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The Democratic Theory of Winning With Less
www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › kamala-harris-narrow-path › 680465
This story seems to be about:
- Adam Carlson ★★★★
- African American ★★
- American ★
- Arizona ★
- Ayres ★★★
- Biden ★
- Black ★
- Blacks ★★
- Blue Wall ★★★
- Brookings Metro ★★
- Center ★★
- Clinton ★★
- Colorado ★
- Crystal Ball ★★★
- Democratic ★
- Democrats ★
- Dobbs ★★
- Donald Trump ★
- Election ★
- Electoral College ★★
- Elon Musk ★
- Georgia ★
- GOP ★
- Harris ★★
- Hillary Clinton ★
- Hispanic ★★
- House ★
- Joe Biden ★
- Kamala Harris ★
- Keystone ★★
- Kondik ★★★★
- Latino ★★
- Latinos ★★
- Less ★★
- Madison Square Garden ★★
- Michigan ★★
- Mike Mikus ★★★
- Mike Podhorzer ★★★
- Mikus ★★★★
- Nevada ★
- North Carolina ★
- Paul Maslin ★★★
- Pennsylvania ★★
- Podhorzer ★★★
- Puerto Rican ★★
- Puerto Rico ★
- Republican ★
- Rust Belt ★★★
- Sabato ★★★
- Sun Belt ★★★
- Supreme Court ★
- Trump ★
- University ★
- Virginia Center ★★★
- Whether Trump ★★★
- Whit Ayres ★★
- William Frey ★★★
- Wisconsin ★★
This story seems to be about:
- Adam Carlson ★★★★
- African American ★★
- American ★
- Arizona ★
- Ayres ★★★
- Biden ★
- Black ★
- Blacks ★★
- Blue Wall ★★★
- Brookings Metro ★★
- Center ★★
- Clinton ★★
- Colorado ★
- Crystal Ball ★★★
- Democratic ★
- Democrats ★
- Dobbs ★★
- Donald Trump ★
- Election ★
- Electoral College ★★
- Elon Musk ★
- Georgia ★
- GOP ★
- Harris ★★
- Hillary Clinton ★
- Hispanic ★★
- House ★
- Joe Biden ★
- Kamala Harris ★
- Keystone ★★
- Kondik ★★★★
- Latino ★★
- Latinos ★★
- Less ★★
- Madison Square Garden ★★
- Michigan ★★
- Mike Mikus ★★★
- Mike Podhorzer ★★★
- Mikus ★★★★
- Nevada ★
- North Carolina ★
- Paul Maslin ★★★
- Pennsylvania ★★
- Podhorzer ★★★
- Puerto Rican ★★
- Puerto Rico ★
- Republican ★
- Rust Belt ★★★
- Sabato ★★★
- Sun Belt ★★★
- Supreme Court ★
- Trump ★
- University ★
- Virginia Center ★★★
- Whether Trump ★★★
- Whit Ayres ★★
- William Frey ★★★
- Wisconsin ★★
For years, the dominant belief in both parties has been that Democrats need to run up a big lead in the national presidential popular vote to win an Electoral College majority. But in the dead-heat election of 2024, that may no longer be true. The distinctive dynamics of the 2024 campaign could allow Kamala Harris to eke out an Electoral College win even if Donald Trump runs better in the national popular vote this time than during his previous two campaigns.
The belief that Democrats need a big popular-vote win to prevail in the electoral vote hardened in the course of those two previous Trump campaigns. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by a resounding 4.5 percentage points in the popular vote but still only squeezed past him by relatively small margins in the three Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the race. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by two points in the national popular vote but narrowly lost those same three states, and with them the presidency.
That history has weighed heavily on Democrats as a procession of recent polls has shown Trump shrinking or even erasing Harris’s national lead. But the pattern of differences among white, Black, and Latino voters found in most of those national surveys show how Harris could still potentially capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory—even if she wins the nationwide popular vote by much less than Biden did in 2020, and possibly by only about the same margin that Clinton got in 2016.
The principal reason is that these recent polls show Trump making most of his gains in national support by performing better among Black and, especially, Latino voters than he did in either of those previous elections. Even the most favorable surveys for Trump consistently find Harris polling very close to Biden’s level of support in 2020 among white voters, which had improved over Clinton’s performance with that group by several points. In other words, Harris will likely rely a bit more on white voters than her party’s past two nominees did.
That subtle shift is the crucial distinction from the earlier contests. It could allow Harris to scrape a win by sweeping the predominantly white, former “Blue Wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, even if Trump improves over his prior popular-vote results by gaining among Black and Latino voters (and Black and Latino men in particular).
[Read: Elon Musk wants you to think this election’s being stolen]
In each of his previous two races, Trump benefited because the decisive states leaned more Republican than the nation overall. In both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote for the winner—first for Trump, then for Biden. In 2016, Trump ran about three percentage points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally; in 2020, he ran nearly four points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally, according to the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
The fact that Trump each time performed much better in the tipping-point state than he did in the national popular vote is central to the assumption that Democrats can’t win the Electoral College without a popular-vote majority. But as the Center for Politics research demonstrates, that hasn’t always been true.
The tipping-point states in the three presidential elections preceding 2016—Ohio in 2004 and Colorado in 2008 and 2012—each voted slightly more Democratic than the national popular vote. And in none of those elections was the disjunction between the tipping-point-state result and the national popular vote nearly as big as it was in 2016 or 2020. In fact, the gap between the national popular vote and the tipping-point state in Trump’s two races was considerably wider than in any election since 1948, the Center found.
Polling in the past few weeks, however, has indicated that this gap has shrunk to virtually nothing. Trump and Harris remain locked in a virtual tie both nationally and in the swing states. With polls that closely matched, none of the swing states appears entirely out of reach for either candidate.
Still, professionals on both sides with whom I’ve spoken in recent days see a clear hierarchy to the states. Both camps give Harris her best chance for overall victory by winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; Trump is considered stronger across the Sun Belt in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada (ranked from most to least promising for him).
That separation reflects the race’s unexpected racial dynamics. If Trump’s polling gains among voters of color bear out in practice, that would benefit him the most in the Sun Belt battlegrounds. There, minority voters are such a large share of the electorate that even a small shift in their preferences—toward Trump—would greatly diminish Democrats’ chances.
Whatever happens in the Sun Belt, though, if Harris sweeps the Rust Belt big three, she would reach exactly the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win (so long as she held all of the other states that Biden carried by about three percentage points or more, which is very likely). All three of those major industrial states are much less diverse than the nation as a whole: In 2020, white people cast about four-fifths of the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and roughly nine-tenths of it in Wisconsin, according to census figures.
“One of the potential outcomes here is that at the end of the day, Trump will have gained with Blacks and Latinos and it may not have decided the Electoral College, if we don’t need [the Sun Belt states] to win,” Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster with long experience in Wisconsin, told me.
Obviously, Harris has no guarantee that she could survive a smaller national popular-vote margin than Biden: The polls showing national gains for Trump could be capturing a uniform uptick in his support that would deliver slim victories across most—and possibly all—of the seven decisive states. Even the most optimistic Democrats see marginal wins in the battlegrounds as probably Harris’s best-case scenario. But the prospect that she could hold the former Blue Wall states even while slipping nationally challenges the conventional wisdom that Democrats must amass a significant lead in the national popular vote to secure enough states to win the electoral vote.
“The Blue Wall states are the likeliest tipping point for either candidate,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter published by the Center on Politics, told me. “If the country moves two to three points to the right but those states only move a point or less, that’s where you start to get the tipping point looking pretty close to the popular vote.”
The Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, also believes that Harris could win the Electoral College with a smaller popular-vote advantage than most analysts have previously assumed. But he says the demographic characteristics of the swing states aren’t the primary cause of this possibility. Rather, the key factor is that those states are experiencing the campaign in an immersive way that other states are not thanks to huge advertising spends, organizing efforts, and candidate appearances.
That disparity, he says, increases the odds that the battleground states can move in a different direction from the many states less exposed to such campaigning. Both Podhorzer and Kondik note that the 2022 midterm elections supported the general thesis: Although broad dissatisfaction with Biden allowed Republicans to win the national popular vote in House elections, Democrats ran much better in statewide contests across the most heavily contested battlegrounds, especially in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
“It is really the difference between how well you are doing outside the battlegrounds and inside the battlegrounds,” Podhorzer told me. Inside the battlegrounds, he pointed out, voters have for years now been exposed at blast-force volume to each party’s arguments on all the major issues. “The cumulative effect of it is that they have an awareness of what is at stake, a different worldview, than people living outside those states,” he said.
The analogue to 2022 this year would be whether general disappointment in Biden’s economic record increases Trump’s popular-vote total in less-contested blue and red states alike, but Harris holds on to enough of the battlegrounds where voters are hearing the full dimensions of each side’s case against the other.
[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]
The same national polls that show Trump gaining among voters of color this year do not show much, if any, improvement for him compared with his 2020 performance among white voters. The latest aggregation of high-quality national public polls published by Adam Carlson, a former Democratic pollster, found that Harris is almost entirely preserving Biden’s gains among white voters; that means Harris is also exceeding Clinton’s showing with them from 2016.
The comparison with Clinton is instructive. Among voters of color, Clinton ran better in 2016 than either Biden in 2020 or how Harris is polling now. But Clinton lagged about three to four points below both of them among white voters. If Harris wins the popular vote by only about the same margin as Clinton, but more of Harris’s lead relies on support from white voters, the vice president’s coalition would be better suited to win the Rust Belt battlegrounds. In that scenario, Harris would assemble what political scientists call a more electorally “efficient” coalition than Clinton’s.
Biden’s margins of victory in the former Blue Wall states were so slim that Harris can’t afford much erosion with voters of color even there. But two factors may mitigate that danger for her. One is that in the Rust Belt states, most voters of color are not Latino but Black, and Democrats feel more confident that they can minimize losses among the latter than among the former.
The other key factor is a subtle change in those states’ white populations. Calculations from the latest census data provided to me by William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, found that since 2020, white voters without a college degree—the demographic group in which Trump performs best—have declined as a share of eligible voters by about three percentage points in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and by about 1.5 points in Pennsylvania. In Michigan and Wisconsin, college-educated white voters, who now tilt mostly toward Harris, largely made up the difference; in Pennsylvania, the share of minority voters grew. In a typical election, these slight shifts in the electorate’s composition probably would not matter, but they could in a contest as close as this one.
“There is still room to grow in the suburbs [across the region], and two things are going to contribute to that growth: January 6 and the Dobbs decision,” Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic consultant, told me, referring to the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 and the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. The racist slurs against Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last weekend could also cost him with Pennsylvania’s substantial Puerto Rican population.
Sweeping Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with a smaller national-popular-vote lead than Biden’s is nonetheless a high-wire assignment for Harris. A significant concern for Democratic strategists is whether the party has plausibly declined since 2020 only among voters of color, without suffering material losses among white voters as well.
One strategist with access to a wide array of party polls, who asked for anonymity to discuss that private research, told me that although many Democrats are optimistic that surveys overestimate Trump’s strength among Black voters, a risk also exists that polls underestimate Trump’s strength with white voters (something that has happened before). That risk will rise if Trump turns out unexpectedly large numbers of the blue-collar white voters who compose the largest share of infrequent voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.
However, the Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me that he is seeing the same divergence between slipping non-white support and steady white backing for Harris in his surveys—and he sees good reasons for that pattern potentially persisting through Election Day. “The Hispanic and African American weakness [for Harris] is a function of a memory of the Trump economy being better for people who live paycheck to paycheck than the Biden-Harris economy,” Ayres said. “On the other hand, there are far more white voters who will be voting based on abortion and the future of democracy. There’s a certain rationale behind those numbers, because they are making decisions based on different issues.”
Democrats generally believe that they maintain a fragile edge in Michigan and Wisconsin, partly because many public polls show Harris slightly ahead, but even more because their party has built a better turnout operation than the GOP in those states. Pennsylvania looks like the toughest of the three for Harris and, in the eyes of many strategists in both parties, the state most likely to decide this breathtakingly close race.
“Looking statewide, I’ve always thought from the time she got in that Harris would do better in the suburbs and the cities than Biden, and Trump would do better in a lot of these redder counties, and the million-dollar question is what number is bigger and how much bigger,” Mikus, the Pittsburgh-based consultant, told me.
Biden carried the Keystone state by only 1.2 percentage points while winning the national popular vote by nearly 4.5 points. Whether Trump wins a second term to execute his dark vision of “retribution” against “the enemy from within” may be determined by whether Harris can hold Pennsylvania while winning the national popular vote by much less, if at all. It would be a fitting conclusion to this bitter campaign if the state that decides the future shape of American democracy is the same one where the nation’s Constitution was written 237 years ago.
Eight Nonfiction Books That Will Frighten You
www.theatlantic.com › books › archive › 2024 › 10 › true-crime-book-recommendations › 680468
This story seems to be about:
- Adnan Syed ★★★
- Alex Mar ★★★★
- America ★
- American ★
- Appalachia ★★
- Archie Panjabi ★★★★
- Becky Cooper ★★★★
- Bill ★★
- Black ★
- Bridge ★★★
- British Columbia ★★
- Bundy ★★★
- Carry ★★★
- Cherokee Nation ★★★
- Connie ★★★
- Cooper ★★★
- Dead Close ★★★★
- Disembodied Torso ★★★★
- DNA ★
- Eisenberg ★★★★
- Elizabeth Kendall ★★★★
- Elmer Fudd ★★★★
- Elon Green ★★★★
- Emma Copley Eisenberg ★★★
- Emory University ★★
- George Jacobs ★★★★
- Godfrey ★★★
- Gross ★★★
- Hae Min Lee ★★★
- Hannah Mary Tabbs ★★★★
- Harvard ★
- Indian ★
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- Indigenous Canadian ★★★★
- Jane ★★★
- Jane Britton ★★★★
- Jane Mixer ★★★★
- Kali Nicole Gross ★★★★
- Kendall ★★★
- Maggie Nelson ★★★
- Mar ★★★
- Mixer ★★★★
- Murder ★★
- Murdered ★★★
- Murphy ★★
- Muscogee Nation ★★★
- Nagle ★★★★
- Nancy Santomero ★★★★
- Native ★★
- Nelson ★★★
- Oklahoma ★★
- Pacific Northwest ★★
- Patrick ★★
- Paula ★★★
- Paula Cooper ★★★★
- Phantom ★★★
- Phantom Prince ★★★★
- Philadelphia ★
- Pocahontas County ★★★★
- Rainbow Girl ★★★★
- Rebecca Godfrey ★★★★
- Rebecca Nagle ★★★★
- Red ★★
- Red Parts ★★★★
- Reena Virk ★★★★
- Riley Keough ★★★
- Ruth Pelke ★★★★
- Seventy Times ★★★★
- Supreme Court ★
- Tabbs ★★★★
- Ted ★★
- Ted Bundy ★★★
- Torn Skirt ★★★★
- Truman Capote ★★★
- Vicki Durian ★★★★
- Victoria ★★
- Virk ★★★★
- West Virginia ★★
- Will Frighten ★★★★
This story seems to be about:
- Adnan Syed ★★★
- Alex Mar ★★★★
- America ★
- American ★
- Appalachia ★★
- Archie Panjabi ★★★★
- Becky Cooper ★★★★
- Bill ★★
- Black ★
- Bridge ★★★
- British Columbia ★★
- Bundy ★★★
- Carry ★★★
- Cherokee Nation ★★★
- Connie ★★★
- Cooper ★★★
- Dead Close ★★★★
- Disembodied Torso ★★★★
- DNA ★
- Eisenberg ★★★★
- Elizabeth Kendall ★★★★
- Elmer Fudd ★★★★
- Elon Green ★★★★
- Emma Copley Eisenberg ★★★
- Emory University ★★
- George Jacobs ★★★★
- Godfrey ★★★
- Gross ★★★
- Hae Min Lee ★★★
- Hannah Mary Tabbs ★★★★
- Harvard ★
- Indian ★
- Indigenous ★
- Indigenous Canadian ★★★★
- Jane ★★★
- Jane Britton ★★★★
- Jane Mixer ★★★★
- Kali Nicole Gross ★★★★
- Kendall ★★★
- Maggie Nelson ★★★
- Mar ★★★
- Mixer ★★★★
- Murder ★★
- Murdered ★★★
- Murphy ★★
- Muscogee Nation ★★★
- Nagle ★★★★
- Nancy Santomero ★★★★
- Native ★★
- Nelson ★★★
- Oklahoma ★★
- Pacific Northwest ★★
- Patrick ★★
- Paula ★★★
- Paula Cooper ★★★★
- Phantom ★★★
- Phantom Prince ★★★★
- Philadelphia ★
- Pocahontas County ★★★★
- Rainbow Girl ★★★★
- Rebecca Godfrey ★★★★
- Rebecca Nagle ★★★★
- Red ★★
- Red Parts ★★★★
- Reena Virk ★★★★
- Riley Keough ★★★
- Ruth Pelke ★★★★
- Seventy Times ★★★★
- Supreme Court ★
- Tabbs ★★★★
- Ted ★★
- Ted Bundy ★★★
- Torn Skirt ★★★★
- Truman Capote ★★★
- Vicki Durian ★★★★
- Victoria ★★
- Virk ★★★★
- West Virginia ★★
- Will Frighten ★★★★
A decade ago, the inaugural season of Serial debuted. The podcast, about the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and questions surrounding the arrest and conviction of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, drew upon the alchemy of suspenseful storytelling and a taste for the lurid that has enticed Americans for centuries. Serial’s massive popularity, and its week-by-week format, overhauled how the genre was received: Audiences were no longer content with merely consuming the story. They wanted to be active participants, to post theories, drive by suspects’ houses, and call attention to errors.
As a result, the true-crime landscape was transformed. Its popularity has soared, making room for work that not only shocks but also asks deeper questions. There has been a welcome uptick in stories that focus on the victims of violence and the social structures that perpetuate it. But a perennial desire for the macabre doesn’t just dissipate under the umbrella of good intentions. The level of dreck in the genre—particularly cheap, poorly researched media that substitutes flippancy for compassion—continues to rise.
This glut makes it hard to identify the best true crime, which harnesses the instinct for titillation in the service of empathy, justice, and maybe even systemic change. These eight books are some of the most accomplished the genre has to offer. They broaden the definition of true crime itself—and most important, they interrogate their own telling of the story, reflecting an essential self-awareness about mining real people’s grief.
The Phantom Prince, by Elizabeth Kendall
So much has been written about Ted Bundy, who murdered dozens of women and girls in the 1970s, most of it wondering, from the outside, how Bundy got away with so much for so long. Kendall, however, had a more intimate perspective: She was his long-term girlfriend (though she uses a pseudonym here). She thought she knew Bundy well, but as the murders of women in the Pacific Northwest began to spread, and police sketches of a man named Ted circulated, she had to confront her level of denial—and then catalog the collateral damage of being a serial killer’s partner. This book is dedicated to figuring out what she actually knew and was kept from knowing, and Kendall does so in plain (if occasionally awkward) prose that doesn’t shy away from her own blind spots. True-crime memoirs were fairly rare in the early ’80s, when hers was released—and it remains an important one.
[Read: The gross spectacle of murder fandom]
Under the Bridge, by Rebecca Godfrey
The horrific 1997 murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk by several other teenagers prompted a reckoning in Victoria, British Columbia. Godfrey, the author of The Torn Skirt, a novel about the effects of a self-destructive girlhood, felt compelled to report on what happened, and why. The fine Hulu series of the same name, released in April and starring Riley Keough and Archie Panjabi, was more about Godfrey’s investigative quest than Virk’s murder. But the original work, which I’ve read multiple times, better depicts the toxic dynamic of teenage girls egging one another on from bullying to more violent acts, while also humanizing the victim and perpetrators.
The Red Parts, by Maggie Nelson
In 2005, Nelson published the poetry collection Jane: A Murder, which focuses on the then-unsolved murder of her aunt Jane Mixer 36 years before, and the pain of a case in limbo. This nonfiction companion, published two years later, deals with the fallout of the unexpected discovery and arrest of a suspect thanks to a new DNA match. Nelson’s exemplary prose style mixes pathos with absurdity (“Where I imagined I might find the ‘face of evil,’” she writes of Mixer’s killer, “I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd”), and conveys how this break upends everything she believed about Mixer, the case, and the legal system. Nelson probes still-open questions instead of arriving at anything remotely like “closure,” and the way she continues to ask them makes The Red Parts stand out.
[Read: The con man who became a true-crime writer]
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, by Kali Nicole Gross
Four years ago, my friend and fellow crime writer Elon Green investigated the alarming lack of true crime written by Black authors; today, white authors still tell most of these stories, most of which are about white victims. This is in part, I’ve come to believe, because so many crime narratives—particularly historical ones—depend on a written record of some kind, which tends to exclude people of color. This book by Gross, a historian based at Emory University, was a revelation to me for uncovering the fascinating, messy story of Tabbs, a formerly enslaved woman, probable fraudster, and murderer in 1880s Philadelphia. Tabbs does not fit into any easy box, and Gross’s careful research places the desperate acts of this particular woman against the backdrop of post-Reconstruction America, a time when the gap between what was promised at the end of slavery and what was actually possible widened sharply.
We Keep the Dead Close, by Becky Cooper
Cooper, a onetime New Yorker staffer, had for years been haunted by a story she’d heard while attending Harvard in the late 2000s: A girl had been murdered, and she had been having an affair with her professor, which the school covered up. The story turned out to be more myth than truth, but Cooper felt compelled to investigate, and she discovered that there had, in fact, been a long-unsolved murder. Some of the details eerily parallel those of The Red Parts—both victims are college students named Jane, both murdered in 1969—but Cooper’s book veers away from Nelson’s. The book, which conjures the vivid, all-too-brief life of the anthropology student Jane Britton, is a furious examination of a culture of complicity at Harvard, where, Cooper points out, sexual-misconduct allegations were (and still are) dismissed or ignored. And like Nelson, Cooper demolishes the concept of closure.
[Read: When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him]
The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley Eisenberg
Before Eisenberg put out her wonderful novel, Housemates, she worked primarily in the nonfiction space, publishing a 2017 feature story for Splinter about the missing Black trans teen Sage Smith, which was reprinted in my true-crime anthology Unspeakable Acts. She also published this book, a standout hybrid of reportage, memoir, and cultural criticism. Her subject was the 1980 murders of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero in Pocahontas County, West Virginia (and the subsequent wrongful conviction of a suspect)—but also the author’s own queer coming of age in the same area of Appalachia. Eisenberg is a warm, compassionate guide through a thicket of violence, abrupt endings, and youthful longings, and her book is an intelligent corrective to common true-crime tropes. “Telling a story is often about obligation and sympathy, identification, and empathy,” she writes. “With whom is your lot cast? To whom are you bound?”
Seventy Times Seven, by Alex Mar
I had been waiting many years for a book about Paula Cooper, the Black teenage girl who was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of Ruth Pelke, an elderly white woman, in the mid-’80s. Though she committed the crime with three other girls, only 15-year-old Cooper was given the death penalty. She became the youngest person on death row in the country at the time, leading to international outrage, a clemency campaign, and an unlikely friendship with the victim’s grandson, Bill. The points this story makes about the human capacity for empathy, who merits collective forgiveness, and the stubborn persistence of the death penalty are discomfiting. Mar (another Unspeakable Acts contributor) has made a long career of probing deeper questions, and in this book she eschews tidy narratives. Forgiveness does not, in fact, overcome the ramifications of violence, as will become clear in Bill’s home and work life—and in Paula’s, after she is eventually released from prison. Mar masterfully explores who is entitled to mercy, and how we continue to fail prisoners during and after their incarceration.
By the Fire We Carry, by Rebecca Nagle
Finally, this terrific new book, published just last month, looks at the larger picture of Indigenous autonomy and forced removal through the lens of one case—the murder of the Muscogee Nation member George Jacobs by another tribal member, Patrick Murphy—asking whether the state of Oklahoma actually had the jurisdiction to prosecute and execute Murphy. In 2020, the Supreme Court would eventually rule that much of eastern Oklahoma did remain an American Indian reservation; its decision set a far-reaching precedent that, in practice, would prove more complicated to enforce. Nagle, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a resident of Oklahoma, writes with sensitivity and empathy for the Native American communities she grew up in and around. Her work is similar in scope and feel to (and clearly in conversation with) Missing and Murdered and Stolen, the excellent podcasts by the Indigenous Canadian journalist Connie Walker.