Maggie Astor

Ryan’s exit leaves 18 Democrats in the 2020 race.

“I wanted to give voice to the forgotten communities that have been left behind by globalization and automation, and I’m proud of this campaign because I believe we’ve done that,” Ryan said in a video announcing his withdrawal. “While it didn’t work out quite the way we planned, this voice will not be stifled.”

He said he would run for reelection to his House seat.

Competing in an overflowing field, Ryan — previously known mostly for challenging Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the House Democratic leadership — never really got a foothold. He qualified for the first two debates in June and July with a handful of 1% polling results, but never came close to reaching the higher thresholds that followed.

When he entered the race in April, he argued that he could win back the white, working-class Midwesterners who had flipped from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. His House district includes Youngstown and part of Akron, a stretch of northeastern Ohio long reliant on the auto industry, and his platform focused on the damage caused by the decline of traditional manufacturing.

One of his central proposals was a large federal investment in renewable energy industries, including electric vehicle construction, to create jobs in the places most affected by that decline.

“I’m in a place to really bridge that economic disorientation,” he said in an interview the day he announced his candidacy. “I want a businessperson in Michigan to say, ‘I think Tim Ryan really understands what we need to do around electric vehicles,’ and I want a worker in Michigan going, ‘Yeah, we just lost our job, let’s make electric — that seems like it’s the future.’”

He also argued that food and agricultural policy connected a range of disparate issues, including health care costs and climate change. He proposed shifting federal funding from large agribusinesses to local and organic farms, and creating tax credits and grants for grocers and other businesses that served so-called food deserts, areas where healthy food is unavailable or unaffordable.

After the mass shooting in August in Dayton, Ohio, Ryan spoke forcefully in favor of gun control, telling CNN that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, needed to “get off his ass and do something.” With the advocacy group Moms Demand Action, he led a “caravan” from Ohio to Louisville, Kentucky, where McConnell lives.

Guns were one of a handful of issues — abortion was another — on which Ryan notably evolved during his House tenure. He once had an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, but donated the money he had received from its political action committee to gun control groups after the Las Vegas shooting in 2017.

But his central message was always about the economy.

Ryan described the decline of traditional manufacturing not only as the focus of his campaign, but also as its impetus. He often recounted his daughter calling him in tears after a friend’s father lost his job at General Motors and saying, “You have to do something.”

So, he liked to say, he did something: He ran for president.

This article originally appeared in

Tim Ryan Ends His 2020 Presidential Campaign

Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio dropped out of the presidential race Thursday, ending a campaign that sought to champion Midwestern manufacturing workers but failed to gain traction.

The lawyer, Steve Patton, gave $5,600 — the legal maximum contribution — to Buttigieg in June and was scheduled to co-host a fundraiser for him Friday. After The Associated Press reported on Patton’s involvement, Buttigieg’s campaign said that it would return the money and that Patton would not attend the fundraiser.

“Transparency and justice for Laquan McDonald is more important than a campaign contribution,” a campaign spokesman, Chris Meagher, said in a statement. “We are returning the money he contributed to the campaign and the money he has collected. He is no longer a co-host for the event and will not be attending.”

Race has long been a political liability for Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has struggled all year to gain support among black voters, a crucial Democratic constituency. In a national Quinnipiac poll released Monday, he was at 11% among white voters but only 1% among black voters.

This Sunday, it will be five years since a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, killed Laquan, who was 17. Van Dyke, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to about seven years in prison, shot him 16 times.

Chicago officials refused to turn over dashboard video of the killing until a judge ordered them to do so in November 2015, and Patton, then the city’s top lawyer, was a leader in the effort to block the footage’s release.

The video — which contradicted police accounts of the killing — showed Laquan stepping away from Van Dyke, who began firing anyway and continued to fire even after Laquan was lying on the ground.

The fundraiser with Patton threatened to draw attention away from Buttigieg’s performance in Tuesday’s debate, which was generally well-received, and back to Buttigieg’s record on race.

Early in his tenure as mayor, Buttigieg fired South Bend’s black police chief, a decision that still angers many residents. And in June, a white South Bend police officer killed a black man, Eric Logan, setting off a crisis that Buttigieg left the campaign trail to address. At a town-hall event after the killing, the anger was palpable, with one attendee shouting, “We don’t trust you.”

Buttigieg released what he called a “Douglass Plan” for black Americans in July, designed to reduce racial inequities, but it has not measurably increased his standing.

While Buttigieg is polling among the top five candidates in the sprawling Democratic field, his overall numbers have generally hovered around 4% nationally, according to polls taken before the debate. He has raised more money this year than any Democratic presidential candidate except Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Buttigieg Cuts Ties With Donor Linked to Laquan McDonald Cover-Up

Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, facing criticism, distanced itself Friday from a Chicago lawyer who tried to block the release of footage of the 2014 police shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald.

Eight candidates have qualified for the debate so far:

— Former Vice President Joe Biden

— Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey

— Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana

— Sen. Kamala Harris of California

— Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont

— Hedge-fund investor Tom Steyer

— Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts

Yang was the latest to qualify because he received enough support in a Quinnipiac University national poll released Tuesday afternoon. Other candidates have until 11:59 p.m. Nov. 13 to qualify.

While 12 candidates qualified for the fourth debate, scheduled for next week near Columbus, Ohio, the DNC has set higher criteria for the next one. Candidates will need at least 165,000 donors (up from 130,000) and at least 3% support in four polls (up from 2%).

As an alternative to the 3%-in-four-polls requirement, candidates can qualify by registering at least 5% support in two polls conducted in the four early-voting states.

The gradually increasing requirements have steadily culled the field of debaters and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic field as a whole. Twenty candidates qualified for each of the first two debates, when they needed only 65,000 donors or 1% in three polls. But only 10 met the higher requirements for the third debate; two more met them in time for next week’s.

Sanders, who is recovering from a heart attack, is still expected to participate in next week’s debate. On Tuesday morning, before seeing a new cardiologist, he told reporters that he had felt unusually fatigued for the past month or two and that he “should have listened to those symptoms.”

Fifth Democratic Debate Will Be in Georgia, With 8 Candidates So Far

The fifth Democratic debate will be held in the Atlanta area on Nov. 20, the Democratic National Committee announced Tuesday. MSNBC and The Washington Post will host it.

Her announcement means the 19 Democratic presidential candidates unanimously support the inquiry. Gabbard had been the only holdout after the White House released a reconstruction of a July phone call in which Trump urged the president of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

“Up to this point, I have been opposed to pursuing impeachment because it will further divide our already badly divided country,” Gabbard said in a statement from her congressional office. “However, after looking carefully at the transcript of the conversation with Ukraine’s president, the whistleblower complaint, the inspector general memo and President Trump’s comments about the issue, unfortunately, I believe that if we do not proceed with the inquiry, it will set a very dangerous precedent.”

She added: “If we allow the president to abuse his or her power, then our society will rot from top to bottom. We will turn into a banana republic, where people in positions of power — from the president all the way down to the traffic cop — will feel it’s OK to abuse their power with no consequences.”

As one of two sitting representatives still in the race (the other is Tim Ryan of Ohio), Gabbard will be able to cast a vote if, in fact, articles of impeachment are sent to the House floor.

What effect, if any, impeachment proceedings will have on the presidential race is impossible to say. Gabbard’s previous opposition to impeachment made her a loner in the Democratic field, but that was not unusual: She has stood apart from the rest of the candidates on a variety of issues, especially foreign policy.

The announcement Friday was a remarkable turnaround for Gabbard, who had said just two days ago that she did not think the reconstructed call had shown “compelling cause” for impeachment. In an interview with Hill TV on Wednesday, when asked directly whether the transcript had changed her thinking on impeachment, she said, “It hasn’t.”

“I’m not a lawyer, but I think most people reading through that transcript are not going to find that extremely compelling cause to throw out a president that won an election in 2016,” she said then. “Instead, what I think most people will see is, ‘Hey, this is another move by Democrats to get rid of Donald Trump,’ further deepening the already hyperpartisan divides that we have in this country.”

A spokesman for her office provided the statement Friday but did not immediately respond to a question about what had caused Gabbard to change her mind.

The whistleblower complaint, released Thursday, at the center of the inquiry included new allegations that the White House had tried to cover up the phone call by putting the transcript in a computer system intended for highly classified information.

While the Democratic presidential field is now united in support of the impeachment inquiry that Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday, the candidates, like the congressional Democratic caucus, are still divided on how extensive the inquiry should be. It is an open question, for example, whether articles of impeachment — if the inquiry leads to them — should focus only on the Ukraine issue or also include past actions by Trump.

Gabbard argued that the inquiry should be “swift, thorough and narrowly focused.”

“It cannot be turned into a long, protracted partisan circus that will further divide our country and undermine our democracy,” she said.

Gabbard is still a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, consistently polling in the low single digits in voter surveys. But this week, she hit a polling threshold that qualified her for the next debate in October.

Tulsi Gabbard, Last 2020 Holdout, Backs Impeachment Inquiry

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii endorsed the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on Friday, dropping long-standing opposition that she had affirmed as recently as two days ago.

It is a bitter reality for the candidates who failed to qualify for next month’s debate, and griping has been in plentiful supply. Some argue that the Democratic National Committee’s qualification criteria are arbitrary — candidates must reach 2% support in at least four polls by approved organizations — and that the committee is prematurely culling the field. Others want the DNC to count a wider range of surveys.

But among voters upset that their preferred candidate didn’t make the cut, some objections stem from misunderstandings of how polling works. We talked to pollsters to clear up some points of confusion.

You probably won’t be polled.

As the story goes, George Gallup, a pioneer of modern polling, once told a woman who questioned his sampling methods — nobody she knew had ever been polled, she said — that being selected for a poll was about as likely as being struck by lightning.

It’s true. If a poll has a sample size of 1,000 — and many are smaller — that’s 1,000 people out of millions. Your chances of being chosen for that poll might be less than one-thousandth of a percentage point.

Dozens of polls have been conducted by DNC-approved organizations this year, but one-thousandth of a percentage point multiplied dozens of times is still a fraction of a percentage point. Your chances look marginally better if you count only the voting-age population or registered voters, but not better enough to be meaningful.

So if nobody has ever polled you, that’s not surprising at all.

But that doesn’t make the polls invalid.

Without a statistical background, it can be hard to understand how such a tiny piece of the electorate can represent the whole. But it absolutely can.

“One of the first things that you learn in probability statistics is that the accuracy of your sample is based on the size of the sample itself and not the proportion of the population that it represents,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Imagine you wanted to know how many blades of grass were in your lawn. If you divided the lawn into 10,000 equally sized squares and counted the blades in 500 of those squares, you could extrapolate that number to the whole lawn. If you made 1 million squares, you could still extrapolate by picking 500 of them. The total number of squares on the lawn doesn’t matter; what matters is that you randomly choose 500 of them to sample.

Similarly, the total number of voters in the United States doesn’t matter. What matters is that each voter has an equal chance of being surveyed, even if that chance is infinitesimal.

Sample size does matter, of course, but only to a point. A 500-person sample is much better than a 200-person sample. But there isn’t much difference in accuracy between a 1,000-person sample and a 2,000-person sample, said J. Ann Selzer, president of the Iowa polling firm Selzer &amp; Co.

You can’t volunteer.

Random sampling is an essential part of polling. You can’t conduct a reliable poll with volunteers, because the people who take the initiative to volunteer won’t be representative of the full electorate.

“You can’t invite yourself to the party,” Selzer said, “because the people who would choose to invite themselves to the party may have some existing bias.”

Some pollsters have a database of registered voters and randomly select some of them. Others use random digit dialing, meaning they have a computer generate random phone numbers.

Online organizations like SurveyMonkey and YouGov operate a bit differently: They take samples from the pool of people who fill out their user-generated surveys, so people can put themselves in the running by taking such surveys. But they can’t make themselves be chosen: Within those pools, participants are still selected randomly, and the pools are still very large.

This month, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii — who ended up falling two polls short of qualifying for the September debate — urged her supporters to take SurveyMonkey and YouGov surveys in hopes of being chosen for an official poll. Her supporters appear to have gone a step further: Selzer said they had been calling her office, asking to be included in her polls, which are not conducted online.

There is no way to increase your odds of being chosen for one of Selzer’s polls, which have been among the most accurate in the country in past elections. They would be less reliable if there were.

Good polls are weighted, but only lightly.

Because demographics like race, sex, age and education level are associated with differences in political opinion, polls are more accurate when the demographic breakdown is accurate. If, for example, women or white people or baby boomers are over- or underrepresented in a sample, the poll results are likely to be skewed.

Pollsters address that problem through a process called weighting. If, say, college-educated men account for a larger percentage of the sample than they do of the full electorate, the pollster will count their responses a little less in the results.

In high-quality polls, these adjustments tend to be small, because a properly selected sample will have a close-to-accurate representation of most demographics to begin with. So a reputable organization would take a sample that was 54% women and weight it to match the percentage shown in the census, but a sample that was 75% women would be fatally flawed.

“If your original sample is way off on a certain demographic, no amount of weighting is going to help you,” said Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. But if you choose your sample properly, he added, “you’re not going to be way off on any of the demographics.”

Every poll can’t be accurate. But averages usually are.

Many people are familiar with the margin of sampling error, which reflects the uncertainty involved in taking a sample of a larger population. A margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points means that a candidate’s actual support could easily be as much as three percentage points higher or lower than what the poll says.

That margin is tied to something called a confidence interval. Most polls publish a 95% confidence interval: 5% of the time, that interval won’t contain the truth because of sampling error. That rate also may not capture every possible polling problem, like people not picking up the phone.

“You cannot treat polls as crystal balls no matter how well they are done,” Murray said. “Statistics tell us that polls cannot be accurate 100% of the time.”

But while you shouldn’t put too much faith in a single poll, averages of many polls are pretty reliable.

To qualify for next month’s debate, candidates needed to register 2% support in at least four of the 21 polls that met the DNC’s criteria. A candidate supported by 2% of all Democratic voters very likely got less than that in some polls. But it would be exceedingly unlikely for them not to reach the bar in at least four.

“If you see in poll after poll that a candidate is not getting the 2%,” Schwartz said, “that will give you confidence that they’re really not at that 2%.”

Why You Can't Volunteer for Election Polls, and Other Polling Facts

Election polls have always been interesting. But this year, they have become official players in the Democratic presidential primary race, because polling badly means you don’t get to debate.

Candidates had until 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday to meet the Democratic National Committee’s qualification requirements: amassing 130,000 individual donors and receiving 2% support in at least four qualifying polls.

Even after two new polls were released Wednesday morning, only 10 candidates made the cut, meaning they can all fit on one stage under rules set by the DNC. Those candidates are:

— Julián Castro, the former housing secretary

— Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota

— Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas

— Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur

The debate will be held in Houston on Sept. 12 from 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern time and will be broadcast on ABC and Univision. The moderators will be George Stephanopoulos, David Muir, Linsey Davis and Jorge Ramos.

The candidates will have 1 minute and 15 seconds to answer questions, and 45 seconds for responses and rebuttals. There will be opening statements but no closing statements.

It was about twice as difficult to qualify for this debate as it was for the first two sets of debates, and exactly half as many candidates qualified.

The one-night format means the leading candidates will all share the stage for the first time. Because of the size of the previous debate fields, two of the highest-polling candidates, Biden and Warren, have yet to face each other directly.

But the format also means that, once again, 10 candidates will be jostling for speaking time — a situation that can lend itself more to sound bites than to in-depth, well, debate. For that reason, some observers had been hoping for two debate nights with five or six candidates apiece.

Several candidates who didn’t make the cut criticized the DNC’s requirements, saying the committee was unnecessarily narrowing the field with five months still to go before the Iowa caucuses.

Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday, said the debate would be “missing something” by not including him. Bullock, who often emphasizes that he is the only Democratic presidential candidate who has won a statewide race in a state that voted for President Donald Trump, said there would be no “rural voice” onstage.

In a letter sent Wednesday to Tom Perez, the DNC chairman, an adviser to Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado complained that the committee had “not provided information on how or why its unprecedented debate qualification requirements were set nor what the criteria will be for the eight future debates.”

The DNC is accepting polls from 16 organizations for the debate qualifications, and some highly regarded pollsters are not on the list. Several more candidates, including the billionaire investor Tom Steyer and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, might have qualified for the debate if more polls had been counted. But a larger list would not have helped Bennet or Bullock, because neither has met the donor requirement.

Some lesser-known candidates have criticized the donor requirement, too, arguing that it creates an incentive to focus on fundraising rather than voter outreach. It seems, though, that 130,000 donors was actually an easier bar to clear than 2% support in four polls.

Four candidates — Gabbard, Steyer, self-help author Marianne Williamson and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who ended his campaign last week — met the donor threshold but not the polling threshold. Nobody, by contrast, met the polling threshold without meeting the donor threshold.

Steyer got three of the four polls he needed, but failed to reach 2% support in either of the polls released Wednesday morning. Gabbard hit that mark in two polls, and Williamson in one.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who ended her campaign Wednesday, and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who also dropped out recently and is now running for Senate, were the only other candidates to reach 2% in a qualifying poll.

Steyer, Gabbard and others who didn’t make the cut for September could still qualify for the fourth debate, which will be held in October. They have until two weeks before that debate — whose date hasn’t been announced yet — to meet the current criteria. (After that, the DNC may raise the qualifications bar yet again.)

So don’t get too excited about the one-night format. The second night will probably be back a month later.

The September Democratic Debate Will Be One Night Only

After two rounds of back-to-back debate nights over the summer, the next Democratic presidential debate will be a one-night affair.

“The Trump Administration shouldn’t get to lock up Robert Mueller’s report and throw away the key,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., argued on Twitter, asking people to sign a petition and provide their names and emails. Such information is often used for future fundraising solicitations.

Within hours of Mueller’s completing his investigation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and the campaign arm of House Democrats were already placing ads on Facebook demanding the full report’s release, with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee seeking 100,000 signatures for its online petition.

With no detailed information available about the report, Warren and Booker — as well as Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif. — sought to focus attention and pressure on how quickly Attorney General William Barr would release the full report.

“Attorney General Barr — release the Mueller report to the American public. Now,” Warren wrote on Twitter.

Gillibrand made similar demands and also retweeted the news of the report along with three words: “See you Sunday.” That is when Gillibrand plans to formally kick off her 2020 campaign in front of Trump International Tower in New York.

Harris, in addition to calling for the report to be released “immediately,” called on Barr to “publicly testify under oath about the investigation and its findings.”

Harris, Warren and Gillibrand also joined Booker in asking supporters to sign their petitions calling for the report’s immediate release.

Six additional candidates — Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington; former Reps. Beto O’Rourke and John Delaney; and Julián Castro — also called for the release of the full report.

“As Donald Trump said, ‘Let it come out,'” Sanders wrote on Twitter. “I call on the Trump administration to make Special Counsel Mueller’s full report public as soon as possible. No one, including the president, is above the law.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/politics/mueller-report-2020-candidates.html" id="4ba717fb-64ad-3e13-a4c3-22a3d959bc5b">The New York Times</a>.

2020 Candidates Demand Full and Immediate Release of Mueller Report

Democratic presidential candidates wasted no time Friday evening demanding the immediate public release of the long-awaited report from special counsel Robert Mueller — and, in doing so, tried to gather new supporters and their email addresses by calling for complete transparency from the Justice Department.

The employees will be represented by a unit of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. They voted to unionize through what is known as a card-check system: A majority of employees signed forms indicating their interest. Sanders has previously called for that method to be used at all companies, instead of traditional elections.

“Bernie Sanders is the most pro-union candidate in the field, he’ll be the most pro-union president in the White House, and we’re honored that his campaign will be the first to have a unionized work force,” his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said in a statement.

One other Democratic candidate, Julián Castro, said in January that he would be supportive if his employees chose to unionize.

Sanders has long been an ardent supporter of organized labor. But in the months leading up to the announcement of his 2020 bid, his campaign was forced to deal with the disclosure of lingering resentment among some female and black staff members who felt mistreated during Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.

Women who worked for him in 2016 described sexual harassment and unequal pay and said the Vermont senator failed to address the problems. Sanders met with about two dozen former employees in January to discuss the complaints, and he publicly apologized twice to the women who were mistreated.

Some black employees, too, said they had felt undervalued during the 2016 campaign, in which Sanders struggled to win over black voters.

Now, as the presidential field takes shape for 2020, Sanders finds himself in an unfamiliar position: front-runner. In the four years since he kicked off an insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton, his progressive brand of politics has become a dominating force in the Democratic Party. Numerous Democratic candidates have endorsed policies, like “Medicare for all” and free college tuition, on which Sanders used to primarily stand alone.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/us/politics/bernie-sanders-staff-unionize.html" id="788684f1-64e3-31f7-aabb-2ce0005c6be2">The New York Times</a>.

Sanders' Campaign Workforce Will Be Unionized

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign staff will be represented by a union, his campaign announced Friday, saying it would be the first time a major-party candidate had a unionized workforce.

But while he was able to stand out in his Senate campaign with a broadly liberal message and no signature policy issue, that broad message is not likely to be enough in a ballooning Democratic field.

This time, the specifics are going to be crucial. Here’s a look at where O’Rourke stands on some major issues.

Immigration

As President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall has become one of the biggest issues in U.S. politics, O’Rourke has made immigration the centerpiece of his speeches.

In addition to supporting the DREAM Act and a path to citizenship for immigrants who are living in the country illegally, he has called for the closing of private immigrant detention centers, denounced the “militarization” of immigration enforcement and spoken out against the wall.

“We are not safe because of walls but in spite of walls,” he said at a rally in El Paso last month held at the same time Trump was holding his own rally nearby. Far from extending a barrier across the entire border, he has said, he would like to remove the existing fencing in El Paso — one of the country’s largest border cities, and O’Rourke’s hometown.

In his State of the Union address, Trump held up El Paso as an example of the need for a wall, claiming that the city had been one of the most dangerous in the United States until a border fence was built there.

But the crime rate in El Paso actually fell long before the fence was built and rose afterward, and O’Rourke is holding up the city as an example of the lack of need for a wall.

Gun control

O’Rourke arguably first made his name when, after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, he livestreamed the sit-in he and other Democratic representatives were holding on the House floor in support of stricter gun laws.

The Republican-controlled Congress did not pass any gun control legislation then, but O’Rourke continues to support similar policies, including universal background checks, magazine size limits and restrictions on some semi-automatic weapons.

He also opposes concealed carry reciprocity, which would make concealed carry permits granted in any state valid nationwide, forcing states with strict licensing requirements to recognize permits from states with looser standards. It is one of the National Rifle Association’s legislative priorities.

Health care

While O’Rourke supports universal health care — increasingly a litmus-test position for Democratic candidates — he hasn’t committed to a specific way to get there. During his Senate campaign, he suggested that universal health care could take the form of a single-payer system or “a dual system,” in which a government-run program would coexist with private insurance.

He has given conflicting messages on the most prominent proposal, “Medicare for all.”

In 2017, during his time in the House, he said unequivocally, “A single-payer ‘Medicare for all’ program is the best way to ensure all Americans get the health care they need.” But during his Senate campaign, he carefully avoided those words, calling instead for “universal, guaranteed, high-quality health care for all.”

He does support expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and has urged Texas to do so. Other points in his 2018 platform included allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices with manufacturers and creating incentives for insurers to participate in the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges.

Climate change

When it comes to proposals for mitigating climate change, opponents frequently cite the potential costs of those plans. But O’Rourke has emphasized the financial impact of climate change itself. Billions of dollars that are spent on steps like sea walls, which would be critical if climate change continues unchecked, is money not spent on other priorities, he noted at a town-hall event with Columbia University students last month.

At that event, O’Rourke spoke positively about the Green New Deal, calling it technically and logistically doable. As for its political prospects, “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s up to all of us, right?”

He supports the Paris climate accords, and has also made a point of emphasizing effects that climate change is having: more storms like Hurricane Harvey, for instance, which devastated Texas.

Criminal justice

O’Rourke emphasized criminal justice in his 2018 campaign, focusing in particular on racial and economic inequities. In an op-ed in The Houston Chronicle, he described his own criminal record — he was arrested once for attempted forcible entry and once for drunken driving when he was in his 20s; both charges were dismissed — and argued that his success since then had been possible because of his race and economic status.

“The chance that I had, and which I have made the most of, is denied to too many of our fellow Texans, particularly those who don’t look like me or have access to the same opportunities that I did,” he wrote.

He called for closing private and for-profit prisons, decriminalizing marijuana and expunging the records of people previously convicted of possessing it, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent crimes, and reforming the bail system so people charged with misdemeanors would not be incarcerated because of their inability to pay.

He also emphasized rehabilitation for offenders released from prison, including the restoration of voting rights. Currently, those rights vary drastically by state.

Trade and agriculture

Like many of the Democratic candidates, O’Rourke has criticized Trump’s trade policies, including the imposition of tariffs, which have hurt some farmers and blue-collar workers. In his Senate campaign, he emphasized the needs of farmers, calling for a stronger crop insurance program and federal investments in rural infrastructure, including high-speed internet, roads and schools.

He has also drawn connections between agricultural policy and immigration policy, noting that immigrants — many of them undocumented — make up a large share of farm laborers. On that basis, he has cast immigration reform as an economic issue as well as a social one.

“We should treat these individuals with dignity and respect,” he wrote on his website last year, “because they are a critical component of our agriculture communities.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/us/politics/beto-on-the-issues.html" id="0bd2a21d-0656-3f90-a6c0-acb0115ce790">The New York Times</a>.

Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who just joined the Democratic presidential race, gained an instant following last year when he came within 3 points of unseating Sen. Ted Cruz.

Where Beto O'Rourke Stands on the Issues

O’Rourke arguably first made his name when, after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, he live-streamed the sit-in he and other Democratic representatives were holding on the House floor in support of stricter gun laws.

The Republican-controlled Congress did not pass any gun control legislation then, but O’Rourke continues to support similar policies, including universal background checks, magazine size limits and restrictions on some semiautomatic weapons.

The Democratic National Committee has set stricter criteria for the third set of debates, which will be held Sept. 12 and 13 in Houston. If 10 or fewer candidates qualify, the debate will take place on only one night.

Candidates will need to have 130,000 unique donors and register at least 2% support in four polls. They have until Aug. 28 to reach those bench marks.

These criteria could easily halve the field: The first two sets of debates included 20 of the 24 candidates, but a New York Times analysis of polls and donor numbers shows that only 10 to 12 candidates are likely to make the third round.

Seven candidates have already met both qualification thresholds and are guaranteed a spot on stage. They are:

Three other candidates are very close: Former Housing Secretary Julián Castro and the entrepreneur Andrew Yang have surpassed 130,000 donations and each have three of the four qualifying polls they need, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has met the polling threshold and has about 120,000 donors.

Beyond them, only three candidates have even a single qualifying poll to their name: the impeachment activist Tom Steyer (two polls), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii (one) and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado (one).

We asked all three of their campaigns to provide donor numbers so we could assess where they stood. Gabbard had just under 114,000 donors as of Wednesday night. A spokesman for Steyer said he was “on track to collect the required number of donors to make the September debate stage,” but did not give a number. Hickenlooper’s campaign did not respond, but Politico reported a month ago that he had only 13,000 donors.

The other 11 candidates in the race have no qualifying polls to their name, and they all went into this week’s debates seeking a viral moment that would attract new donors and lift them, even briefly, in the polls.

The qualification rules do not require enduring support. Even a small post-debate surge could push a 1% candidate up to 2% in the small handful of polls he or she needs.

But for those who have not qualified, the Aug. 28 deadline is an existential threat. Candidates like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York or Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington could be washed out of the race if they don’t get momentum from this week’s debates. And if you’re wondering whether they’re anxious, the answer is yes.

Gabbard’s campaign calculated at one point that she needed a new donor every minute to reach 130,000 by the Aug. 28 deadline, so if you go to her website, a timer next to the donation button begins counting down 60 seconds. Then the text changes.

“Oh no!” it says. “The time expired and you didn’t donate!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/politics/next-democratic-debate.html" id="edd95f6b-5dcf-3ff5-a757-c8044d05ed91">The New York Times</a>.

Only 7 Candidates Have Qualified for the Next Democratic Debate

So you made it through the second set of Democratic debates. Congratulations! Ready to talk about the next ones?

Neither did badly by any means. There was no doubt that Biden beat his lackluster performance from the first debate, and Harris held her own under a barrage of attacks, likely a product of her own strong showing last time.

But Wednesday’s most memorable performance, the experts seemed to agree, came from Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., although so many candidates scored at least some points that strategists questioned whether the polls would move much.

Here is a sampling of responses from some of the people who know the stakes of debates best: veteran campaign strategists and consultants from both parties.

Booker seized the spotlight

Booker went after Biden fiercely on criminal justice, hammering home Biden’s role in creating the policies he is now proposing to reverse. Biden, in turn, attacked Booker’s record as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, but the consensus among strategists was that Booker came out on top.

They also praised Booker’s argument, early in the debate, that the candidates should focus less on intraparty disagreements on health care and more on their actual opponent, President Donald Trump.

“Biden fired back on @CoryBooker about Newark policing under his mayoral Administration. But Booker was faster on the draw and came out ahead on style points.” — David Axelrod, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama

“Strong closing statement by @CoryBooker. He has a knack for weaving together family history with his values. Also, his shout-out to the host city (Detroit) didn’t come across as pandering.” — Laura Belin, Iowa political commentator

“Think it’s pretty clear @CoryBooker has best night. Made his own case — and did it well.” — Jennifer Palmieri, former spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton and Obama

Biden exceeded low expectations

There was little doubt Wednesday that Biden was more prepared and more polished than in the first debate, when he took a drubbing from Harris. He came armed with opposition research on her and Booker, and generally appeared more confident than last time.

His performance was uneven at times — and as several commentators noted, he was the only candidate to abruptly cut himself off, sometimes midsentence, when the moderators signaled he was out of time — but he easily cleared the low bar set by his last appearance.

“Excellent opening statement from @JoeBiden out of the gate. Rising above, focusing on Trump. General election attitude. It’s working.” — Adrienne Elrod, former senior adviser to Clinton

Tuesday night’s debate belonged to the front-runners, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But their counterparts Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., couldn’t quite replicate their dominance.

Maggie Astor

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