One more anomolous election item

Spotted in a San Francisco precinct

The one group that appears to have shifted significantly compared to the last midterm were members of “other religions” — Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, etc. In 2010, three out of four voted Democratic, while this time around it was two out of three. And given that their proportion of the vote increased from 8 percent to 11 percent, that was not a trivial number of votes.

You’re wrong, however, if you think that this shift came from Jewish voters disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Jews voted Democratic by 65-33 yesterday, as compared to 66-31 in 2010. Its the other Others who shifted.

Mark Silk

What's this about? Members of those "other religions" usually qualify as Those People among Republicans.

Frustratingly, mainline Protestants and evangelicals are lumped together in these findings -- though since most are older white people, both groups likely voted Republican, probably at somewhat different rates.

Election afterthoughts

So I read a lot of pundits today and I learned very little.

Click to enlarge.

Yes -- turnout was very low and the electorate skewed old. Because the Boomer demographic bulge is moving into the over 65 category, we can expect that segment to get somewhat larger than in past elections. But on Tuesday this, the most white, segment of the electorate was seriously disproportionally represented and called the tune. In 2012, young voters more nearly equaled the proportion of elders; this time the young were one third as large a fraction of the whole. And those older voters don't like Democrats in power or even their own kids.

... what this represents is a backlash against a change that is coming anyway – a vote by the older generation against the America that the younger generation seems to represent and want. Or a rising up of white America against the browns and blacks.

Andrew Sullivan

Communities of color still voted for Dems, but this election showed some weaknesses among those supportive constituencies that may point to greater future problems than the normal low midterm election turnout.

Even among African-Americans, the target of highly visible voter suppression measures, the GOP percentage increased from 6% in 2012 to 10% in 2014. Among Latinos, the GOP vote share jumped from 27% to 35%. And most startling of all, among Asian-Americans Republicans improved from 26% in 2012 to 49% in 2014. Add all these numbers up, and they begin to matter.

Ed Kilgore

Republicans have been allowing their high profile bigots to drive off any people of color who might be be attracted to rapacious "free market" policies. They elected some new prize specimens yesterday; think Ernst of Iowa and Cotton of Arkansas. But even numerically small moves toward the GOP threaten the Democratic coalition.

I didn't need anyone to tell me why so many of us are in a "throw the bums out" mode: we are assured that we are in an "economic recovery," but somehow our prospects and those of our young people feel as if they've gotten worse, not better, since we elected a Democratic president in 2008. And we are not deceived. No one except the plutocrats is really doing well.

This is not particularly President Obama's fault; it is not even entirely the Democratic Party's fault, though the one percent certainly have their Dem accomplices. Republicans have done everything they could to ensure that the government failed to give people an economic leg up. But this underlying, appropriate, sense that people have been fooled sure made it easy for the billionaires to channel popular discontent against a leader for whom many citizens harbor racial disdain.

How dissatisfied was the electorate? According to the national exit poll, fifty-nine per cent of voters said that they were angry or disappointed with the Obama Administration. Seven in ten said that the economy is in bad shape, and just one in three said it is improving. Sixty-five per cent of respondents said that the country was seriously off-track. That last figure is twelve points higher than the equivalent finding in the exit poll taken during the 2012 Presidential election.

John Cassidy

We're a very unhappy (very rich, very privileged) country and on Tuesday Republicans and billionaires took advantage. So there we are.

It doesn't have to be this way. But getting better results from our democracy is going to take work.

A good result amidst the bloodbath

Shanthi Gonzales was handily elected to the thankless post of member of the Oakland School Board from District 6 yesterday. She won the old fashioned way: she talked with every voter she could find for six months; she won endorsements from organizations that care about the schools, especially the teacher's union; and she rallied her friends and neighbors to spread the word about her to voters. There wasn't any big money in this one, so she took it with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

Why do I care? Because I've known Shanthi ever since she was a young person in public school campaigning to push back against the wave of racist state initiatives in California in mid-1990s. (California looked more like North Carolina and Georgia do today in those days than we wish to remember, suffering election after election driven by older white voters' fear of demographic change.)

Now she gets to try to make some of our suffering public schools work.

Getting our fears in order

The United States really did have a crime wave during the 1980s. There were more assaults, more burglaries, more stranger murders (most murders were committed by people known to the victim, even then, but you get the idea.) The crime wave peaked in 1991. The incidence of these frightening crimes has been falling ever since.

The number of violent crimes has fallen by 32% since 1990 across America as a whole; in the biggest cities, it has fallen by 64%. ... The number of people behind bars has grown substantially in many countries over the past 20 years. ...Prison takes existing criminals off the streets. But in many places, the drop in crime seems to be down to people not becoming criminals in the first place. ...

The Economist

There are lots of theories about why this happened: the linked article is partial to the idea that most businesses now use better burglar alarms; I am impressed by the thesis that a whole cohort of young people suffered low-level lead poisoning that messed with impulse control.

Some places, especially California, responded to the crime wave by locking up people convicted of minor offenses and throwing away the keys. Politicians competed to be "tough on crime." We ended up with too many dangerous, overcrowded prisons; communities where most of a generation of young men of color were rendered unemployable and unmarriageable outcasts; and unsustainable state and local expenses for incarceration.

This year's Prop. 47 aims to put the state on a different, more realistic, path. According to the New York Times:

Under Proposition 47, many low-level drug and property offenses — like shoplifting, writing bad checks or simple drug possession — would be converted from felonies to misdemeanors.

That would cut an average of about a year off the sentences of up to 10,000 inmates, potentially saving the state hundreds of millions of dollars annually. To keep people from returning to prison, or from going in the first place, the savings would be invested in anti-truancy efforts and other programs like mental health and drug-abuse treatment. Some would go to victims’ services, a perennially underfinanced part of the justice system.

Prop. 47 makes sense to me. We overreacted to a few spectacular atrocities then; we can act more sensibly now.

Concurrently, I am intrigued by this chart from Vox:

Some of these fears seem to me to make sense -- others seem wildly unrealistic. I share the fear of my credit card being hacked, not so much because of losing money (the issuers are good about refunding losses) but because of the enormous nuisance involved in resetting all the automated payments I use.

I'm not sure what people mean by fearing computer hacking: if this means that cyber-warfare could bring down our entire economic infrastructure, I'm on board with this. (And distrustful that our "security" apparatus is on the job.) If it means that someone will hack my computer, I'm not so worried: the social networks I participate in spread my "voluntarily" surrendered information far and wide every day. We seem to have chosen to live with this as a society; presumably we'll somehow find a balance.

I'll cop to being concerned about a break-in to car or house. Both have happened here.

I am not a bit worried about being a victim of terrorism. Could happen, but the likelihood is vanishingly small; that goes double for invasive tropical diseases. We need to grow up and learn to live with these as miniscule background risks.

The items in the 18 percent category -- hate crime, murder, sexual assault -- probably aren't nearly as likely as we fear, but the consequences are so devastating that it isn't crazy to be slightly concerned about them. It is no advertisement for the social conditions that we tolerate that we have to fear these at all. This is not part of the human condition!

Not on this list, but as little controllable as most items on it, I'm afraid of "natural disasters"-- some human-influenced, some not (think earthquake) -- that could completely upend the life I lead and the city in which I live it.

Where do you put your fears?

They mean to drag you out to vote

Are political robocalls driving you mad as we approach the end of the campaign season? Take them as a sign that the candidates and propositions that pay for them are as close to their wits end as you are.

Robocalls don't work. The research has been repeated over and over. The only people who tout them as effective are selling them. We hate having our voice mail flooded with unsolicited messages and we certainly are not convinced by recorded promptings.

So why do campaigns buy them? Because they are dirt cheap. And because at this stage, campaigns have run out of useful methods, within their budgets, to contact voters.

The arrival of Big Data in campaigns -- that is, of increasingly sophisticated and accurate ways to select voters who can be profitably targeted for turnout -- may be reaching the limits of its real world usefulness. Sure, a good, intelligently enhanced list of voters can point a campaign to potential supporters. Enhancement definitely includes the ability to follow these voters into their social media worlds. Coupled with smart polling, a campaign may even know what it might say to those selected voters. The potential seems either awe-inspiring, or freaky, depending on how you look at it.

But only the most well-funded campaigns will be able to deliver messages in forms that are attractive and audible to the targets. The campaign arena is just too cluttered.

The New York Times interviewed high end campaign consultants about this.

... as Joe Rospars, the founder of the Democratic digital agency and technology firm Blue State Digital, put it, “The science is ahead of the art.” An analytics team can help a campaign make “a much more targeted buy,” he explained, but that alone will not offer a particularly efficient return on investment if the ad is still “just a white guy in a suit.”

... “It’s very easy to get overwhelmed with all the possibilities you have,” said Alex Kellner, the digital director of Terry McAuliffe’s successful 2013 bid for governor of Virginia and now a director at Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic digital marketing firm. “More campaigns are moving in the direction of having that freak-out moment for a couple of days and saying, ‘Oh my gosh. Here’s all we can do. How can we get it all done?’ ”

The answer for some campaigns, simply, is that they cannot.

The combination of Big Data and careful political science research on what moves voters is reshaping campaigns. But these techniques work best at a grand scale with vast sums of cash available.

We're into the dregs of the season now. In hot campaigns, this is the moment when armies of door knockers -- old fashioned people-to-people contacts -- still can make a small difference, all within the political environment that the more sophisticated techniques have created for them over a long season.***Political science research has turned up only one simple, cost effective way to reliably increase voter turnout. Apparently, despite the reality that outside of Presidential years, less than half of eligible voters bother to vote, we definitely think of ourselves as people who value our ballots and therefore are "good" citizens. One of the curiosities of post-election polling is that more people say they voted (especially for the winners) than actually did. We like our self-image as voters, responsible participants in citizenship and society.

Information indicating which individuals actually voted is part of the public record. It doesn't show who you voted for, that's secret -- but whether you cast a ballot.

Experiments have proved that sending potential voters notices saying that their neighbors will be alerted after the election whether they voted is highly correlated with increased turnout. The tactic -- "voter shaming" --drives turnout like nothing else campaigns have come up with. Social pressure works.

This year, TPM reports that conservative PACs are trying out voter-shaming tactics in Alaska and Arkansas. Some recipients of these messages are outraged.

"It's nobody else's damn business."

I wonder whether campaigns will invest in measuring whether backlash exceeds the gains from these efforts. I suspect they will; Big Data marches on. I'm enough of a campaign geek to also wonder whether smart practitioners of the "art" of politics can figure out how to use this voter-exposure lever without setting off the backlash.

Electoral selfishness: YES on H; NO on I and L

Is it ethical citizenship to decide how to vote based on preserving a not-entirely-necessary amenity you happen to enjoy? On some matters, I think so.

Yesterday for my precinct photography project I was wandering in a bit of San Francisco near Ocean Beach and encountered a classic election season war among dueling signs for several measures on the city ballot.

Measure H would halt replacement of existing soccer fields at the Ocean Beach end of Golden Gate Park with artificial turf and the addition of 150,000 watts of sports lighting that will shine every day of the year. That is, Parks and Rec and the City authorities want to transform the quite wild trails and byways of the park's west end into just one more mid-city style urban recreation area. According to the folks who put Prop. H on the ballot,

the Golden Gate Master Plan states that Golden Gate Park is naturalistic in character, “designed and managed to afford opportunities for all to experience beauty, tranquility, recreation, and relief from urban pressures ...”

The existing west end of the park does just that. On the east end, the section that adjoins the city, we have the De Young Museum, the Conservatory of Flowers, Kezar Stadium, the kind of developments that draw San Franciscans and tourists. At the west end has some recreation areas including the mammoth Polo Fields, but much of it is still quite undeveloped.

I run those west end trails often; I come down YES on H. I want to preserve that open space, those odd nooks and crannies. If Park and Rec can find the money to do some development, I think they can put their artificial turf and light pollution somewhere else and leave a little wildness in an area where I've seen raccoons and coyotes within the past year.

A few houses displayed this sign: Measure. I is Park and Rec's poison pill. If it passes and gets more votes than Measure H, it would throw out the vote on the other one and enable Park and Rec to avoid any more of these tortuous planning processes that have impeded their Ocean Beach soccer fields. A vote for I is a vote for artificial turf anywhere bureaucrats decide we must have it. Just Say NO.

I only saw one of these. Measure L seems to be an aggrieved car owners' manifesto against city policies that aim to reduce automobile use. It would end the city's attempt to activate metered parking on Sundays and holidays, would require neighborhood approval for addition of new meters, and would require construction of parking garages.

I'm a car owner. I drive a disabled friend to church on Sundays and I've been threatened by Sunday metering though I've managed to dodge tickets. If meters were added on my street (and there have been initiatives in that direction), this would be a major inconvenience to me. I try hard not to drive in the most congested areas of the city; we actually have somewhat usable public transit. So I'm not so interested in more parking garages.

But come on, it is dead obvious that if we hope to have liveable cities and a liveable planet, we have to get over our addiction to polluting private cars. NO on L. It will be telling how the city goes on this one.

Seasonal expenditures

Every election season we are buried in glossy mailers and bombarded by TV ads. I don't even live in a state where there are any significant contests for higher offices and yet I am surrounded by pitches for and against this and that.

Think what this must feel like in areas where close contests are being fought out: Wisconsin or Iowa, for example.

All this costs candidates and the "committees," whether independent or party-affiliated, a pretty penny. (Yes, raising the $$ is certainly corrosive and corrupting of democracy.)

David S. Joachim reports that interested parties are on track to spend some $4 billion on this year's election.

That's a lot of money! But it is important to keep the sum in perspective:

... Americans will spend nearly twice that amount this year on Halloween costumes, decorations and candy.

Is this disparity representative of what matters to most of us? Actually, I don't think so. But I do think most people have more idea how to celebrate Halloween than are able to imagine ways of participating more actively in their democracy.

Best new candidate of 2014 gets an unlikely endorsement

Author Stephen King has a message for residents of Maine. If elected, Shenna Bellows could be trusted to be a Senator who understands and advocates for civil liberties. We have Elizabeth Warren standing up for the economic well-being of the 99 percent. We need an equivalent leader who stands strong for the rule of law.

Drought, California's water supply, and Proposition 1

Today the most extraordinary thing happened to me: I got rained on while running along the beach in San Francisco. I hadn't figured on that possibility. Aren't we stuck in an epic drought? Yes, we are.

Having just driven through the Central Valley where parched fields and these signs abound and turned on the TV to catch Gov. Jerry banging a drum for a YES vote on Prop. 1 (and Prop. 2), I figured I'd better find out about the measure, the Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act of 2014.

California is an unstable, unsustainable quagmire when it comes to water policy. The state is largely a desert, rendered abundantly fertile by siphoning water from rivers and mountains, into which 38 million people have flooded to enjoy sunshine and prosperity. At best, for decades we've been running just a little ahead of water collapse.

With the current drought and the prospect of human-caused higher temperatures in the future, the house of cards that has been our water policy seems to be breaking down. Valley residents whose wells are throwing up sand and brown sludge not surprisingly call on the government to help. It's not clear that the state can or will.

Prop. 1 seems to be a laboriously negotiated Sacramento compromise, a glancing blow at deep problems designed by such broad forces so as to please most everyone just a little. Pretty much all the big guns -- elected officials, both political parties and the state unions and the Chamber of Commerce, and the Farm Bureau Federation -- are on board with it. Some enviros are supporters. Here's some of the pitch I received today from the California League of Conservation Voters.

... the investments within this bond seek to address many environmental concerns that that directly affect water supply and access. Passage of the bond will improve access to and quality of drinking water statewide by funding water quality projects in several categories: safe drinking water, recycled water, regional water security, groundwater sustainability and coastal/ river protection. The bond will directly fund ecosystem and watershed restoration, protecting the California coast, the Sacramento River delta, and watersheds that provide California’s water supply. Finally, the bond takes steps to protect communities with the least access to clean water supplies by creating a technical assistance program and prioritizing state funding on the needs of the disadvantaged communities.

Opponents of Prop. 1 are some strange bedfellows. The Center for Biological Diversity argues for a NO.

1. The bond subsidizes more delta water exports. ... This will be very bad news for dozens of endangered and threatened species that call the [Sacramento River] delta home.

2. The bond will make way for new dams and reservoirs. The bond provides $2.7 billion for additional water storage projects to benefit Big Ag, including the Sites, Los Vaqueros and Temperance Flat reservoirs. Building these dams and reservoirs is misguided: It's a grossly expensive way to facilitate Big Ag's access to minimal additional water resources. The result will harm fragile ecosystems which need this water to survive.

3. The bond fails to bring real water solutions to California. The bond slashes funding for water conservation, efficiency and recycling to $1.5 billion -- just half of what it allocates to build new dams and reservoirs. ...

There's some evidence that opposition involves a pincer movement of the water-rich far north and the arid far south of the state. The Chico Enterprise-Register argues that

We in the north state are expected to solve the water problems south of the delta. We will be compelled to solve those problems whether we like it or not. .... We eye Proposition 1 with suspicion, because history has taught us it's wise to do so. It's a $7.5 billion dollar crapshoot that we're likely to lose, no matter how the dice fall.

Some San Diegans also believe that the rest of the state is failing them.

Marco Gonzalez, a prominent environmental attorney from the San Diego region, said Proposition 1 offers little for the local area.

“From a San Diegan’s perspective, Proposition 1 ignores the fact that we are at the end of the water pipeline, and among the most precarious regions susceptible to impacts of long term drought,” Gonzalez, head of the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation, wrote in a recent U-T San Diego commentary. “With more than $5 billion allocated to projects on the San Joaquin River, Shasta Lake, and reservoirs in Contra Costa and Merced counties, San Diego and the rest of Southern California are being hung out to dry.”

Having just spent several hours reading the pros and cons, I am still not convinced that I know which way to go on this. When opponents object that we can't build our way out of our water shortage, they score points with me. As temperatures rise (a certainty) and population increases (not quite such a certainty given the disproportion between housing costs and job opportunities for most people), further fights over who gets the water are a certainty. I'm not sure whether Prop. 1 helps or hurts.

The outfit that distributes these signs urges a NO vote.

A nation of cowards

Yesterday Rebecca carried on an animated conversation about Mainstreaming Torturewith students and faculty at Loyola Law School in New Orleans. In every talk, she elaborates on the point that by embracing torture of enemies -- whether those enemies are resisting occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan and other distant lands or among the "tortureable" class of persons in our domestic prisons -- the United States is transforming its more privileged citizens into "a nation of cowards." We, the spectators of state terror, are encouraged to be attached to a false "security" that our authorities promise is guaranteed by their outrages on human persons. And we become easy marks for those who would terrify us.

According to Joshua Marshall, current US political developments confirm her thesis:

The Return of Terror Politics
... Something very big happened in June when ISIL burst out of Syria and overran a huge chunk of Sunni Iraq. But in the field of US domestic opinion something much bigger and graver happened in September when ISIL beheaded US reporter James Foley and again when they behead fellow journalist and captive Steven Sotloff. (The filmed executions of other foreign nationals followed.) Public opinion data seems to show that these two incidents had a massive and galvanizing effect on US public opinion - driving a public extremely unsupportive of further foreign military operations toward overwhelming support for attacking ISIL.

To make the point clear, what happened in June was a very big deal in terms of the already fractured and fragmented state system in the Arab Middle East. But the executions changed the equation for the US public. It goes without saying that the executions were grisly and brutal, deeply disturbing and revealing about the character of this group. So June and September have an obvious connection. But hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis have been killed in recent years. Thousand of US military personnel have been killed. And even many US civilians and captives have been killed.

But these executions were packaged - there's no other way to put - as brilliantly evil propaganda. That made all the difference in the world in terms of the shifting sands of US public opinion which soon bore fruit in shifting US policy.

Republican Senate candidates and the right wing media generally are all too happy to stoke the fear. They seek to gain advantage over President Obama and Democrats who, once again, can be tarred as bumblers when faced with mortal perils. They would love to return to their glory days in the traumatic aftermath of 9/11 when war hawks ruled the roost.

For the media, stoking fear makes for better story lines. For good or ill, media need elections to be close contests. Turmoil and ferment, emotion and strife sell. Our trained, habitual cowardice is good for the wingers and good for business.

Burke takes on Walker in Wisconsin

For a Californian, it has been interesting for the last week to be in a state where a hot gubernatorial election is underway.

Rural central Wisconsin where we've been is incumbent Republican Scott Walker's territory judging by the prevalence of his lawn signs. Evidence of Mary Burke's campaign was much thinner.

Burke is an intriguing Democratic candidate, a business woman taking on the Koch brothers' pet union buster. Her past experience includes doing strategic planning for the Trek Bicycle Corporation (the family firm) and as Wisconsin Secretary of Commerce.

Current polling suggests this Democrat is running close to Walker. But pulling ahead will be tough. Wisconsin is a paradigmatic purple state: along with Pennsylvania and Florida, it is reliably Democratic when everyone votes in presidential years -- then goes Republican with lower turnout in mid-terms. In the last century, the state was the home of the country's most successful Progressive and Socialist parties.

The National Rifle Association, true Walker fans, have just announced they are throwing down $1 million for Walker. If Walker prevails by a significant margin, expect to see him in the 2016 Republican presidential field.

Then again, Mary Burke might just steal this one if Wisconsin Democrats can organize to turn out their voters. Her campaign is here.

Tim Wu for NYS Lite Gov: democracy at work

Wow! Wow again! The New York Times has endorsed Tim Wu for Lieutenant Governor of New York State.

Wu is the inventor of the term "net neutrality" and the author of the essential book on the history of communications and democracy in the United States which I discussed here.

Lieutenant Governor isn't much of an office and it is very unlikely that Wu will win the Democratic primary against Gov. Andrew Cuomo's hand-picked conservative running mate, Kathy Hochul.

Still the endorsement says a lot about how politics proceeds in one-party Democratic states -- all the large, urban ones. Within the Democratic party, you have the money party -- our very own rich people. And then there are the more populist Democratic constituencies -- various, not always compatible, communities of color, most single women of many communal identities, and the educated young, regardless of race or gender. In one-party states, these groups duke it out for control of the party and political positions. The money party often has more unity than the contending populist fragments, but when the latter get together, they have the votes.

In one-party Democratic states, if this contest isn't happening, democracy is in trouble. Political pulling and hauling -- that maligned "partisanship" -- never goes away. It just changes shape.

There is something about these women ...

On Friday at Netroots Nation I got a look at two women in politics about whom I can feel genuinely warm.

Elizabeth Warren spoke to a packed ballroom -- in the picture, she's that tiny figure on the left; the big screen is how most of us "see" the speakers. It is not a bad view.

If you've had any exposure to Warren, she didn't say anything new. Here's what the New York Times reported in a rather sympathetic piece.

“They cheated American families, crashed the economy, got bailed out, and now the biggest banks are even bigger than they were when they got too big to fail in 2008!” Ms. Warren thundered, in one of her many applause lines. “A kid gets caught with a few ounces of pot and goes to jail, but a big bank launders drug money and no one gets arrested. The game is rigged!”

She went on: “Billionaires pay taxes at lower rates than their secretaries. How does this happen? It happens because they all have lobbyists. Lobbyist and Republican friends in Congress. Lobbyists and Republicans to protect every loophole and every privilege. The game is rigged, and it isn’t right!”

She brought down the house by ending with the declaration that citizens such as those of us at NN14 represent "21st century democracy." I need to think about that.

Meanwhile, Ready4Warren and others had seeded the room with "run, Liz, run" paraphernalia. The Netroots Nation folk are enthusiastic.

I've scandalized some Democrats at NN by saying I'll work to elect Hillary Clinton, but don't ask me to cast my vote for her (abstention is a privilege I get for living in California.) Any number of people in this convention from places like Michigan, North Carolina and Maine who are suffering under Republican governors will tell anyone who will listen why we have to elect even bad Democrats rather than let the other guys in. And I buy it. But it sure would be nice to have someone to be for.

I don't see Warren challenging Hillary Clinton from the left, however much I'd like that. But she sure is keeping Teddy Kennedy's seat properly warm. And she'll take on anyone in service of an economic equity agenda.

The only sadness I felt over Warren's appearance is that she drew three times the crowd that had gathered to listen to Rev. Barber the previous evening. I get that, but I can't be happy about what that says about the progressive movement.
***

The other highlight of the day was hearing my favorite candidate of this cycle, Shenna Bellows who is running for the Senate in Maine give her stump speech. She's animated, intelligent, principled -- and because she is challenging an incumbent has to convince with every utterance that she can upset a three term incumbent.

A former ACLU affiliate director, she has been called the "Elizabeth Warren of civil liberties." She's out to repeal the Patriot Act, but also to bring infrastructure development to rural communities, defend Social Security and enact some tax fairness.

This candidate could (and should) be the surprise of 2014. On Sunday she sets out to walk from Houlton to Kittery to reach as many Mainers as possible. No matter where you live, this is a candidate well worth any contribution you can make.

Human Rights Campaign undermines struggle for rights, again

The elite gay lobbying outfit has covered itself with shame (again) by endorsing Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins over challenger Shenna Bellows. Bellows is a human rights campaigner; she doesn't play along to get along.

I'm not a Mainer, but the best selling author Stephen King is. Here's why he's supporting Bellows over Collins:

It’s been almost 20 years since Maine had a Democratic representative in the U.S. Senate (George Mitchell, if you’re keeping track). The smart money says we won’t elect a Democrat this year, either, but this is a case where I hope the smart money is wrong.

... Sen. Susan Collins is considered a moderate who compromises a lot. Sounds good, but when it comes down to casting votes that serve Mainers, she always seems to end up with her Republican colleagues, led by Mitch McConnell — the hardline block that shut down the government last year and has since neglected many urgent issues (including better care for our veterans) in a near maniacal effort to repeal an Affordable Care Act that is already working.

Moderation is fine, but only up to a point. It’s not helpful to Mainers when Collins continues to vote on the wrong side of policies that matter most.

Collins supports the Patriot Act, and has repeatedly voted for its renewal. She has repeatedly voted to authorize (and legalize) NSA spying. Shenna Bellows advocates repeal of the Patriot Act, and so do I. Obviously we need to keep an eye out for terrorists on American soil, but in the age of drones and mega-surveillance, it’s way past time to restructure this thing. And although Collins claims the NSA spying program is fair, it looks to me too much like a doorway to that world George Orwell wrote about in 1984.

Bellows supports raising the minimum wage. Collins opposes it, which makes me roll my eyes in exasperation. A $10.10 per hour wage in an America where gasoline costs $3.65 a gallon — and where a great many Maine workers have to travel long distances to their place of employment — seems fair to me. The idea that 10 bucks an hour will flatten the economy is basically an idea promulgated by rich greedheads who don’t want to pony up what’s fair to hard workers who are struggling to make ends meet.

Collins supports the Keystone Pipeline. This just makes me sigh, but not because of the pipeline per se. It’s where it comes from. This is tar sands oil, and according to the National Wildlife Federation, it’s “one of the dirtiest, costliest, and most destructive fuels in the world.” It lays waste to fragile ecosystems, emits more of the pollutants associated with global warming when burned, and creates lake-sized reservoirs of toxic waste. It’s a lethally short-sighted quick fix, and the supporters of the Keystone are its enablers.

There's lots more, but you get the gist. Read King's complete letter at the Bangor Daily News.

San Francisco gets to watch big money play in elections

Laurence Lessig has started a PAC (Political Action Committee) -- #MayDay -- aiming to get the influence of big funders out of our politics and win our democracy back from the plutocrats. Huh? He figures it will take money to win a Congress that will do the job and we can crowd fund the project.

For 2014, our goal is $12 million. With that money, we will make fundamental reform the key issue in five congressional races. And win.

Then we’ll apply what we learn to 2016 — when we’ll run a much much bigger campaign in many more districts for this one purpose: to win a Congress committed to fundamental reform.

I'm more than a little skeptical. After all I have worked in politics for a couple of decades. But I do know that he understands how the current crop of billionaire political dabblers are getting their way with most politicians. Here's his vivid description of how this works:

The single greatest fear of any incumbent is that thirty days before an election, some anonymously funded SuperPAC will drop $1 million against him.

When that happens, there’s little the incumbent can do. He can’t then turn to his largest contributors — by definition, they have all maxed out and can’t, under the law, give any more. So in anticipation, the incumbent must line up support — or let’s call it protection. In light of the risk that the incumbent will be targeted, the incumbent needs a kind of assurance: If she needs a defense, there will be the resources to defend her.

... It’s not technically “insurance”; it’s not issued by an insurance company, and there’s no cash premium collected in advance. But it functions like insurance, and indeed, like any insurance, there is a premium of some sort that is collected in advance. Because if you’re going to convince a SuperPAC to be there when you need them, you need to signal that you’re the kind of incumbent they want to protect. “They’d love to support you, Senator, but they have a rule that they can’t support anyone who doesn’t get a 95 percent on their score card.” So the rational representative has a clear goal to work towards — 95 percent or better — long before he actually needs anyone’s money. Thus, without a single dollar changing hands, the SuperPAC achieves its objective: bending Congressmen to its program, through the expectation of a defense if a defense is necessary.

Supervisor David Campos

San Franciscans in the 17th Assembly District have just seen this process at work, with appropriate local variations. Two incumbent city supervisors, David Campos and David Chiu, are running to succeed our termed-out warrior, Tom Ammiano. Campos is a Guatemalan immigrant, gay, and decidedly the candidate of progressive community organizations and progressive labor. Chiu is Chinese-American, generally the candidate of real estate, business, and finance interests in the city; he will have a large money advantage. The district could elect either of them. The probable winner is not easy to call.

On the eve of the June 3 primary (which served as a warm up between these two men for the general election, thanks to California's imbecilic Top Two Primary), venture capitalist Ron Conway who likes to throw his big bucks around in city politics, dumped bundles of cash on perfectly legal hit pieces against Campos. The stuff was vicious, equating a past procedural vote with Campos having endorsed domestic violence. Hits like this assume that most voters have little information. They sometimes work.

Campos didn't have insurance of the financial kind that Lessig talks up -- unless you can call San Francisco's sizable organized contingent of progressive community and labor election activists a form of people's insurance. Phone calls and shoe leather kept Campos close enough in the primary so he retains a good chance of winning among the much larger electorate that will turn out in November. But he'll probably face big tech money playing dirty again.
*** Lessig (he's a Harvard Law prof) is definitely on to the mechanics of how money is distorting our elections. Will his crowd-funded Super PAC make inroads on a corrupt system? I don't know. I have usually felt that agitation for "campaign finance reform" amounted to squeamish moralizing and demonstrated too little awareness that struggles over power are life and death matters, even in a democracy. Maybe the corruption has become so obvious that we're ready to get smarter and tougher. Maybe Lessig can show some of the way. You can sign up to follow his weekly Politics$Picks newsletter. I did.

A candidate with a delightful ad

If I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, I'd certainly consider voting for this guy. The combination of humor with nerdy intensity is both politically attractive and kind of cute.

Providence has long been known for wacky politicians. Daily Kos Elections reports that the city's very own Rob Ford-equivalent, Buddy Cianci, is thinking of making a comeback. In 1984, while serving as mayor, Cianci was convicted of assault. Returned to office after that episode, he lost the job again when he went to prison in 2002 for racketeering. At 73, now he is mulling another run as either an independent or a Democrat; he started political life as a Republican.

If the charismatic Cianci ran, he would certainly make things more entertaining here, and he can't be counted out. Cianci seems to have an Edwin Edwards-like appeal to him among many in the city, remaining popular despite (or maybe because of) his battles with the law. (He's also maintained a presence on radio and TV.)

If voters think Cianci is too much of a good thing, they can always go with Brett Smiley whose ad shows he understands that Providence elections thrive on a bit of the light touch.

Two Davids and assorted June 3 primary miscellany

San Franciscans living in the 17th Assembly District have been exceptionally fortunate in our representation in Sacramento. Tom Ammiano is the termed out incumbent; you might think an outrageous queer comic would be just marginal in the state capitol, but you'd be wrong. After 14 often difficult years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors which included shepherding a local health insurance plan through that body, Ammiano matured into an exceptional legislator. At the state level, he not only stood up for legalizing pot when such an initiative wasn't cool, but also sponsored a bill of rights for domestic workers, new restrictions on use of solitary confinement by state prisons, protections for transgender students, and the Trust Act to get California out of the business of helping federal agents deport innocuous immigrants.

Tom Ammiano is a conviction politician who works for a better, more fair society because he knows in his gut what it is like to be on the wrong end of harmful discrimination.

The 17th Assembly District can elect another individual who runs for office out of something deeper than personal ambition: David Campos. Campos succeeded Ammiano on the Board of Supervisors. He too is gay; he's an immigrant from Guatemala, a lawyer, a smart policy guy. He's also endorsed by Ammiano. But above all, Campos knows why he wants to go to Sacramento:

“It’s not all about the legislation you pass, it’s about the social change you effectuate.” And he noted: “With this David, you don’t need a lobbying effort to get me to do the right thing.”

48 Hills, 1/23/14

As Campos indicates, there's another David in this race, David Chiu, also from immigrant roots. Chiu has been on the Board about as long as Campos; he's shown himself to be an ambitious pol. He presents himself as someone who is "trying to work behind the scenes to get things done." I'm sure Chiu would be a reliable Democratic vote. But we can do better than send up just another time serving Democratic politician who makes a career of pleasing political donors. I've been lucky to be represented by someone who has moved the definitions of what is possible. I want another one of those. David Campos is my guy.***Because of our stupid "top two" voting system, these two guys will slug it out again in November. There's no Republican in this one.***There's another race on the June ballot where San Francisco voters could actually use the "top two" system to good effect. I often complain here that having Nancy Pelosi leading the Democratic caucus means San Franciscans have no real representation in Congress. Pelosi's main job means she owes her allegiance to the Party, not her constituents. She'll be re-elected overwhelmingly in November; no problem there. But instead of her token opposition being some anonymous Republican, if enough of us want to, we can make the indefatigable activist and Green Party stalwart Barry Hermanson the other candidate for Congress on the ballot in November. He'd get 10-15 percent, just as the Republican would. This would be a nice little demonstration, certainly worth a primary vote.***Looking at the ballot, there's Leland Yee's name at the top of the list for Secretary of State. Too bad about that one. I would have voted for him if the bribery and gun running caper hadn't come out. He was never a reliable progressive, though he usually came through for the unions. But generally I think progressives gain from having statewide officials come out of the politics of this town. We knock 'em around in a good way; when they move up in the world, they look like flaming liberals to many people. The political culture here is good for them. Too bad about Leland.

¡No Mas! #not1more

From the protest on Friday in San Francisco's Financial District:

What the system never seems to take into account is that undocumented people aren't isolated strangers in the land. Most have jobs, businesses, families, and often U.S.-citizen children. Many, many families include some members who have legal papers and some who don't. Obama is tossing out Grandpa and Auntie.

Under the Obama administration, some two million people have been deported.

This brave family is fighting a deportation order.

Waiting for an immigration reform that politicians promise but which never seems to come, many people have moved beyond fear.

Young people blocked an intersection chanting, awaiting arrest.

Police gave a verbal warning before taking seated protesters to the paddy wagon.

Father Richard Smith from my little Episcopal parish was among the 23 persons taken into custody.***On Friday afternoon I offered this comment at a Democratic Party-oriented website where people were bemoaning the pattern of fall-off in voting among Latinos in non-presidential elections. Why don't they understand how important it is to vote? they asked. My view:

Don't discount disillusionment among the most politically engaged young Latinos at the Obama administration's policy of using deportation as a fruitless "confidence building measure" with Republicans who aren't going to vote for immigration reform anyway. The Obama administration's deportation toll is apparently reaching 2,000,000 people as of this month. There were protest actions in 80 cities this weekend asking for relief. See #not1more. That's a lot of political capacity and energy that isn't going to go into raising Democratic turnout in November.

My favorite new Senate candidate for the 2014 cycle

If, like me, you occasionally donate even small sums to political candidates you find worthy, your email is probably jammed today with fundraising appeals. We're two days out from the next legal reporting deadline for many local and all federal candidates -- they each want to scare the competition with a big haul. And, if you support them, it's not crazy to help. I do my tiny bit.


Meet Shenna Bellows speaking at a house party this month. She is running for the Senate in Maine against Susan Collins. That's a tough job: the four term incumbent is a fixture in Maine. Collins is called "a moderate." But come on, Collins is a Republican -- what she does in Washington is to enable her party to block anything that might be a progressive agenda. That's her job: making sure her party can prevent any raise in the minimum wage, any effort to get the rich to pay their fair share, any serious attempt to rein in the spook apparatus.

Bellows is good on the economic needs of ordinary people who need government to curb increasing inequality. She is terrific on restoring civil liberties and the rule of law; that's her expertise. We need one of those in the Senate.

If you are at all moved to try to get a better Senator elected and you don't have local candidates to assist this year, take a look at Shenna Bellows. This will be a tough race. Senators can usually die in office if they choose (some seem to have kicked off without anyone much noticing.) It would be great to help install a fresh face among those tired old timers.

Democrats and demographics, part 2

A week or so ago, I posted "Democrats and demographics" arguing that, in California,

the Democratic coalition doesn't need a majority of white voters; it needs a significant fraction, maybe 40 percent of these mostly married whites, and a lot of other voters.

The post was a little lazy. I didn't bother to dig into election results outside of California to report exactly what the national picture of the white vote looked like. In particular, that 40 percent number was just an informed guess. Slate columnist David Weigel has done the digging in discussing the prospects for President Obama's Democrats in 2014:

In 2006 the electorate was 79 percent white. Didn't hurt the party; boosted by the Iraq War backlash, Democrats won 47 percent of the white vote, up from 41 percent in 2004.

Then came 2008, the best Democratic election in a generation. Barack Obama won only 43 percent of the white vote in an electorate that was 74 percent white.

In 2010 the electorate vanilla'd up again—77 percent white this time—and the white vote for Democrats collapsed. They won only 37 percent of it, and only 34 percent of white men.

Now, here's the part that worries Obama. In 2012 the president won re-election despite his share of the white vote tumbling to 39 percent. How'd he do it? Whites made up only 72 percent of the electorate.

Thus, on the national level, Democratic Party victory seems at present to require getting close to 40 percent of the white vote -- and Democrats do just fine (nationally) whenever they exceed that percentage. That's hard to achieve in much of the country in midterm elections in which younger and browner voters are less likely to turn out. In some races, Democrats are throwing money and field staff at the turnout problem. The California experience -- all those community-based and union campaigns -- again suggests that such an effort can make a difference.

I doubt money can build a community voting practice in one or even several cycles, but we do here demonstrate that if funded activists stay with the project, electoral dynamics change. The change may not be in direction, but well placed efforts can speed up underlying trends. The underlying trends continue to favor a Democratic populist electorate for the foreseeable future.