Following the first debate between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, talk show host Bill Moyers said: "Romney was widely lauded as the winner of the first presidential debate. The loser, many agreed, was the truth..."

Both men clashed at the University of Denver on Wednesday, Oct. 3, offering their prescriptions on domestic and economic issues before moderator Jim Lehrer.

Jill Sheppard-Davenport, and her husband Lee, joined more than 100 people at a debate watch party at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Northwest.

"I enjoyed watching it and definitely approved of Obama's concentration on substance," said Sheppard-Davenport, a mental health specialist who has lived in the District for two years. "Romney engaged the audience but I got a little frustrated because it's not easy to look at a guy and say the things he did wrong, but I heard a lot more of that from Romney than what he would do going forward."

Conservative commentator and talk show host Armstrong Williams and Steve Walker, deputy national political director of the Democratic National Committee, who engaged in a mini-debate before the telecast, summarized the strong points of the candidates and explained what each needed to do to be deemed successful.

Read more at The Washington Informer.

When then-candidate Barack Obama won North Carolina by 14,000 votes in 2008, a lot of the credit went to the eye-popping 76 percent turnout rate among African-American voters.

Virginia, too, saw its large share of black voters help put Mr. Obama over the top in a state that hadn’t supported a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson. The results revived Democrats’ hopes for a new Southern strategy and for a new coalition between traditional black voters and progressive newcomers to the growing knowledge economies of northern Virginia and the Raleigh-Greensboro-Charlotte triangle.

But in these two Southern swing states, some polling and anecdotal evidence is giving rise to Democratic concerns that African-American enthusiasm for President Obama has slipped as a result of stubborn economic despair, deteriorating inner city conditions, a sense among voters that Obama no longer needs the black vote to win, and disagreements over social issues, including the president’s embrace of same-sex marriage. Heightening those concerns is the recognition by campaign strategists and analysts that, to win reelection, Obama likely needs to get close to the 65 percent of black voters who turned out in 2008 to vote in 2012.

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Black support for Obama could be seen in a California snap poll taken by SurveyUSA shortly after Wednesday’s first presidential debate, in which everybody surveyed but African-Americans thought Mitt Romney won.

Moreover, in this election, voting for Obama is less about racial pride and more about policy – particularly that Republican policies hold fewer specific rewards or distinct promises for the black community, suggests David Bositis, a political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, in an interview with the Tennesseean newspaper in Nashville.

“African-Americans are still facing a lot of hardships,” he told the paper. “But Republicans are offering nothing more than the same of what they had under George Bush, and what they had under George Bush was hard times – with no promise of things getting better.”


Read more at Yahoo! News.

While pundits and Obama supporters were moaning Thursday morning about how Mitt Romney gained momentum by aggressively going after the president in their first debate, fact-checkers were busy sorting out the truth from half-truth from outright inaccuracies.

Romney, it appears, certainly had more swagger, but Obama had stronger command of the facts.

The Republican nominee rejected parts of his own tax plan, denying he intended to increase tax breaks only for the rich. He also failed to respond with details when asked where he would get the money from to cut taxes for all Americans, increase defense spending and not increase the deficit.

His quick answer was he would put more Americans to work in better paying jobs, which would mean more people paying taxes, which would help close the gap.

Romney’s advisers before the debate essentially told him to stick with jabbing the president, tagging Obama with the still struggling aspects of the economy and not get mired down in the details. Leave the policy wonk patter to Obama and appeal to emotion.

Clearly, the plan worked, at least for a night.
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In an interview last month, David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said that Obama and the Democrats had not done a good job of making clear how the Romney plan would hurt Americans, especially the poor and people of color, even during Obama’s acceptance of the Democratic Party’s nomination at this year’s convention.

The Democrats, Bositis said, did a terrible job, “including Obama—his worst performance is not talking about how much he’s done…”

Read more at the Atlanta Black Star.

On a hip-hop radio station in northeast Ohio, a swing state where turnout among black voters may decide the presidential election, listeners are being exhorted to vote this year — not just for a candidate, but to send a message.

“There are forces at work that don’t want you to vote,” intones an ad produced by the station that mentions no parties or candidates, “and will do anything they can to make it difficult for you to vote. You’re stronger, you’re smarter than that.”

Those “forces,” in the eyes of many minority voters in Ohio and other battleground states, are Republican state legislators who have sought to limit early voting and impose voter identification requirements — moves widely seen as an effort to tamp down turnout by African-Americans.

In Ohio, that effort has mostly failed, with many new restrictions either overturned by the courts or hastily repealed by the Legislature itself in the face of popular uproar. But in the process, Republican legislators seem to have handed a powerful rallying cry to those seeking to maximize minority-voter turnout.

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“The fact that the Republicans are trying to keep black people from voting is only going to want to make them want to vote more,” said David A. Bositis, an analyst of minority voting patterns at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

Read more at The Boston Globe.

Fresh from a controversial NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll which stated that Mitt Romney will receive 0% of the Black vote, the Joint Center for Political and Economic studies followed up with its own poll of the Republican National Convention Attendees.

The report discovered that there were  47 African Americans who were part of convention delegates at the 2012 Republican National Convention which just wrapped in Tampa, Florida. That number amounts to  2.1 percent of total delegates.

Although it seems like a stark miniscule amount, in actuality, it represents a jump in Black representation compared to the last convention.

Read more at Politic365.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies collaborated with the Center on Race and Wealth at Howard University to host a discussion with asset-building coalition leaders from Illinois and Mississippi about the models they have used to develop their state policy agendas. Click here to view the full webinar or here for the webinar slides.

Dr. Wilhelmina Leigh will join a roundtable discussion on "What's Next for Social Security" at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Research Conference on Thursday, November 8, 2012, in Baltimore, Maryland.

The last few years of economic uncertainty have left policymakers struggling with the best way to address the effects of a slow economic recovery. Meanwhile, Americans have seen sources of their retirement income security – home equity, defined benefit pension plans, 401(k)s, personal savings –weakening in recent years, particularly in the wake of the housing finance crisis and the Great Recession. Social Security, the bedrock of most American’s retirement security, finds itself at the center of public debate about how to address its long-term revenue shortfall. But even before the economic downturn, policymakers often discussed Social Security’s long-term solvency through the lens of what cuts needed to be made, despite the fact many Americans found themselves increasingly reliant on the program during the Great Recession. This roundtable will explore provocative questions, seeking fresh ways to bring inside-the-Beltway thinking and policymaking more into line with public support for Social Security by discussing and developing realistic options to improve benefits and pay for the improvements.

Click here for more information on Dr. Leigh's panel. To learn more about the APPAM conference, which runs November 8 through 10, click the REGISTER button to your right.

Dr. Wilhelmina Leigh and Dr. Trina R. Shanks of the University of Michigan will make a presentation on their recent paper, Older African Americans and Asset Holdings, at the "Financial Capability Across the Life Course: Focus On Vulnerable Populations" conference at Washington University in St. Louis on October 25, 2012.

For more information on the conference, which runs from October 24 to October 26, please visit Washington University in St. Louis.

While advocates of voter identification laws say the goal is to prevent fraud at the polls, Rep. Elijah Cummings insists that what is really at work is voter suppression during a campaign that promises to be a tighter than ever race for the presidency.

“As many as one in four African-American voters, more than one in six Hispanic voters, and about one in ten eligible voters overall do not possess a current and valid government-issued photo ID,” wrote Cummings in a press release Sept. 18, citing a NYU School of Law Brennan Center for Justice analysis of a voter rights bill he co-introduced with 13 House of Representatives members.

The bill, introduced as the America Votes Act of 2012 by Cummings and Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), targets the drive spearheaded by Republican opponents of President Obama to require voters to produce government issued identification at the time votes are cast.

Read more at The Afro.