GOP attempts to sabotage ballot initiatives are mostly failing

Plus: The war on families, new polling, voting rights and more

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.

Greetings from here in New York City, where the mayor is finally under investigation for corruption and the Hawk Tuah girl threw out the first pitch at a Mets game attended by thousands of day camp children. I truly love this city.

Lots to cover tonight, from polls and policy to ballot initiatives and more. Before we get to that, a quick announcement: If people are interested, I will be holding open chats here on Substack during next week’s Democratic National Convention. They will be open to paid subscribers and should be a great time. I’ll explain how to access them in an upcoming email, but it’s pretty easy — you can find Substack’s chat threads right here.

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In November 1977, activists arrived in Houston for a rally organized by conservative leaders and cultural dissidents. The event featured patriotic music, marching, and speeches from right-wing figures like Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist firebrand who led the fight to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. 

The gathering culminated with declarations of defiance: more than 15,000 attendees — whose resentments and paranoias were stoked by distortions and lies — voted to condemn abortion, gay rights, and ratification of the ERA, which would have guaranteed equal rights to all Americans, regardless of gender.

The event ran simultaneously with and in protest of the National Women’s Conference, positioning conservatives as guardians of the traditional values and gender roles that organizers claimed were under attack by the feminist assembly across town. They were hardly subtle in their branding: The Pro-Family Rally was organized and hosted by the National Pro-Family Forum, which aligned with Focus on the Family, launched by fundamentalist preacher James Dobson earlier that year.

The religious right and Republican Party more broadly have positioned themselves as sworn defenders of the American family ever since, warping the political definition of the term into a culture war dog whistle. In reality, even much of the GOP’s renewed “pro-family” agenda, touted by lawmakers like Donald Trump’s running mate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is trained on fracturing the modern American family.

Conservatives have a narrow conception of family, which is outlined in Project 2025: “Married men and women are the ideal natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”

Project 2025 also declares that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”

It’s rare for such clinical-sounding sentences to be so loaded, but these extend a middle finger to a wide array of people and types of families, including single-parent households, families that foster and adopt children, and multi-generational households. The message is especially brutal to LGBTQ+ people, whose basic existence has increasingly flustered ideologues and policymakers on the right. 

According to a new report out of UCLA, there are 2.6 million LGBTQ+ parents currently raising kids under the age of 18. They’re far more likely to adopt children and take in foster kids, which is easier to do when you’re part of a married couple. The Republican platform released in July finally cut out the party’s long-standing opposition to same-sex marriage, perhaps because the Supreme Court is handling it.

Legal experts have raised the red flag over indications that the court’s conservative supermajority is laying the groundwork to eventually — and perhaps sooner than later — overturn Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Red state lawmakers are busy working hard to erase LGBTQ+ families in the classroom with book bans and laws that prohibit discussion of same-sex spouses.

Texas took it even further, as state Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to forcibly take minors receiving gender-affirming care away from their parents. A court eventually stepped in and blocked that policy, no credit to the people who pursued it.

This has been an excerpt from my first story for Courier Newsroom, a network of progressive state and local political news sites. There will be more to come. To read the entire story, click on the link below:

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Numbers confirm the vibes: Vice President Kamala Harris continues to hold small but meaningful polling leads in most major swing states, most recently in a new survey from the Cook Political Report that was published on Wednesday.

The Cook poll finds Harris leading five of seven swing states in both head-to-head matchups with Trump and surveys that include third party candidates. Wisconsin is her strongest state in both iterations of the surveys, with a three-point lead in the head-to-head poll and a five-point lead in the poll that includes RFK Jr. and other third party candidates.

Harris is buoyed by the presence of third party candidates in nearly every state, most significantly in Pennsylvania, where she holds a five-point lead with additional rivals and a one-point lead in the head-to-head matchup with Trump. In Michigan, her lead shrinks from three points in a head-to-head race to two points with third party candidates added to the ballot.

The only swing state that the vice president is losing right now is Nevada, where Trump leads by three points in the head-to-head and five points when third party candidates are included. The two candidates are tied in Georgia, both head-to-head and with third party candidates.

Given how far President Biden was polling behind swing state Democratic Senate candidates, the enormous shift left that’s occurred in those same states since Harris replaced him at the top of the ticket shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise. It simply underscores what people told pollsters in aggregate earlier this year: They hated Donald Trump enough to vote for a generic Democrat, but not quite enough to vote for President Joe Biden again.

Harris’s surge has thus prompted many reporters and observers to compare her to the generic Democrat, and while they don’t mean it in any negative way, I’m not sure it’s all that accurate. The past three weeks have seen her favorable ratings skyrocket, and in the CPR poll, voters endorsed her personal attributes.

Harris’s surge has been fueled by an uptick in support from nearly all major demographics. Minority groups that have consistently voted for Democrats have shifted toward Trump and the GOP over the past few years, a trend that the vice president’s entry into the race has begun to reverse, at least for the moment.

Equis Research, a leading polling and consulting outfit, released a study on Wednesday declaring that “Democrats are back in business” with Hispanic voters. Their most recent poll finds Harris leading Trump 56% to 37% with Hispanic voters in the seven main swing states. That 19-point lead is nearly quadruple the five-point margin that Biden held in June.

Even so, Harris hasn’t quite reached the margin of victory with Hispanic voters that Biden pulled off in 2020, so there’s more work to be done for the vice president’s campaign. Fortunately for Democrats, it seems as if Trump is seriously losing his mind and cannot be corralled by Republicans in any meaningful way.

Whereas he once benefited from the nonstop media attention paid to his every move, to the point that CNN used to broadcast empty podiums in anticipation of his news conferences, Trump’s need for constant attention and the media’s happiness to oblige him has led to a real-time chronicling of his mental unraveling. Today’s installment of this psycho-drama featured a semi-incoherent news conference from the golf course where Trump’s ex-wife is buried for tax purposes. In between complaints, Trump attacked Harris on inflation, which she will address in a major policy speech on Friday.

The vice president will pledge in that speech to make tackling inflation her number one priority in the White House, with a focus on groceries, housing, and health care. Last night, her campaign announced that she would enact the first federal ban on price-gouging, by empowering the FTC to set “clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

Trump called this proposal a form of communism in his press conference today, while making his own detail-free promises to lower the cost of groceries.

Harris will also call for the construction of three million new housing units over her first four years in office, with incentives for developers and first-time homebuyers to goose the market.

Missouri: It’s been a big week for direct democracy in the Show Me State. The headliner was the certification of a constitutional amendment to protect reproductive rights, which will now appear on the November ballot. Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft also gave the green light to a ballot initiative that would raise Missouri’s minimum wage to $15-per-hour by 2026 and institute guaranteed paid sick leave.

Arizona: The same far-right majority that revived the Civil War-era abortion ban earlier this year has struck again. On Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an informational pamphlet sent to voters by the state can use the term “unborn human being” in its description of the abortion rights amendment that will be on the November ballot.

The ruling reinstates the language, drafted by GOP lawmakers, after it had been blocked by a lower court judge. Whether or not it impacts the fate of the amendment in November, it hints at how the Republican-stacked court might rule in a case over fetal personhood.

Idaho: Voters in Idaho are all but guaranteed to weigh in on a constitutional amendment to create a ranked choice voting system, in large part thanks to the impatience of Attorney General Raúl Labrador. On Tuesday, the state Supreme Court court tossed Labrador’s attempt to block the amendment, ruling that he improperly circumvented lower courts.

While celebrating this win, many progressive activists in the state already have one eye trained on the next election cycle. This week, a coalition called Idahoans United for Women and Families officially filed four separate ballot initiatives that would restore reproductive rights in a state with one of the most stringent abortion bans in the country. The group plans on getting public feedback on its various proposals, which permit abortion up until different phases of pregnancy, and then focus signature collection on one of them in hopes of making the 2026 ballot.

Maryland: The Baltimore Baby Bonds saga may not be over quite yet, as the state Supreme Court will review a decision by a lower court judge who tossed it from the ballot last week. The city council and mayor both opposed the initiative, which they argued circumvented their authority.

Oregon: Much like their Democratic brethren in Baltimore, Oregon’s otherwise liberal state leaders are actively opposing a basic income initiative. The initiative would use a corporate surtax to provide $1600 a year to every resident in Oregon, but lawmakers say that it would ultimately would take a $400 million chunk out of the next state budget.

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Ohio: The first year of Ohio’s universal school privatization scam has cost the state nearly $1 billion this year. It’s an enormous increase over last year, in large part due to the state’s decision to give public money to wealthy families that already send their kids to private school.

Oklahoma: More than two dozen Republican lawmakers have requested an investigation into State School Superintendent Ryan Walters, the Christian nationalist who is seeking to impose Bible lessons on students, invited PragerU to redesign the state’s curriculum, and lost federal funding for the state education system because he lost the password to the website. As we’ve previously reported, he also tried to fund the first religious charter school in the country, but was smacked down by the state Supreme Court. The guy is a mess.

Georgia: The Board of Elections in Cobb County just voted to charge people a fee to challenge voter registrations, part of an effort to curb the inane mass challenges that Republicans have been lodging since the 2020 election. Cobb County recently rejected 2500 challenges from one lunatic who used EagleAI, the bug-ridden software that targets the registrations of predominantly urban voters.

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