Talking 2024 on Substack Live with Kmele Foster Thursday

Tune in!

Oct 15, 2024

Hey folks! So we have a date and time for my conversation with Kmele Foster, part of Substack’s series of election dialogues. which include some very interesting combinations (I’ll be tuning in to the Nate Silver-Matt Yglesias conversation tomorrow to see definitively who can leave more people pissed off online). Please do set a reminder for my back and forth with Kmele, where we’ll be talking about the interesting trends on race, gender, and other lines we’re tracking in this election — we’ll go live at 8 PM Eastern on Thursday, the 17th.

Democrats Dream of Beating Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz is debating Colin Allred in Texas tonight, as a new poll shows him up by four points on the Democrat:

The Texas Senate race remains close just a week out from early voting, with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz up 4 percentage points over U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, according to a new statewide poll. The Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston survey found nearly enough voters remained undecided to make up the 51-46 difference in the Senate race, with 3% saying they still had not made up their mind between the two-term Republican senator and Dallas Democrat challenging him.

The WSJ did a deep dive this weekend on the trends in the race:

The matchup comes six years after former Rep. Beto O’Rourke came within three points of beating Cruz, drawing national fascination and indicating Texas is potentially competitive. Fervor surrounding O’Rourke thrilled Democrats as he rallied supporters in all 254 Texas counties, livestreamed his every move and appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. (O’Rourke’s race for governor in 2022 was less suspenseful: He lost it by 11 percentage points.)
Allred has been running what might be considered the opposite of an O’Rourke campaign. He has focused on television advertisements over rallies, has been less prominent in the media and made many of his in-person events small gatherings centered on professional or industry groups. The soft-spoken former professional football player elicits little excitement and mostly talks about his reputation as a centrist. At times, some fellow Democrats have questioned whether he is trying hard enough.
Allred has eclipsed Cruz in fundraising in the last three months, adding more than $30 million to the $38 million he had previously raised. Cruz has reported a cumulative $47 million.
The race’s competitiveness should be no shock, said University of Houston political-science professor Brandon Rottinghaus, who noted that Texas is becoming younger and more urban, factors more favorable to Democrats. Cruz, whose approval rating has never gotten above 50%, is an obvious target. Allred’s strong fundraising advantage allowed him to define himself to voters early with expensive statewide TV ads.
Cruz has in recent months sought to portray himself as the bipartisan in the race, taking the lead on widely supported efforts such as continued funding of the Federal Aviation Administration and speaking often of the bills he has passed. Trying to rebrand midcycle, as Rottinghaus said Cruz is seeming to do, is a challenge.

Harris Struggles to Win Over Black Men

Alarm bells.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies are rolling out a blizzard of policies, events and outreach in an attempt to shore up her standing with Black men with just three weeks to go until Election Day.
Harris on Monday night stopped by a Black-owned business in Erie, Pa., to discuss her new economic plan for Black entrepreneurs ahead of a rally there. At the same time, actor Don Cheadle and NFL defensive tackle Thomas Booker headlined a “Monday Night Football” watch party in Detroit in an attempt to use celebrity surrogates to connect with voters. Her strategy is emerging less than a week after former President Barack Obama admonished Black male voters who he said were reluctant to back a Black woman, stern remarks that some in the party say risk making matters worse for Harris.
Quentin James, founder and president of the Collective PAC, a pro-Harris group, said it was important for Democrats to use policy to persuade Black men to vote for Harris over Republican former President Donald Trump. James, who attended Monday night’s event in Detroit, said Obama’s remarks suggesting Harris’s support with Black men is somewhat soft because they are “not feeling the idea” of a female president weren’t helpful.
“While I understand the sentiment of having a desire to see increased engagement, chastising voters has never worked, and it won’t work this time either,” said James, who gave the Harris campaign feedback on the new set of policies rolled out on Monday aimed at improving the economic position of Black men.

America’s Fastest Growing Crime Enterprise

Madeleine Rowley reports on sex trafficking.

Deep inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services resides a tiny agency called the Office on Trafficking in Persons. A large part of its mission is to help survivors of sex and labor trafficking “rebuild their lives and become self-sufficient.” Among other things, it offers food assistance, medical benefits, and cash to migrant minors who have been trafficked but have managed to escape. Once their eligibility to obtain benefits is approved, they receive a document called the child eligibility letter.
Although the number of child eligibility letters the government issues is supposed to be public information, it became available on the trafficking office’s website only after I filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The numbers confirmed what Lisa had told me: Trafficking has increased—a lot—since Biden took office. During the four years of the Trump administration, the government issued an average of 625 letters per year to migrant minors who had managed to break free from their traffickers.
But in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, that number jumped to 1,143. In 2022 it jumped again, to 2,226. Last year, the number stood at 2,148, but that was only through September; the fourth quarter hadn’t yet been counted. To put it another way, forced labor and prostitution among underage migrants more than tripled under President Biden, reaching record highs. And that only counted the handful who had escaped—not the thousands who were still held by the traffickers, the ones Lisa was searching for.
“The sex trafficking of minors, and human trafficking as a whole, is one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises in the U.S.,” said Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Mark Dawson after a big bust in Houston last year that saw the arrest of 10 traffickers, all of whom had gang connections.
Sex-trafficking victims often suffer horrific abuse, as I discovered when I spoke to Landon Dickeson, the 36-year-old executive director for Bob’s House of Hope in Denton, Texas, the only shelter for male sex-trafficking victims ages 18 and up in the country. Dickeson says they’ve seen teens from Central and South America who have been so tortured by their traffickers they can barely function.
Dickeson described caring for teens who have brain damage from being so heavily drugged—teens who have had their fingernails pulled out, and lemon juice poured on wounds. When I asked to interview one of their migrant residents, Dickeson said they simply weren’t in any condition to speak to anyone, much less a reporter.
“We think the cartels and gangs use torture as a control method for the males,” said Dickeson. “They’re not going to fight back if they chain their victims to a radiator, beat them up frequently, or drug them.”

The Black Newborns + Black Doctors Myth

The Manhattan Institute debunks a widely spread myth.

In August 2020, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published an influential academic paper with a striking empirical finding. Using data from Florida hospitals over three decades, the study found that black babies were less likely to die if cared for by black physicians, instead of white physicians, after birth.
In the Florida data set, about eight in every 1,000 black newborns died before leaving the hospital, as compared with only three in every 1,000 white newborns—reflecting the tragic, nationwide racial gap in neonatal mortality. Being cared for by a black doctor, however, appeared to reduce a black newborn’s chance of death. In the raw data, the death rate for black babies seen by black doctors was only four in 1,000. Even in a statistical model that controlled for the newborns’ health conditions and other factors, being seen by a black doctor appeared to reduce black newborns’ mortality by about 1.3 per 1,000.
The article created a stir—unsurprising, given the importance of the topic and the findings’ ramifications—for patients’ choices, for hospitals’ practices, and for the debate over affirmative action. Media outlets including the Washington Post and CNN covered the paper. In 2023, drawing from an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the finding in her dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which addressed the legality of racial preferences in higher education.
In modern social science, however, there are always many ways of analyzing the same data—and sometimes, important details go unnoticed even in peer-reviewed studies. We obtained the same Florida hospital data set with the goal of replicating the study’s findings and running additional models that might help determine just how robust those conclusions are.
We discovered an important repercussion of the way the authors controlled for the infants’ health conditions. The analysis accounts for the 65 health conditions that are most common in the data set, using “diagnosis codes” that are reported for each patient—effectively comparing how the race of the doctor and the race of the newborn interact among newborns who are “equally healthy” in terms of those top 65 “comorbidities.” However, the top 65 comorbidities do not include a single indicator for whether the newborn has a very low birth weight, which is a crucial determinant of infant mortality.
Controlling for very low birth weight—i.e., comparing newborns within the same weight class—eliminates the racial concordance result in the most detailed statistical models. This happens because black doctors disproportionately care for black newborns with healthy birth weights. Conversely, white doctors care for a disproportionately large share of the black babies most at risk, those who have a very low birth weight.

Americans Don’t Trust Media At All

Gallup.

Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” similar to last year’s 32%. Americans’ trust in the media -- such as newspapers, television and radio -- first fell to 32% in 2016 and did so again last year.
For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33% of Americans express “not very much” confidence.
Gallup first asked this question in 1972 and has measured it in most years since 1997. In three readings in the 1970s, trust ranged from 68% to 72%, yet by Gallup’s next readings in the late 1990s and early 2000s, smaller majorities of 51% to 55% trusted the news media. The latest findings are from a poll conducted Sept. 3-15, which includes Gallup’s annual update on trust in the media and other civic and political entities in the U.S.
As has been the case historically, partisans have different levels of confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. Currently, 54% of Democrats, 27% of independents and 12% of Republicans say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. Independents’ trust matches the record low in 2022, while Democrats’ and Republicans’ are statistically similar to their historical low points.