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DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Teamsters union has declined to make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election just hours after releasing internal polling data showing that workers it represents strongly favor former President Donald Trump.
Among rank-and-file members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, 59.6% surveyed said they believe the Teamsters should endorse Trump, compared to 31% voicing support for Vice President Kamala Harris. That more than 25-point gap remained more or less unchanged after the union ordered a subsequent survey following the Sept. 10 presidential debate between Trump and Harris.
Despite the poll results, the Teamsters refused to make an endorsement, saying there was “no majority support” for Harris and a lack of “universal support” for Trump, the union revealed Wednesday.
A Teamsters spokesperson didn’t immediately clarify why the union had different standards for the two candidates.
“The Teamsters thank all candidates for meeting with members face-to-face during our unprecedented roundtables,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said.
“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before big business,” O’Brien said. “We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries—and to honor our members’ right to strike—but were unable to secure those pledges.”
The Teamsters cited Trump’s refusal to commit to vetoing right-to-work legislation as part of its reasoning for not issuing an endorsement.
The Teamsters, which historically have supported Democrats and often donate to left-of-center causes, made an effort to court Republicans this election cycle. The union made a donation to the Republican National Committee, met with Trump, and O’Brien accepted an invitation to speak at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Some on the Right have resisted the union’s attempt to ingratiate itself among conservatives. The Center for Union Facts put up billboards outside the Republican National Convention calling the Teamsters “two-faced” over its history of liberal spending.
Although Republicans were generally open to the Teamsters, the Democratic National Convention snubbed O’Brien by not allowing him to speak at the Chicago event last month, according to The Associated Press.
Harris is considerably less popular among rank-and-file Teamsters than President Joe Biden, who trailed Trump by only about eight points in a survey ordered by the union prior to Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the race. Union leadership met with Harris for a roundtable discussion Monday, The Hill reported.
“We represent everybody from airline pilots to zookeepers, and we don’t just represent registered Democrats,” O’Brien told reporters.
The Teamsters’ endorsement would have had a significant impact if it went to either candidate given the concentration of union members in the swing states of Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, according to Reuters.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Teamsters Decline to Endorse for President Despite Members’ Overwhelming Support for Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.
DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Former President Donald Trump raised about $130 million in August, his campaign announced Wednesday night.
Trump’s fundraising numbers are down slightly from the nearly $140 million the former president brought in during July, when his campaign initiated a fundraising push days after he was shot by a failed assassin on July 13.
Rival Kamala Harris’ campaign has not released its August fundraising figures, but it likely eclipsed Trump’s as Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon released a memo on Aug. 25, in which she claimed the vice president had raised $540 million since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, including $82 million during the week of the Democratic National Convention.
“With Republicans united and a growing number of independents and disaffected Democrats crossing partisan lines, the Trump-Vance campaign has momentum for the final stretch of the race,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in the news release announcing the fundraising numbers. “These fundraising numbers from August are a reflection of that movement and will propel President Trump’s America First movement back to the White House so we can undo the terrible failures of Harris and Biden.”
Contrary to the Trump campaign’s enthusiasm, GOP leaders are raising the alarm behind closed doors and publicly about how a large financial disparity has emerged between the two parties. Liberals have commanding ad-spending leads in almost all competitive Senate races and the Congressional Leadership Fund, the primary super PAC aimed at electing Republicans to the House, is $70 million behind its Democratic counterpart in ad spending, according to Politico.
“The only thing preventing us from having a great night in November is the massive financial disparity our party currently faces,” National Republican Senatorial Committee Executive Director Jason Thielman previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We are on a trajectory to win the majority, but unless something changes drastically in the next six weeks, we will lose winnable seats.”
Statewide Republican parties in a number of states with close legislative elections in November, such as Arizona and Wisconsin, have also been outraised and outspent by their Democratic counterparts.
Before Democrats replaced Biden with Harris, the Trump campaign had overcome his Democratic rival’s cash advantage, Politico reported. The Trump campaign claims to have had $295 million in cash on hand at the end of August.
The average donation to Trump was $56, with 98% of donations being under $200, according to the campaign.
Trump is no stranger to fighting campaigns at a financial disadvantage, defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite only having half as much money, and narrowly losing to Biden in 2020 despite a 3-to-1 cash disadvantage heading into the final month of the election.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post $130M: Trump Team Reports August Fundraising Tally appeared first on The Daily Signal.
DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Vice President Kamala Harris’ previous stance on reparations could cause problems in her coalition as the November election approaches.
Harris, at multiple points in her 2020 campaign for president and during her time as a senator, appeared to endorse the idea of giving some sort of reparations to the descendants of slaves, though her campaign has not responded to recent requests on whether or not she still supports the idea. The issue puts Harris in a bind as a commanding majority of Americans oppose reparations, but African Americans, who make up a key part of the Democratic coalition, overwhelmingly support the idea.
“I think there has to be some form of reparations, and we can discuss what that is,” Harris told The Root, a black publication, in 2019. “We’re looking at more than 200 years of slavery. We’re looking at almost 100 years of Jim Crow. We’re looking at legalized segregation and, in fact, segregation on so many levels that exist today based on race. And there has not been any kind of intervention done understanding the harm and the damage that occurred to correct [the] course.”
Harris also told a radio host in 2019 that she supported reparations, and later reaffirmed her support for the policy in a statement to The New York Times that same year.
“We have to be honest that people in this country do not start from the same place or have access to the same opportunities,” she said in a statement shared with The New York Times. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”
Harris avoided going into the specifics about what her reparations policies would look like while on the 2020 campaign trail. She co-sponsored a bill during her time in the Senate that would have created a commission to study reparations for slavery in 2019, and a year prior proposed a tax credit for black households, according to Politico.
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond when the Daily Caller News Foundation asked about the vice president’s position on reparations.
Reparations are deeply unpopular with the general public, as 70% of Americans opposed the federal government making payments to people who had enslaved ancestors, according to a 2023 Washington Post/Ipsos poll. In the same poll, however, 75% of African Americans expressed support for reparations.
Other polls, like those conducted by the Pew Research Center and The Associated Press, also show Americans in general opposing reparations, while black individuals strongly support such measures.
“Not all Democrats have come out in favor of reparations, and you can find lots of different quotes from people saying they’re against them,” Marquette University political science professor Julia Azari told The Washington Post. “Why stoke an intra party fight when you could just keep highlighting things your opponents have done that are unpopular, like book bans and changing the way people teach history?”
Quentin James, president of the Collective PAC, a committee that supports black Democrats, also cautioned Harris against taking a stance on the issue, according to the Post.
“I don’t think we need to start that conversation before the election,” he said.
Some on Harris’ left-flank, however, argue that a commitment to reparations would help shore up support among the black community.
“There are people who support this and would be more politically engaged if this were a part of our political discourse,” Democratic New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman told the Post as he was lobbying Democrats in January to take up reparations as a national issue. “But it isn’t, so they’re staying home or some are even moving to the Republican Party because it feels like Democrats are taking Black voters for granted.”
A CNN exit poll shows that President Joe Biden won 92% of the black vote in Pennsylvania in 2020, going on to win the state overall by just 1.2 points. In Georgia, Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by a margin of less than 12,000 votes, but won 88% of the black vote, according to The New York Times.
Pennsylvania and Georgia will very likely be among the states that determine the outcome of November’s election.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Kamala Harris’ Past Support for ‘Reparations’ Could Come Back to Haunt Her appeared first on The Daily Signal.
DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The National Park Service has doled out about $250,000 in grants to add LGBTQ+ landmarks to the National Register of Historic Places even as it faces a multibillion-dollar backlog maintaining the public land it oversees.
Through the National Park Service’s so-called Underrepresented Communities Grant Program, which was designed to diversify America’s historical landmarks to include more racial and sexual minorities, the government agency provides grants for several other agencies and nonprofits to seek out “historic” LGBTQ+ locations and submit applications for them to the National Register of Historic Places, government spending records show.
While the Park Service focused on ensuring that the gay community is represented equitably among designated historical locations, however, it faced an estimated $23.3 billion maintenance backlog during fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30, according to a July report from the Congressional Research Service.
[The grant program is funded through the Historic Preservation Fund, which doesn’t use taxpayer dollars but revenue from federal offshore oil and gas leases to support a range of preservation projects, National Park Service spokesman Jordan Fifer said in an email Thursday to the Daily Caller News Foundation.]
[That money is separate from funds appropriated to the National Park Service by Congress for park operations and care, he said. A reference to this being a taxpayer-supported program was removed from this reprint of the article Thursday evening.]
One such grant paid out by the National Park Service went to the State Historical Society of Colorado, a nonprofit, to survey at least 25 different LGBTQ+ historic sites in the state and submit at least three nominations to the National Register of Historic Places, federal spending records show. The grant, disbursed in April, is worth nearly $60,000.
When NPS approves a landmark to be placed on the historic register, its owner becomes entitled to special tax breaks as well as access to many state and local grant programs.
The National Park Service also awarded Washington state’s Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation $75,000 in April to identify an “outstanding representation of queer history” and nominate it for the register, records show.
Additionally, the agency paid the state to “research and develop the first historic context statement to identify significant LGBTQIA2S themes in Washington.”
As NPS provides grants on LGBTQ+ inclusion for national landmarks, it was roughly $7.4 billion behind on road maintenance, $6.2 billion behind on maintaining its buildings, roughly $1.6 billion behind on keeping its water systems functional, and nearly $1 billion deep in a backlog on trail maintenance as of fiscal year 2023, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Many parks administered by NPS in Washington, D.C., for instance, are covered in trash. Until recently, some were occupied by large homeless encampments.
Michael Shepperd, who owns an outdoors store in East Tennessee, voiced concerns in a December 2017 essay that decaying roads and bridges near Great Smoky Mountains National Park could lead to fewer visitors and fewer customers for local businesses.
The National Park Service also issued $50,000 in grants between April 2023 and April 2024 to amend National Register of Historic Places applications for locations in New York City with links to the LGBTQ+ community, according to federal records.
The agency doled out $25,000 to help the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan resubmit its application, this time highlighting its significance to LGBTQ+ culture, and another $25,000 to the Jaffe Art Theatre in the East Village to resubmit its application to the register by emphasizing its importance to LGBTQ+ history.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose agency oversees the National Park Service, appeared at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City in October 2023 to celebrate National LGBTQ+ History Month.
“Tell me, in your own words, why places like this, like Stonewall, are so important to telling America’s story,” Haaland asked drag queen Pattie Gonia, a self-described “professional homosexual” and “queer environmentalist” who appeared with the Interior secretary for a social media post.
“I think it’s because queer rights are more under attack than ever, and I think if we don’t acknowledge the past, we are bound to repeat it,” the drag queen said. “So, at a place like Stonewall, it’s a beautiful place, it’s a place where so much discrimination and hatred occurred against the queer community, but it’s also a place where resistance and queer joy and queer liberation happened.”
The Stonewall National Monument includes a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn that was the site of a series of violent riots where homosexuals clashed with police officers in 1969.
The National Park Service paid out another $50,000 to a nonprofit in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to amend the National Register of Historic Places application of the city’s historic district to recognize its significance to gay history, according to spending records.
The agency has spent $7.5 million on its Underrepresented Communities Grant Program since 2014, with Congress apportioning $1.25 million for the 2024 iteration of the program, according to the agency.
The National Park Service didn’t respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s multiple requests for comment until it that the .
This article, originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation, was modified on the day of publication to clarify that the grant program does not use taxpayer funds.
The post Biden-Harris Admin Spends $250K Looking for LGBT Landmarks as National Parks Fall Into Disrepair appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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