Hot deals on democracy!
Cyber Monday, but for the future of the nation
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
I hope you’ve had a relaxing weekend, filled with family, friends, and good food. I know that this is hardly a universal experience; too many people are forced to work chaotic, punishing shifts at their jobs to power the infrastructure of the long national holiday weekend.
There are others that mourn Thanksgiving as a tragic flashpoint, when outreach to interlopers doomed a proud culture to what has now been 400 years of death, destruction, and an unwanted supporting role in a myth that obscures that devastation. Read this piece on the Wampanoag Indians and their survivors’ ongoing reckoning with the events at Plymouth Rock to learn more.
Today, we’re going to run through a bit of news, then catch up with some of our favorite progressive grassroots organizations. You’ll receive an onslaught of fundraising solicitations later this week from every organization with the ability to rent an email list, but these folks are very much worth supporting.
Also, a quick reminder that premium membership to Progressives Everywhere are 20% off through today. I’ve got a lot of exciting plans in the works for 2022 (new websites! new writers! maybe a documentary!) and need your support to make them happen.
Let’s get to it!
Ballot Initiatives
We’re now in the thick of initiative certification season, an annual tradition in which activist groups hand in stacks of signed petitions into election officials and hope that they’ve collected enough legitimate signatures to get their proposed proposal or question on the following year’s ballot. I will be devoting an upcoming edition of this newsletter to a deep dive into the big initiatives that have been certified for next year’s election, but here are some newsy and relevant items for you:
Florida: A Republican law that would have just about killed the ballot initiative process was tossed out by the courts, but not before the freeze on fundraising and signature gathering forced the campaign behind three voting rights initiatives to push back their ambitions and set their sights on 2024.
Initiatives backed by deeper-pocketed interests, meanwhile, are hoping that the bounty from their petition collecting was plentiful enough to overcome the delay and satisfy election board requirements.
Next year, Floridians could conceivably vote on constitutional amendments that would:
Loosen gambling laws, permitting the construction of more casinos and legalizing sports gambling;
Legalizing recreational marijuana;
Turn the state education director back into an elected position;
Allow for ranked choice voting in state and local elections;
Limit the government’s ability to close houses of worship during pandemics or other emergencies to three weeks;
Create a permanent affordable housing trust fund; Republicans have repeatedly raided the current one to pay for tax cuts and other special interest priorities .
South Dakota: Medicaid expansion is likely to be put to voters in South Dakota next year. The Build Back Better Act would provide full coverage subsidies for people abandoned in Medicaid gap in the twelve holdout states, but they’d only last a few years, creating an uncertainty that retains the urgency around this initiative.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t suffer the fate of last year’s initiative to legalize recreational marijuana, which was permanently tossed out just last week by the South Dakota state Supreme Court in a very specious decision. The activists who led the successful ballot initiative in 2020 are organizing to get it passed once again.
Weed Watch
Speaking of the devil’s herb, here’s some more notable nug news for you:
New York: Marijuana was legalized this past spring, which here in NYC has meant more open consumption of a substance that is still impossible to purchase legally. There’s still no clear timeline for when dispensaries and storefronts will be permitted to sell weed, but a new report reveals that 9% of municipalities in the state have decided to opt out of the retail zoning process altogether.
In short, these mostly conservative and well-to-do towns are going to forgo millions of dollars in tax revenue because they’re under delusion that they can keep the kids that swill vodka in their basements away from being tempted by this spooky gateway drug.
New Jersey: Legalizing this very specific plant has become a big ol’ mess in the Garden State. One aspect of the deal being hashed out amongst lawmakers in New Jersey involves using some of the tax money generated to beef up an unproven pseudo-science police program targeting impaired driving. After so much rhetoric about trying to repair some of the damage wrought by the War on Drugs, the fear is that New Jersey’s biggest cities will remain in ruins, the status quo upheld.
The funding mechanism in place for law enforcement in New Jersey can expedite increased spending on DRE programs, even though communities affected by the drug war are still waiting for the state to establish infrastructure for social equity programs. And at this point, no one can explain how much funding will be directed to the program because the law funds any municipality or county that wants to train a DRE.
So, in effect, the total spend would be tied to how many apply.
An erasure of the drug war, as Scutari promised, would have to wait.
“That money should go to Newark. It should go to Irvington. It should go to Plainfield. It should go to Camden,” said Kimberly Schultz, who as an attorney at the Office of the Public Defender has had many clients charged for marijuana possession. “It should go to places where police enforcement of marijuana cases has caused blight, that’s where it should go.”
Meanwhile, New Jersey’s richest citizens are about to get a huge tax break from Democrats in Congress, who are being forced by a handful of House centrists to lift the SALT cap.
Elections
Texas: State Rep. Jasmine Crockett is running for Congress in one of the new, very blue districts packed by Republicans in the state legislature. Crockett is known one of the most passionate and outspoken progressives in the Texas House, a reputation I can vouch for after working with her on this video on voting rights for More Perfect Union.
I hope that the district lines get redrawn to create a more fair map, but I’ll support Crockett regardless of which district she seeks to represent.
North Carolina: Uhh the Supreme Court just took up a case over the racist NC voter ID bill that could set a very dangerous precedent.
Legislative Updates
Florida: Determined to reverse the will of voters on any issue that does not align with their vulturous ideology, Republicans in Florida are now trying to subvert the $15 minimum wage passed via ballot initiative last year. Ahead of the legislative session in January, State Sen. Jeff Brandes just filed a bill that would allow employers to pay workers a sub-minimum “training” wage for six months after they start their jobs. This is not the first time that Brandes, a favorite of the Koch gang, has taken aim at the minimum wage.
Wisconsin: On a brighter note, there’s a new bipartisan (!) bill on the table that would extend Medicaid for new mothers for up to a year, a major upgrade from the current three month period. Hopefully this passes, even if Build Back Better makes this at least temporarily irrelevant.
I didn’t know until this weekend that I needed new sneakers, a new iPhone, several new baseball hats, or an instant crock pot, but now I find myself doggedly scrolling through various retailers’ websites, determined to find the best price on each. The relentless temptation of discounts touted in emails, social media ads, affiliate link-filled digital deal guides, and TV commercials have made it almost impossible to resist.
So go ahead, do some shopping; there’s no shame in securing lower prices or buying gifts for loved ones, so long as you treat retail workers with respect. If you can, though, try to earmark some of your disposable income for grassroots organizations pushing back against the political machinations of the corporations soaking us this weekend, trying to build progressive power in places where it has long since stumbled, doing their best to mitigate right-wing attacks on women’s health, and pushing to save democracy.
Progressives Everywhere has spent all of this year spotlighting and supporting these local grassroots organizations, and today, we’ll review some of our favorite and raise some money to help them enter a crucial year with some momentum. Pitch in what you can — democracy is a very good investment. Just ask all the lobbyists buying up lawmakers.
Saving Democracy
Unless Democrats pull it together, regain control of their caucus, and pass the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts, it’s likely that a toxic mix of gerrymandering and voter suppression laws will produce a vastly unequal and untenable minoritarian national government for at least a decade. I'm working hard to keep the pressure up on the Senate in my day job at More Perfect Union, but the reality is that even if those bills do pass, they will not be a panacea for Democrats in swing states.
Party infrastructure, decades of grassroots organizing, the national political climate, and a party perpetually hobbled by infighting all threaten to cost Democrats elections in 2022 and into the future. These groups are trying to close those gaps, all with progressive agenda in mind.
Florida:
After close losses in 2018, Democrats got absolutely walloped in 2020. Trump won by over three points in this supposed swing state, while Republicans knocked off several Democratic members of Congress and increased their chokehold on the state legislature.
For those insisting that Florida’s rightward lurch in 2020 was the product of the Donald Trump’s unique ability to turn out troglodytes, it’s gotten even worse this year. As Gov. Ron DeSantis and his legislature cut down public health efforts, banned trans kids from playing school sports, and passed a massive voter suppression bill, the individual unpopularity of those laws has not stopped Republicans from organizing and building up their power in the state. After years of chipping away at a margin that swelled to more than 700,000 in 2008, Republicans this month surpassed Democrats in registers voters in Florida, a major milestone that signifies the GOP’s strength and the state Democratic Party’s continued dysfunction.
This past year, we’ve highlighted several progressive grassroots groups doing the work that the state Democratic Party has failed to do.
People Power for Florida is run by State Rep. Anna Eskamani, one of the most progressive and astute young Democratic lawmakers in the state. She’s spent the year opposing GOP policies, fighting hard to help constituents abandoned by the state’s unemployment and health care systems, and running voter registration and organization drives. Here’s what she told us earlier this year:
“Our hope is that instead of just being one umbrella group that's leading voter registration, we actually want to create 1000 new groups. We want to empower everyday people to do their own voter registration drives. They can use our banner, but our focus is creating new leaders, so we don't want it to be about us. We want it to be about building collective power at a neighborhood level.”
Central Florida is a crucial area for Democrats, so signing up and engaging as many voters as possible there will be crucial this year. That said, the voter registration numbers in much of Florida are inherently skewed by an unbelievably racist law that prevents released citizens from voting until they pay back fines and fees that they often can’t even quantify.
More than 60% of Floridians voted to overturn the law in 2018, but as I’ve noted time and again, DeSantis and the GOP basically reinstated it the next year. As a result, over 700,000 disenfranchised Floridians remain disenfranchised, a normalized apartheid that few people seem to notice or care about. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition is quietly paying off these unfair fines for people and then registering them to vote, returning their constitutional rights after years of their being forced to the sidelines.
Here’s what Neil Volz, the organization’s deputy director, told me earlier this year:
“Now there are people who will come out and say we will walk with you through every step of the way and we won't sleep until all 1.4 million people with past convictions are empowered in the state,” Volz says. “Our ability to reach into the returning citizen community is one isn't like any other organization trying to do it, because we are an organization led by and made up of people with past convictions. I'm a returning citizen, Desmond is a returning citizen. This is us talking to us, and you’ve got to have that kind of community aspect to it.”
You can donate to both People Power Florida and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition here:
Texas:
Joe Biden came closer to winning Texas than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976, providing all the impetus that Republicans needed to make it even harder to vote in a state that had already been ranked the least convenient for democracy. It took him two special sessions thanks to Democratic legislators’ late night escape to DC (read our coverage here), but Gov. Greg Abbott was able to sign an extreme voter suppression bill earlier this fall, furthering the state’s Jim Crow legacy.
Compounded with the preposterously gerrymandered maps that the GOP just passed, the quickly diversifying Texas may well become a Republican safe haven for another decade. It would be nightmare scenario — imagine the Neanderthals that passed that horrific anti-abortion law in charge for a full decade, moving further and further to the right all the time to please a sliver of primary voters. It’s going to take an intense organizing effort to even beat back the coming chaos, but in a state with so many citizens still unregistered to vote and few rights for workers, there’s an opportunity to do just that.
Enter Ground Game Texas, a group founded by former Congressional candidates Julie Oliver and Mike Siegel, who have seen first hand the consequences of surrendering large swaths of the state to the GOP. Their three-pronged strategy of fighting for “workers, wages, and weed” is an attempt to inject populism into a state too often defined by culture wars, and running it in mid-sized cities and metro areas where Democrats have a real chance of growing seems like the perfect approach. Their organizing registers voters and gives them immediate incentives to go to the ballot box.
Here’s what Oliver told us earlier this year:
As part of our postmortem analysis, we looked at data on the issues that got people out to vote. Part of it was very popular progressive policies that are on the Democratic end of the spectrum, but people didn’t know that.
In 2020, there were three issues that outperformed Biden across the board: A minimum wage increase, Medicaid expansion, and the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana.
Texas law precludes statewide citizen-led ballot initiatives, but we can do municipal citizen-led ballot initiatives. So we've been working on coalitions in midsize cities, saying hey, let's do a citizen-led ballot initiative on marijuana decriminalization in places like Killeen, Texas, which has a very large veterans population because it sits right outside of Fort Hood, and is also a majority-minority city. There are real opportunities to pull people into the electoral process by getting them engaged in a ballot initiative.
They’ve already kicked off with several ballot initiative campaigns, which I will cover more in depth in an upcoming edition of the Progressives Everywhere newsletter.
Arizona
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s polling continues to tank with Democratic voters in the state, in part because her insistence on upholding the filibuster is helping to block the passage of the national voting rights laws we so desperately need. The backlash has been animated in part by LUCHA, a progressive grassroots organization that has become a powerhouse in a state that they helped turn blue.
LUCHA, which is run by people of color and focused on issues that impact them, is constantly organizing, engaging with working people and building out a network of activated, motivated voters. Arizona has led the way in dangerous election conspiracies (the head of Cyber Ninjas is $2 million in debt, FYI) and it will take more organizing than ever to overcome what they have in store in 2022.
Stephanie Maldonado, the group’s organizing director, spoke with Progressives Everywhere this fall:
“We're going to continue to organize and we're going to continue to show up to the polls, because that's what's going to change the system that we've been living under. We've turned our frustration into action. It ignites us to keep fighting, to keep organizing, to keep building our power, to keep engaging with community. And even though yes there are setbacks, we use those setbacks as learning in order for us to continue engaging and building over time.”
You can donate to LUCHA here:
Women’s Health Care
I’m going to make his one short and to the point, because the stakes couldn’t be more clear. The Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments of Mississippi’s abortion ban on Monday, and even if it soon throws out Texas’s bounty hunter scheme, it’s looking likely that this extremist right-wing court is going to reverse Roe v. Wade at some point in the next year.
If and when that happens, a callous decision by five or six permanently comfortable ideologues will ignite a reign of terror in red states across the country, electrify armies of far-right extremists, and make life hell for women across the country. It’ll cost untold lives, too. Only a full legal reversal (which again will be impossible should voting rights legislation not pass) would remedy this catastrophe, but even then, there would be vast inequities in abortion access in this country.
There is an entire network of abortion funds devoted to connecting women with the resources they need to make their own health care decisions. We’ve raised over $100,000 for a number of these organizations, mostly located in Texas and throughout the south, and I’d love to increase that number:
Wait, Before You Leave! Join the Team!
Progressives Everywhere has raised over $6.3 million dollars raised for progressive Democratic candidates and causes. Isn’t that cool?
All of that money goes to those candidates and causes and I don’t get a dime of it. And because the only way progressives will be able to rescue this country is by creating their own sustainable media ecosystem, I need your help.
I’m offering very low-cost premium membership to the Progressives Everywhere community, which will help make this project sustainable and allow it to continue growing. It’ll also help me hire another writer/researcher to make this newsletter even better. If you become a member of Progressives Everywhere, you’ll get:
Premium member-only emails featuring analysis, insight, and local & national news coverage you won’t read elsewhere.
Exclusive reporting and interviews
More coverage of voting rights, healthcare, labor rights, and progressive activism.
Previews of new projects
Personal satisfaction
You can also make a one-time donation to Progressives Everywhere’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in an upcoming edition of the big newsletter!