Progressives Every Day: Big Voter Rights and Swing State News
Finally, Bloomberg does something useful
Welcome to the Tuesday night edition of Progressives Everywhere!
Tonight we’ve got a catchup conversation with one of our 2020 endorsees, big news about voting rights, and some scary statistics. Let’s get going!
Candidate Catchup: Christine Morse (Michigan)
The last time we spoke with Christine Morse, the battle over Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s shelter-in-place orders had just inspired a bunch of doofuses to pack up their semi-automatic weapons and march on the empty Capitol. Morse, who is running to flip the 61st District in the state legislature, had no time for their shenanigans.
“There’s a lot of talk about these protests, which are actually organized by national groups,” Morse told me, referring to the dark money from billionaires fueling the rallies. “They have the appearance of being this grassroots effort, but it’s 200 people.”
Since then, Republicans in the state have just continued to sue Whitmer over her modest restrictions, which have saved countless lives in the state. Morse, who currently also serves as a Kalamazoo County Commissioner, has been campaigning hard to make those Republicans irrelevant — she’s in one of the tightest races in a state where Democrats need to flip just four seats to win back the legislature. She’s running hard from a safe distance, operating a grassroots campaign largely through digital means.
I caught up with Morse to get the latest on her campaign, talk about her official GOP opponent (a very wealthy former Trump staffer!), and how things are going down the stretch.
How has the campaign been going?
Well since we last spoke, I brought on my campaign manager, Leah, who is a tour de force. I think when she came on, I had maybe raised almost $50,000. This quarter, we raised over $250,000. I raised $20,000 for my county commission race [in 2018], which was a big deal, so when I was told that I’d probably need to raise $200,000 minimum for this House race, I was like, oh my god, how am I ever gonna do that?
But here we are, and it's only through the work of people like you, with Progressives Everywhere, groups like Sister District, the Indivisible groups across the country that are supporting us. It's kind of crazy, the investment that people are making across the country to flip the Michigan House — well, it's not crazy, because they know how important it is, and they know that their investment can really make a tremendous difference.
You ran unopposed in the primary, so you’ve been able to focus on the general election this entire time. Has it ramped up since the GOP primary?
We sent postcards and did calls [prior to the primary]. I got 13,000 votes to the 10,000 that the Republican [candidates] got combined. My opponent got 6500 votes, so I doubled her up for the primary. That’s not everything, and obviously, we’re not sitting on our laurels. My opponent actually started sending negative mail about me probably a month before the primary. She hadn’t won but she was sending it from her own campaign. They had spent $50,000 in mail by the time of the primary.
She’s got a lot of wealthy donors behind her, right?
Well, she gave herself $100,000. Her husband has paid $20,000 in in-kind expenses. My husband and I have put in about $2100 in in-kind expenses. Other than that, we’ve raised roughly the same amount of money.
You probably have to spend your money in different ways than you’d expected due to the pandemic. What’s it been like, running during this time? How have you had to adjust? Have you been knocking on doors?
[Note: I reconnected with Christine’s campaign manager after the interview for an update on this, given the fluid situation with door knocking. The next answer is from her.]
The situation is complicated, but we are not doing traditional canvassing with volunteers until Election Weekend. At that point, we will provide masks and hand sanitizer and temperature checks for all volunteers and are committed to maintaining social distancing with any volunteer and voter interaction.
Over 2.1 million voters in Michigan (33,000+ in our district alone) have already signed up to vote absentee and the best way to reach people who are about to have ballots in their mailboxes is on the phones. Our team has made 40,000+ calls and it's heating up even more now.
How have the phone calls gone?
It is is a little bit challenging, the contact rate is not great. But we're doing the best with what we have. And I will tell you that once we have a volunteer that contacts someone, I am now following back up with all those people to do another call. I reach out to say, “Hey, I know you spoke to someone on our team, what questions can I answer for you? And what issues do you want to share with me?” And that contact rate has been amazing.
Which issues come up?
I always lead with the message I’ve led with the whole time, which is education funding, protecting our water resources, and health care accessibility and affordability. If I have the opportunity to say that first, the vast majority of people are like, “yep, those are the important things.” Now, do people add certain issues? Yes. In the age of COVID, the economy is becoming more and more something that we're hearing about. A lot of people are out of work. Small businesses are struggling.
We are certainly going to have to fight for our economic recovery and to bring back small businesses and do what we can to support them. The state is going to be missing funding. I'm a county commissioner, I already know we're looking at a $1.9 billion revenue loss that we're going to have to account for. There's going to be a lot of challenges and the economy is becoming more and more prevalent in people's thoughts. The message at the federal level is like, “oh, we're back! Look at the stock market!” But a lot of everyday people are not investing in the stock market. They don’t have money to lose.
The stock market doesn't necessarily impact the people who are losing their jobs and losing their health care because of COVID. So it's a little daunting to think about actually trying to legislate and budget for 2021. But it's more important than ever to have leaders who are going to support the things that we need to invest in.
Want to pitch in to help flip the Michigan legislature blue?
Elections and Voting Rights
Florida: Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that he has raised $16 million to repay the fines and fees of about 35,000 disenfranchised Floridians and enable them to vote this November.
On its own, this is good news. Even better, just in terms of sheer tactics, is that the people they’ll be helping are either Black and Hispanic, owe less than $1500 to the courts, and had registered to vote before the state froze those applications.
On the other hand, it’s infuriating that this has to happen at all. For our new subscribers, a recap:
Until 2018, Florida banned all former felons from registering to vote. In 2018, 2/3rds of Floridians who voted yes on a ballot initiative known as Amendment 4 that would return the right to vote to those former felons (47 other states do the same).
In 2019, the GOP passed what is effectively a poll tax, requiring former felons to pay off those fines and fees to register.
A few weeks ago, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals — with five members appointed by Trump — upheld the racist poll tax.
There are 775,000 Floridians banned from voting, so even with Bloomberg’s largesse, nearly three-quarters of a million people are not allowed to vote this year due to the GOP’s hatred of democracy.
California: A few weeks ago, I reported on Prop 22, the ballot initiative that would not only invalidate important labor laws for gig economy workers, but make it basically impossible to amend the new, restrictive laws it’d enact. Companies like Uber, Lyft, and Instacart have dropped $170 million on it thus far — and today, we learned just how tied to the GOP it is.
Not only have they been using many of the same consultants, they’re also sharing campaign donations:
You know who else is getting money from Yes on 22? The Uber and Lyft drivers featured in its commercials.
Minnesota: QAnon believers make the Tea Party look like rational, reasonable neighbors who happen to enjoy dressing up like Revolutionary War reenactors. And while QAnon cult members certainly have absurdly fringe beliefs, they’re starting to infiltrate our government.
Just look at what’s happening in Minnesota: Six Q members are official Republican nominees in this November’s elections.
Even scarier is the fact that this is not some Midwest fluke. Per the Star Tribune: “As many as 77 congressional candidates and at least two dozen candidates for state legislatures across the country have been linked to the QAnon theory, which emerged in late 2017.”
As a reminder, QAnon posits that the “Deep State” — Democrats, celebrities, liberals, whoever else — are part of a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles that only Donald Trump can stop.
Pennsylvania: PA approved universal mail-in voting this year and it looks like the Trump campaign won’t be able to stop counties from installing drop boxes throughout the state. And yet, there’s one disconcerting issue that still lingers: Naked ballots.
Huh? Yeah, I hadn’t really heard of them either until recently. But according to Philly-area Democrats, the state Supreme Court’s recent ruling that voters use “secrecy envelopes” could lead to a fair number of ballots being discounted.
Here’s the Philly Inquirer explaining it: “Pennsylvania uses a two-envelope mail ballot system: A completed ballot goes into a ‘secrecy envelope’ that has no identifying information, and then into a larger mailing envelope that the voter signs.”
If voters — who largely aren’t used to voting absentee — don’t use them, their vote gets tossed. One estimate suggests that up to 100,000 votes could be thrown away because of it.
It will require action by the legislature to waive the secrecy envelope requirement — and unfortunately, the GOP, which generally hates voting rights, controls the legislature right now.
National: Two quick bits about the Supreme Court fiasco.
As I wrote last night, Democrats need to get some guts. This story does a much better job of explaining why.
It’s no shocker that Mitt Romney said he’ll vote to green-light Trump’s Supreme Court nominee — he’s a Republican, after all. But the statement he made about it did surprise me a little bit:
Wait, before you go!
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