- [Narrator] Ocean State Media congratulates Jim Hummel for being voted into the Rhode Island Radio and Television Hall of Fame Class of 2026.

(gentle music) (machine whirring) - [Narrator] The suspension last fall of Federal Food Assistance benefits resulted in Rhode Islanders needing help to put food on their table.

Food pantries in our area are bracing for increased demand.

- No children should go to bed hungry, and no people should be hungry, not in this country.

- The MAGA movement is now looking to the future.

And this is the shock that I think Trump's experiencing right now.

He said the other day, "I am MAGA.

There is no MAGA without me."

- Everything is so hyperpartisan right now, no state believes that the Feds can actually do this and do it evenly.

They believe it's gonna be weaponized against 'em.

That's the problem.

(gentle inspirational music ending) - And welcome into our latest episode of "Lively", I'm Jim Hummel, we're joined this week by Watchdog RI, Founder and Political Contributor, Ken Block, and Brown University Political Science Professor, Wendy Schiller.

President Trump's threat of federal intervention in this fall's midterm elections has many states on alert.

He has asked Republicans to quote "Nationalize elections requiring proof of citizenship", and severely restricting the use of mail-in ballots.

Ken, no better person to have you.

You wrote the book on voting in the last cycle.

The President apparently has not gotten the memo about the state's running elections.

- Yeah, it's crystal clear legally that the states have the responsibility to conduct elections.

Congress can set guidelines for states bypassing laws, the President has no constitutional mechanism whatsoever to insert himself into directing how our elections get run.

- Yeah, I mean, I think, there's a provision in the Constitution.

"States shall regulate time, manner, and place of elections", and that's really important to remember, and thinking about the first Trump Administration when they asked for voter information, and even the Secretary of State of Mississippi said, "I'm not giving you that information", and I think that a lot of the state officials think, "Well, you know, we have a Republican President now, and I may be a Republican", but there could be a Democratic President.

And then what happens then?

And so -- - It's like blowing up the filibuster, right?

- Yeah.

I mean I think that's very similar rationale, but it's also, it sort of hopscotches over particular states.

You have Republican states in the South, Republican states in the West that are saying yes, and then you have Republican states in the South and West are saying no to giving voter roll information in the second Trump Administration term.

So there's different responses, but certainly I think it's been less enthusiastic among Republicans running state government than the Trump Administration anticipated.

- It's an opportunity lost, honestly, because one of the bigger weaknesses we have in our country is the states largely conduct their elections siloed away data-wise from the way all the other states do, and so when somebody moves from state to state, identifying that that happened and making sure you clean up the voter registration, where the voter moved outta the state could be very difficult to do.

It's a perfect opportunity for federal assistance to maintain a large database to help states identify when people move, or when they die even, 'cause -- - That's the ERIC System, right?

- Well, except ERIC is not governmental, right?

It's a nonprofit, it became politicized a bit.

So it's not the right place to conduct this, ultimately, it really should be the Federal Election Commission, that would be the right entity to go ahead and do this.

The problem is, because everything is so hyper-partisan right now, no state believes that the Feds can actually do this, and do it evenly, right?

They believe it's gonna be weaponized against 'em.

That's the problem.

- Yeah, I mean, when you think about the Federal government, you know, saying, "Well, you have to be a US citizen.

We need proof of that."

You know, you can think about some states that allow people who are undocumented to have driver's licenses.

And if driver's license is your proof to get to register to vote, let's say, or you know, you show up with the ID, and it goes into a machine, and verifies it, and we had signature issues, and you think about that, in terms of absentee balloting, you know, there is a case to be made that it could be that some people who have a driver's license who are undocumented do show up to a polling place, and somehow they are allowed to cast a provisional vote.

I mean, it's possible that that happens.

So I do think that's something worth looking into, and I think states should say, "This is the procedure we have in place to make sure that doesn't happen."

- From the political aspect, though, Trump was so burned, and he still has not gotten over losing the 2020 election, that mail ballots were evil, and it was all rigged, right?

And there's some states like, what is it, Oregon?

There's several states that just, all they do is mail ballots.

They don't -- - Oregon, California, Colorado.

- Right, you can't go to the -- - Nevada also.

Right?

- You can't go to the poll, so the -- - And Idaho, Idaho's adopted mail ballots too.

- So that's a half a dozen right there.

So the messaging switched though.

They went from the Republicans went from "It's bad, bad, bad", to "Maybe we need to play the game, and maybe we need to get ahead."

Now it seems like the President's reverting back to his old "Mail ballots are evil and don't play the game."

I think it's hurting the Republicans, because there's mixed messaging from the top to the states.

- So Trump's sons actually have been encouraging people to vote by mail, right?

So the message is mixed, and it's really, I think it's more about trying to rationalize away the loss in 2020 than it having a real specific problem with mail ballots, honestly, there's no evidence whatsoever that massive mail brought ballot fraud, Even 1,000 invalid mail ballots have been identified, I've never seen a report that said that, so -- - And you did a study in Rhode Island, and you found a handful, where, but at the end of the day, there was not massive fraud.

There's always gonna be error, right?

- No one anywhere has ever identified massive fraud, enough fraud to change an election at the state or federal level, no.

- Well, a lot of that had to do also with the '24 elections, because Arizona was really pivotal, and Arizona has a very healthy, a longstanding mail-in ballot program, and as does Florida, so I think Trump knew for '24, they changed their tune because they wanna make sure that those people who vote by mail, who might have been their constituency, who would vote, so I think that's one of the things, and then in midterm elections, maybe it's not as vital to the President, but Republicans who control state governments have successfully limited some of the outreach on mail balloting, so it used to you get it automatically, for example.

Now sometimes in some states you have to ask for it, and then --- - You're talking about asking for the application.

- Yeah, asking it for the application for the mail ballot.

So it used to be that it was, that application was sent automatically, now you have to ask.

So they are trying to sort of limit the use of mail balloting, particularly to voters, they can identify, 'cause winning elections is all about identifying who's gonna vote, and how to tell your message.

So if they can, we know it down a little bit, there's less uncertainty about who's gonna vote by now.

- And wasn't that the criticism in Rhode Island?

The applications were being sent without people asking back -- - Yes.

- In what those election cycles?

- Yeah, Nellie Gorbea, Secretary of State sent them out, yeah.

- During COVID, right?

- During COVID.

- Well, she wasn't the only one though.

- Yeah.

- There were a bunch of nonprofits and partisan organizations who sent applications.

I got like six or seven applications, right?

And then many people did.

And that's confusing to people who don't pay a lot of attention, right?

You get one, okay, you get a couple.

Now you're wondering why government is sending you so many of these applications, but it turns out, government only sent one, and then a whole bunch of other organizations sent a bunch as well.

So ... - The -- - Yeah, I mean, I think the Republican Party has to be more straightforward.

If you are going to limit mail-in balloting, if you really, as a philosophy believe people should vote in person, then you need to expand the number of polling places, and that's the opposite of what Republican-controlled states have done.

- The last thing I wanted to ask was like, you know, there's been a lot of saber rattling, and I know, I don't know if it's just that, that President Trump says, "Well, we need to send Federal troops into some of these cities", and you know, that's gonna result in lawsuits, but I kind of worry, it's kinda like what happened in Texas the other night with Jasmine Crockett.

They had to put the voting on hold, and there was some confusion.

In the heat of the moment, if Trump is really desperate and wants to send people in, it's gonna affect same-day voting.

I mean, I wonder if there's a preemptive strike that you can get out in front of it, with judges saying, "No, the Feds can't be here."

- Well, he can't, I mean, well, I mean ... - He can't, but he is he going to?

- He can't do it.

- Well, I mean, he, you know, George W. Bush did this in 2000, 2004.

In fact, in terms of positioning law enforcement in poor neighborhoods in places like Florida, and even William Renquist, who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court before he went to the court in the 1950s, he did that in Arizona, he actually stood around at polling places, and tried to, you know, be, not menacing, but discourage people who have a legal right to vote from voting.

So I think the backfiring there is that when you look at geography, and you look at the number of people without a college education, people with only high school education, Trump is brought into the voting population more than 10 million voters, they live in areas that are poor.

So if you're going to put police there, you're gonna discourage people who might vote for you as much as other people.

So I think it's politically, if not constitutionally, not a good move.

- So last thought on this, President Trump in 2018 voted by mail in the New York midterms, and in 2020, he voted by mail in the Florida Republican Primary.

So it's rather remarkable that from the Primary in 2020 to the general election, he became a user of mail ballots to an accuser of mail ballots.

- Wow, that is crazy.

Well, something to keep an eye on as we head further into the midterm session.

Tuesday marks the official beginning of the road to the Fall Midterms with key primary elections in Texas and North Carolina.

What effect will the US attack on Iran, and the residual fallout have on voters as they head to the polls in November?

Wendy, there's a lot of time between now and November, but a lot of the Trump supporters have said, "Hey, our gas prices are down, the stock market's up", and this has had an effect on both of those.

- Yeah, so the military attacks on Iran within a couple of days, gas prices have risen, and that's sort of preemptive and anticipatory of insecurity in the global oil market, but we know that if the shipping lanes are not secure, then people are not gonna get energy, and it's not just oil, it's natural gas, as well.

Now our country, the United States of America, produces a lot of oil and a lot of natural gas, but a lot of our economy rests on the global access to energy.

So, you know, the key is, as we know, no matter which party's running, or whatever happens for 50 years, if gas prices are high in the summer, voters remember that, because they do the most amount of driving, and then when they go to the polls in November, they remember that how much money they spend.

So the Republicans have to find a way to make sure that they're not blamed for this if we're still in conflict with Iran in the summer.

And the second is the casualty rate, we really hope that our service people do not get injured or killed, but if that casualty rate starts to rise, and we are looking at bigger numbers in the summer, then I think Americans get uncomfortable with this, and the Republicans solely own it, but the Democrats will have a tricky way of navigating that politics, but I do think gas prices and casualty levels I think are really important factors.

- You know, it's another foreign war, and one of the building blocks of MAGA has been "America first, no more wars", so I think what President Trump is doing with Iran, because he really took unilateral action, not asking for Congress's approval, what's happened is he's splintering MAGA in some ways, because the true America firsters are looking at another foreign entanglement, another war, which could become another forever war, and that's really not what they want.

So he could be weakening his own movement basically by engaging in what he's doing right now, and it could play a role, in the midterms, Congress has ceded its authority for almost anything to do with oversight over what, anything that President Trump does, so Congress, as well has made a bed, and the question really becomes is because our elections are so close, we're divided just about perfectly equally across the country, you don't need a large group of people to no longer support the President to cause things to tip over the other way.

- Well and Mrs.

Mark Kens bail you out politically, but independent voters.

So independent voters, there's about a 3% swing, and they swung in 2020 for Biden, in 2022, they stayed with the Democrats for congressional elections, but in '24, they switched to Trump, and now his approval rating among independents is somewhere around 26 or 28%.

That's the approval rating among independents.

That group is gone.

You can't win them back, they're not coming back.

They may not vote democratic in November, but they're not gonna vote for Republicans who are really big Trumpers.

The second is the MAGA movement is now looking to the future.

And this is the shock that I think Trump's experiencing right now.

He said the other day, "I am MAGA, there is no MAGA without me", but there will be a MAGA without him in 2029.

- He doesn't wanna be yesterday's news.

- Exactly.

And so the big media voices also have, you know, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, they see the future, they, you know, they're looking to stay in business longer than Trump, so I think now you're starting to see the effects of being in the second term, and being not yet a lame duck, but politically, looking to the future, and I think Trump is holding onto power for as long as he can.

- I find it fascinating that the primaries, we've had this discussion before, you know, our primary's eight weeks before the general election.

I've always said, the primary here, ideally should be in May.

Well, you have incumbents sitting in the General Assembly who would never go for that, because while your opponent's out, you're discussing some, you know, piece of legislation, but I find it interesting that it's starting this early in March.

I mean, we always kind of think of the primary season, 'cause we've been talking about it in the context of Rhode Island, but this is really gonna be a window as these primaries go over the next couple of months about turnout, what you can glean, we're gonna get a preview now before the summer, like we're used to in Rhode Island.

- Sure.

I personally believe that the party that plants itself as close to the middle as they can get away with, will clean up, I think in the upcoming elections.

Except in the deeply, deeply, deeply read states.

There is a disconnect, and I think that if Trump was going to be running again for President, which he can't do, but if he was gonna be running this coming November, he would be wiped out, right?

So the voters have a problem with what Trump has done as just as they did in 2020.

In 2024, the difference really was, Biden lost the trust and confidence of America by appearing to be really enfeebled while he was in power, right?

I think had a different Democrat been able to run a full election, the memory of what Trump did in 2020 or prior to 2020 probably would've kept him out of office, I believe in to the point ... - But we said that in 2016, if the Democrats had had a better candidate other than Hillary Clinton, and the Republicans had had, if you'd had strong candidates on each side, it's just there were flaws with each.

So ... - Yeah, I mean I think the issue for the Republicans is that the very issues that they ran on in '24, and some voters remember '24 are exactly what Trump experiencing now, right?

So inflation has been under uncontrolled, but now it's going back up, but the economy is uncertain, people are unhappy about it, and you know, groceries are expensive, and housing's expensive.

The same exact themes that Biden suffered from, Trump is suffering from, now Trump still has, as we know, 34% of this country will vote for him.

I mean that's the whole, and they'll get on primary.

The question is in terms of Texas, which affects all of the other Senate races, because if he doesn't endorse Cornyn, John Cornyn, the Incumbent, then the establishment Republican Party has to spend a lot of money to make sure Cornyn wins that primary, because James Talarico might be pretty competitive against Ken Paxton, who's more extreme then you can't put money into Michigan, or Alaska, or Maine, or North Carolina.

So this is the pressure, this is the argument they're making to Trump.

"You are gonna lose the Senate.

You could lose the Senate if we have to spend a lot of money defending Texas."

- We've talked to you a lot.

I asked you every time in two years ago, even a year ago, I was like, "Oh, the Senate's gonna be the way, the people are up and all that", now it's in play.

- It's in play.

And it's been in play for the last couple of months, because -- - Why?

- A few things, Ohio for example, you have an incumbent who got defeated two years ago, Sherrod Brown, or yeah, two years ago, and he's running again, and Labor somewhat defected two years ago to a guy named Bernie Moreno, and the turnout wasn't quite as high in places that would've been good for the Democrat, but now, Sherrod Brown's making the argument, "Look, Trump promised you A, B and C and we've got more plants closing than ever, and your life isn't any better.

And I worked for you, and I'm on your side", and I think Labor's gonna come out for him, so the dynamics locally, in terms of the economy are changing the rhetoric, and the chances for Democrats.

But there's still a very big climb.

Alaska's not gonna elect a -- I think that they're gonna stay Republican, and Michigan, for example.

- What about Maine?

- Maine?

Susan Collins is always supposed to lose, and she always wins.

- Yeah.

- So we'll see.

- Final thought on that?

- It's gonna be interesting, I think it's going to be brutal, and I hope for sanity, but I suspect we won't get it.

- All right.

The suspension last fall of Federal food assistant benefits resulted in more than 100,000 Rhode Islanders needing help to put food on their table.

And with looming cuts, food pantries in our area are bracing for increased demand.

I visited three area distribution sites, and here is some of what the people who work there told me.

Is there a little bit of anxiety, like we've been through this before, what's gonna happen as we go into February and March?

- Yeah, so some of what we see, of course, is anecdotal, but we are seeing some more anxiety, you know, and there are a lot of factors out there, the other thing that we're hearing about is sort of the affordability for people, so we had a client here that was new the other day, or that had been here 20 years ago, and came back and said, "I'm working full time, I just don't have the money.

You know, I just need help."

- Close to 80% of our shoppers are Hispanic, and they are Black and Brown people, who as we all know are targets for ICE, and so we try to ensure that those who are afraid to come, that we can get food to them.

We delivered food last week actually to a couple of people who could not get here.

- My thinking is, we need to be ready, we need to be ready to handle new clients, we are always tracking to see that number of new clients coming in, but we also are always thinking about, well, if our client, who is an existing client is also a SNAP recipient, and they have a loss of a percentage, or all of their SNAP benefits, what does it mean for them?

- We have to feed people.

They have to eat.

And you can't just rely on agencies like ours, who are dipping into their rainy day fund, if you will, and continue to do that, 'cause we won't be here if we continue to do that.

So that's why we are strong advocates for the Federal Government stepping in, and really doing something that's more substantial than what they're doing now, 'cause this isn't enough.

I personally feel that it's a failing of the Federal administration by not providing enough Federal feeding programs, and I think unless it turns around in next November, there will continue to be a huge need.

- You can watch my full story about the need for food assistance on our Ocean State Media YouTube page.

I think what I took away from this, I went to Barrington, I went to Providence, I went to North Providence, those SNAP benefits when they were suspended, you realize how many people relied on them.

I think the encouraging thing for me was a lot of people stepped up with donations, which was really nice to see in Rhode Island.

- Sure.

- Not totally unexpected, but philanthropy can't fill the gap.

- It can't, and that's where exactly where I was going to go.

Governor McKee made a big deal about how he's freed up another million dollars to help.

But when you take a look at the Rhode Island Food Bank, which serviced 90,000 people in November for the last couple of Novembers in a row, a million dollars every month's about $80,000 a month.

So you're giving everybody who goes to the food bank, Rhode Island Food Bank, an extra dollar worth of benefits a month, that's not much, right?

And a million dollars is less than a drop in the bucket.

$12 a year buys you what?

A family-sized pack of chicken, right?

- Mm.

- In fact, I was talking to my wife about this last night, and I said, "Well, keep you buying them, you know, I couldn't think of anything we could buy in the market for a dollar."

She goes, "Pretty much nothing at this point."

- Not even a candy bar.

- Not even a candy bar.

So if we're gonna make a dent in it, we shouldn't have politicians crowing about, "Yeah, hey, I got a million dollars.

Look at how good I am", right?

We have to do something meaningful, and meaningful is a lot more money than a million.

- Well, we also have to figure out why people are going hungry, why they can't be paid the wages or earn the living that would give them access to food, and in a way, that was not nearly so precarious as it is now, but you know, so the food system, the Food Stamp program was a political compromise in the 1960s between farmers and densely populated urban politicians, people who represented cities, for example, which had the greatest concentrations of poverty.

So Southern rural, Western rural, and then cities and then farmers.

And the deal was, "We'll pay you subsidies for your food, and for the school lunch programs quite similar, we'll buy your excess product, and then we will give it to schools", and food stamps is really sustains a lot of the agricultural industry, and so there's a political coalition that protects it.

And we saw that even now under the Trump Administration, the USDA and Brooke Rollins, who's the Secretary of US, of the Department of Agriculture.

- Agriculture, yep.

- Right.

So what happened was that he was gonna cut, cut, cut, suspended, and within days, you know, Republicans from Southern states, for example, said, "You can't do this", and then Republicans from farm states said, "You can't do this.

You are going to destroy us."

So this is the fabric that actually sustains this program, and that's why it managed to come out of that, even though it was temporarily suspended, that's why that suspension didn't last all that long, because there's a lot of political power behind this program.

- But I think what also got lost in the sound and fury of the DOGE cuts is, there probably is fraud, and there is, I mean the states probably need to take a deeper dive, I understand it's food assistance, and it's not other things that may out here, but I wonder if anybody has the stomach to go in, and look at that, or it's like, "Ah, it's Federal money, it's not on our budget, we're not gonna worry about it."

- Well states, typically, some states potentially many states have been bad stewards of federal money over the years, I mean, look what happened in Minnesota with that program, right?

So, sure, and because it's all computerized, and digitized, there's the ability is there to really dig in and get going on it, and a state like Rhode Island that's considered to be aggressive and evil, if you do something like that.

- You've done those deep dive though.

- I have, I've taken the arrows for having done it too.

So it's doable, and you know, when I did look at food stamp fraud, in fact we ran the state of Texas's food stamp program, for a decade, the computer systems.

So I have a lot of experience with it, and we found a lot of fraud, when we first brought that system in, and we managed to squeeze out about a billion dollars of savings down there.

So it's all doable, you need the political will to do it, and you can't do it a way that's overtly against people, right?

It's not about being against people, or against feeding people, it's just about making sure that everybody plays by the same rules or the same way.

- I think your point is a good one is why do we have people who need this assistance, it's what we call the working poor now.

It used to be kinda like you're on food stamps, and it's a whole different class, now you have people, because the housing in Rhode Island is so high now, they can barely, you know, you only have so many dollars, so how much you're paying -- - And health insurance too.

Medicare.

- And health insurance at the end of the day, the food sometime, if you know you're gonna have availability at a food pantry or whatever, so maybe your dollars go here, and then you try to get assistance.

But that, I thought in November, that suspension, well, how long was that?

Two weeks maybe?

- Yeah, barely two weeks.

- That, I mean it showed the stress on the system, did it not?

- Well, somewhere in between 42 and 48 million people receive some food stamp assistance, SNAP, they're called, it's called SNAP now.

So Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.

So yeah, so 48, that's a, you know, there's 332 million people in the country, so that's a lot of people, and they're everywhere, and as I said, there are large pockets of people who are in Republican states.

- Bipartisan need, is it?

- So it's a bipartisan need, and I think Medicaid expansion also in terms of social welfare programs, and those associations has really changed, so many more people are on Medicaid, and if the politics are a little fraught for the Democrats though, because there are people who are not receiving any SNAP assistance, or are on Medicaid, and view themselves as independent, and they pay taxes, and they don't like the idea of supporting people who don't, and the other thing is that the Trump Administration tried to make it so that undocumented were the villain of the story, but that got dissipated, because so many people who are US citizens -- - In red states.

- Yeah.

- Okay, let's go to outrageous and or kudos, Mr.

Block, let's begin with you this week.

- So I'm gonna come back to Iran, and my outrage is Congress not doing their job, right?

Not providing any oversight, not being a check and balance to the executive branch, we desperate, the founders gave us a Congress, and made them effectively coequal with the President, in fact, if anything, the President is a little bit underpowered in the Constitution, relative to Congress, but we're not operating with that way right now.

We went to war against England, because we didn't want to have a single person overseeing and dictating what the country did, we wanted representation.

We didn't want taxation without representation, yet we have tariffs, which is taxation, enabled by President Trump.

So yeah, that's my outrage.

We need Congress to do its job.

- Wendy, what do you have?

- There's so many outrageous -- - [Jim] Should we budget another half hour for you or not?

- So I'm gonna do something a little off of the wrench here, which is, there are new laws now in some states for women who were domestic violence abused and victims, and they ended up killing their abuser in self-defense essentially, and they're sentenced to 20, 30 years in prison, and they're New York state, Oklahoma for example, and there are laws now on the books, but the journey for these women to make their case is really difficult and really fraught, and you still have, you know, people who say, "No, no, no, you know, we never saw the abuse, we're not believing you."

And the idea that women are not believed when they claim that they are abused, and it's just everywhere, and I think that that is just the 21st century, it's really time to change that, and I think that would greatly help the cause of making sure that women are safer than they are now.

- All right, thank you both.

Thank you for bringing your A game as usual.

We appreciate it.

And thank you for joining us.

Be sure and check us out on Facebook, X, Instagram, and on the Ocean State Media YouTube channel.

We'll see you next time right here on Lively.

(gentle inspirational music) - [Narrator] "Lively" is generously supported in part by John Hazen White's "Lookout."