"Can't we all get along?"

Senator Rafael Warnock of Georgia has a new book. I guess that means he's dipping his toe in the water, testing the temperature for a Democratic presidential run in 2028. Good for him -- the more the better, since we probably know clearly what we don't want: that would be Donald Trump, corruption and misrule, and more endless wars. But do we know what do we want? The people who want the job need to make their case.

Warnock sat for a long interview with David Marchese of the New York Times [gift link] which I found full of intriguing tidbits. Marchese's interjections are in bold type. Warnock affirms the traditions from which he comes:

We’ve only been a democracy in a real sense since 1965. What we are witnessing in real time is an assault on those basic voting rights. I think that the Supreme Court has committed violence against the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system. And as someone whose parents lived through that ugly history, I take deep offense....

Warnock's appreciation of democracy leads him to hate gerrymandering which enables politicians to pick their voters rather than the other way round. 

But he's a pastor also; he comes from a broad faith perspective. 

... For me, the acid test of one’s faith is the depth of your commitment to the people who are on the margins. I’m a Matthew 25 Christian.

“What you did unto the least of us, you did unto me.” 

I don’t understand how you read that, say a long prayer, hold hands with your fellow legislators and then cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. ...

... Part of the obligation of a person of faith is to ask yourself: “What are you actually worshiping? What are you actually committed to?” Are you committed to the poor? Are you committed to the despised and the rejected? Would Jesus agree with the actions of ICE in this moment, in which we’re seeing organized cruelty on our streets, masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, separating families, terrorizing whole communities of people, whether they’re documented or not, whether they are citizens or not? What is it in the Gospel, I would ask my colleagues, that says that this is right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There’s some variation of that in all of the great faith traditions, and that’s the question people aren’t asking themselves deeply enough. Because if you do, you might actually have to make some decisions that make you uncomfortable. 

... One of the animating ideas of your book is that America has lost its way morally. What sort of practical, specific signs are you looking for, or should any of us be looking for, that would make us think America has morally found its way again? What would that look like? Isaiah says that “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” As a preacher, I used to think that text meant that the glory of the Lord is so amazing and so overwhelming that all flesh will see it and you can’t help but see it because it’s God’s glory. 

I actually read it in reverse now. The insight that the prophet is laying out for us, whether you’re a person of faith or not, is that there are some things we can only see when we get together. 

On its face, Warnock's prescription here might seem almost laughably weak and inoffensive, a version of "Can't we all get along?" as the spurious quote from police brutality victim Rodney King asks.

But maybe Warnock is on to something about us: maybe what we will want in 2028 is someone who stakes out principled pro-democracy policy positions, but also credibly tries to bring us together. I'm skeptical, But Warnock seems to be exploring such a path ...

Good news for women in Georgia and beyond

Via Jessica Valenti at Abortion Every Day:

A Georgia judge has struck down the state’s 6-week abortion ban! In an absolutely epic ruling, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney didn’t just repeal the law—but eviscerated it as forcing women to be “human incubators.”

“Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have.

…It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could–or should–force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

I mean, wow. (McBurney even added in a footnote, that “it is generally men who promote and defend laws like the LIFE Act.”)

We needed our occasional win, especially in a state where women can't put abortion on the ballot for a popular vote. It may take a little while to learn whether Judge McBurney's rule survives appeals.

Ten states will be voting on reproductive freedom this year. Wherever abortion has been put to vote, so far we win.

• • •

The apparently tireless Jessica Valenti has a book released today from Penguin Random House  on the ongoing struggle: Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win.

We are incomplete if we cannot control out bodies.

MAGA at work

Isaac Arnsdorf's Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy is a fascinating piece of election journalism, perhaps most especially to a practitioner of campaign mobilization like me. But it's also a book for anyone who, confronted by the spread and endurance of the MAGA movement, finds themselves asking, "what's wrong with these people?"

Arnsdorf is billed as "a national political reporter' for The Washington Post, but in this volume he goes local, looking at the on-the-ground antics of MAGA in Arizona and Georgia.

He explains his project: 

... The movement now called MAGA has long existed in the American political bloodstream ...this movement's ideology was and is loosely defined by nationalism and tradition social values, fierce opposition to liberalism as a slippery slope to communism, and a tendency toward paranoia and conspiratorial thinking....

... In the story of the mass radicalization of the Republican Party, Trump is a singular, indispensable actor. But his perspective is not where the drama and tension unfold. This book turns the camera around from its usual focus on politicians and operatives, focussing instead on the faces in the crowd: what makes them believe, what motivates them, what stirs them to action. ...

Arnsdorf's story has two main protagonists;

• in Cobb County, Georgia, Salleigh Grubb, previously a casual suburban Republican, was so thrown off center by the convergence in 2020 of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and Trump's loss in November, that she became a vehement "Stop the Steal" activist.

On Facebook she posted an upside-down flag, widely recognized in right-wing circles as a distress signal.

Her energy was unabated despite repeated Georgia setbacks.  Eventually she was elected county chair and even met her orange-coiffed cult leader in person.

• in Maricopa County, Arizona, Kathy Petsas had served as a district chair for the Republican Party for decades, laboriously turning out voters for GOP nominees whether she thrilled to them or not. A post-2020 influx of new MAGA militants found her leadership too accommodating and practical for their virulent politics. They voted her out and overwhelmed party old-timers.

Behind both these stories in Arnsdorf's telling lurks Steve Bannon, the podcast proponent of burning the whole country down and MAGA's evil wizard. Bannon is clearly a bad dude, but I am not sure I would ascribe quite as much agency to him as Arnsdorf does. He is, after all, a mercenary con man who grabs onto whatever looks like a good thing with showy pomposity. A very American type. Plenty of MAGAs thrill to his style.

Bannon discovered one Dan Shultz, another familiar sort of rightwing crackpot, who had found his obsession in what he called the Precinct Strategy. If he could just convince MAGA true believers that political parties needed thousands of local precinct activists to turn out their neighbors and that these precinct chairs would then participate in intra-party elections for party office, MAGA could take over the Republican apparatus and elect its candidates to public office. Shultz, through Bannon, enjoyed good timing for his nostrum; Biden had won in 2020, Trump refused to concede, and MAGAs needed something to do. Riding Bannon's cred, pretty soon the Precinct Strategy was all the rage among MAGAs.

What Dan was offering was so pure, so simple -- seventh-grade civics. Bannon knew there was a hunger out there for that. ... The Precinct Strategy could help restore that missing [social] connective tissue. ... There was already a structure, an organization, a hierarchy. ...

For Kathy Petsas in Arizona, this new crop of enthusiasts (and fantasists) engulfed her district leadership.

.. she started getting deluged with applications to become precinct committee members ... It was an obscure role and Kathy was used to getting two or three people a month who might express interest in become a PC. ... she invited the applicants to meet for coffee. ... if these strangers were asking to represent her party in her district, and she was going to exercise her discretion as chair to appoint them, then Kathy wanted to get to know them a little first. She had 132 coffees. ...

.. It was clear to Kathy from the start that Donald Trump was many things, but he was not a conservative. ... It wasn't just the Trump was rude, he brought out the rudeness in his followers; they were not winning anybody over by standing on street corners with Trump signs and guns. Kathy believed that elected officials were supposed to represent everyone, not only the people who voted for them. But everything Trump did was for his base. ... He didn't stand for anything but himself.

But she wasn't the sort of Republican to become a Never-Trumper (unfortunately). She been around long enough to suspect she might have to reconstruct the party if the fever passed. Still ...

... she wasn't going to go door to door for candidates she couldn't defend. .. [the new PCs etc] were like living, breathing manifestations of all the conspiracy theories and misinformation that had been swirling and spreading for two years now.

Neither of these two state parties -- not Georgia nor Arizona -- came out of the 2022 cycle successful. In Georgia, Trump-promoted Senate candidate Herschel Walker proved too crazy for the electorate. The Arizona party seems still fully MAGA-fied having nominated the batshit loony Kari Lake for the Senate in 2024. Trump is running again.. This story is not finished. Isaac Arnsdorf does a useful job of introducing some grassroots combatants.

• • •

I do have a major to bone to pick with this journalist however. He would have written a better book if he'd done some research into how precinct level party organization of all variants of U.S. parties have worked for decades -- perhaps even back to William  L. Marcy in New York in the mid-1840s. Smart party leaders have long known that neighbors engaging neighbors was the gold standard of electoral organizing. Dan Schultz' idea was no novelty.

My mother was Republican precinct leader in Buffalo, NY, in the 1950s and '60s; she kept a card file on every voter, recording whether she'd gotten them to vote yet! Such people were then and always the backbone of civic engagement. And she was a Nelson Rockefeller-Republican, not any kind of insurgent!

This is how functional elements of political parties have long organized themselves and their voters. Such organization is the strongest form of civic engagement this democracy knows; door-to-door canvasses from strangers, phone and text contact, and mass media don't hold a candle to year round persuasion by your neighbors. Where it exists, deep precinct organization is the way to go. Parties can seldom achieve it or maintain it over time. People get exhausted. The tone deaf MAGA antics Arnsdorf describes don't seem likely to age well ... but prediction is still foolish.

And if your door-to-door outreach is by an offensive MAGA nut ... perhaps not an attractive strategy as people like Kathy Petsas understand.

For International Women's Day

Wow...this is inspiring. She begins alone, and then others come to stand with her against the water cannons, and then more, until they all are holding each other up. This video is a sermon. https://t.co/huAep7NVZI

— Anne Robertson (@RevAnneR) March 8, 2023

The Rev. Anne Robertson, whose tweet this is, has served for decades as a United Methodist pastor. I don't know if she knows more about the intricacies of the situation in this Georgia which straddles Europe and Asia in the Caucasus region than I do. For me that's very little. Americans aren't much good at knowing about faraway places.

But like her, I want to recognize courage and collective action where I see it.
The Guardian explains the protests:

Police in the former Soviet state of Georgia have used water cannon and teargas in an attempt to disperse thousands of people who rallied on Tuesday night after parliament gave its initial backing to a draft law on “foreign agents” which critics say represents an authoritarian shift.

... The law, backed by the ruling Dream party, would require any organisations receiving more than 20% of their funding from overseas to register as “foreign agents”, or face substantial fines.

Critics have said it is reminiscent of a 2012 law in Russia that has since been used to crack down on dissent.

In too many countries, including also Hungary, Poland, and Nicaragua, which preserve ostensibly democratic elections, these state efforts to eliminate international support for a wider international  culture, often feminist, are a step toward authoritarian capture. So Georgians wave the European Union flag, though Europe is unlikely to want to bring Georgia in any time soon.
This law in Georgia is widely contested.

Georgia’s president, Salome Zourabichvili, has said she intends to veto the law if it crosses her desk but the parliament could override her veto. She expressed solidarity with the protesters on Tuesday.

The struggle for more freedom never ends.

A Georgia Senator

He not only won. He seems to embody very decent threads from among the country's traditions. A majority of us still seem to have a yen for decency when it is on offer. How to enlarge that strain in our national cacaphony?

Defiant voters

Charles Blow shares what voting felt like in Georgia when he cast his ballot in the run-off election between brain damaged Trumper Hershel Walker and U.S. Senator Rev. Rafael Warnock. Those of us who live in states that make it is easy to vote should be thankful for what we've won.

This is my second election cycle in Georgia, but I still can’t get used to the wait times to vote. It’s a voter suppression tactic in and of itself. It’s a poll tax paid in time. ... I lived more than 25 years in New York, where I took for granted that voting was a casual affair. 

... as I waited, something else occurred to me: Voter suppression is one of the surest cures for apathy. Nothing makes you value a thing like someone trying to steal it from you.
The line, and all the people patiently waiting in it, is a symbol of resilience and perseverance. It is a reminder that people will work hard to overcome obstacles to accomplish things they deem essential.

... These waits can disproportionately affect nonwhite voters. According to a report by Georgia Public Broadcasting and ProPublica before Election Day in 2020, a shrinking number of polling places “has primarily caused long lines in nonwhite neighborhoods where voter registration has surged and more residents cast ballots in person on Election Day.”

According to the report, the nine metro Atlanta counties “have nearly half of the state’s active voters but only 38 percent of the polling places.”

... People who defend voter suppression point to [high turnout] numbers as proof that their critics are simply being hyperbolic and creating an issue where none exists. But that is the opposite of the truth as far as I can see it. From my perspective, voters are simply responding with defiance to the efforts to suppress.

... I have nothing but disdain for the efforts to suppress the vote in my new home state, but I have nothing but admiration for the voters’ determination not to be suppressed.

Democracy is being saved by sheer force of will, by people climbing a hill that should never have been put in front of them.

My friends who worked with UniteHERE in Reno are now on the ground along with so many others, encouraging Warnock supporters to defy a system that wants to shut them out. We'll find out on Tuesday night whether defiant citizens can again prevail.

What Georgians are seeing

Whoever makes Senator Rafael Warnock's election ads has a wonderful sense of humor -- and smart tactical sense.

Last cycle, Warnock proclaimed how much he loves puppies.

This time around he has to run against Georgia's beloved football hero, Hershel Walker. For fans of the Georgia Bulldogs, the Heisman-winning running back is close to a demi-god. But the Trump-endorsed GOP pick has NO qualifications to be a U.S. Senator. He's a serial domestic abuser whose ex-wife has charged he choked her. He has struggled with a mental health diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. Speaking about gun violence, he's downright incoherent. 

Warnock goes straight at Walker's strength in this ad, bravely making fun of himself on Walker's athletic turf. Warnock insists he is the Senator the people of the state need, one who is representing Georgians. 

It's a strong ad and Warnock is a fine comedic performer.

2022 Elections: Senate contests Democrats should and must win

In many states, Republican gerrymanders make it hard for Democrats to win a fair share in state legislatures. For example, Democrats, including Governor Tony Evers in 2018 and Joe Biden in 2020, won the majority of all Wisconsin votes. But the state legislature is completely controlled by Republicans. Their dominance is bolstered by geographical sorting, rural and urban, as well as gerrymandering. In some states where this pattern prevails, Democrats can be quite competitive statewide and so have opportunities to win or hold onto U.S. Senate races. 

Here's a run down of the most competitive states.

• Georgia: Incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, elected to a short term in 2020, will be running against Trump-cult adherent and Georgia football hero Herschel Walker. Since Walker is pretty close to certifiably nuts, violent, the acknowledged father of four children by four different women whose paternity he at first concealed, and a serial fabricator, this shouldn't be much of a contest. But that assumption disregards the heft of college football in the Peach State. Warnock has been a strong voice for voting rights and for the people of Georgia.

• Pennsylvania: This open Senate seat attracted a wild cast of characters in both party's primaries. TV-doctor Mehmet Oz won the Trump endorsement and squeaked through for the GOPers. Apparently he actually lives in a mansion in New Jersey which may not go down well with Pennsylvania voters. John Fetterman, the Democratic Lieutenant Governor, is a 6'7", tattooed, shorts wearing, giant straight shooter, a bit of a breath of fresh air in the staid political class. Let's hope he can overcome some health challenges.

• Wisconsin: Republican Ron Johnson, the Senate's dumbest anti-vaxxer and an apparent Trump co-conspirator who tried to prevent the 2020 transfer of power to Joe Biden, is up for re-election. If Dems were not so well organized, as the sitting Senator, he'd probably be a shoo-in; the primary for the Dems is late, August 9 and the winner may have a shot in a state usually quite evenly divided.

• Arizona: Incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly will face off against one of several Republicans to be chosen on August 2. The leader among them, a man who needs another vowel, sitting Attorney General Mark Brnovich, figured out his own advancement meant he had to support Donald Trump's Big Lie against his own Republican election officials in this battleground state. Trump has endorsed Blake Masters, a hard right libertarian and tech-bro Peter Thiel protege, who wants to privatize Social Security.

• Nevada: Incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez-Masto is running for a second term. Her opponent is Adam Laxalt -- whose own family considers him an unworthy usurper of a proud Nevada name -- a far right wingnut and failed governor candidate. Not going to be easy for Cortez-Masto though; the Democratic registration advantage in the state is declining.

• North Carolina: This open seat is an attractive long shot prize for Democrats as their nominee for the state's other Senate seat only lost by 1.8 percent in 2020 while Trump won the state. The sitting governor is a reasonably popular Democrat, so Dems see a chance. Democrat Cherri Beasley, a former judge of the state Supreme Court, is running against Republican Ted Budd, a Congressman who doubles as a gun range owner. Early polls give Beasley a chance to pull this one out.

• I'll be watching also New Hampshire, Ohio and Missouri where the vagaries of electoral contests might shake up Senate prospects -- though probably not, as party polarization is such a strong force.

2022 elections: governor contests that Dems need to win

Republicans are pushing hard to win races for governor this year in states where support for the two parties hangs on a few votes. And Democrats are doing everything they can to win, block, or hold governor's offices in the same states. These states deserve governors who give a damn about the well-being of their residents -- Democrats usually care more for that work. But furthermore, who holds these offices will matter in 2024 if there is another close national election and GOPers are running around screaming that the vote was "stolen." We're seeing all too much of what that can be like. A Democratic governor can help shut down a lot of bullshit.

So here's a rundown of some of the most critical governor races in 2022.

Arizona: Donald Trump has a favorite in the August 2 primary: GOPer Kari Lake, a Phoenix TV anchor. Lake is leading in the primary polls. She has advocated jailing Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, her opponent in the governor's race, so as to overturn the 2020 vote count. 

“Frankly, I think she should be locked up,” Lake told the crowd in Cave Creek, which responded by starting a Trumpian chant of, “Lock her up!”

Her campaign could not explain what crime she's charging Hobbes with. Lake asserts that, if she had been governor, she would not have certified Joe Biden's 2020 Arizona victory.

Pennsylvania: Republicans have nominated one of the most looney-tunes characters around in the Keystone State. According to the Washington Post, Doug Mastriano is an insurrectionist who has been subpoenaed by the January 6 investigation. There's video showing him crossing Capital police lines, though what else he did inside is not known.

He’s a first-term state senator who was relatively unknown — until Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, in large part by narrowly losing Pennsylvania to Joe Biden. ... [He] rose to prominence in the aftermath of the 2020 election by falsely claiming Trump won the state. Mastriano also helped commission an unauthorized audit of voting machines in a rural county ...

The Democratic Party nominee for Governor is the state’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro. The winner will get to name Pennsylvania's secretary of state, the official who oversees elections.

Michigan: Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer has been a stalwart supporter of the rule of law against right wing mob pressure. Dogged by pushback against public health rules and mask mandates, she was even the intended target of a militia plot, according to the FBI. Two conspirators convinced a jury that they were just being blowhards (seems likely a role they know well); two more are awaiting a second trial.

Well known Republicans aspiring to run against her made a mess of their campaigns, hiring paid signature collectors who made up false voters on their papers. So their names will not appear on the August 2 primary list which now consists of a smaller field of also-rans.

GOP hopefuls who qualified for the Aug. 2 primary ballot include a conservative media personality, two COVID-19 lockdown protesters, a pastor and a wealthy businessman. 

None has held an elected office before but are seeking to bring a fresh perspective to Lansing and unseat Whitmer, who has built up a big campaign war chest as she seeks re-election to a second term.

Let's hope Whitmer can overcome whoever comes out of this odd scrum.

Wisconsin: The Republican frontrunner in the August 9 primary was former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch who fully supported Trump’s recount requests based on baseless claims of election fraud in 2020. That wasn't good enough for Trump; he liked construction executive Tim Michels better. He dropped an endorsement in his inimitable style. Here's why Trump liked Michels:

"Wisconsin needs a Governor who will Stop Inflation, Uphold the Rule of Law, strengthen our Borders (we had the strongest borders in history just two years ago, now we have the weakest!) and End the well-documented Fraud in our Elections," read a written statement from Trump ... "Tim Michels is the best candidate to deliver meaningful solutions to these problems, and he will produce jobs like no one else can even imagine."

The Democratic incumbent governor of Wisconsin is Tony Evers. Dems are aiming to re-elect Evers to preserve some honesty and sanity in state government.

Nevada: Democrat Steve Sisolak was elected governor in 2018 and has done a creditable job during a pandemic that crashed the state's vital hotel, casino, and restaurant industries. For months, Nevada had some of the nation's worst unemployment.

Trump offered a late endorsement to Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo who prevailed in the Republican primary held June 14. The former president wanted a high profile win by backing the guy who was already leading the GOP field. The race between Sisolak and Lombardo is expected to be close.

Georgia: Democrat Stacey Abrams is taking on incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp in a re-run of their 2018 contest. This will be a very tough race, possibly turning on some of the restrictive election laws Kemp has signed. In case you have forgotten, Georgia is the state where GOPers made it illegal to give out water to people waiting in line to vote.

There's nothing easy about any of these contests.

Secretaries of State: a cascade of dangerous Republican crackpots

In most states, an elected Secretary of State administers elections; it's a lot of work and relatively low profile. For example, here in California, that's incumbent Shirley Weber who is running to stay in the job in November.

This year, in states that are expected to be battlegrounds between Dems and GOPers, some mighty sketchy kooks are trying to implant themselves in the system in anticipation of their Orange God/King (h/t Charlie Sykes) running in 2024. It's not pretty and it's dangerous. (Not all the members of this gallery of rogues have yet won their primaries, but the outlook is clear.)

Here's a rundown:

Arizona: The presumptive Republican nominee (primary August 2) is Mark Finchem. His website (I'm not linking to these nutjobs) declares:

Since my very first election, I knew something was very wrong with our elections process. Major defects such as chain-of-custody of ballots, hidden contributions, and expensive unnecessary technology have contributed to the decay of public confidence in our elections. Then on November 3rd, 2020, the unthinkable happened: Americans witnessed real-time reallocation of votes from one candidate to another, broadcast on national television.

Finchem is not only a QAnon believer, he was present at the January 6 Capitol insurrection. It's not clear whether he was among the mob breaching the building. He's Trump-endorsed, naturally.

Two normie Democrats, Reginald Bolding and Adrian Fontes, are running to oppose Finchem in the primary.

Michigan: The incumbent Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, is seeking reelection despite death threats when Biden prevailed in 2020. Kristina Karamo is the presumptive Republican nominee.

... the Oak Park Republican skyrocketed to fame in conservative circles after claiming she witnessed fraud at Detroit’s absentee counting board while working as a poll challenger in November 2020. ... Karamo referred to herself as an “anti-vaxxer,” opposed the teachings of evolution in schools, likened abortion to human sacrifice and said LGBT people and those who have sex outside of marriage “violate God's creative design” and are indicative of a culture of “sexual brokenness.”

Michigan GOPers and the Donald think she's their kind of gal.

Nevada: Silver State Republicans joined the Secretary of State clown car in the June primary, nominating Jim Marchant for the office. The Nevada Independent reported:

Marchant

Telling Republicans their votes haven’t counted for diddly-squat due to rampant fraud, then asking them to go cast a ballot, seems a bit counterintuitive for a “get out the vote” campaign. And yet, among at least some Republicans, that has been the message during much of the 2022 primaries. In February, Republican candidate for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, told a crowd in Reno that their vote “hasn't counted for decades.”  

“You haven't elected anybody. The people that are in office have been selected. You haven't had a choice,” Marchant said.

Trump likes this guy too. The normie Democrat running for the open office is Cisco Aguilar.

Georgia: Brad Raffensberger, the Republican incumbent Secretary of State, unexpectedly won his May primary to keep to his office over a Trump-endorsed challenger. He withstood Trump's pressure to "find 11,780 votes" to defeat Biden in 2020. Death threats followed. He is favored to keep the job, however a state law since passed removed the position of state election board chair from the Georgia Secretary of State's duties. He no longer has as much power as he did in 2020.

Senator Raphael Warnock and governor candidate Stacey Abrams will have to win indisputably in fall 2022 to overcome the obstacles state Republicans have erected to free and fair voting.

Pennsylvania: They don't have an elected secretary of state to run elections in Pennsylvania. The job is appointed, so the issue of who runs the 2024 election will be determined by who wins the governor's race this fall. State Republicans have nominated a real doozy. Doug Mastriano is another insurrectionist who has been subpoenaed by the January 6 investigation. There's video showing him crossing Capital police lines, though what else he did in not known.

He’s a first-term state senator who was relatively unknown — until Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, in large part by narrowly losing Pennsylvania to Joe Biden. ... [He] rose to prominence in the aftermath of the 2020 election by falsely claiming Trump won the state. Mastriano also helped commission an unauthorized audit of voting machines in a rural county ...

Wisconsin: In this very contested state, elections are administered not by an elected official, but by a bipartisan regulatory agency, the Wisconsin Elections Commission. This supposedly neutral agency has been the location of complicated infighting over false Republican assertions that the 2020 election was fraudulent. UpNorthNews reported on the commission and former Attorney General Bill Barr's recorded testimony to the January 6 commission:

In a video played Monday during the second public hearing of a special congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection, former President Donald Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr laughs and scoffs at claims that cell phone data proves there was voter fraud in Wisconsin in the 2020 election. ... 

[In response to these claims] Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) member Ann Jacobs mentioned [in a meeting] that the drop box at one Milwaukee library is directly below an apartment building—filled with digital pings from cell phones, laptop computers, tablets, and other devices from people not physically using the drop box. 

In February, Assembly Elections Committee Chair Michelle Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) turned the committee’s time over to a presentation from someone convicted of fraud who was claiming numerous irregularities with the state’s voter database. Only a week later did Brandtjen schedule time for WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe and Technology Director Robert Kehoe to refute the baseless claims. 

“Making unverified, fantastical claims without consulting real election officials has the effect of diverting lawmakers and the public from tracking real issues in need of improvement,” Kehoe told the committee. “That could end up causing real harm to Wisconsin elections.”

Wisconsin election administrators will face constant pressure so long as Republicans are making false assertions about voting.

2022 election preview -- because democracy is on the line

The media refer to 2022 as "an election year." In fact, and probably to the detriment of citizen engagement with democracy, every year is an "election year" somewhere and in many places at some level of government. 

This is a federal midterm election year during which we'll vote on all 435 members of the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate, and a slew of state governors. It is also a year in which the candidates of the Irresponsible Party -- a nice label for Big Lie-promoting Republicans, don't you think? -- will be seeking revenge for losses in 2020 and to win power going forward. And the history of midterm elections under a new president says they'll have the wind at their backs.

The purpose of this post is to lay out some context for the contests we're all going to live through, as much for my own understanding as any reader's, though perhaps some might find this useful. So here goes:

Gerrymandering: Because 2020 was divisible by 10 and the Census Bureau somehow completed a plausible count of us all as required by the Constitution, states are reapportioning the districts in which we vote for state reps and Congress. Republicans control all branches of government (state legislatures and governors) in 23 states; Democrats in 15; and others are divided. State laws about reapportionment allow for many variations on how districts are drawn, but who is in power has a lot to do with the results, mostly.

In a general way, the predominance of Republicans in many state governments would promise that Congressional maps would grossly favor Republicans. And in some places (looking at you, Tennessee) they do, so far in the process. And in a few Democratic Party controlled states like Illinois, Dems are shoring up their advantages in Congressional seats. But the best-informed observers including Dave Wasserman at the Cook Report and many others don't see Republicans creating many aggressive gerrymanders. Rather,

... Republicans don’t appear likely to gain a significant number of seats through redistricting. Instead, they’ve taken up a new strategy: make red seats redder.

If this is correct, it should seem familiar to Californians. In 2000, the state legislature approved what amounted to an incumbent protection gerrymander: though Dems predominated, they largely made their own members and sitting Republicans invulnerable to challenge for a decade. Only one Congressional seat (won by Democrat Jerry McNerney in the northern Valley) turned over during the '00s, despite growing Democratic margins among the electorate. The sense they'd been disenfranchised encouraged Californians to adopt our current independent Citizen Redistricting Commission to do the job. (We still get mostly Dem Reps because we are mostly Dems.)

Elections for the House of Representatives: Decades of gerrymandering and voluntary self-sorting by political preference mean that hardly any Congressional races are really competitive. As of today, the Cook Political Report points to a measly total of 13, nationally. Some others may develop because of local circumstances or candidate quality. But unless you live in or to next to one of these competitive districts, your political attention is better paid to other offices. 

Elections for Governor: Though Republicans have ridden decades of smart gerrymandering to control of many state legislatures, in quite a few of these states the electorate statewide is closely divided. These are mostly "battleground" states in presidential years. And electing Democratic governors to four year terms in 2022 will help protect an honest vote count in 2024 if the Reps try again to override the decision of the voters. 

States where elections for governor are critical and where volunteer help and any available cash might be of assistance include:

• Georgia: the inspiring Stacey Abrams will again be on the ballot. This will be very tough, but never count that brilliant organizer out. 

• Nevada: Incumbent Democrat Steve Sisolak will be seeking another term. 

• Pennsylvania: Attorney General Josh Shapiro is the consensus Democratic candidate. A slew of Reps are running in a primary on May 17.

• Wisconsin: Incumbent Democrat Tony Evers will face whoever wins the Republican primary on August 9. There are at least two well-funded contenders, both Trumpy. Wisconsin has the best organized Democratic Party in the country. 

• Michigan: Incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer will try to hold on for another term. A Black Detroit police chief, Jame Craig, is one of the leading Republican contenders; these will face off on August 2. 

• Arizona: the governor's office is open as the incumbent Republican is termed out. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs probably leads the Democratic aspirants, while Republicans have a slew of choices including QAnon and Trump-loving news anchor Keri Lake. The primary is August 2. 

• Another governor's race I'm watching: in Maine, Trumpish former governor Paul LePage wants to take back the job from incumbent Democrat Janet Mills.

Then there are the Senators. Again, Democrats are quite competitive statewide in places where Republican gerrymanders keep them out of power in the state legislatures.

• Georgia: Incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock looks to be taking on Trump-cult adherent and Georgia football hero Herschel Walker. Since Walker is pretty close to certifiably nuts, this shouldn't be much of a contest, but that assumption disregards the heft of college football in the Peach State.

• Nevada: Incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto will seek a second term. Her likely opponent Adam Laxalt -- who his family considers him an unworthy usurper of a proud Nevada name -- is a far right wingnut and failed governor candidate. Not going to be easy for Masto though; the Democratic registration advantage in the state is declining.

• Pennsylvania: This open Senate seat has attracted a wild cast of characters in both parties, including the 6'7" tattooed Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman and, among the Reps, TV-doctor Mehmet Oz. Fortunately the primary is in May, so we'll get a look at the real shape of the contest here fairly early in the year.

• Wisconsin: The Senate's dumbest anti-vaxxer, incumbent Republican Ron Johnson, is up for re-election. If Dems were not so well organized, as the sitting Senator, he'd probably be a shoo-in; the primary for the Dems is late, August 9.

• Arizona: Incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Kelly will face off against one of several Republicans to be chosen in August. The leader among them, a man who needs another vowel, sitting Attorney General Mark Brnovich, figured out his own advancement meant he had to support Donald Trump's Big Lie against his own Republican election officials in this battleground state.

• North Carolina: This open seat will be an attractive prize for Democrats as their nominee for the state's other Senate seat only lost by 1.8 percent in 2020 while Trump won the state. The sitting governor is a reasonably popular Democrat, so Dems see a chance. There's a wide field of Dem and Rep candidates running in a June 7 primary (date subject to all sorts of litigation over House seat boundaries; North Carolina is Republican Congressional gerrymander ground zero.)

• I'll be watching also New Hampshire, Ohio and Missouri where the vagaries of electoral contests might shake up Senate prospects -- though probably not, as party polarization is such a strong force.

Whew!!! Gonna be a tough year -- and as much Democratic Party success as can be won matters desperately to the preservation of some remnant of U.S. democracy.

Those of us who care need to pick the most plausible contests and be ready to donate and work.

Finally, if figuring all this out is just too much, and you have some cash, consider supporting Swing Left's national fund which prioritizes smartly for us.

Capital weighing in

Ever since the misbegotten 2016 presidential election, I've been haunted by what the graphic above shows. Somehow Donald Trump was able to win despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won the counties which provide 64 percent of the nation's GDP -- a rough measure of economic strength.

The 2020 election pattern was similar: Joe Biden won a few more counties -- counties which provide 66 percent of GDP. Democrats win where the country's wealth comes from. GOPers win all those expanses of land in economically hurting places. Only the Electoral College makes it close.

Now I'm a good loosely left-ish progressive, so I tend to expect that corporate capital gets what it wants, most of the time. I'm not happy about that, but I observe its truth. So I find the electoral pattern a little puzzling. Would capital long be content to be ruled by a party to hails from places that are failing?

Turns out, of course, the GOPers offer lots of goodies to corporate capital, in particular weak regulation and low taxes. And corporations usually donate to both parties, making sure they keep a foot in both camps.

But capital that's winning is far more forward looking than most individual politicians. It has to be, to avoid being a casualty of capitalism's unceasing waves of creative destruction. And hanging in with the parts of the country that are failing economically is backward looking.

There are all sorts of specific circumstances that stand out in the current tiff between Mitch McConnell and such behemoths as Coke and Delta Airlines and Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Major League Baseball. Georgia's voter suppression law is thoroughly rancid and the proposed Texas voting restrictions might turn out to be even worse.

But behind it all, is the reality that business is going to go where the profits are. And that's where the money and the people are. 

There are wedge opportunities for Democrats here. At the very least, we ought to be able to show that it might profit capital to make something like 64 percent of its investment in politicians on the forward looking side. That's both where the votes and the economic opportunity are located. The squishy, but widespread, corporate recoil from outright destruction of democratic rights is a good omen. Corporate capital is showing which way it thinks the wind is blowing.

San Francisco's big dick does right by voting rights

Wherever you go in this city, the still-novel Salesforce Tower looms.

Salesforce, the data/software company has an important presence in Atlanta. It has announced unequivocal support for inclusive voting rights, against the Republican push for suppression in Georgia, according to Judd Legum. 

The news came by tweet: 

A person’s right to cast their ballot is the foundation of our democracy. Georgia HB 531 would limit trustworthy, safe & equal access to voting by restricting early voting & eliminating provisional ballots. That’s why Salesforce opposes HB 531 as it stands.

On flipping states toward democracy

 

The corporate campaign to push back against Republican voter suppression legislation is on in Georgia. This billboard targeting one of Atlanta's biggest businesses was paid for by the New Georgia Project which is leading the resistance to GOPer efforts to crush democracy when they don't like the results of people voting. The sort of ant-democratic voting rules they are pushing are only a little less violent than the 1/6 assault on the Capitol. I mean, outlawing giving out water to people waiting in long lines to vote? 

In a recent interview with the Times' Kara Swisher, Georgia voting rights leader Stacey Abrams explained the strategic insight which led to the creation of the New Georgia Project. All of us concerned with organizing ourselves for more effective progressive politics can learn from her.

I am part of a coalition of organizations. I would say I had a bit of a lead in the process in that I helped to secure tens of millions of dollars for the state of Georgia. I have been a clarion demanding attention for the state for about a decade. I helped build infrastructure and invest in organizations. I mean, one thing that Lauren [Groh-Wargo, Abrams' political director/side-kick] and I are always very intentional about is when we raise money, we share our resources. So when we did the New Georgia Project back in 2014, we took a quarter of a million dollars and made sure we gave it to other organizations that weren’t going to have access to the resources we did. 

In 2020 and 2021, we shelled out more than $25 million to other organizations. And so my posture is that, yes, I had a leadership role in this, and in a lot of ways became sort of the avatar for what happened. But what I always want people to remember is that it took a coalition of organizations more than a decade to get us here.

Swisher: So what did you learn from Georgia 2020 that you think would help turn states blue? How do you scale? 

Abrams: There’s scaling, and then there’s replication. Sometimes you scale an organization so that the organization just expands its service map. 

And sometimes you replicate it in the franchise system. And instead, you say here are the benchmarks, here are the metrics, and here are the resources you need, but then you allow each franchisee to adapt to where they are. Changing a state is a franchise model. It’s not a scaling model. 

And our responsibility, my responsibility is to make certain that any franchisee of democracy, plus any franchisees of Democratic transformation, big D, that they have the building blocks they need as a franchise would. But my intention is not the scaling notion. That is, I should not be making the decisions —

She's talking about creating and aiding organizations that are rooted in their places and can, with investment of sweat and money, turn their places in a progressive direction.

Abrams: ... you got to figure out what your opportunities are where you are. Then the building blocks are the same. The building blocks are, you’ve got to build political power within your actual party. Your party has to be effective. You have to understand what the party is and what the party isn’t. You have to have political leaders that are willing to take risks and work with other political leaders, not worrying about who gets the credit. 

You’ve got to raise absurd amounts of money, but that money can be raised. And part of the conversation we’re having is with donors that they need to invest in places and understand that investment cannot be a one-off, and they cannot only show up during elections. 

You’ve got to work with the grassroots organizations and recognize that they don’t have to have the exact same methodology that you have. But they have to have a combined ethos and an intentionality of working together. And then you have to wash, rinse, repeat, and evaluate what you did that worked and what you did that didn’t work and whose fault it was.

She has proved she knows whereof she speaks.

Don't let the sponsors off the hook

Georgians struggling to preserve their access to the ballot against a deluge of state voter suppression bills know where Republican politicians' weak spots are: among their corporate funders. 

Here's Nsé Ufot from the New Georgia Project Action Fund:

Some of the country’s biggest corporations are getting away with a stunning level of deception in Georgia. 

Companies like Coca-Cola, Delta, UPS, and AT&T have made a public show of supporting voting rights, and the rights of Black voters in particular. With splashy ads and Black History Month campaigns, they’ve tried to curry favor with customers by trading on the history of the Civil Rights Movement and portraying themselves as allies of its modern-day equivalent. 

But behind the scenes, these same corporations have been donating millions of dollars to the politicians who continue to spout racist lies about the 2020 election and who are working feverishly, right now, to roll voting laws back to the Jim Crow era and silence the voices of thousands of Georgia’s voters. 

These companies cannot have it both ways. It’s time for them to take a stand. They either support the freedom to vote or they do not. We will no longer accept empty rhetoric....

In many states where Republican legislators have believed themselves free to roll back civil rights, calling out their corporate ties is a tried and true tactic. Big national corporations often care more about their national brand and "good will" than about retrograde local politicians. 

In Georgia in 2016, LGBT activists fought off a discriminatory anti-gay bill with help from the Walt Disney Co., Marvel Studios, AMC, and Viacom. Georgia's governor decided he didn't want to face a boycott by dozens of pop culture stars.

Arizona, which also flipped from GOPer to Democratic in the 2020 presidential election, is another target for voter suppression by a Republican legislature. Arizona also has experience with corporate push back against right wing state policies. In the early 1990s, this then very conservative state refused to recognize the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday -- and the NFL removed a Super Bowl from Phoenix. In 2014, American Airlines and Marriott hotels joined the opposition to a bill allow discrimination against gays.

This year, Popular Information reports that major Arizona political donors including Union Pacific and Prudential Financial have pushed back against the current restrictive bills. Others have not taken a pro-inclusive voting stance, including Pinnacle West (the Phoenix area electric power provider), Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Farmers Insurance.  

Campaigns to expose corporate sponsors of right wing power grabs have a good track record.

And, of course, Democrats in Congress must pass the For the People Act to stop most all these anti-democratic shenanigans.

Black people save the country -- again

The Senate elections in Georgia -- the two new Democrats that the Peach State is sending to DC to break the Republican legislative strangehold -- mean, once again, we can hope for sane governance from the Feds. Congrats to "Rev. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff" as I've been naming them to voters on phones for a month.

It was a tremendous privilege to work with UniteHERE on this campaign, while knowing that every progressive force and person in the country was pulling hard for a Democratic and small "d" democratic result. And the people of Georgia have delivered, even if it isn't quite official at the moment of this writing.

The insightful reporter Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out a meaning of this result during a FiveThirtyEight live blog of the election. He wrote:

Democrats spent a lot of time the last four years obsessing about states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and wooing white voters without college degrees in particular. And while it’s not clear that Biden did that much better than Hillary Clinton with white voters without college degrees, he did win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But Georgia is a different ball game, in part because of its big Black population. And notably, the Democrats ran a campaign for these Senate seats that reflected the large Black electorate in the state:

1. They embraced the approach of Stacey Abrams, a Black woman, of really trying to boost turnout among voters of color, younger voters and those in the Atlanta area.
2. They embraced two candidates with lots of ties to Atlanta’s Black community. In Warnock, the pastor of the church MLK and his father ran, but also in Ossoff, who worked for two Atlanta Black congressmen, the late John Lewis and Hank Johnson.
3.  And lastly, they embraced a kind of social justice message. Ossoff and Warnock talked a lot about voting rights and other “Black” issues on the campaign trail.

If Democrats win one or both of these races, I would expect them to run similar campaigns to this in other states in the South with large Black populations.

Southerners have been telling the rest of us for years that there's a hopeful promise in their region arising from the Black history of pain, of enslavement, and of struggle. If we're to preserve and extend freedom, Black southerners will be among our leaders. Let us continue ...

The stakes in Georgia

Today Georgians vote in the two U.S. Senate elections which will determine whether Republicans or Democrats control that legislative body. If the Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff prevail, our new President will have a chance of getting something done. If the GOPer incumbents win, expect stonewalling of everything, including funds to vaccinate against the coronavirus and to assist economic recovery.

Those are the national implications of this election. But this election also has huge stakes for democracy within Georgia. The New Georgia Project's Nsé Ufot explained what the election means for Georgians in the Atlanta Voice:

For too many years, Georgia’s conservative leaders have gotten used to cherry picking their voters. Instead of trying to appeal to a wider swath of voters, they have worked to deny voting rights to those Georgians whom they don’t care to represent, especially Black people. Thanks to extensive voter suppression tactics — from purging voters from the rolls, to withholding voter registrations under an “exact match” law, to shutting down precincts – these officials have worked, too often successfully, to suppress our votes.

... Even as more than 10,000 Georgians have lost their lives to COVID-19, Georgia Republicans are already working to walk back the measures taken to make voting safer in the face of the pandemic, recently unveiling a plan to restrict vote-by-mail and roll back the election laws that facilitated record-high turnout in the state in November. This move comes on the heels of a decision made by election officials in Cobb County to cut early voting locations by half ahead of the Georgia runoffs, which will disproportionately affect voters of color. 

... These suppression efforts are a response to the shifting power dynamics in Georgia: our representatives are afraid of our power and want to curtail it. Because of a multiracial coalition of Black, Brown, Gold, and progressive white voters, Georgia went blue in November. You see it in the numbers: our state had more than 6.6 million registered voters in 2016; this year, it reached an all-time high of 7.6 million, with registrations among Black, Latino, and Asian voters booming. 

... The defenders of the status quo have seen what Georgians can do when we all turn out to vote, and that’s why they’re scared.

Over the last month, it's been an education and sometimes a pleasure to phone Georgians about their election. UniteHERE callers have been thanked and blessed -- a lot.  Let's hope Georgians who have already voted, and those who turn out today, succeed in building a new, more inclusive future, for everyone, in their state. Just as in Washington, democracy itself is on the ballot in Georgia.

Why are Jenkins and other UniteHERE members working so hard in Georgia?

Let him tell you himself. Jenkins Kolongbo is knocking on doors in Georgia for U.S. Senate candidates Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Offoff. UniteHERE members expect to hit 1,000,000 doors before the polls close tomorrow.

Hundreds of us are backing up Jenkins and the Georgia team on the phones from all over the country. You still have one more day to join us. Sign up for a shift and join us on Tuesday, January 5.

A little more Stacey Abrams wisdom

How did a former Georgia state Senate minority leader and defeated gubernatorial candidate in a red state become a nationally known progressive Democratic star? We know she is one -- but how'd she get there? It wasn't by winning (statewide) elections or by mastery of sound bites in national media. 

Stacey Abrams' prominence started with -- and still largely rests upon -- her service as an evangelist for smart grassroots organizing as a route to political power within our quasi-democratic system.

This month, thousands of Democrats are trying to apply the lessons that she and her extended network -- Fair Fight, the New Georgia Project, and many local groups -- have perfected over a decade.

A while back Abrams gave the incomparable feminist journalist Rebecca Traister an interview full of organizing tips derived from her Georgia work, a few of which I want to share here. Says Abrams:

Having volunteers is great, but having experienced volunteers is vital. So when someone learns how to door-knock, when someone learns how to organize and get other people to work with them, that is gold. When campaigns are intentional about building that muscle memory in places where it hasn’t existed before or worse, where it’s atrophied, that changes the outcome. What [Atlanta Congressional candidate] Jon Ossoff did in 2017 by investing in communities that had not been contacted in previous elections, what I did in 2018, absolutely helped support what [Atlanta Congressional candidate] Lucy McBath was doing in the Sixth in 2018. It’s one of the reasons she had an even easier time this cycle of winning. Because you’re building capacity among voters who become more engaged.

Jon contacted this whole group of voters called the unlisted — people who don’t vote, so they really get pushed outside of any communication about politics writ large. But when you go to them and say, “We think you matter,” that changes the dynamic. It doesn’t guarantee a voter, but it guarantees an eyeball. Those people got contacted by Jon’s campaign, and by my campaign, and then again in 2020. So we’re growing new voters: low-propensity voters who may move from low propensity or no voting into moderate propensity, or maybe we create a super-voter.

... It’s important that we understand that voter suppression being stopped is why they are so mad. Republicans had a plan for stopping voters from getting to the polls. We beat them in multiple states and flipped the outcome. The margins are small because the outcome can be undone very quickly.

... we have to invest in people who understand the places where they live. I understand Georgia, but I only understand Georgia because I worked with Georgians who were here before I got here and who will be here after I’m dead. There is absolutely a necessity to build in place.

Thanks to all this organizing work that has gone before, two Democratic candidates have a chance to win Senate seats on January 5 -- and the whole national Democratic organizing cohort is on the ground and on the phones to get it done. Thanks Stacey!

All out for the Georgia Senate races

Stacey Abrams rallied over 700 UniteHERE canvassers and remote phonebankers this morning over zoom.

"You are going to knock on one million doors! If you have to, irritate the dickens out of the people you meet. Ask them what they want and let them know we can get it done. We turned Georgia blue and we can do it one more time."

Walking door to door this time of year is cold work.

Canvassers and phone callers alike are learning about Georgia.

Walkers on the ground are out from dawn to dusk. We know -- if we want more coronavirus help from the federal government, if we want health care for everyone, if we want a government that respects workers and democracy -- we have to get this done.