Biden’s transition team, fearing Trump’s moves, sets massive fundraising goal

Joe Biden’s transition team has expanded its fundraising goal far beyond what Hillary Clinton raised in 2016, anticipating that, should they prevail in November, the Trump administration could actively work against their efforts and that the coronavirus pandemic will make a presidential changeover more difficult than ever.

The Biden transition team is aiming to raise at least $7 million by Election Day and build a staff of at least 350 people, according to a person familiar with the transition’s planning, while another person said the total fundraising goal is $7 million to $10 million.

The budget far exceeds the $2.1 million that Clinton raised for her transition planning by Election Day 2016, or the $6.5 million Trump’s transition raised before he assumed the presidency. Mitt Romney in 2012 raised $8.9 million for what is considered the most robust prior effort to plan a transition hand-off between two different parties.

Several people involved in raising money for Biden’s transition said the pitch to potential donors leans on fears that President Donald Trump will not ease the handover process if he loses. That possible complication, along with the dueling health and economic crises hitting the country, will require more staffing and resources for a Biden administration-in-waiting.

“They’re quietly organizing people to say, this is going to be a very, very difficult transition,” said a California-based strategist who advises Democratic donors and requested anonymity to detail the fundraising pitch and other sensitive conversations about the Biden transition. “Trump is going to make this extremely difficult, so we need to be prepared.”

But a person close to the transition said that Trump’s potential to disrupt the process was not part of the pitch but may have come up in response to questions.

Evan Ryan, former Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs during the Obama administration and the spouse of longtime Biden advisor Tony Blinken, is helping to lead the fundraising effort. The group has also hired Marcus Switzer, a Democratic fundraiser who worked on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton and a former longtime member of Facebook’s board, is also involved. A person close to the transition said Bowles was offering advice and context as a veteran of past administrations.

Money raised for the transition fund covers a range of bureaucratic priorities, particularly salaries for staff and advisers working on the incoming administration’s policies. After a winner is declared, the federal government also kicks in money to help cover transition costs for the president-elect.

Two people involved in Biden transition fundraising said it has already brought in at least $2 million, and one person said the transition has already raised $3 million. The committee declined to comment.

But one former Obama administration official said they were worried that the Biden effort wasn’t robust enough. “Given the enormity of the crises facing the country right now and the certainty that Trump will not go quietly, it’s concerning to me that their ambition of scale is lower than Romney’s,” the official said.

Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who headed Romney’s transition, said it was difficult to gauge the preparedness of the team based on fundraising alone. “A lot of this depends on how many operate as volunteers and how many operate on salaries,” he told POLITICO.

People involved in the Biden transition emphasized that it is not diverting resources from the election. Instead, they said, the transition team is approaching donors who have already contributed the maximum amount to the Biden campaign and to the Democratic National Committee. Individual donations to the transition are capped at $5,000.

Biden’s campaign is far from facing a cash crunch as it heads into the fall. Last month, it smashed fundraising records by bringing in a record $365 million along with the Democratic National Committee and affiliated groups, outraising Trump by $154 million.

“It’s prudent to raise as much as you can as early as you can,” said one former Democratic fundraiser who has advised previous transitions. The fundraiser continued: “The cost for staffing this effort balloons very quickly, especially when we can expect the briefing book that may be provided by the Trump administration to the Biden administration will contain a whole lot of nothing. They’ll literally be starting from scratch.”

Raising money for the transition is a discreet enterprise, as donors said they want to avoid the appearance of presumptuousness during the election. A memo obtained by POLITICO earlier this summer urged donors involved in the effort to keep it “quiet” so “we do not distract attention from the core task of winning the election.”

Earlier this month, the Biden campaign rolled out a long list of new hires to the transition committee, including advisers and co-chairs. They included both people from the left and the center as the Biden effort tries to show a united front after a divisive primary.

The transition also includes many veterans of the Obama administration, particularly those who served in the vice president’s office and are considered loyal lieutenants. Back in June, the Biden campaign announced that Ted Kaufman, Biden’s former chief of staff and Senate successor, would oversee the transition effort.

The transition fund isn’t the only post-election vehicle that could help with a potentially rocky transfer of power. High-dollar donors are also fielding appeals to give to legal and recount funds through the DNC. One Democratic strategist said that those who are giving to the transition fund “are individuals who are interested in agency assignments and ambassadorships.”

But other bundlers said they’ve “only gotten ‘yeses’ from donors” when asked to give to the transition.

“The reason is fairly obvious: The things that we need to do to unravel the mess that Trump has created is going to take a substantial amount of time and money,” said one Democratic donor, who is not directly involved in the transition effort. “This is a transition like no other.”

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Illinois AG brings his South Side upbringing into criminal justice

CHICAGO — Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul saw a question pop up on his Facebook feed after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. “How old were you when a cop 1st pulled a gun on you?”

“Seventeen,” he answered. It happened at the corner of 50th and Woodlawn avenues on Chicago’s South Side.

Recounting the scene decades later in an interview, Raoul, 55, said he and another kid were calling out to a friend who had just driven by. They were being loud the way teenage boys are, and running. A few beats later, a police car had rolled up and the officer drew his weapon before handcuffing them and taking them to the scene of a nearby mugging. The victims, who were white, initially thought Raoul and his friend looked like the perpetrators but said “they had different jackets on.”

Raoul paused at the recollection, the first time he'd detailed the incident publicly. “If it weren’t for the puffy jacket I wore that day … I think about how that could have changed my life forever.”

It wasn’t his last brush with the police even after he became a local prosecutor, and there are plenty of Black Americans with their own stories about confrontations with law enforcement. But few of them rise in power like Raoul, the son of Haitian immigrants, who served 14 years in the state Senate seat that opened up with Barack Obama’s election to Congress.

Now, nearly two years in as Illinois attorney general, Raoul is a figure to watch as a state official responsible for translating protest and outrage on the streets into actionable criminal justice and policing reforms after Floyd’s death and the August shooting of Jacob Blake in neighboring Wisconsin. While not ignoring the attorney general's role in consumer-protection issues, Raoul is steadily expanding the job to rethink how law enforcement approaches communities of color, including licensing officers and building a public database of police misconduct. It’s an issue he championed in the Legislature, but the weight of an attorney general title — and a world in which everyone can bear witness to police behavior with their mobile devices — has offered him a chance to pull new levers on criminal justice.

“The timing of this atrocity during a pandemic offered an opportunity to do something bolder,” he said of Floyd's killing. “And this perfect storm has allowed me to convene people to discuss next steps in a way that was unthinkable before this moment.”

It’s an impetus for law enforcement to help design “real changes,” Raoul said. “It’s allowing us to work toward creating a code of conduct and a real, statewide platform for police accountability.”

Raoul is one of seven Black people serving as independently elected attorneys general (there’s only one Black woman: Tish James of New York). Though they’re small in number, their voices carry weight among state attorneys general nationwide, said Karen White, executive director of the Attorney General Alliance, a bipartisan group that convenes more than 40 state attorneys generals to discuss emerging legal issues such as cannabis regulation and sports betting.

“He’s one of the most prominent African American statewide leaders in the country,” White said of Raoul. “Their mere presence [during group discussions] asks us to look at things from a perspective that we might not if they weren’t in the room.”

Color is hardly the only factor. Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris climbed the ladder of California politics as the state's attorney general before getting elected to the Senate. Yet while she's aligned herself with the movement to make a less punitive criminal justice system, her past tough-on-crime positions as San Francisco district attorney dogged her presidential run among the party's left wing. And Black AGs are in charge of studying some the most heated police killings of the year with Minnesota's Keith Ellison investigating Floyd’s death and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a rising star in the GOP who spoke at the Republican National Convention last month, is facing criticism for the pace of his probe into Breonna Taylor’s killing in Louisville.

Raoul has rallied other attorneys general seeking clearer authority from Congress to pursue pattern-or-practice discrimination probes into troubled police forces that the Justice Department under President Donald Trump resists doing. And he is pushing for Illinois to license its police officers, an idea that languished in the state Legislature for years, including his own attempts to resurrect the issue.

Now the state’s Legislative Black Caucus is crafting new criminal justice and victims’ rights legislation — a “Black Agenda” — to be considered in November when lawmakers briefly reconvene. Raoul, who said he also wants attention and “comprehensive, effective services” for crime victims, is on the phone or in Zoom meetings with state legislators and law enforcement officials hashing out the details.

"I've heard the attorney general recount a story often — about a shooting outside his home. His son was trying to get inside and officers on the scene expressed an attitude that was less than guardian or protective,” said state Sen. Elgie Sims Jr., an active member of the caucus who has worked with Raoul for years. “The frustration that you hear when he recounts that story illustrates what many Black people feel in those moments. That’s the type of experience he brings to the attorney general job.”

Raoul, who recovered from Covid-19 this summer, has pushed back at Trump, joining other Democratic attorneys general in suing the administration for greater protections for immigrants and to challenge White House efforts to limit the 2020 Census. But he’s also sought support from the U.S. attorney and local special agents with the FBI, DEA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to talk about tackling crime, especially gun violence and drug trafficking, which remain stubborn issues in Chicago and subject to Trump's public ire.

The Floyd case and his own experiences facing a police officer’s gun have prompted Raoul to push the Chicago Police Department to collect data on all incidents in which an officer points a weapon at a member of the public. That work is part of a federal consent decree established in 2018. “My office held strong on including that requirement in the face of resistance from CPD, and I’m determined to ensure it’s implemented,” he said.

Raoul’s experiences growing up on Chicago’s South Side, seeing gun violence outside his front door, navigating Illinois politics and surviving cancer, fuel his ambitions and leave some nerves close to the surface — something that can be seen as a liability.

“I’m a guy who wears my emotion on my sleeve,” he said. As a state senator, he was known to tear up during committee debates.

There is a larger question at hand: In a world in which more diverse voices are starting to reshape the corporate world, media, Congress and the criminal justice system, how do those people — let’s be clear, Black and brown people — get elected to these posts? While Black candidates and officials do make successful runs for many state and federal legislative seats, short of Obama’s presidency, it’s exceedingly rare to see one build a coalition that unlocks statewide support.

“There is an opportunity to right some of the wrongs of these systems by having more diverse leaders who come from these communities, who give lived experiences about how law enforcement treats people. It’s critical,” said Quentin James, president of The Collective PAC, which promotes African Americans running for local, state and federal offices. Collective PAC's numbers are startling: Of the 346 statewide elected offices in the U.S., 18 are held by African Americans. Five percent.

Along with the seven Black AGs, there are only a handful of Black lieutenant governors, including Illinois’ Juliana Stratton. There hasn’t been a Black governor in the U.S. since Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, and just 10 Black people have ever served in the U.S. Senate, including Harris.

Ellison knows this delicate dance. After serving in the U.S. House for a dozen years, he was elected Minnesota’s first Black attorney general in 2018, the same year Raoul and James won their races.

“You have to convince people that the drive to run statewide is to extend service to everyone in the state, and you’ve got to do it with a degree of concern of empathy for people who are outside of your experience,” Ellison said in an interview. “It’s somewhat ironic that as African Americans, everyone takes it for granted that if you’re a white AG, that the AG is looking out for everyone. But people somehow need to be convinced that I’m not only going to be concerned about African Americans.”

Ellison tries to be authentic, and to prove his point he ticked off campaign trips to cornfields and dairy farms across the state, and his mom’s experience growing up on a farm in Louisiana.

“What I decided to do is say, ‘I’m just going to do me, man’,” he said.

For Raoul, there was a sense that being himself — with all his flair on issues he really cares about, like health care — might leave the wrong impression with the news media and white voters.

Talking to voters on the South Side of Chicago is natural to Raoul. But that’s politicking in Chicagoland, where the city is split pretty evenly among whites, African Americans and Latinos. Its suburbs are much whiter and half the state’s population lives outside of Cook County.

For his 2018 campaign, Raoul had to recalibrate his tactics in Southern Illinois, where Confederate flags still flapped in the wind on his way to campaign events and his name might not roll off voters’ tongues. Polls showed Raoul with a lead, but he had a “foreign-sounding name” and was seen by some downstate voters as a “Chicago Democrat” — the stereotype of a machine politician. Barack Hussein Obama plowed through similar difficulties.

“You’ve got to find the right balance between responding with the fervor and the passion the moment demands and not coming off to a statewide base of voters as being an angry Black man,” said Christian Mitchell, an African American state representative (now deputy governor) who stepped in to help Raoul’s attorney general campaign after the primary.

Raoul ultimately won the election — easily, it turned out. Anti-Trump sentiment helped in the deeply blue state but voters may have been taken by Raoul’s heart-on-his sleeve approach. In his last ad before the election, he acknowledges Nov. 6, Election Day, is an “emotional day for me.” It's the anniversary of his father's death.

In his victory speech, Raoul tweaked the skeptics who called his race “a nail-biter” and said, “Numbers don’t lie.”

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‘A huge risk’: Trump’s allies can’t sway him on mail-in voting

For a few weeks, Donald Trump’s advisers had seemingly gotten through to him — the president was finally encouraging his supporters to vote by mail, at least some of the time.

On-message Trump didn’t last long. He recently appeared to suggest people vote twice — voting in-person as a way to determine if their mail-in ballot had been counted — later warning Democrats would be “thieving and stealing and robbing” their way to an election win. Now, five Republicans close to the president’s campaign say that if Trump keeps up his vacillating mail-in voting rhetoric, they fear infrequent voters, especially older ones, will simply sit out the election.

In an election where a record number of Americans are expected to cast ballots by mail, that could cost Trump a victory.

“He should be encouraging people to do it, if that makes them feel more comfortable,” said Karl Rove, a veteran Republican strategist who has been informally advising Trump's campaign.

Unlike the president, Trump’s own campaign has spent weeks urging supporters in 17 targeted states to mail in their ballots, making pleas through a dedicated website, Facebook ads and robocalls narrated by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.

“If you’re Donald Trump, you need every vote you can get, no matter how you can get it,” said Scott Jennings, who worked under President George W. Bush and is close to the Trump White House. “We’re in a close race. The president needs to tell their supporters to vote any way they can — and as soon as possible.”

Many Trump allies say the president’s concerns about mail-in voting are valid — primarily his claim that unsolicited ballots and ballot applications will be sent to millions of people ineligible to vote. But they argue that in a pandemic when many people are expected to avoid the polls, it’s more important to get Republicans to vote however they can.

Four additional Republicans familiar with the situation said this point was made early on to Trump, with advisers urging him to state that he does trust some forms of remote voting. And in August, the message appeared to be sinking in — sort of.

Trump started drawing a distinction between requesting an absentee ballot and universal remote voting. And he suddenly started imploring supporters in Florida to request mail-in ballots, insisting back-to-back Republican governors had cleaned up the process in the crucial battleground state.

But Trump simultaneously continued his almost daily rants about massive election fraud and rigged elections in tweets, interviews and speeches. And then last week, while on another tirade about remote voting, Trump appeared to encourage North Carolina residents to illegally cast two ballots — by mail and in person — prompting a fresh spate of worries by his allies. Despite pointed condemnations from even some Republican election officials, Trump is still urging his supporters to go to polling stations on Election Day to see if their mail-in ballot was received, exacerbating confusion.

Already this year, about 1,000 people attempted to vote twice in Georgia’s primary and runoff elections. Another 40 did the same in Pennsylvania’s primary.

“Hell, he’s been told for four years he needs to be more precise with his language,” said a former White House official. “The problem with saying stupid stuff like that is it helps the other side delegitimize legitimate concerns.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said he would like to believe the North Carolina statement was a joke but that Trump’s lines should be “vetted” beforehand — but he knows that would take away from the president’s popular style.

“That’s part of what makes him work,” Gingrich said. “He’s very lively. He’s off the cuff. But there’s great danger in having that kind of style.”

Tens of millions of Americans are expected to cast their ballot by mail this year — many in Republican-dominated states and swing states where GOP turnout is crucial for Trump. A third of registered voters said they prefer to mail their ballot, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released Thursday, even though only 3 in 10 say they are “very confident” their vote will be counted accurately if they do so.

Several Trump allies say that culturally, more Republicans prefer to vote in-person on Election Day than Democrats, but that could change this year with the pandemic.

Trump’s push against mail-in voting began in the spring as the pandemic continued to rage and his poll numbers against Democrat Joe Biden dropped nationally and in battleground states.

There are signs Trump’s language could be backfiring. Recent polling shows Republicans have become concerned about voting remotely, while Democrats are outpacing Republican requests for absentee ballots in some swing states, including North Carolina, the first state in the nation to send out absentee ballots.

Trump should have been “clearer,” a former White House official acknowledged.

“Anytime you have a president creating confusion in that process, there’s a huge risk,” a former Trump campaign aide agreed.

Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, who are trying to hang onto the Senate and retake the House, have broken with Trump on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said voting by mail will not result in fraud.

“The election is going to be fine,” McConnell said in his home state of Kentucky last month. “Many parts of our country vote by mail. Oregon, Washington and Colorado have voted by mail for years. There is nothing we can do or should do, the federal government, to dictate to those states how they vote.”

Separately, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently told Axios that he warned Trump his language could hurt the party.

“Republicans should be embracing this,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political strategist based in Sacramento, Calif. “It’s crazy the president is destroying confidence in this.”

Democrats — and even some Republicans — suspect Trump of trying to undermine confidence in the election in order to explain away or fight a potential loss in November.

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment about his allies’ concerns about the president’s language. Instead, it blamed the media for not accurately reporting the president’s position.

“It’s amazing that the media can go from insisting that voter fraud doesn’t exist to screaming about it when President Trump points out the giant holes in the Democrats’ voting schemes,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has blamed the media, too — arguing the press took Trump’s double voting in North Carolina comments out of context. She said Trump was merely trying to explain that voters could check on Election Day to see whether their ballots were received, and cast a provisional ballot if they hadn’t been.

“What I would say is that the president has laid it out very clearly: You should verify your vote,” she said. “The president wants enfranchisement, plain and simple.”

Trump has attempted to distinguish between mail-in ballots and absentee ballots, saying the latter has additional safeguards and go to only those who request them. But across the country, the distinction appears negligible, with election officials saying the ballots look identical. Some states even use the names interchangeably or use a single term for all mail-in ballots.

Richard Hasen, an elections law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said Trump believes more fraud occurs when a state automatically sends ballots to voters, as opposed to having voters request them.

“That’s not true of the states that regularly do all vote-by-mail elections, and I did not see reports of widespread fraud in the Nevada primary where they sent every registered voter a ballot,” he said.

But there are still several potential problems with mail-in voting: Voting rolls that determine who receives a ballot could be inaccurate, ballots could be sent to the wrong address or lost in the mail, or voters may have their ballot tossed out for not following directions, for not having a proper signature or for having a name that doesn’t exactly match information on file with election officials.

Trump’s allies say states that want to switch to voting by mail need years to build up the infrastructure necessary to handle both the outgoing and incoming ballots, citing 319,000 mailed ballots that were thrown out in 2016, many for failing to follow the directions or missing the deadline.

This year, voters have already lodged complaints about the timeliness of receiving ballots from the beleaguered United States Postal Service in their state’s primaries.

Hans von Spakovsky, who manages the conservative Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative, said Trump’s advice to confirm your ballot has been received is necessary.

"Given the many complaints from voters in state primaries that their absentee ballots were not delivered in time by the U.S. Postal Service, this is a wise precaution,” he said.

Trump has mostly criticized Democratic states for their voting policies, but states with Republican officials have also expanded vote-by-mail programs.

Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — already conduct elections entirely by mail with few problems. In 2020, four states — California, Vermont, New Jersey, Nevada — plus Washington, D.C., plan to send ballots to all registered voters. Ten others, including Arizona, Wisconsin and Iowa, will send ballot applications to everyone.

Some states will allow coronavirus as a reason to vote by mail, though voters in most other states can request a mail-in ballot without providing a reason.

Trump’s campaign and the RNC have already taken to the courts dozens of times as part of a $20 million effort to challenge voting rules. His aides and outside advisers began scrambling to ponder possible executive actions he could take to curb mail-in voting, though they have yet to come up with an answer.

An outside Trump adviser credited both early voting and absentee voting as helping Trump secure victory in 2016 and insisted the president has tailored his voting by mail language to reflect its importance this year.

“He’s gotten better,” the adviser said. “He’s done a much better job. He’s honed his message.”

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The flip side of Trump's eviction ban: Landlords face big crunch

The White House’s move to ban evictions across the country during the coronavirus crisis is having an unintended side effect: It's threatening the livelihood of millions of landlords.

The sweeping order effectively requires landlords to subsidize distressed tenants’ housing through the end of the year or face criminal penalties and hefty fines. That’s a tall order for the country’s 8 million independent landlords — most of whom lease a unit here or there on property they own without the financial backing of professional management companies.

“Everyone wants to point the finger and look at the Wall Street types that have invested in real estate, but that’s really a fraction of the market,” said Bob Pinnegar, CEO of the National Apartment Association. “Most of the rental housing we have in this country is provided by individuals who are simply running a small business and trying to stay afloat and survive.”

More than 22 million rental units, a little over half the rental housing in the country, are in single-family buildings with between one and four units, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute. And most of those buildings have a mortgage — meaning the property owners themselves still need to make their own monthly payments.

“In a four-unit building, if one person can’t pay rent you’ve just lost 25 percent of your income,” Pinnegar said.

Most of the units are owned by mom-and-pop landlords, many of whom invested in property to save for retirement. Now they’re dealing with a dramatic drop in income, facing the prospect of either trying to sell their property or going into debt to meet financial obligations including mortgage and insurance payments, property taxes, utilities and maintenance costs. If enough landlords can no longer make those payments, it would threaten everything from the school budgets funded by property taxes to the stability of the $11 trillion U.S. mortgage market itself.

Six months into the crisis, millions of tenants can no longer meet their rent — and the situation is only getting worse. Tenants already owe some $25 billion in back rent and will owe nearly $70 billion by the end of the year, according to an estimate last month by Moody’s Analytics.

President Donald Trump’s Sept. 1 announcement offered no rental assistance for tenants, meaning that when the order expires on Dec. 31, they’re still on the hook for months of back rent. And it offered no relief for landlords either.

As a result, lobbying groups for the building owners are pressing for Congress to pass some form of direct assistance to keep tenants paying their rent. Landlords are also challenging Trump's action in court.

The federal enhancement to unemployment benefits included in the $2 trillion CARES Act in March — a $600-a-week boost that helped many laid-off tenants pay at least some of their rent — lapsed in late July. And negotiations on a new financial relief package have broken down.

One in three tenants failed to make their September rent payment on time, according to the latest Apartment List survey. And a little over 25 percent said they had slight or no confidence in their ability to pay their rent this month, according to Census data published Wednesday, with another 22 percent expressing only moderate confidence.

“We’re trying to address renters not being able to pay rent — that’s one problem,” said Paula Cino, a vice president at the National Multifamily Housing Council, a landlord association. But "property owners rely on those payments to meet their own financial obligations."

“Now we’ve prolonged this uncertainty, provided this long-term period where rent money may not be coming in and we haven’t created support” for the property owners, she added.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the order banning evictions, citing the public-health risks of pushing distressed tenants into homeless shelters or other crowded living conditions during the pandemic. The order surprised industry lobbyists, who had focused most of their efforts on Treasury and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Once landlords have paid expenses associated with the property, they keep on average just 9 cents of every dollar paid in rent as profit, according to a National Apartment Association analysis.

“This is not a high-margin business,” Pinnegar said. “This order issued by the CDC is potentially the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

One in four small landlords said they had already borrowed to make ends meet in a July survey by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, while an Avail survey of small landlords in August found that 35 percent were dipping into savings to cover operating costs. Those costs will only increase as the weather turns colder, requiring landlords to heat their buildings and remove snow and ice in some states.

“More than half (58%) of small rental property owners lack access to credit to cover emergencies, such as lost rent payments, and they may lack sufficient assets to pledge to a lender when rental income stops,” wrote American Bar Association President Patricia Lee Refo in a Sept. 5 letter urging Congress to provide rental assistance.

Housing advocates and industry groups have come together on the push for rental aid money, which would prevent tenants from being hit with massive back rent bills at the end of the crisis while preserving income for landlords.

“We can’t just keep kicking the can down the road and not think about the implications for these small landlords,” Noerena Limón, senior vice president of policy at the Hispanic real estate professionals group, said during a Center for Responsible Lending event on Black and Latino homeownership on Tuesday.

But few are optimistic about the state of negotiations on a new relief package, and they worry that the CDC order will be extended.

“What’s so frustrating is we see this coming and we know how to get ahead of it,” Cino said. “Some direct housing support is critically important here, but it’s very divided right now.”

While the order stipulates that struggling renters must do their best to make partial payments, landlords say the language is too vague to help — and that the blanket ban on evictions has taken away any incentive tenants might have to work something out with their landlords.

A Virginia landlord filed the first federal challenge to the new order on Tuesday, arguing that the CDC is misinterpreting its authority under a 1944 public health law that gives the agency certain powers to prevent communicable diseases from crossing state lines.

“It’s very easy to vilify landlords and to say evictions are bad and therefore the landlords need to just take it on the chin,” said Caleb Kruckenberg, who represents the landlord. “My client, he’s a small businessman.”

The landlord, Richard Lee Brown, is “out more than $8,000 just in rent, and he’s had to pay utilities and upkeep, and the CDC has told him… you’re just going to have to let the tenant live there for free, you’re going to have to pay for it,” Kruckenberg said.

The moratorium, he said, amounts to the CDC “rewriting state law” by imposing criminal penalties on landlords who seek to initiate an otherwise legal process in their state.

“If the CDC is right, that that regulation allows them to basically do anything they want to as long as they say it’s for public health, then there’s no limit,” Kruckenberg said. “If their interpretation is correct then there’s not a single thing they could not do as an administrative agency.”

The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Biden courts Black farmers to dent Trump's lead among rural voters

The Biden campaign has spent the summer criticizing discrimination in agriculture, organizing roundtable discussions and tapping former Black government officials in an aggressive push to attract Black farmers, a small but potentially significant slice of the rural vote.

Farmers of color, numbering more than 260,000 nationally, make up between 10 and 65 percent of farmers in almost a dozen states, including swing states of Arizona, Florida and Nevada. Many say the focus from Biden is the first time in years a presidential nominee has paid attention to their needs.

“I think the Biden campaign is trying to mobilize resources to address each key segment of agriculture. And I didn’t see that before,” said Dewayne Goldmon, executive director of the National Black Growers Council, one of the organizations the campaign has courted.

Black farmers have long struggled to get equal access to USDA programs that help build credit and address civil rights complaints. They have pushed the government for more enforcement to retain land that has been in their families for generations at a time when farmers, generally, are facing unprecedented economic headwinds due to the pandemic and trade war disruptions. The Biden campaign has released a plan to work with nonwhite farmers to tackle these issues.

“It's no secret to anyone that Black, brown, native farmers have experienced structural exclusion and a variety of obstacles to equal participation in the agricultural sector,” said Seema Sadanandan, a senior policy adviser with the Biden campaign. “The idea here is to continue the pathway forward but also take big leaps and steps in terms of opening up credit and capital for these marginalized farmers.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign has declined comment on whether its rural voter strategy includes outreach to nonwhite farmers. Former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton did not target minority farmers four years ago.

In a Fox News poll in July, 49 percent of rural voters said they supported Trump and 40 percent sided with Biden. That's a much closer margin than 2016 election exit polls, which found Trump earned 61 percent of the rural vote compared to Clinton's 36 percent.

John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, endorsed Biden in March. Boyd said he threw his support behind the former vice president after listening to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue speak at a Wisconsin dairy expo.

"In America, the big get bigger and the small go out," Perdue said. "I don't think in America we, for any small business, have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability."

Boyd said the secretary appeared to be favoring big farmers over small ones, many of which are struggling to survive amid the Covid-19 pandemic and worst economy since the Great Depression. Family farm bankruptcies increased by nearly 20 percent from 2018 to 2019, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

“That statement alone showed us we weren't going to have any type of platform in this administration,” Boyd said. “People like myself have really given up on that. The Trump administration is non-existent so we didn't have a whole lot of choice and we hope things will be better with a Biden/Harris ticket.”

Boyd said initial discussions with the Clinton campaign in 2016 were not productive. While “Hillary’s vision for America” was promoted as a comprehensive plan, it excluded any mention of Black farmers, Boyd said. The Trump campaign has formed tangent coalitions, including Blacks Voices for Trump and Farmers and Ranchers for Trump, but neither mentions Black or farmers of color.

“It wasn't peaches and cream with the Hillary Clinton campaign,” he said. “They were not aggressive enough to adopt some of our issues.”

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, said she believes the Biden approach is a good start and it makes sense to address the needs of nonwhite farmers.

“You have to give him some credit. Other previous candidates have not made this a part of the platform,” said Brown, whose organization has targeted rural voters. “It’s worth noting that for him to include this as a part of the campaign, there is a lot of value in that.”

Nonwhite farmers have been a focus of the Biden campaign from the start, campaign officials say.

Trey Baker, director of African-American engagement for the campaign, said it’s one way the campaign reaches out to all of the Black community.

“So many friends and leadership of the campaign are from areas that have really large agricultural sectors. We have people with stakes in this campaign who also recognize how important it is that we address Black farmers,” Baker said.

Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy hosted one of the roundtables to discuss the need for racial equity within USDA, agriculture and rural community policy-making. Espy told participants that he was confident Biden would address access to credit, keeping land in the family and having Black representation on FSA councils and within the department.

Kimberly Ratcliff, president of 100 Ranchers, said at the roundtable that her main concern is being able to pass Black farms down through the generations. She said she's convinced that Biden shares her goal.

“I think he has been pretty open about how he feels about agriculture and about the importance of having generational wealth. The way I view it, all these are steps to create generational wealth for producers,” Ratcliff told POLITICO.

While many are excited about Biden’s focus on Black farmers, some farmers of color argue he does not go far enough. Lawrence Lucas, president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, said in a letter to the campaign, dated Sunday, that his group was disappointed in a lack of “a solution-driven civil rights policy.”

The group, which had worked closely with the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders campaigns, had hoped that Biden would adopt most, if not the all, of the former candidates’ proposals.

“We turned to the Biden campaign because we were very optimistic they would come up with a plan similar to the Warren and Sanders campaigns,” Lucas told POLITICO. “We are disappointed because they are a marathon away from those recommendations.”

While Warren’s proposal and Biden’s plan address heir’s property and seek to create an equity commission, Warren’s addresses issues related to the landmark Pigford civil rights lawsuit settlement, more of the USDA's civil rights office and local county committees.

“Improve the plan and make it more comprehensive to systemically change USDA once and for all,” Lucas said. “If they can do it why can’t he? I do feel as though if it was important enough for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, why haven’t they?”

Goldmon, of the Black Growers Council, said the leadership of his group supports the Biden campaign’s strategies to address systemic racism in agriculture. A priority for the campaign should be addressing chronic issues, including access to USDA loans and programs, he said.

According to a study by Data for Progress, farmers of color were often denied loans and credit, lacked access to legal defense against fraud and experienced “outright acts of violence and intimidation,” causing a 90 percent loss of Black-owned farm land from 1910 to 1998.

While the number of white farmers has stayed around 3 million since 1910, the number of farmers of color has fallen from more than 940,000 to 267,941, accounting for about 8 percent of farmers. That includes 21,267 in Arizona, 21,294 in New Mexico and 12,156 in Florida, according to the 2017 Agricultural Census.

“You're dealing with a profession that's still for the large part multigenerational, capital intensive, and so my father and grandfather missed out on opportunities that their white neighbors didn't,” Goldmon said. “It’s common sense to know that the farm that I inherited is still going to be less capitalized than the farms it's growing alongside and, a lot of times, competing against.”

Lloyd Wright, a Black farmer and former director of the USDA Office of Civil Rights, said the Biden campaign is smart to focus on nonwhite farmers. Wright chairs the Rural Farming Working Group, an informal network of formal USDA employees that meets once a month to get USDA to address the plight of Black farmers.

Wright said his group is “100 percent” committed to getting Biden elected.

“I fall with those who say we should give him credit for including some minority farmers in this policy. I am less concerned with the policy than I am with the implementation of policy,” he said. “We are ready to move onto the next step of getting the right people into positions in the department to implement policy.”

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