A8 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 , 2019
party officials have worked for
months to disabuse any notion
that a loss in ruby-red Kentucky
could forecast a difficult environ-
ment for Republicans in 2020.
McConnell has spoken with
Trump about Bevin’s race multi-
ple times, according to two peo-
ple familiar with the calls who
spoke on the condition of ano-
nymity to confirm private con-
versations.
The majority leader’s out-
reach to the White House dates
to at least April, when McCon-
nell warned Trump during a
phone call that whether or not
the president had any impact on
Bevin’s reelection, a Republican
loss would be interpreted as a
sign of political weakness aheadalliance with Trump and, in the
final weeks of the race, the Demo-
cratic-led House’s impeachment
probe against him.
Democrats hope the anti-Bev-
in fervor, as well as Beshear’s
focus on state issues, will help the
41-year-old triumph over the gov-
ernor Tuesday.
“Matt Bevin is kind of the
antithesis of any politician I’ve
ever been around in that he
seems to get up every day and
decides, ‘Well, who am I going to
piss off today?’ ” said Rep. John
Yarmuth, the sole Democrat in
the state’s congressional delega-
tion.
Republicans are aware of the
political narratives that off-year
elections can carry, and senior“If Bevin wins, he’s got Donald
Trump and Mitch McConnell to
thank,” said Rep. James Comer
(R-Ky.), who is known to have a
poor relationship with Bevin and
entertained a primary challenge
against him earlier this year.
Unprompted, Comer noted
that his internal polling last year
showed Trump with a 69 percent
approval rating in his western
Kentucky district, while Bevin
was at 29 percent. Trump defeat-
ed Democrat Hillary Clinton in
the state by 30 percentage points
in 2016.
But the increasingly polarized
and nationalized governor’s race
has helped Bevin, 52, pull even in
public and internal campaign
polling as he has zeroed in on hisstate legislators from his own
party.
Republicans hope Trump’s
presence in Kentucky in the final
hours before Tuesday’s election
will inject enough momentum to
boost Bevin over Democrat Andy
Beshear, the state’s attorney gen-
eral and son of a former governor.
“This guy, Beshear, is a major
leftie,” Trump said at Monday’s
rally. “You know that, right?
Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.) — who will be
on the ballot next year — has set
aside any lingering tensions from
a contentious Senate primary
against Bevin in 2014 and has
tapped his extensive political net-
work to aid the struggling gover-
nor in his reelection bid.tors from participating jurisdic-
tions will study the data and
redistribute resources accord-
ingly, Stewart said. After the
2016 numbers were published,
for instance, election officials in
Fairfax County, Va., learned that
the worst wait times occurred in
the morning, Stewart said. So
they asked for more money and
hired poll workers to work extra
hours at the start of Election
Day, he said.
Trickier scenarios will be
harder to fix, including states or
local jurisdictions with regula-
tions requiring voting equip-
ment to be distributed evenly
according to the population of
registered voters. That can make
it difficult to address the reality
that other factors besides popu-
lation affect long lines, Stewart
said.
And states that use voting
machines rather than paper bal-
lots can struggle to nimbly re-
distribute equipment, because
the machines are expensive and
there is a finite number of them.
Paper ballots enable officials to
set up additional voting stations
more easily, he said. That limita-
tion applied to Georgia, he said.
Richard Barron, the top elec-
tion official in Fulton County,
said he is eager to look at the
study and try to distribute re-
sources to improve wait times.
However, he said he is con-
strained by the county’s supply
of electronic voting machines
and by the expectation that new
machines being deployed next
year will slow voters down even
more as they get used to them.
There are also political forces
at work, he said.
“This county, politically, it’s
split,” Barron said. “There’s a
Democratic south and a Repub-
lican north. I hear about it if we
don’t have everything even.”
The good news in the study:
The average voter found 7.
people in line upon arriving at a
polling location, and the aver-
age wait time was 8.9 minutes.
Wait times sometimes exceeded
30 minutes in 4.8 percent of
precincts and sometimes ex-
ceeded one hour in only 1.5 per-
cent of precincts.
Wait times were longest when
polls first opened, when 21.
people were in line, on average.
The Presidential Commission
on Election Administration has
recommended that voters
should not have to wait more
than 30 minutes.
[email protected]BY AMY GARDNERVoters in communities with
greater minority populations
and lower incomes were more
likely to wait longer to cast their
ballots in the 2018 midterm
elections, with Fulton County,
Ga., topping the list, according to
a new study published Monday.
The percentage of precincts
surveyed where voter wait times
sometimes reached more than
30 minutes doubled between
2014 and 2018, to about 6 per-
cent, according to a study of
3,119 polling places across the
country conducted by the Bipar-
tisan Policy Center, a Washing-
ton-based think tank, and MIT.
Fulton County, home to Atlan-
ta, was the epicenter of a conten-
tious and racially charged gover-
nor’s race last year between
Democrat Stacey Abrams, who
is African American, and Repub-
lican Brian Kemp, who is white.
After Kemp, then the secretary
of state with oversight of voting,
won narrowly, Abrams accused
him of orchestrating a campaign
of voter suppression to steal the
contest; she pointed to broken
or inadequate equipment in the
Atlanta area and the resulting
long lines as one example. Kemp
has denied the accusation.
But the study offers a nu-
anced portrait of the causes of
longer lines in Georgia and
elsewhere — and presents the
data as a prescriptive opportu-
nity for election administrators
to improve wait times by under-
standing when and where they
occur.
“There’s a lot of things going
on in Georgia,” said Charles
Stewart, a political science pro-
fessor at MIT and one of the
study’s authors. “It was a big
surge in turnout. You can go
down the list before you get to
the malevolent explanations.”
Stewart and the study’s other
authors, for instance, cited rela-
tively less political clout as one
possible reason minority-heavy
precincts did not have enough
resources to avoid long lines.
“The affluent neighborhood
— if they are experiencing long
lines, it might very well be that
the county commissioner lives
in the neighborhood and knows
what buttons to push, and the
people who live in that neigh-
borhood have experience asking
for things and getting them,”
Stewart said. “Minorities might
think, ‘When we ask, we don’t
get things.’ Or maybe, ‘We don’t
have time to press our case.’ ”
The researchers also ex-
plained that the longer lines
correlated with a higher propor-
tion of renters vs. homeowners.
A surge of first-time, younger or
highly mobile voters in these
communities may have waited
longer because more voters are
showing up at the wrong polling
location or taking longer to fill
out a ballot, they said.
Matthew Weil, another of the
study’s authors and director of
the Bipartisan Policy Center’s
Elections Project, said the wait
times “shot up” in cases where
the minority population
reached 90 percent or more.
After Georgia, topping the list of
the longest wait times were
precincts in South Carolina, Ne-
vada and Washington, D.C.
Weil said election officials
need to tailor their resource
needs precinct by precinct.
“This should allow jurisdic-
tions to use this data and say,
‘This polling place over here had
four check-in tables and eight
places to vote,’ ” Weil said.
“ ‘That wasn’t enough. We better
make sure we up the resources
in time for 2020.’ ”
The study collected data from
a sliver of the nation’s estimated
116,000 polling locations. But
the authors said it is the largest
study on wait times to date,
covering a representative swath
of the country’s demographic
makeup over 11 states and
18 million registered voters.
Researchers found that while
wait times sometimes exceeded
30 minutes in 6 percent of the
precincts surveyed, most lines
were very short, with roughly a
third of the hourly observations
reporting no line at all. But
addressing problem spots, the
study reports, “is not about
understanding how long lines
will be on average. Instead,
election officials must account
for how long the line will be at
its worst.”
Ideally, election administra-Study: Long voting lines
likelier in minority areas
of an election year, said one of
the people with knowledge of
the conversation. That was de-
spite McConnell’s argument to
Trump that off-year gubernato-
rial races are often overinter-
preted for any political implica-
tions.
Indeed, Trump made the race
to reelect Bevin about him, tell-
ing the crowd: “If you lose, it
sends a really bad message ...
you can’t let that happen to me.”
Vice President Pence, who is
close with Bevin because of their
shared connection as Republi-
can governors, campaigned with
him in southeastern Kentucky
on Friday. Bevin is also a regular
White House visitor, attending
events on workforce develop-
ment and criminal justice re-
structuring.
An Oct. 16 Mason-Dixon poll
of 625 likely voters showed Bev-
in and Beshear dead even at
46 percent. Although Bevin’s job
approval rating remains under-
water at 45 percent, compared
with 48 percent disapproval,
that is an improvement in recent
months.
His internal figures have
shown a similar trajectory.
Down by as many as 15 points
against Beshear in June, Bevin
has seen his numbers rise since
then, with a spike of about a
half-dozen points in July coin-
ciding with Democrat Amy
McGrath’s nationally noticed an-
nouncement that she would
challenge McConnell next No-
vember, according to two GOP
operatives familiar with the fig-
ures.
Bevin’s numbers have gradu-
ally risen since September, when
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-
Calif.) announced the start of an
impeachment inquiry into
Trump and his campaign for-
mally launched an ad campaign
against Beshear.
Still, other Republicans cau-
tioned against reading too much
into the results should Bevin fall
short Tuesday.
If Bevin loses despite the
president’s last-minute efforts,
“it has nothing to do with
Trump,” Comer said. “It’s just
Bevin.”
[email protected]Felicia Sonmez in Washington
contributed to this report.BY SEUNG MIN KIMlexington, ky. — President
Trump’s push to rescue a trio of
GOP gubernatorial candidates in
red states escalated Monday as
he headed to Kentucky to cam-
paign for Gov. Matt Bevin — a test
of the president’s ability to pull
one of the nation’s most unpopu-
lar governors across the finish
line.
During the election-eve rally
at Rupp Arena in Lexington,
Trump urged the crowd to back
Bevin, touting the state’s econo-
my and praising the embattled
governor for making decisions
during his time in office that set
up the state “to be a rocket ship
in the future.”
“We’re sending a signal by
doing that to the rest of the
country, to the rest of the world,
that the Republican Party, you
know what we stand for,” Trump
said. During his turn on the
stage, Bevin too urged rallygoers
to send a message to Washing-
ton: “That Kentucky is bleeding
red and that we support to the
president of the United States,
Donald J. Trump!”
Referencing the governor’s
aggressive personality and per-
sistent calls to the White House,
Trump added, “He’s such a pain
in the ass, but that’s what you
want!”
Trump also used his speech to
criticize the Democratic-led im-
peachment inquiry, calling it a
“deranged, hyperpartisan im-
peachment witch hunt.”
In the crowd standing behind
him were several supporters
wearing white T-shirts bearing
the words, “Read the tran-
script!”
Although all three Republi-
cans vying for governor in Ken-
tucky, Mississippi and Louisiana
have closely allied themselves
with the president, Bevin has
been the most adept at adopting
brash Trumpian tactics. The gov-
ernor’s abrasive demeanor has
led to high-profile clashes with
teacher unions, the media and
Trump looks to give Ky. governor a last-minute boost
PHILIP SCOTT ANDREWS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
President Trump leads a rally Monday night at the University of Kentucky’s Rupp Arena in Lexington. He traveled to the state in support of
Gov. Matt Bevin, who was running neck and neck with Democrat Andy Beshear, the state’s attorney general, ahead of Tuesday’s vote.President rallies crowd
in support of Bevin,
a politician of his own ilk“There are no facts in the
record at all, zero,” Gorsuch
said. On the other hand, if all an
officer had to do was say some
“magic words” about his experi-
ence or training, “what are we
fighting about here?” he asked.
At one point, Gorsuch seemed
to adopt the accent of a street-
wise New York cop, and Har-
rington drew laughter when she
said, “This is Kansas, not New
York.”
“Touche,” Gorsuch replied.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer
said he believed it was at least
reasonable for an officer to
suspect the registered driver
was behind the wheel, even if
his driver’s license was suspend-
ed.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts
Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito
Jr. seemed firmly on Kansas’s
side.
“Reasonable suspicion does
not have to be based on statis-
tics, it does not have to be based
on specialized experience,” Rob-
erts said. “As we’ve said often, it
can be based on common sense.”
Harrington responded: “But,
if they’re just relying on an
assertion of common sense,
they have to give us some way to
assess whether that is a reason-
able common-sense inference.”
Roberts said that was not the
case. “I was just going to say if
they’re relying on common
sense, they don’t have to give
you anything more than com-
mon sense.”
Alito said that what Har-
rington was proposing — a look
at the total circumstances sur-
rounding an officer’s decision to
stop a vehicle whose owner has
a suspended license — would
make for “either a trivial deci-
sion or a revolutionary deci-
sion.”
It’s trivial if all that was
lacking in Glover’s case was a
statement from the officer
about his training, Alito said.
“It’s a revolutionary decision
if in every case involving rea-
sonable suspicion there has to
be a statistical showing or an
examination of all the things
that you think are necessary
here.”
The case is Kansas v. Glover.
[email protected]er.
“The problem is not that the
state necessarily needs signifi-
cantly more evidence; it needs
some more evidence,” the state
court ruled.
Some justices, particularly
Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Ka-
gan, seemed to agree with their
Kansas counterparts about the
Constitution’s protection
against unreasonable searches
and seizures.
Why should the court second-
guess the trial judge, who said
that in his experience, many
people lawfully drive vehicles
not registered to them, Soto-
mayor asked.
Kagan hypothesized about a
municipality that required mo-torists to carry their licenses
with them at all times, but a
survey showed only 50 percent
of teenagers did so. “So now it’s
like common sense that if you
see a teenager, she won’t be
carrying her driver’s license
with her,” Kagan said. “Does
that give the police officer the
ability to stop every teenager
that he sees?”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
wondered whether it might be
more likely that the person
behind the wheel was not the
registered owner with the sus-
pended license.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said
he was troubled that Mehrer did
not testify, so there was no
questioning about whether his
experience or training caused
him to “assume” the driver was
Glover.BY ROBERT BARNESThe Supreme Court on Mon-
day seemed prepared to say it
was reasonable for police to pull
over a vehicle registered to
someone with a suspended driv-
er’s license even if officers don’t
know for sure who is driving.
The court heard a case from
Kansas that could have a big
impact on when police may stop
a motorist who has not other-
wise broken the law, sorting
through phrases such as “com-
mon sense” (18 mentions), “rea-
sonable suspicion” (44 men-
tions) and “assume” and “as-
sumption” (25 mentions).
Kansas Solicitor General
Toby Crouse said it was “com-
mon sense” for sheriff ’s deputy
Mark Mehrer to stop a truck
owned by Charles Glover after a
routine license plate check
showed Glover had a suspended
license.
“It would have been poor
police work for Deputy Mehrer
not to initiate the stop in this
case and investigate further to
confirm or dispel his suspicion,”
Crouse said.
Justice Department lawyer
Michael R. Huston agreed. “The
purpose of reasonable suspicion
is simply to conduct further
investigation,” Huston told the
court.
But what if a law-abiding
citizen was simply borrowing
the truck? “There’s literally
nothing she could do to avoid
being seized,” said lawyer Sarah
E. Harrington, representing
Glover.
As it turns out, Glover was
driving near Lawrence, Kan., in
2016, and Mehrer charged him
with habitual driving with a
suspended license (and then let
him drive away). The Kansas
Supreme Court, however, said
the officer had not done enough
to justify the stop.
All that is needed for a traffic
stop, the U.S. Supreme Court
has ruled, is reasonable suspi-
cion that the law is being bro-
ken, which can be a low hurdle.
But the Kansas Supreme Court
said that Mehrer didn’t even
have that: He had only an
“assumption” that the driver
behind the wheel must be Glov-Supreme Court appears prepared
to rule for police in traffic-stop case
The court heard
a case from Kansas
that could have a
big impact on when
police may stop a
motorist who has
not otherwise
broken the law.