It was obvious that women of color would be key to the Harris campaign, a theme you'd have to be blind to miss. Throughout that day, and during the campaign, her identity was the message. At her launch the campaign offered two versions of its "For the People" signage: one in conventional red, white, and blue, and another in purple, yellow, and red, a thoughtful homage to Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to run for president in 1972. Harris's campaign stressed then, and every day after, that being a black woman would make her the obvious choice for primary voters in South Carolina and beyond, where African Americans comprise much more of the electorate than in Iowa and New Hampshire. [...]

An unfortunate byproduct of Twitter's chokehold on elite discourse is that it forces otherwise smart people to focus so deeply on niche arguments and savvy takes that we often forget things that used to be rather obvious in politics. Among them: Winning campaigns have a message. It's not a complicated or sexy piece of analysis, but the four Democratic front-runners--Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg--have all defined for voters and the media why they are running for president and what separates them from other choices on the ballot. Regardless of ideology or background, they can answer the question in a tidy and easy-to-understand fashion. No other Democrat besides Andrew Yang has done so. The front-runners have organizing principles. They get attention without relying on "moments." They can raise money. Their policies, personality, talents, and biography all gel together in a way that makes sense. Their ability to explain why they are each running for president gives them a permanent safe harbor-- an ability to change the subject, to go on offense, to ignore the utter smallness of Twitter, and to beat into the brains of voters an uncomplicated framework that they can carry with them to the caucus precinct or ballot box come Election Day.

Harris failed to do any of these things. Much like her slogan--"For the People!"--Harris came off as standing for everything and hence nothing. Her shifting positions on Medicare for All, abolishing private insurance, federally mandated busing, and elements of the Green New Deal reinforced the percolating idea that she was too calculating and too political--like Clinton before her--with no principled core beyond winning the next election. Her ideological squishiness offended Sanders ideologues, who roasted her for changing positions on a Sanders-crafted Medicare for All bill that she rushed to endorse in 2017. Her stumbles gave comfort to Warren supporters, who smartly understood that Harris and Warren voters are actually pretty similar: college-educated women who like the idea of a woman running for president. Harris staffers and surrogates, preoccupied with the permanent soul suck of Twitter and elite opinion, spent time complaining about sexism and publicly fighting with reporters, blaming the media for "erasing" Harris even after she had tumbled to low single digits on her own merits. Warren's campaign never engages in those fights: Its candidate has a message that prevents them from getting sucked into internet quicksand and squabbles over left-wing purity tests. On many days it felt like Harris's first and only audience was the political press and self-appointed Twitter pundits, not voters. Few people would say the same about Biden, Sanders, Warren, or Buttigieg, who are squarely focused on Iowa along with their own media strategies. Their poll numbers reflect it.

George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer acquitted of homicide charges in the 2012 fatal shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, is suing Martin's family, prosecutors and others involved in the case he claims rested on false evidence, according to a copy of the suit sent to the media Wednesday.

Zimmerman is represented by Larry Klayman, a high-profile legal crusader tied to conservative causes and the founder of Judicial Watch before splitting with the activist group.

"He's a Korean," Miller said of Jetton. "He has decided because, because he is an Asian, that my district might need an Asian to win. And that's kind of racist in my mind, but anyway, that's not necessary, at least not yet."

Miller surmised that Chan, who he has never met, decided to enter the fray "probably for the same reason."

"He has not been around Republican channels at all, but he's an Asian," he said. [...]

Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, swiftly rescinded his endorsement of the incumbent's bid for re-election. His spokesman John Wittman explained that the governor deemed Miller's comments "inappropriate and out of touch with the values of the Republican Party."

Linda Howell, the chair of the Fort Bend County GOP, expressed concerns about Miller's ability to represent such a diverse district in a statement asking Miller to consider withdrawing from the race. And Miller himself acknowledged their validity, in his own statement that afternoon.

"I do not want to be a distraction for my party or my constituents, and therefore have decided not to seek re-election," he said, after apologizing to Jetton, Leonard, and his supporters.

What Miller's GOP critics have not acknowledged, however, is that Republicans across the nation have been fretting about the kind of demographic change that has already happened in Texas, a "majority-minority state" since early in the 21st century. Many of them seem to have a sense that diversity is inevitably a threat to their party's future prospects.

"He represents the old traditional Texas GOP that you saw for much of the last 20 years, especially in Fort Bend," said Jay Kumar Aiyer, a political scientist based in Houston. "He thinks the party tapping a younger minority candidate is giving into political correctness, and not the reality of the district and county being so diverse."

But that reality is not a threat to Republicans such as Jetton or Chan--not because they are Americans of Asian descent, but because they have shown a commitment to representing a diverse district, and have, as candidates, focused on issues of interest to the entire community, such as public education, transportation, and infrastructure.

And Miller's downfall illustrates that his weakness is not a function of the much-discussed demographic changes in Fort Bend County, but of his own struggles to respond to such changes as a more effective leader might.

Since the 1980s, Democratic candidates have proven that they can win elections while losing whites without a college degree by a significant margin. Obama won 36 percent of their votes in 2012. Bill Clinton averaged 41 percent in his two victories. And in 2020, the candidate will likely need to win a smaller share of white people without a degree, because that group has long been declining as a share of both the electorate and the broader population. According to Gallup, their share of the population has declined by three percentage points since 2014. And a study released by the Center for American Progress in October projects that next year their share of the electorate will be 2.3 points lower than it was in 2016.

The reality is that the Democratic candidate is unlikely to do as poorly with this group as Hillary Clinton did. In 2016, despite winning the national popular vote by a significant margin, she won just 28 percent of these voters, according to Pew, and that wasn't enough to deliver Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. According to a data set that combines survey and voter registration data with election results, Clinton lost non-college-educated whites by a 28-point margin in 2016, significantly worse than Obama's 10-point deficit in 2008 or his 21-point gap in 2012.

A similar analysis looking back further found that Al Gore lost working-class whites by 17 points in 2000, and they went for George W. Bush over John Kerry by 23 points in 2004. Clinton also fared significantly worse among this group in 2016 than Democrats did overall when Republicans crushed them in midterm waves in 2010 (by 23 points) and 2014 (by seventeen points).

The slow pace of Russia's shift away from carbon is increasingly risky as the European Union, the biggest buyer of the country's oil and gas, prepares a plan to reduce net emissions to zero by 2050. A key proposal is a carbon tax on energy imports into the EU, which the Center for Environmental Investments, a Russian research house, says could cut Russia's energy exports by a third in the coming decade.

With prices for renewable energy in some places below those for power from burning carbon, some forecasters predict oil demand will start falling within five years, about a decade earlier than Russia planned for. That could render obsolete a dozen multibillion-dollar oil and gas projects in Siberia and the Arctic. "Russia risks being caught out by the speed of change," says Kingsmill Bond, a strategist at Carbon Tracker, a London researcher that estimates major energy companies must reduce production by a third by 2040 to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a goal of the Paris Agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions. "They're anticipating that everything is going to be fine for the foreseeable future."

Crime in Malmö has reached its lowest level in 20 years, but still almost three quarters of the southern city's inhabitants feel worried about being exposed to crime, according to an annual safety survey. [...]

A local police chief in northern Malmö, Andy Roberts, said that an unbalanced depiction of Malmö in the media also contributed negatively to residents' perceived safety.

"There are often dark newspaper columns about Malmö, we shouldn't underestimate the image and the psychological impact that creates. There is really a lot of focus on the negative, both in the mass media and from police," said Roberts.

The Israel Defense Forces admitted Wednesday that it had published inflated numbers of ultra-Orthodox enlistment for years, after a report in Hebrew-language media claimed officers had purposely lied to cover up slumping recruitment tallies.

According to the Kan public broadcaster, officials in the army department responsible for tracking enlistment numbers in the Haredi community have been lying about how many of them join up, doubling and even tripling the tally, to make is seem like the military was meeting the quotas set by the law.