One of the many things that make seven-time Olympic medalist and 2016 Olympic all-around champion Simone Biles so great is the incredible difficulty of the skills she performs.

Watch the broadcasts of the U.S. Olympic Trials for gymnastics happening at Target Center in Minneapolis this weekend, and it should be obvious even to the casual observer.

Her speed, strength and mental acuity, along with superior technique, make it possible for her to do the skills and do them very well, giving her higher difficulty marks than many others.

But she’s far from alone in pushing that envelope.

Gymnasts in the Elite ranks do harder skills every year, and that rise has been exponential since I competed in the 1976 Olympic Trials in Los Angeles at the age of 14.

Some of this rapid ascent is due to better coaching and better tools to learn skills, such as foam pits and rod floors that save wear and tear on joints.

Specific drills allow a gymnast to break a skill down into multiple parts, learning each part properly before doing the whole thing for the very first time.

Growing up in Dickinson, North Dakota, our gym didn’t have a foam pit.

Trying to learn a double back, for instance, required two coaches standing on either side of the gymnast and “chucking” them around.

In addition, competitive gymnastics equipment itself has evolved dramatically, becoming safer, springier and generally better for the athlete.

Back in the day, competing on vault meant going over a smooth, kind of slippery leather-covered rectangular “horse.”

Today’s vault is a padded “table” with a much wider surface area, covered with a textured material.

This has allowed many more gymnasts to perform the Yurchenko entry to the vault, which is a roundoff onto the springboard, back handspring onto the table, with flips, twists or both afterward.

Biles can do a double pike Yurchenko, flipping twice when others flip once. She’s the only woman to do it, and the vault will be named after her if she performs it successfully at the Olympics.

A safety-zone mat that surrounds the springboard is required for that Yurchenko style of entry and gives an extra measure of safety.

The uneven bars in my day were situated much more closely together, with the supports held to the floor by sandbags or weights.

On wrap-around skills, the base of the bars had a tendency to lift up, which was scary.

In those instances, teammates would sit on the weights to help out.

The bars themselves were a strange oval shape; they gradually became rounder and smaller, and easier to hang onto.

Wearing grips with wooden dowels, like most gymnasts do today, also keeps them more secure while circling around the bar.

Also, the bars are now situated much farther apart, allowing for big swings and release moves between them, and are attached by cables to the floor.

The balance beam, too, has changed. When I first started gymnastics, my dad built me a wooden beam for the backyard, and its edges were quite sharp.

The manufactured beams we used in the gym were obviously better but still made of wood and painful if you came down on them awkwardly.

We wore special socks on our feet and ground them into a wooden box with rosin for a good sticky feel.

Today’s beams are padded and covered in a material that’s a whole lot more comfortable than wood.

It still is only four inches wide, though, and that will probably never change.

As for floor exercise (my favorite), wrestling mats were what we tumbled and danced on first, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t get wiped down after the wrestlers used them.

Eventually, there was a floor system manufactured with vinyl covering, which wasn’t great.

At international meets, we used a floor that was essentially plywood sheets covered with a thin layer of carpet.

It had a small amount of “oomph” to it, but was a far cry from the springy floors of today, which are layered with metal springs, plywood, styrofoam and carpet.

All of these factors have come together to keep gymnasts safer, but also allow for increased difficulty, which is inherently riskier and more dangerous.

Here’s wishing all of the athletes a safe and successful competition at Target Center as they vie for a spot to represent the U.S. at the Olympic Games in Paris later this summer!

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Anna Claire Vollers | (TNS) Stateline.org

For abortion rights supporters in Florida, it was a tumultuous day of highs and lows.

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court paved the way for the state to ban nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. But it also OK’d a ballot measure that would allow Florida voters to overturn the ban this November.

“I was elated and devastated,” said Natasha Sutherland, the communications director for Floridians Protecting Freedom, a coalition of state and national organizations that gathered nearly 1 million signatures for a proposed constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion.

“Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant by the time they’re outside of the six-week window for abortion care,” said Sutherland, who lives in Tallahassee. “Considering the stakes are so high with the abortion ban we’re now under, it was really important for us to ensure we gave it all we’ve got.”

This November, voters in as many as nine states could sidestep their legislators and directly decide whether to expand access to abortion through citizen-led ballot initiatives. Constitutional amendments in Colorado, Florida and South Dakota already have qualified for the ballot, while coalitions in Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Nevada are still collecting signatures or awaiting state approval on their measures.

Two more states, Maryland and New York, have abortion rights ballot measures that were referred by their state legislatures, though New York’s is currently tied up in litigation.

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled the constitutional right to an abortion, kicking the issue back to the states. Fourteen states have outlawed abortion with almost no exceptions, while another seven states ban abortions at or before 18 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research organization.

Yet access to abortion remains popular, even in conservative states. Since the high court’s 2022 decision, voters in six states have approved abortion access via ballot measure, including in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.

“The whole idea of the initiative process is to put pressure on state lawmakers when there appears to be support for an issue that the median voter in the electorate might want but the median lawmaker doesn’t want,” said Daniel Smith, a professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Florida, who has authored books and papers on ballot initiatives.

In several states, Republican lawmakers opposed to abortion rights have tightened signature requirements or raised the percentage of the vote required for ballot initiatives to pass. Proponents of stricter rules say they want to prevent out-of-state interests from manipulating the process by funneling money to initiative campaigns. They say they also want to ensure that populous urban centers don’t have too much power. But in several cases, GOP backers have acknowledged that their goal is to thwart abortion rights measures that are broadly popular.

Mat Staver, an attorney based in Orlando, Florida, said it should be harder to get constitutional amendments passed because organizations from outside the state are funneling money into ballot initiatives such as the ones expanding reproductive rights. Staver is the co-founder of Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based nonprofit that opposes abortion-related ballot measures in Florida and other states.

“Even though we have a 60% threshold [in Florida], if you have the financial resources, you can get pretty much anything on the ballot you want,” he said. “That’s not good for Floridians because that doesn’t allow for debate.”

Critics argue that legislators’ attempts to impose new restrictions subvert one of the purest forms of direct democracy available to citizens.

“Democracy requires compromise,” said Alice Clapman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a progressive law and policy nonprofit. “I am concerned that there seems to be a resistance to leaving these issues to the democratic process. Some people in power in these states feel certain issues shouldn’t be up for democratic debate.”

‘Monopoly power’

For decades, legislators on both sides of the political aisle have tried to make it harder for citizens to get various proposals on the ballot, said Smith. It just depends on who’s controlling the state’s levers of power.

“The ballot initiative takes away the monopoly power of lawmakers,” he said. “We can look at restrictions by Republicans right now on the initiative process, but doing so is myopic. It happens on both sides.”

In today’s polarized political climate, voter support for a ballot measure doesn’t necessarily translate into support for a political candidate who backs it. Smith’s research has found that many people may vote for a ballot measure while also voting for candidates from the political party that opposes it.

“And they’re fine with that,” Smith said. “There’s no cognitive dissonance in the voter’s mind. [The ballot measure] is a one-off.”

Ballot measures typically don’t boost voter turnout in presidential election years like they do in midterms and special elections. But 2024 could be different, Smith said, thanks to tepid public enthusiasm for the repeat matchup between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. A ballot measure might prod more people to head to the polls.

‘Not unlike gerrymandering’

Last month, the Missourians for Constitutional Freedom campaign turned in more than twice the likely number of signatures needed for its measure to qualify for Missouri’s ballot in November. The proposed constitutional amendment, like Florida’s, would legalize abortion up to fetal viability— the point at which a fetus can survive outside the uterus, often considered around 24 or 25 weeks of pregnancy.

“The signature-gathering piece of this campaign was the most incredible thing I’ve ever been a part of,” said Mallory Schwarz, executive director at Abortion Action Missouri, one of the organizations participating in the campaign. “I have never seen the level of enthusiasm about the issue that I saw this year.”

Coalition organizations trained more than a thousand volunteers who canvassed in their communities, held house parties, and knocked on tens of thousands of doors in less than three months, Schwarz said, eventually gathering more than 380,000 signatures. The state must now certify the petition for it to appear on the ballot.

Missouri voters of all political stripes have a deep attachment to the ballot initiative process that dates back more than a century, Schwarz said: “We’ve seen issues that may be presented as partisan really appeal to people across the board, year in and year out.”

In recent years, ballot measures in Republican-controlled Missouri have raised the state minimum wage, expanded Medicaid, overturned a so-called right-to-work law and decriminalized cannabis use.

This year, Missouri Republicans put forth several proposals designed to defeat abortion rights initiatives, including one that would require ballot measures to win not just a majority of votes statewide, but also a majority of votes in Missouri’s congressional districts.

After heated debate, the bill passed the Senate, but the House couldn’t reconcile different versions of the bill before the session ended.

“It’s not unlike gerrymandering,” Schwarz said. “The only way they can stop the will of the people is to change the rules of the game.”

Florida lawmakers filed a similar bill last year. They proposed a constitutional amendment to increase the percentage of votes a ballot measure needs to pass, from 60% to a two-thirds supermajority. The bill passed the House but died in the Senate.

In 2023, ballot initiatives in eight states attracted more than $205 million in donations, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign financing and lobbying. Sutherland, with Floridians Protecting Freedom, pointed out that the campaign raised nearly $12 million in April and May, but about 70% of contributions coming from within Florida.

An array of tactics

After abortion rights advocates gathered nearly 500,000 signatures in Ohio to get a reproductive rights amendment on the November 2023 ballot, the Republican secretary of state and the Ohio Ballot Board changed the wording of the amendment’s summary in a way that opponents said was incomplete and inaccurate. Ohio voters approved the ballot measure anyway, enshrining abortion access in the state constitution last November.

A similar scenario unfolded In Missouri, where Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft attempted to change the wording of a proposed abortion rights ballot measure so that it would ask voters whether they were in favor of “dangerous and unregulated abortions until live birth.” A Missouri court later struck down the language.

In Arizona, GOP lawmakers have put their own constitutional amendment on the November 2024 ballot that would require organizers to gather a certain percentage of signatures from every one of Arizona’s 30 legislative districts rather than in the state as a whole. They’ve also considered a strategy to introduce their own abortion-related ballot measures to compete with the abortion rights measure.

If reproductive rights ballot amendments pass, they’ll likely face legal challenges that stretch far beyond the election.

Staver, of the Liberty Counsel, said his organization would investigate legal channels for blocking implementation of Florida’s amendment.

“There may be litigation that would be necessary to argue that preexisting constitutional rights override this amendment,” said Staver, who believes the amendment is overly broad.

Clapman, with the Brennan Center, said she also expects lawmakers to continue pushing back against ballot measures: “It’s not a fight that’s going to go away even if initiatives pass.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

Fidel Martinez and Cerys Davies | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

For three decades, Mike Madrid has been tracking the seismic shifts in the Latino electorate.

In that time, the Republican political consultant has noticed a population becoming predominantly U.S.-born and increasingly English-speaking. It’s a change in the electorate the Democratic Party is ignoring, he says.

Democrats’ “whole strategy for most of my career was to run against Pete Wilson and Prop. 187, and I get that,” Madrid said, referring to the former GOP governor’s successful initiative to make it California law to deny social services to undocumented immigrants.

“But you know, you can run on that maybe two or four years afterward. They were running on it 20, 25 years afterwards. And it’s just so particularly ingrained in their inside baseball mentality.”

Meanwhile, “Latinos have been screaming at us through polling data for 30 years,” he said. “Jobs, the economy, upward mobility, housing, education and health care — middle-class, basic getting-through-life stuff — this is what the data tells us they care about.”

This alleged disconnect between the Democratic Party and Latino voters is a key theme in Madrid’s “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy,” released last week by Simon & Schuster. Part memoir and part explainer, the book provides a comprehensive breakdown of how and why the Latino electorate is so misunderstood.

Madrid, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a “Never Trump” political action committee, says that he hopes “The Latino Century” serves as a wake-up call for the Democratic Party to stop taking Latino voters for granted ahead of such a consequential election.

The red, white and blue cover for “The Latino Century” depicts a woman, a man and two children standing in front of a house

I spoke with Madrid on the heels of his book release. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q. What was the impetus for your writing this book?

A. I’ve been researching and looking at the data and doing campaigns all over the country with Latinos for over 30 years. I realized the time to put what I’ve learned in writing was right after the 2020 election — we saw a historic slide of Latinos away from [Democrat Joe] Biden.

The Democrats were either dismissing it or saying it wasn’t happening. And it occurred to me that they probably needed some help in understanding the Latino vote. I realized I needed to write a book and explain what was going on — before the 2024 election — otherwise we risk sliding into a really, really dark place.

Ironically, if Trump is reelected, he will do it with a historically high number of Latino voters, and that doesn’t sit right with me.

Q. De Los recently quoted you in a story about how 1 in 5 Latino voters were considering casting a ballot for a third-party candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Can you tell me more about why this trend in the electorate didn’t surprise you?

A. The whole thesis of the book is that neither party understands our community, and neither party has given due diligence to it. As a result, Latino voters are responding to that reality in myriad different ways. One of the main ones is [by] responding to candidates who are attacking their own parties and saying the parties themselves are not working.

It’s particularly ironic because Latinos by every metric have a higher trust and confidence in all of our social institutions. That fact is a really big reason why the book is optimistic, and I believe that in this current fragile state of our democracy, Latinos are replenishing the values that can keep this country going forward. I feel so passionately about that.

So when I see this populism, this antiestablishment sentiment in our community, it’s really contained to the political parties. Everything else, whether it’s higher education, church, government or the military, there’s very high levels of trust and support and confidence. The two areas where we are rejecting it with this very antiestablishment movement is with both political parties.

Q. You’re a data-driven guy. What does the data say about who Latinos are?

A. Well, it’s both who we are and who we are becoming. Two-thirds of us are U.S.-born. The fastest-growing segments of our community are third-generation and fourth-generation. Over 60% of us are Mexican American. We’re increasingly becoming part of the non-college-educated, blue-collar workforce.

There’s a very large divide between our women, who are going to college at higher rates, and our men — which is going to have massive impact in our institutions and our society. We have the largest gender gap out of the four largest racial or ethnic groups in the country.

There’s a lot happening very, very quickly, and it’s why I think nobody here really has a good grasp on this.

Latinos have a much weaker partisan anchor than any other race or ethnicity in the country. We have lower turnout rates in large part because neither party is saying anything that we’re buying.

We are the moderates in both parties, and both parties are currently obsessed with playing to their extremes. There’s this massive disengagement, and the Democrats refuse to believe it because their whole worldview is “Non-white voters can’t be anything other than Democrats.”

That’s why I say Republicans are the beneficiaries of this, but it’s not because of anything that they’re doing. In fact, what they’re doing is restricting further growth.

There’s two bad options, and a lot of Latinos are opting out.

Q. So since we’re talking about there being a general misunderstanding of who Latinos are, one of the biggest misconceptions I think that still exists, and one that’s very pronounced, is this idea that we all speak primarily Spanish. Can you talk to me about what role language plays when it comes to polling Latinos?

A. This has been one of the largest public criticisms I’ve made about Democrats — generally it’s one or two firms specifically that have really led them down a road of disaster over the last 10 years.

I had my book launch (last) Tuesday, and John Perez, the former speaker of the California State Assembly, came and kicked off all the festivities. He’s a dear friend, one of the brightest members I’ve ever worked with.

He represented the most Latino Assembly district in California, and he said that when his consultants — white consultants, incidentally — wanted to start communicating to the voters, they wanted to do it in Spanish or bilingual platforms. John said, “No, let’s do polling. Let’s look at this with a number of different methodologies to determine what language these voters want to reach out to.”

And what his research showed was that only 25% of Latinos — of voters in the most Latino Assembly district in the entire state — wanted communications in Spanish. That is a shocking, striking number to most people who don’t understand the community. They all think it’s 80-85%.

Again, this is not Mike Madrid saying it. This is one of the most progressive Democratic Latinos representing the most Latino district in the state. His own research was saying it was 25% 15 years ago, when we were much more of an immigrant and naturalized constituency.

Today that number has probably dropped to 17%, 15%, maybe. Let’s just say it’s stayed the same; it’s still far lower than where one or two Democratic firms that are really influencing the narrative here are polling at. Ask any credible pollster.

We’ve interviewed Latino pollsters in the Democratic Party, and most of them say that if you have 15-17% Spanish-language interviews, you’ll have a credible baseline standard. I would agree, and I wouldn’t even mind erring by another 3 to 4% — going to maybe 20%, which is high.

But some of these firms — and when I say some, I mean one or two — are polling with 35% Spanish-language interviews. And, no surprise, their results are very, very skewed towards more immigration-related issues, more skewed towards issues that affect the recently naturalized.

That direction is exactly the opposite of where the Latino electorate is going quickly, rapidly, measurably, and by very, very big numbers. The Democratic Party has been left in the exact opposite direction of where they should be going. And this is all demonstrable.

Q. Let’s talk about Donald Trump. We have a presidential election in a little over four months, and he’s one of the candidates. A portion of your book also focuses on the work you did with the Lincoln Project to prevent him from winning in 2020. How do you think he’s going to fare this time around with Latino voters?

A. That’s a really tough question. I don’t mean to dodge it. That’s a little unfair because I don’t have the access to the data and analytics that I’ve had for the past 30 years by working on a campaign.

But what I will say is this: All of the data — all of the publicly available data — is showing higher levels of support for Trump than any Republican candidate since I was involved with independent efforts with George W. Bush in 2004.

This is not a prediction. It’s equally as plausible that Trump could get 27% of the Latino vote as it is that he could get 45%. That’s all dependent, I think, on what the Democrats do and if they can make the adjustments. And that’s why I’m ringing the alarm bells here before they run out of time to fix this problem.

If the election were held today, I believe Donald Trump would get more than the 37% of Latino votes that he got in 2020. I think he would get about 40-42%. Which, by the way, is enough. Everything else being equal, he would win Arizona. He would win Nevada. He would win Georgia. He would win Wisconsin.

Q. And at least three of those states have significant Latino populations.

A. All of them do! There’s more Latino voters in Wisconsin than Black voters now.

Q. Oh, really?

A. Oh yeah. Georgia’s share is a little bit smaller, but it’s still about 50,000 voters in a race that was won by 30,000 votes last time. But Wisconsin, as a percentage, has more Latinos than Georgia. In every one of the swing states, the number of Latino voters is bigger than the 2020 margin of victory.

For 30 years, I’ve been asked this question by all types of reporters: “Are Latinos going to be the decisive vote in this election?” I said no. In 2024, for the first time in my career, I’m saying yes — Latinos will be the decisive vote.

They will determine the outcome of Nevada. They will determine the outcome of Arizona. They will determine the outcome of Wisconsin. They will likely determine the outcome of Georgia and will absolutely determine the outcome of North Carolina.

Q. What can the Democrats do between now and November to shore up the Latino vote, to prevent Trump from getting 40-42% of their votes?

A. Two things. The first is [that] if Biden went to the Rose Garden today and announced a Latino Marshall Plan for housing to dramatically stimulate the home construction space, you would see those numbers start dropping immediately for Trump.

One in 5 Hispanic men work in residential construction or a related field. Interest rates have tripled in the last four or five years. Tripled. Since the Trump era, the currency has devalued by 20% because of inflation in the last five years. You cannot tell me that a U.S.-born, English-speaking Latino construction worker is better off now than he was during the Trump administration. You can’t credibly say that.

I don’t care where the Dow is at. I don’t care what the GDP growth is. I don’t care what employment numbers are. One in 5 Hispanic men — 20% of our men — work in the residential construction industry or a related field, [as a] Realtor or mortgage broker. All of that has contracted. It is completely shut down. That means Latino construction workers not only can’t build housing and put food on the table, but they also can’t buy their first homes, which are already way overpriced because supplies are screwed up.

So when you ask me, what could they do tomorrow? That’s the first thing I would do. Literally tomorrow, do that and those numbers would come back into a more historical range. Would it fix the whole problem? No. Could it make the race a hell of a lot more advantageous for Biden? 100%.

The second is — here’s what I really don’t get — Joe Biden is drilling more oil than Sarah Palin’s greatest fantasy; why aren’t they taking credit for it? Because they’re afraid of their left flank. They think that they are going to leave them, but they’re not going to.

You know that, right? That we’re producing more domestic oil than at any time in the history of this country?

Q. No, but I’m not surprised.

A. Yeah! Why is he not talking about that? Would that help in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas? Of course it would. Would it help in southern New Mexico and California’s Central Valley? Of course it would. Is it going to get him 20 or 30 points? No. Will it get him 4 or 5%? It will, 100%.

So start talking about that part instead of “Build Back Better” and Bidenomics. Oh, yeah, we’ve got money for infrastructure to build bridges in 2045, but that means nothing to working-class people.

Go in and do something and talk about your domestic energy policy. You’re doing it, so take credit for it. At least get some upside for it.

___