Politics

Standing outside a Walmart in Sterling Heights, Mich., the choice seemed simple to Heather Abro. She voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, “because I wanted to give someone who was not a politician a chance.” Besides, she “couldn’t connect” with Hillary Clinton: “I didn’t like her.”

This year Abro, a 42-year-old high-school math teacher who identifies as Catholic and has voted for both parties in the past, will cast her ballot for Joe Biden. “I think about what we look like to the world and sometimes it’s embarrassing,” she says, citing Trump’s handling of the pandemic, embrace of conspiracy theories and appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. “We teach our children to think before they talk, and he’s not modeling that.” She’ll vote for Biden this time because she thinks he’s a decent man. But mostly because “he’s not Trump.”

If Biden wins on Nov. 3, it will be largely because of college-educated suburban women like Abro. Fleeing Trump in droves, they’re the biggest and perhaps most important cohort in the Biden political coalition, an unlikely alliance of angry young voters, voters of color, terrified seniors, and exhausted suburbanites who make up the broadest base of support for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton.

The former Vice President to Barack Obama linked himself to his boss throughout the Democratic primary, but polls suggest he could wind up with a more durable coalition. Biden has shored up Obama’s base of young voters and voters of color: Americans under 30 are on track to vote at record levels in 2020, overwhelmingly for Democrats. Biden has maintained the gains Democrats made in the suburbs in 2018, winning suburban voters — particularly suburban women– by more than 20 points. Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has allowed the Democratc nominee to build a durable lead with seniors, who are especially vulnerable to the disease and disapproving of the President’s handling of it.

And while Trump handily won white evangelical and Catholic voters in 2016, Biden is now even or even narrowly leading with white Catholics in some polls— something only two Democrats have achieved in the last 50 years. Biden has also narrowed Trump’s lead with non-college whites and rural voters, the key component of the President’s base.

If the polls are right, assembling this …read more

Source:: Time – Politics

A childcare workforce strategy could create 42,500 jobs and add nearly $6 billion to Alberta’s GDP, says the NDP, calling on the UCP to better support child care or risk economic recovery.

The bulk of the proposals could start now and be paid for with $120 million the UCP government has already budgeted for childcare in 2020-21, the NDP argues in its plan released Friday.

The NDP argues the province needs a workforce strategy to address the sector’s labour shortage by beefing up education for early childhood educators, supporting their professional development, and dealing with long-term challenges operators face in attracting and retaining the workforce.

In a Friday interview, Notley said universal, affordable childcare is the single most effective economic strategy the province can adopt to get people back to work and grow the economy and called on the government to get to work on a comprehensive strategy as soon as possible with resources already budgeted.

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Source:: Edmonton Journal – Politics

Going into the home stretch of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump has seized on an unusual political tactic: take credit for the return of Big Ten football to appeal to sports-crazy voters in key Midwestern swing states.

When conference officials announced Aug. 11 that they would postpone the football season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump slammed the decision, lobbying publicly for a return to the gridiron. On Sept. 16, Big Ten officials reversed course. The season opener, between Illinois and Wisconsin, kicks off Friday night, and tomorrow will see a full slate of games. For the President, it’s a chance to spike the football before fans in crucial Electoral College states. “We got Big Ten open,” Trump told sports journalist Jason Whitlock in an interview released on Thursday.

But the play hasn’t worked very well, according to a new poll from Arizona State’s Global Sport Institute that was shared exclusively with TIME.

The survey of undecided voters who identify as college football fans and live in closely contested Midwest swing states with Big Ten schools or other key states found that just 2% of this cohort would be “much more likely” to vote for Trump because he’s claimed credit for Big Ten football’s return. Another 7% said they’d be “somewhat more likely” to vote for him.

But whatever gains Trump appears to have made among this small subset of the electorate were mostly offset by those turned off by his boasting: 7% of those surveyed said Trump taking credit for the Big Ten restart made them “much less likely” or “somewhat less likely” to vote for Trump. In the end, 84% of respondents said the Big Ten strategy had no effect on whom they will support.

The poll, by OH Predictive Insights, a non-partisan public-opinion research company, surveyed 400 registered voters who identified as undecided college football fans in Midwestern battleground states with Big Ten schools—Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Minnesota—as well as the battleground states of Florida, Arizona and Nevada. (The poll has a 4.9% margin of error and was conducted between Oct. 14 and Oct. 21.)

Mike Noble, managing partner and chief pollster at OH Predictive Insights, questions the efficacy of Trump’s strategy of claiming credit for the return of college football during the waning weeks of the campaign. “It’s not moving the needle,” Noble says. “It’s not effective. And frankly, if I was …read more

Source:: Time – Politics

There’s no shortage of rage and upset in the partisan debate over what our children should be taught in school, but that’s a good thing.

The uproar signals that our system is grinding forward. Given this high level of public input and scrutiny, parents can be assured that no extremist ideas will find their way into the final curriculum.

There’s no better disinfectant than sunshine, which is why I have long advocated that the names of lead curriculum writers be made public. Former premier Rachel Notley refused to do so. Her government kept them secret, which made it difficult to scrutinize their ideas and biases.

In the case of Premier Jason Kenney’s new K-12 curriculum writing process, the United Conservatives made public the names. This has allowed for ongoing critiques, including scathing criticism of historian C.P. Champion, Kenney’s lead for the social studies curriculum.

Champion’s recommendations for a new K-12 social studies curriculum were
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Source:: Edmonton Journal – Politics