Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp secures narrow primary victory
With all districts reporting, Mapp, who is seeking his fourth term as mayor, had 3,547 unofficial votes and Wyatt had 3,226, according to the Union County Clerk's website.
Wyatt, who is serving his first term on the City Council, unsuccessfully challenged Mapp for mayor four years ago.
With no Republican or independent candidates running in the November general election, Mapp is expected to be reelected this fall.
The voter support for Mapp, however, does not appear to have carried over to his running mate Bridget Rivers, a former City Council member, who was seeking the 4th Ward Council seat. Preliminary results show Democratic Councilwoman Terri Briggs-Jones leading Rivers by an unofficial tally of 658 to 367 with all districts reporting.
More: With victory, Mikie Sherrill finally comes out swinging — at Jack Ciattarelli | Opinion
No Republican or independent candidates have filed to challenge Briggs-Jones.
Email: srussell@gannettnj.com
Suzanne Russell is a breaking news reporter for MyCentralJersey.com covering crime, courts and other mayhem. To get unlimited access, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp secures narrow primary victory
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The Hill
33 minutes ago
- The Hill
US manufacturers are stuck in a rut despite subsidies from Biden and protection from Trump
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats and Republicans don't agree on much, but they share a conviction that the government should help American manufacturers, one way or another. Democratic President Joe Biden handed out subsidies to chipmakers and electric vehicle manufacturers. Republican President Donald Trump is building a wall of import taxes — tariffs — around the U.S. economy to protect domestic industry from foreign competition. Yet American manufacturing has been stuck in a rut for nearly three years. And it remains to be seen whether the trend will reverse itself. The U.S. Labor Department reports that American factories shed 7,000 jobs in June for the second month in a row. Manufacturing employment is on track to drop for the third straight year. The Institute for Supply Management, an association of purchasing managers, reported that manufacturing activity in the United States shrank in June for the fourth straight month. In fact, U.S. factories have been in decline for 30 of the 32 months since October 2022, according to ISM. 'The past three years have been a real slog for manufacturing,'' said Eric Hagopian, CEO of Pilot Precision Products, a maker of industrial cutting tools in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. 'We didn't get destroyed like we did in the recession of 2008. But we've been in this stagnant, sort of stationary environment.'' Big economic factors contributed to the slowdown: A surge in inflation, arising from the unexpectedly strong economic recovery from COVID-19, raised factory expenses and prompted the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates 11 times in 2022 and 2023. The higher borrowing costs added to the strain. Government policy was meant to help. Biden's tax incentives for semiconductor and clean energy production triggered a factory-building boom – investment in manufacturing facilities more than tripled from April 2021 through October 2024 – that seemed to herald a coming surge in factory production and hiring. Eventually anyway. But the factory investment spree has faded as the incoming Trump administration launched trade wars and, working with Congress, ended Biden's subsidies for green energy. Now, predicts Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, 'manufacturing production will continue to flatline.' 'If production is flat, that suggests manufacturing employment will continue to slide,' Zandi said. 'Manufacturing is likely to suffer a recession in the coming year.'' Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to protect U.S. manufacturers — and to coax factories to relocate and produce in America — by imposing tariffs on goods made overseas. He slapped 50% taxes on steel and aluminum, 25% on autos and auto parts, 10% on many other imports. In some ways, Trump's tariffs can give U.S. factories an edge. Chris Zuzick, vice president at Waukesha Metal Products, said the Sussex, Wisconsin-based manufacturer is facing stiff competition for a big contract in Texas. A foreign company offers much lower prices. But 'when you throw the tariff on, it gets us closer,'' Zuzick said. 'So that's definitely a situation where it's beneficial.'' But American factories import and use foreign products, too – machinery, chemicals, raw materials like steel and aluminum. Taxing those inputs can drive up costs and make U.S producers less competitive in world markets. Consider steel. Trump's tariffs don't just make imported steel more expensive. By putting the foreign competition at a disadvantage, the tariffs allow U.S. steelmakers to raise prices – and they have. U.S.-made steel was priced at $960 per metric ton as of June 23, more than double the world export price of $440 per ton, according to industry monitor SteelBenchmarker. In fact, U.S. steel prices are so high that Pilot Precision Products has continued to buy the steel it needs from suppliers in Austria and France — and pay Trump's tariff. Trump has also created considerable uncertainty by repeatedly tweaking and rescheduling his tariffs. Just before new import taxes were set to take effect on dozens of countries on July 9, for example, the president pushed the deadline back to Aug. 1 to allow more time for negotiation with U.S. trading partners. The flipflops have left factories, suppliers and customers bewildered about where things stand. Manufacturers voiced their complaints in the ISM survey: 'Customers do not want to make commitments in the wake of massive tariff uncertainty,'' a fabricated metal products company said. 'Tariffs continue to cause confusion and uncertainty for long-term procurement decisions,'' added a computer and electronics firm. 'The situation remains too volatile to firmly put such plans into place.'' Some may argue that things aren't necessarily bad for U.S. manufacturing; they've just returned to normal after a pandemic-related bust and boom. Factories slashed nearly 1.4 million jobs in March and April 2020 when COVID-19 forced many businesses to shut down and Americans to stay home. Then a funny thing happened: American consumers, cooped up and flush with COVID relief checks from the government, went on a spending spree, snapping up manufactured goods like air fryers, patio furniture and exercise machines. Suddenly, factories were scrambling to keep up. They brought back the workers they laid off – and then some. Factories added 379,000 jobs in 2021 — the most since 1994 — and then tacked on another 357,000 in 2022. But in 2023, factory hiring stopped growing and began backtracking as the economy returned to something closer to the pre-pandemic normal. In the end, it was a wash. Factory payrolls last month came to 12.75 million, almost exactly where they stood in February 2020 (12.74 million) just before COVID slammed the economy. 'It's a long, strange trip to get back to where we started,'' said Jared Bernstein, chair of Biden's White House Council of Economic Advisers. Zuzick at Waukesha Metal Products said that it will take time to see if Trump's tariffs succeed in bringing factories back to America. 'The fact is that manufacturing doesn't turn on a dime,'' he said. 'It takes time to switch gears.'' Hagopian at Pilot Precision is hopeful that tax breaks in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill will help American manufacturing regain momentum. 'There may be light at the end of the tunnel that may not be a locomotive bearing down,'' he said. For now, manufacturers are likely to delay big decisions on investing or bringing on new workers until they see where Trump's tariffs settle and what impact they have on the economy, said Ned Hill, professor emeritus in economic development at Ohio State University. 'With all this uncertainty about what the rest of the year is going to look like,'' he said, 'there's a hesitancy to hire people just to lay them off in the near future.'' 'Everyone,' said Zuzick at Waukesha Metal Products, 'is kind of just waiting for the new normal.''
San Francisco Chronicle
38 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
US manufacturers are stuck in a rut despite subsidies from Biden and protection from Trump
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats and Republicans don't agree on much, but they share a conviction that the government should help American manufacturers, one way or another. Democratic President Joe Biden handed out subsidies to chipmakers and electric vehicle manufacturers. Republican President Donald Trump is building a wall of import taxes — tariffs — around the U.S. economy to protect domestic industry from foreign competition. Yet American manufacturing has been stuck in a rut for nearly three years. And it remains to be seen whether the trend will reverse itself. The U.S. Labor Department reports that American factories shed 7,000 jobs in June for the second month in a row. Manufacturing employment is on track to drop for the third straight year. The Institute for Supply Management, an association of purchasing managers, reported that manufacturing activity in the United States shrank in June for the fourth straight month. In fact, U.S. factories have been in decline for 30 of the 32 months since October 2022, according to ISM. 'The past three years have been a real slog for manufacturing,'' said Eric Hagopian, CEO of Pilot Precision Products, a maker of industrial cutting tools in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. 'We didn't get destroyed like we did in the recession of 2008. But we've been in this stagnant, sort of stationary environment.'' Big economic factors contributed to the slowdown: A surge in inflation, arising from the unexpectedly strong economic recovery from COVID-19, raised factory expenses and prompted the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates 11 times in 2022 and 2023. The higher borrowing costs added to the strain. Government policy was meant to help. Biden's tax incentives for semiconductor and clean energy production triggered a factory-building boom – investment in manufacturing facilities more than tripled from April 2021 through October 2024 – that seemed to herald a coming surge in factory production and hiring. Eventually anyway. But the factory investment spree has faded as the incoming Trump administration launched trade wars and, working with Congress, ended Biden's subsidies for green energy. Now, predicts Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, 'manufacturing production will continue to flatline.' 'If production is flat, that suggests manufacturing employment will continue to slide,' Zandi said. 'Manufacturing is likely to suffer a recession in the coming year.'' Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to protect U.S. manufacturers — and to coax factories to relocate and produce in America — by imposing tariffs on goods made overseas. He slapped 50% taxes on steel and aluminum, 25% on autos and auto parts, 10% on many other imports. In some ways, Trump's tariffs can give U.S. factories an edge. Chris Zuzick, vice president at Waukesha Metal Products, said the Sussex, Wisconsin-based manufacturer is facing stiff competition for a big contract in Texas. A foreign company offers much lower prices. But 'when you throw the tariff on, it gets us closer,'' Zuzick said. 'So that's definitely a situation where it's beneficial.'' But American factories import and use foreign products, too – machinery, chemicals, raw materials like steel and aluminum. Taxing those inputs can drive up costs and make U.S producers less competitive in world markets. Consider steel. Trump's tariffs don't just make imported steel more expensive. By putting the foreign competition at a disadvantage, the tariffs allow U.S. steelmakers to raise prices – and they have. U.S.-made steel was priced at $960 per metric ton as of June 23, more than double the world export price of $440 per ton, according to industry monitor SteelBenchmarker. In fact, U.S. steel prices are so high that Pilot Precision Products has continued to buy the steel it needs from suppliers in Austria and France — and pay Trump's tariff. Trump has also created considerable uncertainty by repeatedly tweaking and rescheduling his tariffs. Just before new import taxes were set to take effect on dozens of countries on July 9, for example, the president pushed the deadline back to Aug. 1 to allow more time for negotiation with U.S. trading partners. The flipflops have left factories, suppliers and customers bewildered about where things stand. Manufacturers voiced their complaints in the ISM survey: 'Customers do not want to make commitments in the wake of massive tariff uncertainty,'' a fabricated metal products company said. 'Tariffs continue to cause confusion and uncertainty for long-term procurement decisions,'' added a computer and electronics firm. 'The situation remains too volatile to firmly put such plans into place.'' Some may argue that things aren't necessarily bad for U.S. manufacturing; they've just returned to normal after a pandemic-related bust and boom. Factories slashed nearly 1.4 million jobs in March and April 2020 when COVID-19 forced many businesses to shut down and Americans to stay home. Then a funny thing happened: American consumers, cooped up and flush with COVID relief checks from the government, went on a spending spree, snapping up manufactured goods like air fryers, patio furniture and exercise machines. Suddenly, factories were scrambling to keep up. They brought back the workers they laid off – and then some. Factories added 379,000 jobs in 2021 — the most since 1994 — and then tacked on another 357,000 in 2022. But in 2023, factory hiring stopped growing and began backtracking as the economy returned to something closer to the pre-pandemic normal. In the end, it was a wash. Factory payrolls last month came to 12.75 million, almost exactly where they stood in February 2020 (12.74 million) just before COVID slammed the economy. 'It's a long, strange trip to get back to where we started,'' said Jared Bernstein, chair of Biden's White House Council of Economic Advisers. Zuzick at Waukesha Metal Products said that it will take time to see if Trump's tariffs succeed in bringing factories back to America. 'The fact is that manufacturing doesn't turn on a dime,'' he said. 'It takes time to switch gears.'' Hagopian at Pilot Precision is hopeful that tax breaks in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill will help American manufacturing regain momentum. 'There may be light at the end of the tunnel that may not be a locomotive bearing down,'' he said. For now, manufacturers are likely to delay big decisions on investing or bringing on new workers until they see where Trump's tariffs settle and what impact they have on the economy, said Ned Hill, professor emeritus in economic development at Ohio State University. 'With all this uncertainty about what the rest of the year is going to look like,'' he said, 'there's a hesitancy to hire people just to lay them off in the near future.'' 'Everyone,'' said Zuzick at Waukesha Metal Products, 'is kind of just waiting for the new normal.''
Indianapolis Star
40 minutes ago
- Indianapolis Star
Democratic-leaning Indiana donors want to 'turn our state around,' but lawsuit shows infighting
An alliance of large Democratic donors seeking to inject life into Indiana's progressive causes outside the struggling state party is now embroiled in a legal fight that includes a candidate challenging U.S. Rep. André Carson. Jennifer Watts, the now-former executive director of Stand Up Indiana, a public-facing nonprofit advocacy and communications organization associated with the donor alliance, is waging a defamation suit against her former employer and the organizations coordinating the donor alliance ― a largely behind-the-scenes collective of secret donors whose goal is to, in effect, turn Indiana more blue. One of the defendants is Democratic 7th Congressional District candidate George Hornedo, who sits on the board of Stand Up Indiana, according to the court filing. The legal fight threatens to distract from the group's goals in a state where Democrats already struggle to adequately field and fund candidates. The dispute is also just the latest example of broader infighting among Democrats, spilling over into groups outside of the traditional party structure. The lawsuit also comes as the donor alliance is facing criticism from some within the party over the group's mere existence and its strategy. Among the statements these defendants allegedly said about Watts, which she said are false: that she lied on her resume and that she participated in illegal lobbying activity. "It was devastating to discover the lies being told by a small group seemingly determined to destroy my future and my ability to provide for my family," Watts wrote in a statement to IndyStar, calling these alleged attacks "politically motivated." Through Indianapolis attorney Tim Delaney, the defendants declined to comment. Progressive donors have been working behind the scenes for years to set up what's colloquially known as a donor alliance or 'donor table' ― a way to collectively pool their resources to support progressive causes, coordinate turn-out-the-vote efforts in ways that the traditional Democratic party infrastructure can't, and overall, boost electoral wins in an environment where Indiana Democrats have been in a decades-long slump. There's a lot of money and several big Indiana names involved, according to public IRS filings. The donor table is formalized into two groups: a 501c4 called Indiana Progressive Collaborative, and a 501c3 called Indiana Democracy Collective, both led by executive director Rima Shahid, who used to head Women4Change Indiana. Some other well-known names in wealthy progressive circles are on the boards of these organizations, including Marni McKinney Waterfield, chair of the philanthropic powerhouse McKinney Family Foundation, and Rachel Simon, president of the Herbert Simon Family Foundation. The Indiana Democracy Collective and Indiana Progressive Collaborative, which are named defendants in Watts' defamation lawsuit, collectively raised $1.8 million in 2023, according to their latest publicly available 990 filings. The state party central committee raised $2 million the same year. Unlike donors to the state party, the identities of individual donors to these groups are private. Stand Up Indiana, and its 501c4 sister organization Stand Up Indiana Action Fund, are also named defendants in the lawsuit, along with Shahid, Hornedo and Al Carroll, a board member. Watts filed the lawsuit in early May, not long after she was fired from her job as executive director in late April. She alleges that this firing was in retaliation for her demanding an investigation into the statements allegedly made about her at a previous board meeting and to third parties. One former board member at Stand Up Indiana resigned shortly after that board meeting, documents obtained by IndyStar show, expressing their lack of confidence in other board members' commitment to the mission. For the past few decades, Republicans have entrenched their control of state politics in Indiana, and the Democratic Party has struggled to so much as withhold their limited ground. Indiana Democrats have not won a contested statewide race since 2012. The official party apparatus has struggled to raise money in the way it used to in the mid-2000s, when there was more political balance in Indiana and Hoosiers voted for President Barack Obama. The donor alliance, as the Indiana Democracy Collective puts it in their tax filing, wants to "turn our state around" by increasing civic engagement and corralling donors to invest in "long-term political and civic infrastructure." Such "donor table" setups exist in many other states. In Georgia, for example, a coalition of donors and organizations called the Georgia Alliance knocked on nearly 6 million doors in the 2022 Senate runoff election, in which Democrat Raphael Warnock won with a slim margin. The model for these ecosystems comes from Colorado, where in the mid 2000s a liberal donor collective is credited with helping Democrats take and keep control of the statehouse. Like many other states', Indiana's donor alliance is affiliated with the Committee on States: a national donor collective that's worked since then to spread the Colorado model. Part of this was born of a recognition that where the American right wing excels at funneling influence through "dark money" networks, Democrats have less of a footprint, especially in Indiana. The state party is limited in the coordination or strategy-sharing it can do with nonpartisan nonprofits, which is the gap groups like these can fill. They can organize year-round on particular issues or values ― not necessarily tied to a particular party, per se ― whereas parties with limited resources tend to be all-consumed with election cycles. In an interview with IndyStar last year, Watts described Stand Up Indiana's role as coordinating messaging around progressive issues among the many existing organizations in Indiana, with the funding muscle and strategy that groups on the right like the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity do. "The right is way more organized than we are," she said. "They have been investing in grassroots. They have been investing in online organizing, in online communities. They have really set up more grassroots systems aligned with institutions like churches, gun clubs, like very established organizations that the right has been able to tap into, and we are very far behind that right now." Now, she sees the allegations in this lawsuit has just one symptom of a broader dysfunctional culture within progressive politics in Indiana. More: For Indiana Democrats these days, every year is a rebuilding year "This lawsuit is about more than the personal harm I've endured," she said. "It's about confronting the broader culture of cruelty and retaliation that festers in Indiana politics—especially toward strong women who refuse to conform or remain silent." "As a survivor myself, I stand with the growing number of women who are courageously speaking out against this toxic culture of defamation, retaliation, harassment, and abuse in our state," she continued. "We cannot build a thriving democracy while allowing these behaviors to persist." Infighting in Indiana's Democratic party — and the donor alliance itself — ranges from the interpersonal to the existential, in part reflecting schisms happening nationally. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett's administration and the Democratic-led Indianapolis City-County Council are embroiled in multiple alleged sexual harassment scandals, from Hogsett's handling of complaints against his former chief of staff to new abuse allegations against a City-County councilor. The state party has taken heat for its response to another set of sexual harassment allegations against state Sen. Greg Taylor of Indianapolis. Philosophically, the competition for the state party's new chair, as well as for their state attorney general nomination, reflected a battle of old guard vs. new guard. The blowout Democrats experienced in the 2024 election only exacerbated ongoing arguments over the right way forward for the party: whether to lean into populism or favor the interests of the donor class, whether to run progressives or try to win over moderate anti-Trump Republicans, among other disagreements. More: Democrats thought state races could be close, but Republicans clobbered. What happened? The donor table is not immune to similar fractures. Multiple former leaders of organizations within the donor table ecosystem told IndyStar that there doesn't seem to be a coherent strategy or vision. And Watts isn't the first executive director of an organization associated with the donor table to part suddenly. Former State Rep. Chris Chyung, who was executive director of another group that received grants from the Indiana Democracy Collective, said he felt the collective should be focused on populist and working-class issues, rather than identity politics and issues he views as pertinent to the elite donor class. "There's no strategy, and if there is a shadow of a strategy, it's the losing strategy," he said. The progressive organizing space is already small in Indiana, said Common Cause executive director Julia Vaughn. Before the donor table got off the ground, Vaughn said she gave it a piece of advice about doing work in the democracy space: Don't start another organization. Fund the ones that already exist instead. "You waste a lot of energy getting something up and going, and a lot of times, new organizations have growing pains," she said. "They seemed, even in their formation, to be operating at this level sort of up in the sky, and the rest of us are working in the street, where the work is supposed to happen." "I'm not sure I understand exactly what it is they're trying to accomplish," she said. Other party operatives have previously told IndyStar they see the work of the donor table as complimentary and supportive of the party's overall mission. "I like the fact that we have so many people wanting to bring change to Indiana after 24 years of one-party rule. I don't view it as a detriment," said Robin Winston, a former party chair. "It may not come through the auspices of your party, but I do think the stated goal is fundamental change."
