When "electability" is really about control
And control is not about progress
Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.
We’ve got a fair amount of news to discuss tonight, including some key primary election results, state Democratic Party drama, and ballot initiatives. I’ve also got some thoughts on the January 6th committee and the desperate quest for any progress at all on gun control — that one is under the “Big Story” banner, so keep scrolling and reading.
Elections
California: It would require an entire newsletter simply devoted to covering primary elections to break down the many legislative and Congressional races at play tonight in California. Enter Primary School, a fantastic newsletter that offered up this excellent guide to the down-ballot battles happening in the Golden State.
California’s marquee races tonight were the mayoral primary in Los Angeles and the successful recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Both elections were warped by ungodly sums of money, the media’s obsession with crime, and the effects of extreme income inequality. The results were a mixed bag at best.
In LA, former Republican and Trump donor Rick Caruso didn’t win outright but bought his way to a runoff election in November. It’s amazing what $40 million of one’s own money and a bottomless well of cynicism can purchase these days.
Caruso’s campaign focused on law and order and letting wealthy developers do whatever they want to the city. He’s been helped by the support of mega-rich celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian, who apparently hold a lot of sway in LA, as well as Elon Musk, who holds a lot of sway with people that harass me on Twitter.
Caruso and progressive former Rep. Karen Bass are neck-and-neck and headed to a runoff in November.
The dynamic was much the same in the San Francisco recall, though Mayor London Breed was probably the most famous person backing the conservative candidate. Boudin was elected just a few years ago on a bold platform of criminal justice reform, and even though serious crime in San Francisco has fallen during his tenure, he was kneecapped by cops who refused to do their jobs for two years, Republicans, and wealthy NIMBY types in a city that has long had a conservative streak underneath its culturally liberal reputation.
These two races are important not only because they directly impact the everyday lives of more than 5 million people, but also because they represent the biggest and boldest efforts by deep-pocketed conservative PACs and individual donors to shape Democratic primaries and crush the left.
They’ve had mixed results thus far — Henry Cuellar got bailed out in Texas, while Summer Lee and Jamie McLeod-Skinner overcame huge outside spends — but the size and prominence of LA and San Francisco make them more prominent to a national media thirsty to punch the left and uplift cynical conservative Democrats (see: Eric Adams) whenever possible.
It’s an institutional bias that’s impossible to eradicate no matter how poorly their fetishized strongman performs in office (see: Eric Adams), and these results won’t do much to discourage the breathless stories about how Democrats are losing touch with their platonic ideal of voters (their mom’s Facebook friends).
Iowa: Retired Admiral Mike Franken made easy work of former Rep. Abby Finkenauer in the Democratic Senate primary, setting himself up for a matchup with incumbent Republican Charles Grassley, who won his own primary today despite being 89-years-old and more incomprehensible on Twitter than ever.
Franken pulled away from Finkenauer rather easily over the past few months, making for a disappointing end for an energetic candidate that could have provided a very clear contrast with Grassley. Finkenauer, who was elected to the House during the 2018 wave and then bounced in a bad 2020 for Iowa Democrats, spent a fair amount of time at picket lines during last fall’s months-long John Deere strike.
I covered the strike over at More Perfect Union, and her comms team really tried to emphasize both Finkenauer’s support for striking workers and her own background as the daughter of union members. The campaign just seemed incapable of building any momentum, at least in part because it was often in disarray. Finkenauer barely made it onto the primary ballot in the first place due to questions over whether she’d satisfied the signature-gathering requirements, and it took a court ruling for her to get her name before voters.
New York: Four years after they took New York politics by storm, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Alessandra Biaggi are teaming up once again.
Back in 2018, AOC and Biaggi toppled two of the state’s most toxic, conservative lawmakers in unlikely primary victories powered by fed-up locals and grassroots activists. AOC won her Congressional primary against Joe Crowley in June, and amid a whirlwind of national attention, she made time to help Biaggi knock off Jeff Klein.
Today, Ocasio-Cortez announced her endorsement of Biaggi’s campaign to join her in Congress, handing the State Senator a huge boost in her underdog fight against DCCC chief Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. AOC had already been openly critical of Maloney’s decision to hop districts and potentially hand a seat to Republicans, so when Biaggi defiantly declared her candidacy for NY-17 after being drawn out of NY-3, it opened the door to this renewed alliance.
Ballot Initiatives
Montana: The State Supreme Court has given the green light to activists seeking to gather signatures for a constitutional amendment that would guarantee Montanans the right to pre-K education.
Modification of Article X does not increase the cost of school district funding, according to a fiscal note from the Governor's Office of Budget and Program Planning. However, if the legislature added funding for pre-K, the estimated cost increase per year would be about $9 million. Property taxes statewide would also increase by about $2 million per year in the first three years, according to the fiscal note.
The fiscal note seems to echo McGrath, who wrote in his opinion that constitutional provisions do not expend money from the state's treasury. "Instead," McGrath said. "The document only provides the framework through which the Legislature may do so."
To the attorney general's office, that is "splitting hairs," Nerison said. However, McGrath's use of the phrase, "may do so," opened the possibility for the legislature to choose not to fund constitutional mandates, Nerison said.
Based on how Republicans in Missouri refused to fund Medicaid expansion for a year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the legislature in Montana try the same thing.
South Dakota: The State Supreme Court may have been able to toss out their successful legal weed ballot initiative, but South Dakotans tonight resoundingly rejected the legislature’s attempt to blow up the direct democracy process altogether.
Michigan: With a split government and a tossup election on the horizon, activists on both sides of the aisle are working to enact their priorities through ballot initiatives this year.
It’s not going all that well on the right side of the aisle, though — conservatives have been rocked by a major petition signature forgery scandal, which took out five leading gubernatorial candidates and just added one of the GOP’s prized ballot initiatives to the pile.
Unlock Michigan 2.0 would have mandated the end of health emergencies after 28 days without a renewal authorized by the legislature, but its sponsors rescinded their petitions and killed it until next year at the earliest.
“Protecting public health isn’t the easiest job in the world and for months, Unlock Michigan 2.0 stoked fear and intimidation of our public health officers and others in the health care field,” said Linda Vail, Ingham County health officer and member of Public Health Over Politicians. “I want to thank every single doctor, nurse, public health officer and everyone working in Michigan health care for raising their voices because they made all the difference in stopping this dangerous ballot initiative.”
What’s the difference between Hillary Clinton’s private email server and a violent attempt to overthrow the United States government?
There were serious political consequences for the email server.
On Thursday night, the special House committee assembled to investigate the January 6th insurrection will present its findings to the American public. The bipartisan roster of representatives will provide a carefully researched timeline that finally reveals how Donald Trump and a deranged crew of powerful politicians and half-wit hatchet men worked to overturn the 2020 election, first through far-fetched legal machinations and then by stoking paranoid diehards into mounting a frenzied siege on the US Capitol.
The media will call the presentation a blockbuster moment. The most salient and sexy details will top headlines and cable news chyrons. And then whichever recommendations that the committee offers in service of protecting democracy — which will already be watered down by the persistence of Liz Cheney and indifference of some other members — will land in Congress with a thud, dead on arrival.
In any world with the slightest tether to reality, the committee’s findings would lead to mass prosecution, the permanent disgrace of countless politicians, and unanimous votes of approval for constitutional amendments to secure the future of multiracial democracy. In the United States, the “blockbuster” presentation will fade from the national conversation within weeks, written off as a partisan farce by conservatives and all but forgotten by liberals panicking over the next three assaults on fundamental rights and human decency.
This is not pessimism, just a clear-eyed reading of data and understanding of historic precedent. While there was a general consensus in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection that it was inappropriate for Republican leaders to assist thousands of dead-enders to furiously storm the Capitol in an attempt to seize power over the American government, public opinion has since largely bifurcated along the typical partisan breakdown.
Recent poll numbers are nauseatingly predictable:
This did not have to be a hopeless cause. Many Republican leaders were aghast at the insurrection but privately confident that stoking a podunk army into laying waste to the Capitol would finally break the spell that Trump had cast over the party’s base. Perversely, they were disappointed by Democrats, who had to be pressured into impeaching Trump and then waited more than six months to assemble any kind of investigation into the insurrection and its origins.
Democrats’ dawdling gave the right-wing ecosystem time to legitimize and mainstream the Big Lie and refashion the Q-pilled small businessmen that rampaged through the Capitol into patriotic freedom fighters. Polls now show that a majority of Republicans believe that both the effort to overturn the election and the mass stampede through the nerve center of American democracy were justified responses to the tyranny of whichever shadowy forces the pillow guy ranted about that week.
The insurrection is now just part of the political narrative, a data point in the partisan algorithm. Today, the New York Times ran a story presenting the January 6th hearings as an opportunity for floundering Democrats to win back reluctant voters. The biggest attack on the US Capitol since the War of 1812 has been reduced to fodder for pundits and reporters looking for editorialization.
The presentation on Thursday will do nothing to change this — the White House is already working to make sure of it.
The same dispiriting and dangerous cycle is playing out with gun control.
The massacre of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde proved that we have not gone fully numb to the carnage that unlicensed weapons of war unleash upon innocent, unsuspecting Americans every single day. Even Republicans were forced to act as if they gave a damn about the vaporizing of those poor children, who they could not blame for their own murders.
Gov. Greg Abbott was forced to duck out of the NRA convention a few days later, while Ted Cruz exposed the depths of his depravity by going on extended rants about doors. Republicans were on the ropes as Americans indicated almost unanimous support for many gun control measures, and as the Uvalde police department’s cowardice and jaw-dropping lies continued to pile up, they were unable to fall back on their tired “good guys with a gun” rhetoric.
Hobbled by the filibuster, Democrats had two choices: they could try to convince 10 Republicans to vote for some kind of substantive gun control legislation or they could relentlessly hammer Republicans for being an unreasonable death cult, making it a top campaign issue and tying to the rest of the GOP’s horrid disregard for children.
They inevitably chose the former, which had the effect of portraying Republicans not as a blood-thirsty fascist sect that regularly makes it easier to commit mass murder, but instead as rational, good-faith actors who sought to find a solution for this scourge.
After a week of breathless updates on the negotiations between John Cornyn, Chris Murphy, and several other interchangeable senators, the prospects for any worthwhile legislation have dwindled to almost nothing. They’re desperate for any compromise at all, but nothing they get will actually make a dent in the problem.
Instead, Democrats are providing Republicans even more political cover and making it even more difficult to paint the GOP as the conniving fascists bent on creating a violent right-wing theocracy. They’ve also galvanized Fox News, dunce right-wing influencers, and other media hooligans to turn this into just another culture war that they can use as troll fodder, as the video above indicates.
If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that Democrats can be ruthless in crushing their own supporters while appearing absolutely feckless when dealing with Republicans. In their relentless pursuit of the mythical moderate Republican voter that can be won over with institutional squishiness, they’re handing the country over to the vicious reactionaries who understand how to wield power. But then, maybe they like it that way.
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