A career foreign service officer, Bridget Brink served as US ambassador to Ukraine under Biden. Now she's running for Congress in her home state of Michigan. It seems possible that having been witness up close to a genuinely existential struggle leaves this observer with "no fucks to give" in a political race.
Over images from the Russian assault on Ukraine, Brink declares: "Appeasing a dictator will never achieve a lasting peace..."
The House district is competitive. There will be other Democratic contestants. I have no idea whether this approach will "work" for Brink, but I find it refreshing.
• • •
As we watch helplessly while Donald Trump playacts the strongman in the most volatile arena in today's world, it doesn't hurt to be reminded of what war, even a "small" war, looks like.
I was going to take a day off from the blog, but instead I'll offer this from the Sierra Club.
I grew up swimming in the Niagara River which runs between the Great Lakes of Erie and Ontario. It was not a particularly pleasant environment. Paying attention to what else was in the river was a necessity. If you didn't keep your head up, you could find yourself stuck in great floating masses of dead river grasses and bumping against corpse after fish corpse floating down river belly up. All this death was the evidence of Lake Erie "dying" upstream, poisoned by industrial pollution and fertilizer run off.
But I carry in my body the awareness that we can kill these vast bodies of water. The video explores the struggle to save the more inland lakes of Huron and Michigan from further contamination by a 70 year old, vulnerable pipeline. A spill here could contaminate 20 percent of the earth's fresh water. We have to get off our addiction to gas and oil. And we are well on the way to technology that can replace fossil fuels.
The progressive Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan has revoked the easement for the pipeline through the Straits of Mackinac and ordered it decommissioned. The oil companies hope they can get Joe Biden to overturn her order. The people of Michigan's Upper Peninsula struggle for their water and their way of life.
The election of an abortion rights-defending state judge in Wisconsin yesterday marks another step in Democrats reclaiming majority power in the states of the upper Midwest.
Citizens of Wisconsin have proved repeatedly that in statewide elections they will vote for Democrats they find attractive. The state legislature remains rigged by a Republican gerrymander: Dems get over 50 percent of the state vote, but GOPers occupy almost two thirds of the seats thanks to uncompetitive district lines. Next up for Wisconsin: re-electing Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin in 2024.
Michigan did Wisconsin one better: because it was possible put a citizen referendum on redistricting on the ballot and win it, gerrymandered districts were redrawn to be more fair. Democrats not only elected a powerful majority in the state legislature, but also an energetic, all-women, team to statewide offices. In 2024, Michiganders will fill an open U.S. Senate seat -- it's early but the likely Democratic nominee looks to be another woman.
Meanwhile, Dems shored up majority power in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Illinois over the last two years.
Might Ohio be next? Looks awfully hard, but pro-choice Ohioans are working to put a reproductive rights referendum on the ballot. It remains to be seen whether they'll be able to navigate a legal minefield laid out by their opponents. Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom need all the help they can get.
Note to the Democratic Party: struggling for abortion rights is a political winner. Get with it!
Here's an interesting discussion of why Michigan and Ohio, states which might seem similar, have diverged politically since 2016. In that year, both voted for Donald Trump. By 2022, Michigan elected Democrats to state offices across the board, while Ohio elected Republicans to the U.S. Senate and statewide. The latter is now considered a solid "red state," while Michigan looks solidly "blue."
These are apparently demographically similar places, with only small differences:
Michigan and Ohio have similar white populations, 78% and 80%, respectively; Black populations, 14% and 12%; bachelor’s degree recipients, both 18%; people over 65, both 17%; median household incomes, both $59,000 in 2020 dollars; and workers belonging to unions, 13% and 12%.
The study's authors go on to discuss whether perhaps different voting laws shape different electorates. Michigan has put in place automatic voter registration through the DMV and election day registration. Ohio makes potential voters sign up a month in advance. Michigan's easier voting laws may make for increased participation.
According to the Michigan secretary of state’s official election results, there were 4.5 million total votes in the gubernatorial election, the highest office contested in 2022. Meanwhile in Ohio, the secretary of state reported 4.2 million total official votes cast for governor. ... The total number of voters in Ohio dropped by 295,466 between 2018 and 2022.
Well - maybe. But I have reservations, based having worked the election in Nevada in 2022. Under a Democratic governor and legislature, both elected in 2018, that state put in place election laws that do everything possible to make voting easy. Every Nevadan got a ballot in the mail, could mail it in or vote it in person as much as two weeks before election day, or register on election day if somehow they'd missed out on the mailing or at the DMV.
And Nevada remained its deeply divided self in 2022, replacing its Democratic governor with a Republican, and re-electing a Democratic U.S. Senator, both by razor thin margins.
So very easy voting in Nevada (easier than in Michigan I think) wasn't enough to shape the partisan outcome.
The authors of the Michigan/Ohio comparison note one considerable discrepancy between but don't discuss it much:
Ohio voters were less likely to reside in a union household – 21% to 27% – and were much more likely to identify as Republicans, 41% to 32%.
Did the labor movement in Michigan get out the vote?
From what I saw in Nevada, it was the massive commitment of the hospitality union -- Culinary/UniteHERE -- to electing the Democrat that saved Senator Catherine Cortez Masto. Union membership in Nevada is not so different than in the other two states, between 11 and 12%. But a determined, high functioning union sector can make a difference in outcomes. And, so far, union membership does keep a lot of Nevadans identifying as Democrats.
Perhaps unions in Ohio, despite their nominal membership, are not doing the work of communicating the advantages of Democratic governance to their people. Or maybe, their members have irrevocably soured on messages from these unions. These study authors conclude that whatever is going on, it may not be irrevocable --"... writing off Ohio as a noncompetitive state may be premature." Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown will be testing this out in 2024.
You may vaguely remember Sarah Huckabee Sanders -- one of Trump's press secretaries who was willing to say that down was up and up was down for the former POTUS. Well she has wandered off to Arkansas (sorry Arkansas, a state with some good people and lovely outdoor resources) and won the Governor's mansion, sort of a hereditary perk since her father once held that job.
Governor Huckabee has just worked with her tame Republican legislature to legalize child labor. Really. Here's how CNN reports the legal change:
Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders
signed a bill into law this week that rolls back a number of child
labor protections across the state, including a measure that had
required employers to obtain work certificates for children under the
age of 16.
“The Governor believes protecting kids is most important, but this
permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the
government for their child to get a job,” Sanders’ spokesperson Alexa
Henning said in a statement. “All child labor laws that actually protect
children still apply and we expect businesses to comply just as they
are required to do now.”
Previously, minors under the age of 16 needed to verify their age
and get the written consent of a parent or guardian before a work
certificate could be issued by the state’s Division of Labor. But H.B. 1410,
known as the Youth Hiring Act of 2023, which passed the Arkansas state
legislature earlier this month, no longer requires youth under the age
of 16 to have that work certificate as a condition of their employment.
If you think child labor is purely a thing of the past, I would suggest reading Educated and think how this might work out in Arkansas.
• • •
Meanwhile, the great state of Michigan where a Democratic legislature has prevailed over a gerrymander (and over indigenous white Christian nationalists who sought to kidnap the Democratic Governor) to do away with a "right to work" law.
Not that long ago, the Michigan Capitol was a laboratory of conservative
policymaking. In 2012, with Republicans holding full control of state
government, legislators passed a right-to-work law that allowed employees in unionized workplaces to opt out of paying union dues or their equivalent. ...
“You’ve got this climate where companies
that you might have been negotiating with for decades now see unions as
weaker,” said Ms. [Lisa] Canada, who until recently served as the political
director of the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights.
“So they go into negotiations with a whole different attitude.”
When
Democrats came to power this year, they quickly pledged to undo
right-to-work. And on Wednesday, workers in union apparel testified in
support of the repeal and filled the balcony of the House chamber as
Democrats invoked their two-seat majority to do what they said was the
will of the people.
So-called "right to work" laws allow some employees in unionized workplaces to free ride on the benefits won by the struggles of their unionized co-workers. They serve the employers' interests by undermining solidarity among co-workers. The bosses love that.
Michigan is demonstrating that, as my UniteHERE colleagues would say: "When we fight, we win."
Feeling miserable because of the recent US Supreme Court massacre of our personal choices? Skeptical that a log-jammed Congress will come to the rescue for those people who need/want an abortion?
You should know that activists are DOING something in a couple of dicey states.
In Michigan: State Rep. MalloryMcMorrow (@Mallory McMorrow) shouts on Twitter ...
You are NOT powerless. A ballot initiative to get an amendment to the state Constitution on the Nov ballot which would enshrine abortion access and reproductive rights in Michigan has collected the most signatures of any ballot effort IN STATE HISTORY. Volunteers are STILL GOING.
Activists explain that they must submit 429,000 signatures to qualify. So far, they have 800,000 signers and still going.
“We are past the threshold, and we are very confident that we are going to have a large cushion,” [Merissa] Kovach [policy strategist with American Civil Liberties Union] said Tuesday.
... More than 10,000 donors from across the country have given more than $100,000 to the campaign since Friday, Kovach said Tuesday.
The campaign told reporters Friday it had attracted a total 30,000 volunteers to circulate the petition and collect signatures.
“Our volunteers have exploded,” Kovach said.
Winning in November will be a fight -- in Michigan it always is for progressives. But this popular outpouring bodes well.
In Kansas: On August 2, voters will have a chance to vote their desire for legal abortions even sooner. The state constitution currently protects a right to abortion. The forced pregnancy forces thought to overturn this rule in a very low-turnout summer primary election. The Supremes have unleashed outrage that may spoil their plan.
In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court found that the state constitution protects the right to an abortion. Anti-abortion groups wasted little time in strategizing how to nullify that decision.
They settled on a ballot vote to amend the constitution with language making it clear that the constitution protects no such right, and asserting that the state does not require government funding of abortion services. It guarantees the very conservative legislature’s right to pass abortion laws “including, but not limited to, laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstances of necessity to save the life of the mother.”
... The sleepy primary is suddenly being held in a time where abortion is headlining the national conversation. The fresh wave of attention has given opponents of the amendment, many of whom admitted to TPM that they were very worried about the vote before the leak and final decision came out, a dose of renewed hope.
When they knock you down, girls get up and fight some more.
When I'm out and about wearing my Voters Not Politicians sweatshirt, I've had people call out from cars and stop me to applaud the slogan on my back. Since I'm in California, it's not surprising they don't know the campaign it promotes; it comes from Michigan where a remarkable citizen organizing movement has seen years of work come to fruition today.
I'll pass the explanation to VNP Executive Director Nancy Wang:
Five years ago, a grassroots group of concerned citizens set out on a journey to end gerrymandering in Michigan. Today, their vision was made a reality when Michigan’s Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission adopted the first maps in our state’s history drawn using the fair, impartial, and transparent redistricting process that more than 2.5 million voters approved in 2018.
The beginning: This journey started with 33 town halls in 33 days where our all-volunteer team traveled the state to educate people on gerrymandering and explore what a fair process could look like. From there, our policy team crafted a constitutional amendment that took feedback gathered at these town halls and research from other states. What resulted was an amendment, tailored to Michigan, that put redistricting in the hands of voters - not politicians.
During these town hall meetings, VNP also began recruiting what became a 6,500 person volunteer group of citizens who joined together with one goal in mind: to end gerrymandering in Michigan.
The petitions: On August 17, 2017, our people-powered movement launched one of the largest all-volunteer signature collection efforts in Michigan history. Thousands of volunteers joined the effort and collected signatures in every single one of Michigan’s 83 counties.
On December 18, 2017, VNP turned in more than 425,000 petition signatures to put our initiative on the 2018 ballot. After winning a series of legal challenges, the initiative was officially added to the ballot as Proposal 2.
“Yes on 2” Our massive volunteer group hit the ground running to campaign for Proposal 2. Thousands of volunteers knocked on doors all summer long asking their neighbors to vote “Yes on 2.” ... On November 6, 2018, 61% of Michigan voters passed the Proposal 2 amendment and made fair, impartial, and transparent redistricting part of Michigan’s constitution.
Shaping Michigan’s Future: The grassroots organization immediately reengaged volunteers across the state in a massive effort to educate voters about the new redistricting process. Through workshops, digital videos, and community outreach, VNP reached a broad audience of Michigan voters — especially those in historically underrepresented communities — with information on the Commission application process.
VNP held more than 300 events and identified more than 12,000 Michigan voters who were interested in applying to serve on the commission. When COVID-19 hit Michigan, VNP quickly moved and held 13 virtual workshops and provided 110 applicants with free, remote notary services.
Our organization did all of this while protecting the amendment in court from political operatives who wanted to change the amendment’s fundamental features.
So are the resulting Congressional maps some kind of pro-Democractic Party gerrymander? Nope. But thousands of Michiganders have made the electoral process their own. That's a huge exercise of engaged citizenship that the country needs more of. The redistricting Commission, which included Dems, independents, and Republicans, managed to pass a new maps by a bi-partisan vote. The Michigan news site MLive reports on the Congressional map:
When the lines drawn following the 2010 census were first put into practice, Michigan’s Congressional delegation was a 9-5 split. In 2018, Democratic candidates flipped two of those seats, bringing the delegation to a 7-7 split.
Based on a partisan fairness analysis from experts contracted by the commission, the Congressional plan is projected to split with seven Democrats and six Republicans representing Michigan in Congress.
Fair state legislature maps, which the Commission also drew, may prove more important than the Congressional map. The disproportion in the legislature was what got people stirred up in the first place.
Being thoroughly partisan and desperate to preserve a Democratic House delegation, I might have preferred a clean, Dem-favorable, gerrymander. But Michigan is a dangerously divided state where the right has too often turned to armed thuggery. If engaged citizens can win at democratizing a usually obscure process issue, they are building a force which our enfeebled civil society needs to endure.
"Look, we shouldn’t have had the election on Tuesday," she said. "It was an untenable decision (on whether to vote), but the people of the state of Wisconsin rose up.
State Republicans thought they'd sewed this one up by forcing voters to either navigate a bureaucratic maze to receive an absentee ballot or venture into hours-long lines to cast an in-person vote at inadequate polling sites. But voters risked their lives to have their say. Notably, in Milwaukee where COVID is mowing down Black citizens, Karofsky ran up a 68-32 percent victory. Her urban and southern margins overwhelmed rural GOP voters. The map of the vote looks a lot like the party distribution of Wisconsin votes before former governor Scott Walker and his merry band of Republican voter suppressors took over the state after 2010. Let's just hope no brave voters pay for this one with their lives!
Next door in Michigan, mid-west voters show how to get it done
Katie Fahey thought there must be something wrong with her state's elections. No matter who won the overall state totals, Republicans always seemed to control the legislature. The 27 year old program coordinator for the Michigan Recycling Center realized the boundaries of their districts had been gerrymandered so the GOPers couldn't lose. So she wrote on Facebook: "I'd like to take on gerrymandering in Michigan. If you're interested in doing this as well, please let me know." Next thing she knew she was leading a citizen group that called itself Voters Not Politicians. After holding 33 local meetings to assess support, they took advantage of Michigan's initiative process to write a law requiring an independent redistricting commission to perform the line-drawing process. Political professionals scoffed. Four thousand volunteers collected over 425,000 (no paid petitioning here!) and put the measure on the ballot for 2018. After court challenges and a tough campaign, the measure prevailed in the November election and so far has withstood repeated Republican-inspired judicial review.
The documentary Slay the Dragon tells the story of Fahey, her associates, the Voters Not Politicians campaign -- and, moreover, how Republican gerrymandering has shaped politics in the upper midwest. Gerrymandering is both simple and brutal, enabling winners to design their own impregnable districts, and also technical, an exercise in big data manipulation and legal fancy footwork. This story makes the process and its grossly undemocratic implications broadly understandable. It offers a remarkable picture of what people feeling a moral imperative can do against powerful, fully funded opponents, including ones wearing judicial robes. One of the elections professionals interviewed here offered a summary which I think applies; when it comes to preserving democracy against greed and the power-hungry,
"We have to be our own saviors."
...
I've been following the Voters Not Politicians effort since December 2017, so there was little in this I didn't know. Yet I found the film intellectually satisfying and emotionally gripping, despite running over an hour and half which seem long for something so full of talking heads. This is a very professional project. It's available on YouTube, Amazon, and other streaming platforms. Highly recommended.
Yesterday an organization that calls itself Voters Not Politicians submitted 430,000+ signatures to Michigan's Secretary of State for an initiative to reform the process through which legislative and Congressional boundaries will be drawn after the 2020 Census. They want an Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission of registered Michigan voters to draw districts using guidelines that ensure fairness, instead of just enshrining the power of whatever partisan legislators happen to be in office when the lines are drawn.
Gerrymandering -- jiggering district lines to get a desired result -- used to be a quite primitive process involving a fair amount of guesswork about which neighborhoods could be counted on to vote in what way. Sure, it often worked, but it was crude. Today election software makes it easy to use histories and the demographic characteristics of voters to lump us into groups whose leanings predict which party and even what sort of candidate will win in any set of boundaries. Just about the only way such gerrymandered districts change their partisan leanings is when people move in and out. Most elections just ratify the status quo rather than reflecting voter opinions.
Though Republicans were widely successful in drawing favorable Congressional districts for themselves in 2010 (because they had just won many state legislative contests), some of what they did was extreme enough so it is being challenged in court -- because effectively a well done gerrymander disenfranchises people whose votes can never count for a winning candidate. Federal courts have intervened repeatedly in North Carolina where gerrymandering reduced the effective power of Black voters. The Supreme Court is considering a Wisconsin case in which Republicans had managed to draw lines that yielded them 60 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly despite winning only 48.6% of the two-party state-wide vote. The outcome of the case is uncertain; courts don't want to get into the job of examining the fairness of district boundaries because judges fear they'd be inundated with hard cases. And unless they can come up with unusually clear standards, that's almost certainly true.
Michigan voters are proposing to take the line drawing away from the politicians.
As a Californian, I've seen this in action. The Congressional lines drawn here after the 2000 census amounted to another kind of gerrymander: an incumbent protection plan. Sitting Congresspeople and legislators avoided a fight by drawing boundaries that tended to keep them in office, regardless of party. This worked fine for the politicians. In 2004, just three of the 53 districts were won with less than a 60 percent majority. Only one Congressional seat changed party during that decade!
Significant numbers of California voters felt disenfranchised, so we passed Prop. 11 in 2008 followed by Prop. 20 in 2010, giving responsibility for reapportionment to a Citizens Redistricting Commission. The result was a significant shakeup among Congressmembers; some members retired after losing their safe districts while quite a few seats became more competitive. Both political parties hate losing their chance to draw their own seats, but we probably have somewhat more competent and attractive politicians among the new crop. So far, this electoral gimmick seems to work for more representative governance.
California currently elects 39 Democrats and 14 Republicans to Congress -- not an unreasonable split given the partisan lean of state voters. Democrats hope to win even more Congressional races in 2018 since seven districts currently held by Republicans voted for Clinton in 2016. Republicans are targeting at least one highly competitive seat they hope to flip. When districts are reasonably fairly drawn, such changes become possible.
Michigan has 14 Congressmembers, currently divided 9 Republican and 5 Democratic. None of the incumbents had less than a 12 percent margin of victory in 2016 -- that is, none of the seats was competitive between the parties. Yet the state as a whole could hardly be more competitive. Donald Trump won Michigan with 47.50 percent of the vote to Clinton's 47.27. It seems very likely that a non-partisan redistricting commission could provide more fairness to the choices that are offered to Michigan voters. Voters Not Politicians collected their initiative signatures with volunteers hardly any support from established political players! This effort has the feel of a movement.
