The big elections you haven't heard a word about this year
Housing! Police! Jobs! Pay! It's all here.
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
Though purely happenstance, it feels appropriate that Halloween is coinciding with the third act in several horror stories playing out right now:
Democrats in DC are trying to hammer out a deal to save the Build Back Better Act, Biden’s economic agenda, and any hope of avoiding a wipeout in 2022.
World leaders are in Glasgow, trying to hammer out a deal to salvage the planet and save mankind from being wiped out by climate change.
And volunteers in Virginia are trying to salvage the gubernatorial election and save us from nine months of the worst kind of political punditry.
Oh, and on Monday, the right-wing Supreme Court will hear arguments over Texas’s abortion ban.
There’s a lot on the line, and due to the way our government, media, and political economy are structured, it feels as if there’s little that any of us can do to make even the faintest whisper of an impact on any of these tenuous situations. The promise of American democracy is often discarded by the wealthy few that actually control the levers of power, but in today’s edition of the newsletter, we’ll look at the cities and states where voters are bypassing inert lawmakers in hopes of creating tangible change.
But first, thank you to our latest crowdfunding donors: Ben, Rena, and Taylor!
Considering the outsize media attention it has commanded, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Virginia gubernatorial election represents the sum total of what will be on the ballot on Tuesday. But in reality, Election Day will feature competitive contests all across the country, with voters weighing in on important municipal elections (we covered some of the biggest races late last month) and a fair number of ballot initiatives and amendments.
Last week, Progressives Everywhere went in depth on the David vs. Goliath battle over a historic affordable housing initiative in St. Paul, Minnesota, where corporate landlords are dumping millions into an effort to scare a majority-renter city into voting down a progressive rent control policy. Today, we’ll look at some of the other key ballot initiative fights that voters will decide on Tuesday.
Economics and workers
Tucson, AZ: The minimum wage in Arizona is $12.15 and rising every year in concert with inflation, but activists and workers in the state’s second-biggest city want to speed up and solidify the annual pay bumps. In seeking to seize their economic future from the whims of broader monetary conditions, the Southern Arizona Prosperity Alliance organized and qualified a ballot initiative that would have a broad impact on wages for the city’s lowest-paid workers.
Proposition 206 would raise the minimum wage to $13-an-hour in April and $15 by 2025. Crucially, it would give an even bigger boost to tipped workers, who right now toil for the federal sub-minimum wage of $2.83-an-hour. By 2025, tipped workers would make $12, a leap that will allow them to survive bad shifts and empower them to not tolerate the harassment of rude, crude, and violent customers.
The proposition would also provide recourse to workers when their shifts are canceled at the last minute. Those scheduled for at least three hours will be entitled to three hours’ pay if an employer cancels on them inside 24 hours before they’re supposed to clock in.
Prop 206’s provisions would be enforced by a newly created Department of Labor Standards, an entity that would provide workers with access to relevant records and pursue bosses that bilk their employees. Backpay orders, civil fines and license suspensions would be on the table for repeat offenders.
Colorado: Conservative groups have been pouring money into campaigns to pass Proposition 120 and Amendment 78, which would cut property taxes and give lawmakers more control over government spending, respectively.
Should Prop 120 pass, state courts will likely be involved in adjudicating its impact; the state legislature recently passed a much smaller tax cut and reorganization to mitigate a potential blow to municipal coffers. The bottom line, though, is that state and local budgets risk being blown to smithereens, which would be devastating for public school systems in particular.
Democrats are urging people to vote no on both propositions, though Gov. Jared Polis, who is enormously wealthy, says he will personally vote for Prop 120.
How might Colorado fill in the education funding gap that would be created by Prop 120? If Prop 119 passes, the state will place a 5% sales tax on marijuana and use the income to finance after-school learning programs and opportunities for low-income Coloradans. It’s a something very much worth passing, but it shouldn’t escape anyone that, in effect, consumers would essentially pay the price for tax breaks given to the wealthiest few.
Voting Rights and Government
New York: A trio of constitutional amendments aims to open up democracy and inject fairness into a state that isn’t exactly a paragon of open governance or honest politicians.
Proposition 1 addresses the redistricting process, with three especially notable provisions. The headliner is a ban on prison gerrymandering, which counts incarcerated people in the districts where they’re imprisoned and not where they actually live. This artificially inflates the population in more rural and conservative districts and is the norm in a vast majority of states.
The proposition would also cap the number of state senators at 63 and allow the party in power to pass maps with just a simple majority of the vote instead of 2/3rds currently required.
Proposition 3 would remove the voter registration deadline that currently sits 10 days before Election Day and Prop 4 would remove the stringent excuse requirement on absentee voting and make it a universal program. Both of these things are big deals and would bring New York out of the voting rights Stone Age.
The two non-voting rights propositions would also lock in progressive priorities. Proposition 2 would guarantee every New Yorker “the right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment,” while Proposition 5 would allow New York City’s Civil Court to hear cases worth up to $50,000.
St. Petersburg, FL: While much of Florida veers toward a right-wing autocracy, this Gulf Coast city is attempting to better emphasize racial equity and democratic equality.
Right now, the city council consists of eight members selected in at-large elections, but should Amendment 1 pass, the council would switch to district-based representation. This would allow minority and low-income communities a better chance at having their voices heard and would make lawmakers more accountable to constituents.
Amendment 2 would reform the local redistricting process, which would be especially important in the event that the first amendment gets the green light from voters. Amendments 3 and 4, meanwhile, would create a racial equity plan for the city, require the mayor to appoint a Chief Equity Officer, and fund the activities overseen by the Equity Officer.
Boston, MA: Whereas many cities are being overrun by racist parents who want to turn their local school boards into lil Klan training grounds, city council members and voters in Boston are trying to wrest back control of the city Board of Education to make it more equitable.
The city used to elect its school board until Mayor Ray Flynn won a referendum that gave him complete control of the board’s makeup. That led to a precipitous drop in minority representation and, 30 years later, a major gap in student performance and test scores. As Bostonians prepare to elect the first non-white, non-male mayor in city history, they’re also seeking to correct this injustice by reinstating an elected board of education.
Santa Cruz County, CA: Measure A would make permanent the Santa Cruz Children’s Fund, which provides money for child care, pre-school scholarships (I assume they are not merit-based), and increased access to parks. it would also beef up its funding by sending 20% of the county’s marijuana tax revenue to fill its coffers. And in Santa Cruz, marijuana sales are considerable, to say the least.
Housing
St. Paul, MN: We covered this one in depth last week! In short, grassroots activists and corporate landlords are battling over a ballot initiative that would cap rent increases at 3% per year. Here’s the link again.
Minneapolis: Minnesota forbids city councils from passing rent control laws, requiring instead that residents authorize them directly via ballot questions. Like their neighbor across the river, Minneapolitans will be voting to approve a cap on rent increases, but instead of a specific number, they will only be authorizing the city council to pass one legislatively.
Boulder, CO: Racist single-family zoning laws have long kept the suburbs predominantly white and expensive, but slowly but surely, housing policy is beginning to bend under the weight of vast economic inequality. In Boulder (and much of Colorado), there is a limit of no more than three unrelated people can live in a single housing unit. The law severely limits roommates, communal living, and recovery houses, staples of NIMBYism.
The Bedrooms Are People campaign has spent the past few years fighting to qualify and now pass a ballot initiative that would significantly loosen the strict limits. If passed, housing units could serve as the primary residence for a number of people equal to the number of bedrooms plus one. For example, if a house has four bedroom, five unrelated people could live in it. Bedrooms would have to meet certain requirements, including “70 square feet of floor space, two points of egress, one window and a minimum of 7 feet in at least one direction.”
The mayor and much of the city council is against it, as is to be expected. A similar measure passed in Denver earlier this year.
Police and Public Safety
Cleveland: Voters in the poorest big city in the country will have the opportunity to enact across-the-board reforms on Tuesday. Non-profit executive and political newcomer Justin Bibb is running an energetic progressive campaign against longtime City Council President Kevin Kelly in the mayoral race, which is he is tipped to win after finishing first in the primary, while activists are rallying behind a major police reform initiative.
Issue 24 is a city charter amendment that would rewire the citizenry’s relationship with Cleveland’s historically police department. It would create a citizen oversight commission of 13 residents who would have authority to mete out discipline to officers who break the law.
Minneapolis: A little more than a year after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, residents in the city have the chance to disband and reorient the police department altogether. Question 2 would replace the police department with an agency that explicitly prioritizes public safety. What it would look like would be up to the mayor and city council, so that part is entirely up in the air.
Afraid of attack ads, most Democratic politicians in the state have announced opposition to the measure, though the most powerful of those opponents have decided not to press the issue and campaign against it. AG Keith Ellison and Rep. Ilhan Omar are actively working to win its passage.
Austin: Though known as the longtime liberal oasis in deep red Texas, conservatives in Austin have won a number of victories over the past few years by harnessing the reactionary politics of the wealthier suburbs to pass scummy ballot initiatives. In May, they won passage of an initiative that basically made homelessness illegal, and on Tuesday, they’ll try to pass Proposition A to jack up the number of cops in the city to hit a ratio of two per thousand people.
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Legislative updates
New Jersey: The Garden State just joined Illinois as the only other state to provide a full year of Medicaid to women after they give birth. Other states are throwing fewer crumbs at low-income mothers, including Texas, where coverage was expanded to six months this year. Up until now, NJ only offered 60 days.
Arkansas: Another attempt to legalize weed is underway. After failing to make the ballot in 2018, a group of pro-marijuana activists is again collecting signatures, this time to get the Arkansas Recreational Marijuana Amendment of 2022 in front of voters next year. Right now, only medical marijuana is legal in the state.
Voting Rights and Redistricting
Mississippi: Jim Crow may have to cede just a little bit of ground. The Mississippi state House Judiciary Committee is looking at restoring voting rights to some former felons — or at least making it easier for them to get their voting rights restored. Progress, I guess.
Arizona: The “Independent” Redistricting Commission released legislative and Congressional maps last week that would give Republicans a significant edge based on last year’s turnout figures and demographics. This was almost destined to happen once the GOP pushed through its preferred citizen commissioner.
Iowa: On the bright side, the system worked more or less as intended in Iowa, where legislators passed a new round of maps with near-unanimity.
Michigan: Back in 2018, Republicans rushed through a flurry of bills during the lame duck session before Democrat Gretchen Whitmer moved into the governor’s mansion. One of those laws decreed that activists could not collect more than 15% of signatures on ballot initiative petitions from any single Congressional district. Nearly three years later, a panel at the Michigan Court of Appeals said that law is likely unconstitutional, ruling that it was “an unnecessary and unreasonable restraint on the constitutional right of the people to initiate laws.”
Read It and Weep (With Joy)
Florida: Repulsive, homicidal creep Gov. Ron DeSantis has been taking a “victory” lap to celebrate Florida’s recent dip in Covid stats, which conveniently ignores the fact that the state has lost over 15,000 more people than it should have due to his public bashing of vaccines — there are only so many people to die of the virus and it looks like they’re at least temporarily tapped out in Florida.
While the national media continues to tout DeSantis as some kind of political genius (despite the fact that he had to resort to remarkably racist tactics to barely scrape by against a Black, scandal-plagued, self-proclaimed democratic socialist), the editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel called the Trump wannabe out for his vicious, bloodthirsty approach to the pandemic:
Florida led the nation in case rates for much of the summer, and our governor was silent. Well, not totally silent. He did rail against mask and vaccine mandates, measures intended to prevent people from falling ill.
Now, a governor whose sole contribution to fighting the outbreak was to expand antibody treatments for people after they got infected is taking full credit for the decline in cases.
As others have already noted, it’s like a firefighter tossing a bucket of water on a house that’s already been burned to the ground and then declaring victory.
What a fraud. What a phony.
It’s so transparent, but far too many gullible Floridians and complicit politicians are going to buy and echo DeSantis’ savior rubbish.
It’s as damning of our national media as it is of DeSantis himself. Hopefully at least one of them is capable of seeing the light and changing.
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