This Is What The Future Looks Like
Relational, Responsible, Revolutionary
Welcome to the big Wednesday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
While Republicans are stealing another Supreme Court seat in broad daylight, this week isn’t all bad news. In fact, the reason why the GOP is so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court is that they know that we are just a few weeks away from a blue wave overtaking traditionally red states and ending the Republican reign of terror.
We’ll look at positive polls out of North Carolina and Georgia in a bit, but first I want to focus on all the good news coming out of Texas. There’s one Congressional race in particular that would be the final nail in the Republican coffin.
But first: Thank you to GoFundMe donors: Susan, Leigh, Jerry, Mehroo, Kristin, Helen, and Cliff!
If We Win This One, Texas Really Could Go Blue
As I said, there’s lots of good news coming out of Texas. Early voting began in the state yesterday, drawing record turnout in the big Democratic counties and Dem-leaning swing counties. The GOP lost a ridiculous lawsuit that tried to further limit absentee voting. And a big set of polls in the most crucial swing State House districts indicate that the legislature really could flip blue (I broke it all down district-by-district in last night’s newsletter for premium members).
More than any other race, the dead-heat competition in the state’s 22nd Congressional District embodies the tussle between old Texas and new Texas. The Republican candidate is a far-right, power-abusing, anti-mask, disgraced-cop hatemonger, the archetype of Trump-era conservatism. Democrats, on the other hand, have nominated a long-time State Department Foreign Service Officer who has fostered a huge coalition in a very diverse district.
Sri Preston Kulkarni, the Democratic candidate, first ran for this seat in the 2018 election, before it was clear that the state was trending blue. He spent over 15 years working overseas, mediating negotiations and peace deals between hostile nations. Once Trump took over, that job became more and more difficult — the United States was supposed to be a beacon of democracy, but it was starting to look and feel more like a troubled nation.
“After everything I'd seen, from [Trump’s] birther attacks and saying that Latinos are drug dealers and rapists, then the Muslim ban, then the Charlottesville Nazi rally, I just had to do something,” Kulkarni tells Progressives Everywhere. “I started out not thinking that this was winnable, I was doing because it was the right thing to do.”
He didn’t get much help from the national Democratic Party — the DCCC was focused on flipping the House and prioritized the obvious swing districts. Instead of getting assistance from DC and targeting only established moderate voters, Kulkarni decided that he’d expand the electorate in one of Texas’s most diverse districts.
Kulkarni’s campaign built the largest relational organizing program in the nation during that election cycle, with volunteers phone-banking in 13 different languages. By connecting with so many tight-knit communities within the district, the campaign became something of a community in and of itself.
“The third-largest language we speak in Texas is Vietnamese and Texas has the largest Muslim population out of any state in America — these are not stereotypes people have of Texas, but that’s what it looks like out here in the suburbs, and it’s just about getting them into the electorate,” he says. “Inclusion is what we do. By reaching out to people, showing up at mosques and temples and Chinese community centers, having volunteers to speak these languages and understand these cultures — that’s the only way you get change, through coalition building.”
In the end, Kulkarni came just a few points shy of a massive upset victory over Republican Rep. Pete Olson, and in fact gave him such a scare that Olson announced his retirement the following summer. Kulkarni quickly declared that he was going to run again to finish the job.
From the start, he focused his second campaign on issues such as affordable healthcare (the trauma of his family nearly going bankrupt when his dad got sick has stuck with him all these years later) and removing big money from politics (“the amount of time we spend fundraising is not healthy for democracy,” he says, “and I’ll push from day one to have publicly financed campaigns.”)
While Olson was certainly conservative, his 2020 Republican opponent, Troy Nehls, is (as I noted before) a far-right, power-abusing, anti-mask, disgraced-cop hatemonger. His record is appalling: Nehls was fired twice as a police officer for a litany of offenses; is being sued for overseeing a jail where a 15-year-old boy was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a volunteer and failing to act; and at the height of COVID-19 ravaging Texas, he decried a mandatory mask order as “communist.”
That last part shows just how disconnected he is from modern Texas and his district in particular, which is home to more doctors than any other district in the state. Kulkarni, on the other hand, can list off a whole litany of steps that need to be taken to both continue to protect people from a second wave and ultimately recover from the wreckage of the pandemic.
Letting science determine policy, helping small businesses and sole proprietors get the loans that the disastrous PPP largely denied them, supporting business relaunches, outfitting schools with the latest technology and ensuring that students have remote learning devices — it’s all there, ready for policy meetings as soon as he gets to Congress.
He’s been able to keep tabs on what’s happening in his community despite the virus in large part thanks to the relational voter program that the campaign maintained and expanded this cycle. It’s once again the largest in the country and has proven a lifeline for so many people in the district during the pandemic. The plan is to ensure that it continues to do so for the long term.
“We don't want to just win an election on November 3rd, we want to have the largest community organizing project that we've ever had here,” Kulkarni says. “That means that everybody in the community knows they have a voice and they can communicate through those leaders directly up to Washington, DC, in the highest halls of power. And when we have something that we've done for them, we pass that message back through the community so that they don't feel separated from their elected representatives in Washington, because that's how you lose faith in democracy and your representatives. We have to restore faith in democratic institutions.”
Right now, the race is officially listed as a toss-up. Let’s help Kulkarni get over the finish line and turn Texas blue.
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Important News You Need to Know
Money: Democratic grassroots donors continue to prove how much they hate Trump by pouring money into big national campaigns that probably don’t need it anymore (though the enthusiasm is great!).
Tonight, Presidential nominee Joe Biden announced that his campaign took in an eye-popping $383 million in September alone. TV and digital advertising professionals rejoice!
The Lincoln Project, meanwhile, took $39 million from donors in the third quarter of 2020. I don’t love this — sure, their Facebook and Twitter ads are pretty good, but a huge chunk of what they raised was routed back to the pockets of its Republican founders.
Plus, they don’t need small donations — the Walton and Getty heirs, along with some huge Hollywood donors, gave them enough cash!
Polling: More good news for Democrats in swing states. As I mentioned up top, both Georgia and North Carolina are moving blue.
Quinnipiac has excellent numbers in Georgia. They have:
Biden up 51-44% on Trump
Jon Ossoff up 51-45% on Sen. David Perdue
Raphael Warnock at 41% with Rep. Doug Collins at 22% and Sen. Kelly Loeffler at 20%
The New York Times/Siena College poll in North Carolina is also looking pretty good. They have:
Biden up 46-42% on Trump
Gov. Roy Cooper up 51-37% on Lt. Gov. Dan Forest
State Rep. Cal Cunningham up 41-37% on Sen. Thom Tillis
Georgia: Early voting started Monday in Georgia, and as expected, it was a disaster, with lines that extended up to 11 hours in some (Democratic) districts.
Now, two days into early voting, nearly 250,000 Georgians have already lined up to cast their ballots.
Ironically (or not), the huge turnout overwhelmed the voter check-in computer systems, which in some places slowed the lines outside polling places even further.
The outside vendors have increased bandwidth, which has helped… but makes me wonder why they didn’t have it maxed out in the first place.
Florida: Some sad news out of Florida, as the state’s first transgender woman to run for State Senate died of cancer today.
Melina Rayna Svanhild Farley-Barratt was the Democratic nominee in the State Senate’s 5th district, which is very rural and very red. That makes her run even more historic, as she had to put up with a whole lot of awful crap during her uphill campaign.
Farley-Barratt was pretty well-known in state politics, as she was the legislative director for the Florida chapter of the National Organization for Women.
You can read a good interview with her from 2019 over at The Advocate.
Michigan: Two weeks after the GOP-leaning State Supreme Court stripped Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of her emergency powers, she reached a deal with the Republican legislature (which we will flip next month!) on a wide range of COVID-related measures.
Among other things, the compromise:
Extends unemployment benefits by six weeks and grants partial benefits to part-time workers;
Better regulates nursing homes;
Allows government businesses and public hearings to be done remotely;
Gives liability protection to pharmacists and healthcare providers.
The bill also, pathetically, contains a non-binding resolution condemning court-packing.
Meanwhile, Democrats could flip the state’s Supreme Court back to blue (though it’s technically non-partisan) by winning a crucial election next month.
The Economy: I’ve long chafed at the official national unemployment statistics and think they’re especially absurd to cite right now. A new study makes clear just how bad things are right now, even if the official numbers are starting to look a bit rosier.
The US has long had a much higher “true” unemployment rate, with tens of millions of people who are working enough hours to not qualify for unemployment benefits but not making a living wage.
The “true unemployment” rate, in fact, is a gobsmacking 26.2%. And, as Axios points out, “if you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage, the rate rises even further, to 54.6%.”
Black Americans have it even worse (of course), with that number sitting at 59.2%. Infuriating.
Wait, before you go!
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