voting for Biden anyway.”
 AT: Biden Solves – DNA
Biden created and supports CODIS
Finlay 15 (Anita Finlay; In 2012, she became a regular commentator on the top rated Jerry Doyle Show (8 million listeners per
week), America’s Radio News Network and The Michelle Jackson Show. ; 3-19-2015; “Biden and Mikulski Secure $41M Federal
Funding to End Rape Kit Backlog“; AnitaFinlay; https://anitafinlay.com/biden-and-mikulski-fight-to-end-rape-kit-backlog-
nationwide/; Accessed 7-12-2020; RD) (the brackets are part of the original card)
Back in 1994, when Biden was a senator, he teamed up with Mikulski to pass the Violence Against Women Act. It was this landmark
piece of legislation that, among other things, first required states to provide free DNA testing to anyone who reports a rape. VAWA also
resulted in the creation and implementation of the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, the criminal forensic database used by the FBI to
match the DNA evidence from rape kits to convicted felons. Since, as Biden noted, studies show “repeat offenders commit over 90 percent of the rapes
committed in the country,” CODIS has proved extremely effective in identifying rapists and, often, linking them to multiple assaults. “DNA is the
guilty person’s worst enemy and it is the innocent person’s greatest and best friend,” [Biden] said.