Republicans, lobbyists try to rob service workers and kids

Polls, Supreme Court bombshells, UBI, and shameless restaurant owners

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

It’s a packed edition of the newsletter today, so I really just want to share one quick thing in this introduction before jumping into the news:

The Los Angeles Times accidentally confused Donald Trump for OJ Simpson near the end of its obituary for the former football player and likely murderer, who died of cancer today at 76 years of age.

There’s a sort of symmetry to the flub, confusing two crooks in their late ‘70s who hate women, lived for the limelight, and dominated the tabloids in ‘80s and ‘90s. Simpler times. The error, by the way, has since been corrected.

OK, lots to go over today, including pitched battles over workers’ rights, the abuse of democracy, and big elections news out of a number of crucial swing states.

Please consider a subscribing and/or donating to keep this work sustainable. Far-right extremists are financed by billionaires and corporations, who invest in conservative outlets, think tanks, and law firms to advance their interests. We rely on forward-thinking readers like you.

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😲 Party of Freaks: Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde became the new frontrunner for biggest gaffe of the year on Monday when he told a conservative talk radio show host that the elderly are incapable of participating in democracy.

• “Well, if you're in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy,” Hovde said. “Almost nobody in a nursing home is in a point to vote. And you have children, adult children showing up that said, who voted for my 85- or 90-year-old father or mother?"

• Adding context doesn’t really help matters, either: Hovde was discussing the paranoid fit thrown by Wisconsin Republicans after the 2020 election, which among other things led the party to demand that the Racine sheriff’s department investigate high voter turnout at a nursing home. These people are nuts.

• When Donald Trump announced at a rally last week that he was endorsing Eric Hovde for the GOP Senate nomination in Wisconsin at a rally last week, the former president told the wealthy businessman that he had “tremendous potential.” He didn’t get more specific than that, but now it’s clear that Trump saw Hovde as someone who could one day rival him for the dumbest person in politics.

☎️ Blue vs. Devil: A new poll finds Democrat Josh Stein leading Republican Mark Robinson by 8 points in the North Carolina gubernatorial election. Both Stein, the state’s attorney general, and Robinson, the lieutenant governor, are well-known entities in the state, which is a net positive for Democrats because it means that people are well aware that Robinson is an unhinged, Holocaust-denying bigot.

Ironically, while they are clearly having none of their local fascistic loon, the poll finds North Carolina voters choosing Donald Trump by two points over President Joe Biden. It speaks to the uniqueness of the grifter king’s appeal that any time Republicans tend to lose elections when they nominate anyone with similar derangements, even when Trump hands them his complete and total endorsement.

I wouldn’t discourage the GOP from its tendency to self-sabotage, but it’s also less than encouraging that swing state Democrats have become somewhat reliant on the Republican base’s habit of nominating utter sickos to win elections. Speaking of…

🧑‍⚖️ Judgment Days: Now that state supreme courts have become another part of the partisan lawmaking machinery, the stakes in these races have never been higher. The spotlight this week is on two major swing states.

• The Arizona Supreme Court on Monday ruled to uphold an anti-abortion law that was first passed when Abraham Lincoln was still president and Arizona was still 50 years away from statehood.

  • Justices are appointed to Arizona’s high court by the governor, but they still have to answer to voters through retention elections, which give voters a chance to either approve of a justice’s job performance or kick them off the bench.

  • Of the five justices that voted to enforce the law, two will be on the ballot in November. Supreme Court Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn Hackett King each face retention elections. They may have just written their own demises. We’ll have more on those two races in the months to come.

• In Wisconsin, liberal justice Ann Walsh Bradley announced on Thursday that she will not run for re-election in 2025. This immediately becomes next spring’s marquee race, as it gives conservatives a better chance of retaking a court that liberals now control with a slim 4-3 majority.

  • It was only last spring that liberals finally flipped what had been a goonish far-right court of whiners and began undoing some of the damage the old majority had caused in collusion with former Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP’s gerrymandered supermajority in the legislature.

  • There will be plenty of major decisions made between now and then, including on abortion and the controversial anti-union laws enacted under Walker.

🔬 A Nation Divided: A new study from the Pew Research Center offers some compelling insights into how the electorate has shifted and reconstituted along partisan lines heading into the 2024 elections, offering both legitimate reasons for concern and optimism.

Let’s break down some of the numbers and dive in.

• For all the discussion about partisan realignments among minority voters, topline levels of support for both parties among Black, Hispanic, Asian, and white voters have remained pretty steady since 2020.

• That said, shifts in the demographic makeup of the voting population has shifted the coalitions of each party. For example, whereas non-Hispanic whites made up 85% of the voting public in 1996, they now account for just 67% of eligible voters. So, even though Democrats are still supported by around 41% of white voters, they now constitute 56% of the base, down 21 points from 1996.

• The biggest shifts among white voters have been along educational and geographic lines.

  • Back in 1996, just over 50% of whites without college experience considered themselves Democrats; today, just 25% of non-college whites identify with the party.

  • On the flip side, support for Democrats among college-educated white voters has gone in the other direction, jumping from 22% to 45%.

Note: I’ll have much more on these numbers in the next issue of Progress Report….

RIGGED GAME

🧐 Shameless: It’s been a busy week for conservative tools in Arizona, where Republican legislators voted to advance a proposed constitutional amendment that would reduce the minimum wage for bar and restaurant employees. It will be on the ballot in November.

• Currently, Arizona allows tipped workers — think waiters, bartenders, and similar positions — to be paid $3 less than the state’s minimum wage, which right now is set at $14.35 an hour.

• The proposed amendment, which was pushed by the Arizona Restaurant Association, would allow employers to pay tipped workers a full 25% less than the minimum wage, provided that they earn enough tips to get net $2 above the hourly minimum.

• It is essentially a way to place a larger burden on service industry and hospitality workers, many of whom have spent years years organizing to shift away from the tipping model that studies have shown results in less take home pay for women and people of color.

• There’s no way for the Arizona Restaurant Association or the legislature to obfuscate that dynamic, either, because the amendment is actually an attempt to preempt a campaign to eliminate the tipped minimum wage being led by One Fair Wage, a worker-activist group run largely by women and people of color.

• The organization’s initiative calls for raising the minimum wage by $4 over the next two year and phasing out the two-tier minimum wage by 2027.

• OFW has run similar campaigns in a number of different cities and states, with each and every one of them uphill struggles even in supposedly progressive places. I worked with the organization on a piece back in 2022 when it was trying to get the policy changed here in New York. All that was required was an executive order, but Gov. Kathy Hochul refused to even consider the idea.

📓 What Choice?: Speaking of legislatures rushing to prevent the public from foiling the plans of wealthy conservative lobbyists, Republicans in Nebraska are moving forward with a bill that would nullify an upcoming ballot initiative aimed at repealing the state’s school voucher scheme.

• Enacted last year, Nebraska’s convoluted school privatization law allows people and businesses to donate some of what they owe state in taxes to nonprofits that provide scholarships to private schools.

• Just as some states launder public money to private schools through parent-controlled “education savings accounts,” this was Nebraska’s attempt to avoid the legal and tax implications of public money being directly given to private schools.

• In response, the Nebraska Education Association launched a ballot initiative campaign aimed at repealing the program. It qualified for the fall ballot over the objections of many Republicans, including State Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, the force behind the scholarship-voucher hybrid scheme.

• Linehan is also behind this new bill, which drops the convoluted scholarship program and simply sends state money to private and religious schools. There are two days left for the legislature to get it on the ballot before the end of the session.

💰 Give People Money: Being poor is a full-time job, and as a growing number of universal basic income programs are proving, even just a little bit of cash can be the difference between an exhausting doom loop and real forward progress.

• Up in Washington last year, the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King gave 102 people checks worth $500 every month for 10 months. The payments were mostly put toward rent and food, and the broader results, released this week, were stunning: employment nearly doubled among the recipients, and the jobs tended to be high-paid and better ranked.

  • Similar results came out of a universal basic income pilot run in nearby Tacoma a year earlier, setting the stage for a second round of monthly cash deposits of $500 for 175 people who could use the investment.

  • Though they’ve proven largely successful, these are still small trial programs, sometimes funded with one-time budget allocations or private grant money. As advocates work to convince friendly lawmakers to make them permanent, more hostile figures want to snuff them out altogether.

• Such is the case in and around Houston, where the government of Harris County is all set to launch a program that will give nearly 2000 working people a $500 check every month for 18 months, with zero strings attached. Eligible applicants to Uplift Harris were limited to people who make up to 200% of the federal poverty line.

  • On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General and lowlife Ken Paxton filed suit to stop the program, which he blasted as an unconstitutional use of taxpayer money.

  • Paxton, fresh off a decade of abusing his office to shake felony charges for securities fraud, did not acknowledge in his statement to the press that the program is being funded with money carved out from federal Covid relief aid directed to county governments.

CLASS WAR

✊ Organizing Uptick: The NLRB announced this week that there has been a 35% jump in filings for union elections since October 1st, which marked the the beginning of the fiscal year.

• Part of the increase is due to the uptick in election petitions filed by employers, which is the product of last fall’s Cemex decision. The ruling gave employers a two-week time period to either voluntarily recognize a union or file for an election. Any further delay would put the employer at risk of the NLRB formally recognizing the union and issuing a mandatory bargaining order.

• Before Cemex, employers tended to do everything they can to discourage and intimidate workers in the lead-up to a union election, then string negotiations out as long as possible. Being forced to file for an election doesn’t mean they can’t still union-bust, but the Cemex decision also gives the labor board the power to recognize a unit that lost an election due to crass interference.

• It took months of relentless harassment and delays before Starbucks workers in Buffalo were allowed to vote for their union, while the Amazon Labor Union workers had to wait even longer. By contrast, the UAW is now getting elections held at Mercedes and Volkswagen just weeks after filing.

👶 Save the children: Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers just vetoed a bill that would have further rolled back child labor laws in the state.

• The law would have ended the requirement that 14- and 15-year-olds obtain work permits before taking a job with a formal employer (ie not a babysitter).

• Guardians have to co-sign on the permit applications, which are also used to prevent young teenagers from working in hazardous conditions.

• Republican sponsors insisted that the law was just about removing the bureaucracy of an online application form, not the desire of employers to exploit (mostly poor, migrant) children for cheap wages.

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