NPR Battleground Map: Florida, Pennsylvania Move In Opposite Directions

"A candidate wildly unpopular with non-white voters and presiding over a deeply fractured party with swaths of voters who can't stomach their nominee simply has little shot of winning a state as diverse and competitive as Florida. This, at least, is the conventional wisdom from wise political players who never imagined the reality star could win the Republican nomination against Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. TheTampa Bay Times surveyed more than 130 Florida political professionals, fundraisers and other experienced politicos, and nearly 70 percent predicted Clinton will win Florida in November. ... "Florida being Florida, the safe assumption is that the numbers will tighten into a neck-and-neck contest by November. Yes, Trump can win America's biggest battleground state, but only if the GOP closes ranks behind him. And only if he can perform far better against Clinton than Mitt Romney did against Barack Obama in places like Tampa Bay and North Florida to compensate for what most experts predict will be a historic Democratic drubbing in vote-rich southeast Florida."

"I'd argue Pennsylvania has leapfrogged Colorado and Virginia as the next most winnable state for Republicans. In fact, it may be on pace to claim sole 'tipping point' status. As it turns out, Colorado and Virginia are among the top 10 fastest Democratic-trending states in the nation — they are, respectively, getting about 0.9 percentage points and 1.2 points more Democratic-leaning compared with the country every four years. By contrast, Pennsylvania has gradually migrated in the opposite direction. It's gotten about 0.4 percentage points more Republican every four years. Projecting this trend forward another four years from 2012's results would reorder the existing battleground states on the 2016 electoral map." Nine months ago, the women formed the Women's Collective. The president of the group, 48-year-old Lissy Sunny, rises in the shadowy dawn to work the tea estate until dusk. She lives with her husband in a rudimentary three-room accommodation provided rent-free by Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company — considered one of the most progressive employers in the industry. But after 20 years of toiling, Sunny sounds more angry than grateful as she recalls the event that triggered the women's agitation for greater compensation. "We worked hard from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. — we wanted the company to succeed," she says. "But when they cut our bonus in half last September, we said we won't work like this — we cannot live like animals. We're not slaves. We need a dignified life." Sunny says the greatest indignity was being forced to choose which of her two children to educate. There wasn't money for both. Years ago, she chose her daughter, the better student, leaving her son, Denil, to live at home and work for the tea plantation. "He's depressed," she says, and "blames us for not giving him a proper education." He's 29 now, and she points out that his company job is a safety net for her and her husband. As long as her son works, they have a place to live as they grow old. The need for housing, Sunny says, has tethered generation after generation to the plantations. Trade union leader V.O. Shaji has a provocative name for this dependence — calling it "civilized slavery." Shaji says tea plantations pay field workers the lowest minimum daily wage of any sector in the state. They were given shares in the company 10 years ago to give them a sense of ownership, but the shares offer little financial reward. That's why their bonus matters so much. And why the women took extraordinary steps to restore it. So I think the political orders here, more decentralization, something I think is inevitable, is something that obviously we're going to have to manage and this will be a process that unfolds over a period of years, but we have to define our interests very specifically, and we have to make sure we're protecting those interests, and we have to have partners in the region that we can work with to do that. Adele, too: "Yeah, I want to tell that lady as well, can you stop filming me with a video camera? Because I'm really here in real life — you can enjoy it in real life." On how to hold territory after retaking it from ISIS Smartphones may be ubiquitous, but there are still limits to common courtesy. Recently the movie theater chain AMC backed off a proposal to allow texting in cinemas after it garnered enormous public backlash. Well, Kelly, so far every territory, every town, every city that has been retaken from ISIL, ISIL has not been able to come back and reclaim it. So we've managed to hold with the forces we're working with every single major area that we have retaken and that's quite significant, and there's a reason for that, and I can't guarantee you could have something happen over the next week or the next month, but that's been the trend over the last 18 months. Schultz thinks that sense of decency should extend to live music. "I think of it like, if we had that same attitude and you went to see Hamilton, people would be totally up in arms about that," Schultz said. "But for some reason it's completely acceptable to do at shows." That's because every time before an operation that we support is launched, we do the hard work, the political work, who's going to govern after, who's going to hold and how will we stabilize. And within the global coalition, we have a stabilization funding mechanism, kind of a quick hit, fast project mechanism to get people back to their homes, to get life back to the streets. (That said, Hamilton isn't immune to cellphone faux pas either. As The New York Times reported, the musical's star Lin-Manuel Miranda once chastised a certain celebrity on Twitter for incessant texting. Meanwhile, Patti LuPone grabbed a phone away from one audience member in the middle of Shows for Days.) So in the city of Tikrit, which is an iconic Sunni city in the heart of Saladin province, the city was entirely depopulated from ISIL. When it was liberated last summer, we worked very closely with local leaders, the local actors, flooded resources into Tikrit through this stabilization funding mechanism and eventually people start to return to their homes. And then they see that the people of Tikrit are in charge of their security, that local Tikritis are the policemen in the streets. It reaches a tipping point, and now 95 percent of the people have returned have to Tikrit. In this environment, Yondr has found fans of its own in artists like Alicia Keys and comedians like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K. and Hannibal Buress. In Ramadi, we're working to do the same thing. What has slowed down the returns in Ramadi, about 60,000 have returned, are these IEDs and booby traps that ISIL leaves in almost every home before they retreat from an area. So working through the coalition, we raised immediately $15 million. One of our close partners, Norway, has been a leader in this effort. We have a world-renowned company overseeing the de-mining effort in Ramadi — that's ongoing now street by street. The point I'm trying to make: this is a painstaking, very difficult, very complex, very dynamic effort, but it's not just the military. We have to be thinking about what comes next, and before we cooperate with local forces on the ground, we think all of that through. On the likelihood of more attacks Well, the reason Manbij is so important is because Manbij cuts off the ability of these terrorists to travel from Raqqa and out of Syria into Turkey and into Europe or anywhere else. What we're doing before we move into Raqqa proper is isolating Raqqa entirely. We've cut off all the roadways between Raqqa and Mosul, and we're now in the process of cutting off all of the access from the Turkey border into Raqqa, and so that is very much ongoing. So in the meantime, there are terrorists in Raqqa who are planning external attacks. We're trying to find them, and when we do find them, we target them, but that can be difficult, too. I'll give you an example: the terrorist Jihadi John, who's known for attacking American hostages, his main job for ISIL — he was a computer hacker. He was sitting in his apartment building all day trying to inspire attacks here in the United States and elsewhere. We eventually identified him, but he was living in his apartment building with hundreds of people, and it's a very difficult question, what do you do in that circumstance? He never came out of the apartment building. He eventually did come out, and we targeted him with real precision, and obviously, eliminated that threat. So this is what our intelligence professionals are doing every single day. We're getting more information every single day on ISIL. We're learning who the leaders are, we're learning who they're connected to, and then we're finding out where they are, and when we find out where they are, we target them. We're taking out about one leader now every three days. First, they organized a strike, independent of the trade unions. For decades, they belonged to the unions but they now accuse them of being corrupt and ineffectual. Then the women went directly to senior state officials to demand a $4 a day increase in their wages. They won an increase of just $1 a day but even that amount was unprecedented, and it was applied industry-wide to tea pickers across the state. Rajeshwari says the women didn't trust the male-dominated unions to represent their interests. "There's an ego problem," she says. "A man cannot stand and respectfully listen to a woman. They don't want to listen. So, we boldly walked away. But now they are scared, and they will have listen to us. Women have won, despite these men." The minimum daily wage is now 301 rupees — about $4.40. If they pick more, they earn more, and many do. For each extra kilo, they earn just pennies. But it is an improvement for this newly mobilized female workforce. Rajeshwari says decades of being dismissed by complacent, patriarchal unions compelled the women to challenge the status quo. "We gathered our courage and succeeded," she says. "It's men who ruled for the last four generations. It's men who ran the unions. For so long, it's only men. That's why we women came together."