Ron DeSantis, still the worst, won’t stop cheating
He continues his war on abortion and voting. Plus polls, voting rights, and more.
Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.
October 7th should be a day of solemn commemoration, of simply remembering the 1100 Israeli Jews who were murdered in the chaos of Hamas’s brutal attacks one year ago today. But Benjamin Netanyahu and his corrupt far-right government, having seized on fear and anger to justify the unjustifiable, disgraced the memory of those victims and robbed their families of what could have been a day defined by community and solidarity, which they so desperately deserve.
So instead, the Israeli victims are now forever involuntarily and unfairly tied by the cruelty and selfishness of those politicians — and the moral weakness of our own leaders — to the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and descent into regional war. None of it has made Jews any safer, to say the least, and it’s driven a wedge into the American Jewish community that may take generations to heal. The 10/7 attacks were called Israel’s 9/11 almost from the moment they happened, and the phrase is more apt than perhaps anybody could have anticipated.
There’s a lot to discuss tonight, including the return of the most grating guy in America, polls, an outrageous story about a Pennsylvania Republican, campaign analysis, and more.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration sent a threatening letter to a local TV station last week, demanding that it stop airing an ad in support of the abortion rights amendment that will appear on the November ballot.
The ad, produced and paid for by the group Floridians Protecting Freedom, features a woman Caroline discussing her decision to terminate her pregnancy in 2022 due to health issues. As she explains, that would be virtually impossible to do now under the state’s current six-week abortion ban.
“The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom,” she says. “Florida has now banned abortion … even in cases like mine. Amendment 4 is gonna protect women like me.”
The letter from the DeSantis administration called the ad “false” and “dangerous,” claiming that because the law does technically allow for abortions to save the life of the mother, Caroline’s story is untrue. But as has been the case everywhere these ultra-restrictive laws have been passed, medical professionals have been extraordinarily reluctant to perform the procedure late in even the most dangerous pregnancies, to the point that women have been left to bleed out as doctors conferred with hospital lawyers.
(Incidentally, the US Supreme Court just today declined to hear a challenge to Texas’s ban on most emergency abortions. Georgia’s six week abortion ban was reinstated by the state Supreme Court. )
The letter to the WFLA-TV, which was first exposed by the excellent Florida reporter Jason Garcia, threatens the station with “criminal proceedings in county court” if it doesn’t comply and stop running the ad. It’s a textbook example of government overreach and suppression of speech, and it’s just one of several extreme interventions that the DeSantis administration has tried to scuttle the abortion rights ballot amendment.
At the same time that DeSantis is demanding that the ad be taken down, his administration is using taxpayer dollars to actively campaign against the amendment — including with its own TV ads, which provide a misleading narrative about Florida’s reproductive rights laws.
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration last month launched a website chockfull of lies and misleading statistics with the explicit purpose of dissuading people from voting for the amendment.
Floridians Protecting Freedom sued over the site, only to have a Jeb Bush-appointed judge in Tallahassee last week toss the case last week. The great irony here is that the judge wrote in his decision that the court “must trust the people to decide what information is important to them,” which sounds like a great counter-argument to the accusations levied against FPF’s TV ad.
Perhaps most egregiously, DeSantis has dispatched his goon squad election police to the homes of people who signed a petition to get the amendment on the ballot earlier this year.
DeSantis justified the harassment by citing vague accusations of petition fraud, but came away with no confirmed cases or arrests. State officials also sought lists of petition signers from county election officials, an act that had no precedent.
In other DeSantis news, the governor has been preparing for Hurricane Milton, which surged to a category five storm today, by ensuring Floridians have the right to purchase a handgun during hurricanes and refusing to discussing logistics with the vice president. President Biden finally got DeSantis on the phone tonight, and I commend him for having the stomach to listen to that soul-curdling voice.
Ohio: After a decade and a half of living under some of the most extreme gerrymanders in history, voters in Ohio are once again geared up to pass a constitutional amendment to ban the practice.
A new poll from YouGov and Bowling Green finds that 60% of Ohioans support Amendment 1, which would create an independent redistricting system that could not be overridden by a self-interested legislature. Just 20% of Ohio voters say they oppose the amendment. Even a plurality of Republicans affirmatively back the measure, 41%-34%.
The only warning sign is that only 22% of voters say that they’ve heard a lot about the amendment, while 51% are casually informed. A lot of voter education will be required over the next month to overcome the egregiously misleading ballot description assigned to the amendment by Secretary of State (and failed Senate candidate) Frank LaRose.
Good use of money: I’ll never not be nauseated by the billions of dollars that get blown on 30-second TV ads during major election years (total ad spending is expected to hit $12.3 billion this year), but until our bluetooth brain implants can start receiving directly customized messages, we’re forced to analyze just how it’s being burnt.
According to CNN, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in September went big on taxes, which were mentioned in 40% of its ads, and abortion, which was named in 32% of its ads. The campaign reduced its focus on housing and made no mention of inflation or the economy writ large — odd, considering the increased consumer confidence and good inflation reports.
Donald Trump’s campaign went in the exact opposite direction, putting much of its money behind ads that hit on inflation, housing, and the economy. The increase in ads on housing is especially stark, and as I’ve been saying for two and a half years, it’s a subject that is likely to swing the election for many people.
One very interesting note: Both campaigns went from heavily focusing on crime to not mentioning it at all in their broadcast advertisements last month.
Nothing to see here: Last week, Politico published a story about the centerpiece of Trump’s plan to reduce drug prices. Two days later, his campaign had wiped it from his website and campaign has disavowed it.
Trump has backed something called most favored nation status, which demands that the US pays the same price as other high-income nations for any given pharmaceutical. It’s been backed by progressives for years but more or less heterodox among Republicans; Trump tried to implement it as a rule in late 2020, but it was quickly tossed by a court.
Trump made it one of the few substantive policy proposals to be featured on his website, and in June 2023, he made a video saying he’d implement it as soon as he returned to the White House. Now, that video is gone and his spokespeople have dropped it from their talking points, which consist of one paragraph from the RNC platform.
Pennsylvania: Rich guy Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s campaign recently held a Black outreach event at Max’s Steaks in Philadelphia, and if it sounds strange that the neighborhood cheesesteak favorite would allow a Republican “anti-woke” phony who has millions invested in Rumble to use their space, you’ve got some very good instincts.
As it turns out, Max’s manager was pitched an event on behalf of autism awareness, to which he said yes because his niece and nephew are autistic. The McCormick volunteer who put the whole thing together is a Moms for Liberty nut, autism truther, and former staffer for Dr. Oz’s failed Senate campaign, which all fit together quite nicely.
“We didn’t sign up for that at all. Zero,” Sfida told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter near the end of the event. “I could throw them all out of here, but I’m going to be nice. Do your thing. When you’re done, leave. You’re not welcome back.”
Michigan: The Detroit News, one of the city’s two major papers, is out with a new poll that finds Kamala Harris with a 2.6% lead on Donald Trump among voters in Michigan, 46.8% to 44.2%.
The newspaper’s most recent prior poll, which was co-commissioned with a local TV station, had Trump ahead by 1.2 points. It was released in late August.
I’ve got some housing stories for you tonight…
Colorado: The city of Pueblo is taking a unique and heartening approach to fighting crime. Instead of pouring more money into policing, it’s going to build affordable housing.
The duplexes will be built on the east side of the city and be open to those who make between $34,000 and $68,000 a year. They’ll be available in four to six months, making it one of the faster affordable housing programs you’ll find.
“I think when you start to come in and revitalize certain sections with tree trimming, new sidewalks, paving, new housing structures, new infrastructure I think you really can start to drive a lot of the crime issues and a lot of the blight issues out of the community,” Pueblo Mayor Heather Graham (lol) said at the recent groundbreaking.
Disappearing act: A new investigation by the AP has found that the nation could lose up to 223,000 affordable housing units over the next five years due to a time bomb baked into the Low Income Housing Tax Credit.
The TLDR is that developers who take federal financing through the LIHTC to build housing units are obligated to keep them affordable for 30 years. After that, unless there are additional grants or credits provided to the owners, they can take them up to market prices.
This wouldn’t be as big of a deal if America hadn’t stopped building affordable housing between 2008 and 2022, but now it presents a potential emergency and even more impetus to have the federal government finance more construction.
New York: A half-a-loaf law passed by the legislature earlier this year didn’t implement good cause eviction requirements across the state, but it did end the pre-emption that made it impossible for cities to pass it on their own. Since April, when the law went into effect, activists have been working to do just that, to great effect.
Already, it’s passed in Albany, Kingston, Ithaca, and Poughkeepsie, and it’s looking good for Syracuse and Rochester, two of the biggest cities north of NYC. They are also two of the poorest areas in New York State
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