Jason Kander Says Only One Party “Wants to Let Black People Vote”

Listen to him talk about his fight to protect voting rights.

Ed Ritger/The Commonwealth Club

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Jason Kander keeps busy. He’s a combat veteran, a former Missouri secretary of state, the founder of voting rights advocacy group Let America Vote, a podcast host, and a candidate for Kansas City mayor. Now he’s written a memoir, Outside the Wire, which traces his path from a soldier in Afghanistan to a rising star in the Democratic Party.

Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery interviewed Kander last week at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, where they talked about Kander’s book, his unforgettable 2016 campaign ad, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s “villainous superpower,” and the GOP’s strategy of disenfranchising likely Democratic voters. “One party wants to keep the federal government out of our elections, and the other party wants to let black people vote,” Kander said.

Watch the entire event here: 

Or listen to the conversation below on this week’s Mother Jones Podcast, where you’ll also hear Mother Jones Washington, DC, bureau chief David Corn’s analysis of this week’s explosive legal developments and an interview with author Brian Abrams about his new book, Obama: An Oral History.

You can subscribe to the Mother Jones Podcast using any of the following services:

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We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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