Things to talk about that aren't Liz Cheney
There are so many options!
Welcome to a Wednesday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
There is all kinds of chaos swirling around capitol buildings across the country right now. Republicans nationwide are moving to cut the social safety net and cut ties with reality, both parties are devolving into revelatory internal battles, and the media is wasting its time eulogizing one of the worst people in Washington.
(Don’t worry: That last bit is the only Liz Cheney reference you’re going to get here tonight.)
Now let’s get going!
2020 Election: The Democratic data firm Catalist released this week a new analysis of how Americans voted last year, revealing a handful of interesting trends that may or may not mean anything. A few numerical takeaways:
74% of white voters turned out in 2020, compared to just 50 percent of eligible Latino voters, 63 percent of Black voters and 62 percent of Asian-American voters.
And yet, Asian-American turnout was up 39% as compared to 2016, Latino turnout was up 31%, and Black voter turnout was up 14%.
Biden underperformed Obama’s 2012 numbers and Clinton’s 2016 numbers with Black and Latino voters, but a huge surge of Black voters in Georgia handed him the Peach State.
In Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas "nearly as many non-voting people of color (11 million) as there are voters of color (13 million), mostly concentrated in Latino communities. The numbers look quite different among white people in these states, with only 9 million non-voters and 24 million voters.”
Voters under 30 made up 40% of the electorate. Boomers made up 44%.
Overall, 56% of new voters supported Biden.
Overall, I’d say that Democrats need to do far better with Latinos, the number one growing demographic in the country, while doing everything they can to cement the support of the young people (student debt cancelation!) that will control a plurality of the votes in 2024.
DNC: I guess that after three and a half years of my writing this newsletter, I’ve finally gotten through to the DNC. Today, the national party announced that is launching a version of the “50 State Strategy” that began under former chairman Howard Dean all the way back in 2005.
The plan includes a desperately needed data exchange program and a new fundraising model that allows donors to dump cash into a fund that gets dispersed to every state party, with an emphasis on the states where the Democratic Party brand is in the toilet.
Under the agreement, state parties will get $12,500 each month from the DNC, up from the $10,000 they received during much of President Donald Trump’s tenure. State parties will have no restrictions on the money, though most are expected to hire more staff.
A new additional program will boost payments to Democratic parties in GOP-dominated states, defined as meeting two of three measures: a supermajority Republican legislature, no Democrat in the governor’s office or U.S. Senate, or a congressional delegation that is at least three-fourths Republican. Democrats said 18 states qualify. They’ll get an additional $2,500 in monthly support, plus be eligible for grants to fund specific programs, such as voter registration.
I think this is a better investment than endless milquetoast TV ads and doomed campaigns like Amy McGrath’s 2020 race.
Florida: A few years back, when the studios that make big franchise movies realized that they had complete power over the vast majority of the entertainment journalism world and could get days and days of free advertising with almost zero effort, they began releasing “teaser trailers,” which are basically trailers for trailers. Then, when that became standard practice, the studios decided to test the limits of their powers and started posting cryptic images with dates on them, which generally announced the dates that they would release the trailer for the trailer.
Just as I have migrated from entertainment to politics, Nikki Fried, Florida’s Democratic Commissioner of Agriculture, went Hollywood today with a teaser trailer for her own gubernatorial campaign.
The race for the Florida Democratic gubernatorial nomination now has one official candidate (Rep. Charlie Crist) and two candidates who have released teaser trailers (Fried and Rep. Val Demings).
New York City: I’ve had a pretty basic weekday routine since I got my vaccination a few months ago: I wake up, I work for about 10 hours, I go to the gym, I stop by the grocery store, I find a glossy flyer from Manhattan District Attorney candidate Tali Farhadian Weinstein in my mailbox, and then I go back up to my apartment.
Farhadian Weinstein is running to replace disgraced DA Cy Vance, who went easy on anyone with money, from half of Wall Street to the Trumps and Harvey Weinstein. The candidate Weinstein has put the story of how she fled Iran with her parents at 4 years old at the center of her campaign, framing herself as an underdog and conveniently leaving out the fact that she’s married to an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier and has financed all those mailers with ungodly sums of Wall Street money. She’s also plastered TV and Google with incomplete biographical ads. Between her sheer financial might and connections with big-name lawmakers like Sen. Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, Farhadian Weinstein has become the frontrunner in next month’s Democratic primary.
There’s a somewhat similar dynamic playing out in the mayoral race, with conservative Democrats Eric Adams and Andrew Yang using name recognition and gobs of cash to take the lead in polls. It feels a bit like the ‘90s right now, with the leading candidates openly backing the NYPD and talking about courting the rich. But this isn’t the city of Jerry Orbach’s Law & Order anymore; Occupy Wall Street ushered in the post-Bloomberg era a few years before his third term actually ended, and over the past few years, New York has become a hotbed of progressive energy, big election wins, and substantial policy victories. So what gives?
In some ways, progressives are in danger of becoming victims of their own success — and new rules — in both the mayoral and Manhattan DA races.
There are several viable progressive candidates in each race, and with the new ranked-choice voting system, there is less incentive for those lagging in the polls to withdraw and throw their support to the strongest contender. That’s allowed more conservative candidates like Farhadian Weinstein, Adams, and Yang to take leads with small pluralities, giving them the frontrunner sheen. I also think that the city, taken as a whole, isn’t as progressive or ripe for grassroots organizing as most of the individual districts where the lefty candidates have won over the past three years. As much as I agree with the policy, centering conversations about intersectionality and defunding the police isn’t going to win over old people in Queens and Brooklyn or rich folks in Manhattan.
We’ve still got just about a month to go before the primary, so I’m hoping that some progressives begin to consolidate support from the left. With Scott Stringer in trouble, it’s looking like Dianne Morales might be our best shot for the mayor’s office, which is not something I expected at the outset of this race.
Housing
National: A temporary stay was issued Wednesday on a federal court ruling last week that vacated the CDC’s extension of its eviction moratorium. The Department of Justice is appealing the ruling, so the moratorium remains in place for the moment.
New York, California, and 11 other states have implemented their own temporary moratoriums, but most others won’t lift a finger to keep people in their homes; some are already green-lighting evictions of people who aren’t covered by the stipulations of the CDC order.
Americans owe more than $50 billion in back rent and 14.5 million people say they’re uncertain how they’re going to pay their landlords next month. The federal government has authorized over $63.5 billion for rent relief over the past year, but there’s been trouble getting it to tenants, which puts a whole lot of people in danger of losing their homes sometime soon.
Washington: The eviction moratorium in Washington State is scheduled to end on June 30th, and in an attempt to both cushion the blow and provide a modicum of protection to tenants going forward, Gov. Jay Inslee on Monday signed a bill that requires “just cause” for a landlord to boot a renter.
Here’s the rundown of the provisions:
Previously, landlords were allowed to end month-to-month leases with 20 days’ notice, without providing a reason. Under the measure that passed the Legislature last month, landlords can now end leases for reasons like failure to pay rent, unlawful activity and nuisance issues, as well as cases in which a landlord intends to sell or move into a rental.
Landlords can still end a tenancy at the end of an initial lease without cause if the initial rental term is between six months and one year and the tenant is given 60 days written notice.
Under the new law, landlords who remove tenants in violation of the rules may be subject to a penalty of up to three months’ rent plus attorney fees and costs.
I hope that the penalty also allows the tenants back in their homes. According to U.S. Census data, “166,712 adults in Washington said they have slight or no confidence that their household could pay rent for the month of April,” as reported by King5 News in Seattle.
Health Care
Missouri: Hey, here’s some more good news! Missouri Gov. Mike Parson is laying the groundwork for expanding Medicaid benefits, even though the GOP legislature did not include a dime of the mere $130 million he requested for those benefits in the $35 billion budget that it sent to his desk last week.
Still no word on whether he’s actually going to allow people to enroll, but if he needs encouragement, he can look to Oklahoma, where Gov. Kevin Stitt is proceeding with the expansion despite the funding not passing out of the legislature just yet. Then again, Stitt is trying to migrate the whole thing into a privatized managed care system, which should not inspire anyone.
Mississippi: Our friends at The Fairness Project are officially in on a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid in Mississippi, the state with the worst health outcomes in the entire country. More on that in an upcoming edition of this newsletter!
Workers’ Rights
“The Labor Shortage”: Parson giveth and Parson taketh. Missouri today became one of the eleven Republican-run states to use the “labor shortage” myth to strip workers of the expanded unemployment benefits provided by the American Rescue Plan. The plan is working to perfection:
The national Chamber of Commerce and its local affiliates spent months planting stories about how workers won’t return to accept their poverty wages,
Desperate local media members ran with these dumb stories, assuming they were reporting out interesting twists unique to their market
The jobs report allowed the right-wing to latch on to the growing mythos
And now eleven governors have cut a hole in the social safety net, forcing workers back to subsistence wages in shit jobs.
Most of these states just operate on the national minimum wage, making it even more devious and pitiful. Here’s a helpful thread on the numbers and the misnomers behind it all.
I just hope Democrats run on this sort of thing in the midterm elections and not on some sort of amorphous notion of patriotism and turning Liz Cheney into a martyr. (I know I said I wouldn’t mention Liz Cheney again in this newsletter, but I feel like this was sort of the opposite of mentioning her? Is all press good press? I don’t know.)
Florida: Given all the other horrible bills that high school bully Ron DeSantis has signed over the past few weeks, it’s a bit surprising that he is not among the governors that have rescinded the expanded unemployment benefits. My guess is that DeSantis would love to slap the crumbs of bread out of people’s mouths, but is unable to do so because Florida’s unemployment system has been unconscionably (if purposely) defunct for much of the past year, thereby denying them those crumbs in the first place.
A true warrior for cruelty, DeSantis is instead doing the best he can at the moment, revoking the waiver for the work search requirement that makes it all that much harder for Floridians to qualify for benefits and pushes them into crappy jobs. At least Florida voters passed a minimum wage hike before the GOP destroyed the ballot initiative system.
Voting Rights
National: I really can’t tell at this point whether Joe Manchin is purposely contumacious or really delusional.
On the one hand, he’s now looking unlikely to support the For the People Act, even after saying that he liked a lot of elements of it just a few weeks ago. But on the other hand, he’s acting as if the Republican refusal to work with Democrats on the bill at all during Tuesday’s markup is a matter of good faith policy differences and that Mitch McConnell is going to let ten of his senators go vote for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore the pre-clearances that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013’s Shelby v Holder.
Just read what he said to ABC News today:
"No matter what was brought up it was a partisan vote, 9-9. This is one of the most — I think — important things that we can do to try to bring our country back together and if we do it in a partisan way, it's not going to be successful I believe."
I want to say he’s full of it, but now check out this video that I found of a speech he gave a few weeks ago at the Marion County Chamber of Commerce:
Boy is he frustrating!
Arizona: Gov. Doug Ducey rushed to sign a voter purge bill on Tuesday immediately after the loony state Senate took a break from its circus audit to finally give it the green light. It’s another travesty, but watching the floor debate did lead me to discover a young legislator named Juan Mendez thanks to a barn-burner of a speech he gave in opposition to the bill. I clipped the final third or so of it right here. You’ve got to watch this — I hope to speak with him soon.
Weed Watch
South Carolina: Hey, let’s end on a good note. Medical marijuana is likely coming to South Carolina!
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