At midnight on election day last Tuesday, vote tallies showed Republican candidates ahead in key races in Florida, Georgia and Arizona. However, many votes remained to be counted in all three states. The stakes are high: two Senate seats (Florida and Arizona) and two governorships (Florida and Georgia), plus some lower offices. And as the count has proceeded, the Democratic candidate in each case has gained more votes than the Republican, narrowing the margin or – in the case of the Senate election in Arizona – taking the lead.
Republicans, led by President Trump, have responded by declaring that counting these votes is somehow fraudulent. The GOP’s rhetoric has been particularly preposterous in Florida, where Governor Rick Scott is attempting to switch offices by ousting incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson. Scott’s Tuesday night margin of 50,000 votes is now down to 15,000, and he’s demanded that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigate some unspecified malfeasance. Each race now appears likely close enough to trigger a recount (or in the case of the Georgia governor’s race, a run-off.)
All this has led many to compare the current situation to the nightmarish legal battle over the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
But two critical facts from that debacle have been erased from history, and are not being mentioned anywhere today:
First, we know that Al Gore won Florida in 2000. If a full, fair statewide recount had taken place, he would have become president.
Second, Gore lost largely because, unlike Bush, he refused to fight with all the tools available to him.
Jane McAlevey, a longtime union organizer and author, witnessed the disaster up close as part of the AFL-CIO’s team on the ground in West Palm Beach. In the prologue to her 2012 book, “Raising Expectations” (excerpted with permission below), she describes what she saw in enraging detail, concluding that “the absolute determination with which the labor elite and the Democratic Party leadership crushed their own constituents’ desire to express their political passions cost us the election.” Today she is deeply concerned that Democrats have forgotten — or never even knew — what happened 18 years ago. “It’s another national, defining crisis,” McAlevey said Friday. “We need to win it this time. If Democrats have not learned the lessons from 2000, [the GOP] will manipulate the process again and take away the rightful decision of the voters, in Florida, Arizona and Georgia.”
Al Gore, right, alongside his running mate Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., makes a statement on the recounting of votes in the state of Florida on Nov. 8, 2000, in Nashville, Tenn.
Photo: Hillery Smith Garrison/AP
The 2000 election took place on November 7. By that night it was clear that Gore had won the national popular vote, but that whoever took Florida would win the electoral college and the presidency. The Florida vote was so close that the networks alternately declared both Gore and Bush the winner, and Gore called Bush to concede and then called him back to retract his concession.
The Florida Division of Elections announced the next day that Bush had won the state by 1,784 votes. However, this margin was so small that Florida law required a machine recount of the state, which reduced Bush’s lead to 327.
The presidential choice on about 170,000 ballots could not be read by machine. Of these, 60,000 were “undervotes” – for instance, the voter had not fully punched through the ballot’s relevant perforated box. The remaining 110,000 were “overvotes,” in which the voter may have voted normally for Bush or Gore but also wrote in their name.
The Gore campaign requested a recount by hand in four heavily Democratic counties. The Bush campaign sued to stop this. The Gore campaign’s efforts then disappeared for the next month into a mind-numbingly complex legal process, overflowing with ballot-design and deadline minutiae that no normal Americans could follow.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party conducted a nationwide PR campaign with a message Americans could follow: that Gore was a pathetic sore loser who simply would not accept that he’d been defeated. Much of the national media eagerly adopted this frame.
On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court rejected Gore’s request for a hand recount in four counties. Instead, it ordered a statewide hand recount of undervotes, with the decisions being made according to the “intent of the voter.”
The U.S. Supreme Court then halted this recount on December 12, declaring that, since different Florida counties used different voting methods, the voter intent standard violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
Gore could theoretically have asked the Florida Supreme Court to order a statewide recount with more explicit standards. But he took the advice of one of his lawyers, who told Gore this would “cause a tremendous uproar.” And in any case, as the book Deadlock later put it, “the best Gore could hope for was a slate of disputed electors” – i.e., he might become president, but Republicans would complain about it.
Thus Gore conceded to Bush again, in a speech full of high-minded rhetoric about “the law” and how his surrender could “point us all to a new common ground.”Bush officially won Florida by 537 votes and the electoral college by 271-266, and went on to become one of the most catastrophic presidents in U.S. history.
A year later, in November 2001, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago announced the results of an examination of all 170,000 undervotes and overvotes.
NORC found that with a full statewide hand recount, Gore would have won Florida under every possible vote standard. Depending on which standard was used, his margin of victory would have varied from 60 to 171 votes.
The recount was paid for by a consortium of news outlets — CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Tribune Company, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times, and the Palm Beach Post. But this was just two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The outlets patriotically buried the blockbuster news that George W. Bush was not the legitimate president of the United States.
For instance, the headline of the New York Times article on the recount was “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.” This was technically true — since Gore’s legal team had not demanded a full recount of the state — and it was shamelessly misleading. But even Gore himself had no interest in making an issue about what had really happened. Asked for comment by the Washington Post, Gore would say only that “the presidential election of 2000 is over.”
In McAlevey’s book, she recounts that in her first days in West Palm Beach she worked on collecting affidavits from Floridians, mostly retirees, who believed their votes had not been correctly tallied. There were huge numbers of them, and they were furious. McAlevey asked her superiors, “So when can we actually mobilize them, put these wonderful angry senior citizens into the streets and on camera?”
The answer came back: never. She then learned that Jesse Jackson was coming to Florida to lead a rally, but organized labor would not be participating. Why? Because the Gore campaign wanted everyone to stand down. McAlevey quotes a higher up as telling her, “The Gore campaign has made the decision that this is not the image they want. They don’t want to protest. They don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to seem like they don’t have faith in the legal system.”
This was Gore’s central mistake. “You cannot trust ‘the legal process,’” McAlevey explains today. In reality, there is no such thing as a fair legal process separate from and immune to outside political pressure.
The Republicans understood this in 2000, but Democrats did not. Instead, terrified of being portrayed as acting as a mob, the Democrats ceded people power to the GOP — who actually were a mob. “The original use of a mob in recent history was the Brooks Brothers riot,” says McAlevey, who was present when paid Republican staffers famously halted a recount in Miami-Dade. “They were literally throwing chairs and tables.”
Already the GOP is gearing up for the same kind of direct, physical intimidation of vote counts in support of their legal strategy. Staffers at the Broward County election headquarters have requested police protection from Republican activists who’ve shown up at their offices addled by Trumpian conspiracy theories about vote fraud.
To stop a rerun of 2000, says McAlevey, “Every house of faith, every synagogue, every church, needs to be out in the streets with serious, non-violent action, on a message of ‘don’t let them steal your vote’ … that we must have the right and freedom to vote.” A clear message from organized people in the streets will create political support for a legal strategy to get every vote counted.
Even some of the Republicans involved in their 2000 victory have recognized how damaging it was. Sandra Day O’Connor, part of the 5-4 Supreme Court majority that awarded Bush the presidency, said in 2013 that it might have been better if they’d never agreed to hear the case. Matthew Dowd, once a top Bush campaign staffer, tweeted Friday that “Not counting all the votes in Florida in 2000 was a grave injustice and caused many to question the legitimacy of Bush election. Let us not repeat that injustice in FL and AZ this year. Count all the votes.”
Whether Democrats will have the creativity and mindset needed to make this happen remains to be seen. But one thing’s for sure, says McAlevey: Anyone who at this late date believes in a strategy of trusting the system to deliver the most basic justice “needs to have their head examined.”
Prologue to “Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell),” by Jane McAlevey, Verso Books, 2012. Reprinted with permission.
The post Democrats Should Remember Al Gore Won Florida in 2000 — But Lost the Presidency With a Preemptive Surrender appeared first on The Intercept.
The most high-profile bipartisan legislation of the Trump era turned out to be electoral poison — or at least, not a prophylactic — for the Senate Democrats who decided to support it, which could serve as a lesson for party leaders wishing to join with the president on other bills next year.
The “Crapo bill,” a bank deregulation measure co-authored by Senate Banking Committee chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and several centrist Democrats, passed Congress this spring with the help of 17 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus and 33 House Democrats.
In the 10 states where Donald Trump won in 2016 and a Democratic senator stood for re-election this year, the three who opposed the Crapo bill all won a greater share of votes in their states than the seven who voted for it. Senators voting “no” averaged 54.7 percent of the vote and won by 10 percentage points, while the “yes” votes averaged 48.1 percent and lost by 1.5 points. The only Republican who lost, Dean Heller of Nevada, also voted for the Crapo bill, and fell by 5 points to Jacky Rosen, who voted against the legislation in the House.
The Crapo bill rolled back a number of elements of the Dodd-Frank Act, including, in particular, stiffer regulations on banks that have between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets. A recent proposal from the Federal Reserve, using authority granted by the Crapo bill, expands that deregulation up to banks with as much as $700 billion in assets.
Senate Democratic supporters justified their votes by casting the legislation as a tweak to benefit community banks in small towns and rural areas, despite its greatest impact occurring well up the chain. In fact, the bill has already led to accelerated consolidation and further disappearance of community banks.
In reality, the Democrats’ rationale was likely more cynical: They thought supporting the bill would unlock campaign contributions from the financial industry. And they were right.
The three Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee who co-authored the legislation — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, and Montana’s Jon Tester — became the top three senators for financial industry donations in 2017, as the bill was being written. By the end of the cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the largest Senate recipients of campaign money from commercial banks were Heitkamp ($320,891), Tester ($274,944), bill supporter Claire McCaskill ($236,743), and Donnelly ($232,966). A little behind them was the Democratic Senate candidate from Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema ($173,204), who voted for the Crapo bill in the House.
The American Bankers Association ran an ad for Tester, and Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded group, launched a spot thanking Heitkamp for her vote. The Independent Community Bankers of America sent mailers for both Democrats.
By contrast, three more liberal Democrats running in Trump states — Bob Casey of Pennsylvania; Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin; and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, ranking member of the Banking Committee — decided that it wasn’t worth increasing industry donations by deregulating the banking sector. Their own results showed them to be right.
The following chart lists the share of the total vote each Senate Democrat running in a Trump state earned in the election, based on CNN’s numbers as of November 8. Casey, Baldwin, and Brown were the biggest winners, followed by Debbie Stabenow, who ran in a state more Democratic on Tuesday than Ohio but received a smaller percentage of the vote. Heitkamp and Donnelly, two of the co-authors of the Crapo bill, lost their races, as did McCaskill; Nelson’s race is headed to a re-count.
| Candidate | Percentage | Margin of victory |
| Bob Casey, Pa. | 55.5 | +12.7 |
| Tammy Baldwin, Wis. | 55.5 | +11.0 |
| Sherrod Brown, Ohio | 53.1 | +6.2 |
| Debbie Stabenow, Mich. | 52.3 | +6.6 |
| Jon Tester, Mont. | 50.2 | +3.3 |
| Bill Nelson, Fla. | 49.9 | -0.2 |
| Joe Manchin, W.Va. | 49.5 | +3.2 |
| Claire McCaskill, Mo. | 45.5 | -6 |
| Heidi Heitkamp, N.D. | 44.6 | -10.8 |
| Joe Donnelly, Ind. | 44.5 | -6.9 |
Note: Sinema ran against Martha McSally, and the race is still too close to call, though Sinema has a lead that appears strong. Notably, both Sinema and McSally supported the Dodd-Frank rollback as House members.
Heller, who was the top Republican in terms of commercial banking industry donations ($227,325), also did poorly, losing his race.
None of this is to say that the banking bill was the primary cause of defeat or sluggish performance on Election Day; there were far more important factors, from the relative conservative lean of the states, to the Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation vote, to Trump’s racist fearmongering.
But the rationale for supporters was that voting for the Crapo bill would help them electorally. Not only could they tout working together on bipartisan relief for local lenders, but they could haul in campaign donations to outpace their rivals. This was the myth that was proven wrong by the results.
Casey, Baldwin, and Brown didn’t chase the banker cash, and they did fine — better, in fact, than those who did. That shows that deregulating the financial industry was unnecessary as a political tool. To quote Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, it was “One of the all-time stupidest votes. This bill had no business passing.”
One of the all-time stupidest votes. This bill had no business passing. https://t.co/RiRg3osQWL
— Adam Jentleson ? (@AJentleson) November 8, 2018
The industry took notice of the stumbles of their Democratic backers in Congress as well. Ian Katz, a partner at Capital Alpha Partners, told Politico, “Since so many moderate Dems who supported S. 2155 lost, it may now be harder to get the Dems needed to get to 60 on financial services legislation. … It would be hard for Dem senators to think that cooperating with Republicans on financial policy is helpful to winning re-election.”
It will be interesting to see whether that point resonates with the Democratic leadership. Already, there’s been chatter in some circles about bipartisan cooperation with Trump on infrastructure spending or bills to lower the cost of prescription drugs. The devil would be in the details with those bills, but the idea that Democrats must show that they can reach across the aisle, particularly in pursuit of industry friendly deregulation, would seem to be disproven by this outcome.
Moreover, the new crop of freshman Democrats must consider the real value of Wall Street cash as well. It’s long been tradition to drop freshmen onto the House Financial Services Committee as a way to cultivate relationships with big-money lobbyists and shake down the industry for donations. The banks want something in return for that, and this leads to round after round of bipartisan deregulation. The midterm results show that such shilling for Big Finance has little utility in present-day elections.
The post Democrats Who Voted to Deregulate Wall Street Got Wiped Out in a Setback for Bank Lobbyists appeared first on The Intercept.
All but two of the 21 House committees are currently chaired by white, male members of Congress. The two exceptions are committees chaired by white women.
That’s all about to change.
With Democrats having seized control of the House of Representatives, a historic number of women and people of color are poised to take the helm of at least eight powerful committees when the 116th Congress takes shape. Some of these chair positions would be held for the first time by a woman or a person of color.
New York Rep. Nita Lowey on the Appropriations committee, Virginia’s Bobby Scott on Education and Workforce, California’s Maxine Waters on Financial Services, Mississippi’s Bennie Thompson on Homeland Security, Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva on Natural Resources, Maryland’s Elijah Cummings on Oversight and Government Reform, Texas’s Eddie Bernice Johnson on Science, Space, and Technology, and New York’s Nydia Velázquez on Small Business all hold the position of ranking member on their respective committees.
California Rep. Mark Takano, vice ranking member of Veterans’ Affairs, has announced his bid to chair the committee. He’s been endorsed by ranking member Tim Walz — now Minnesota’s governor-elect — who’s retiring at the end of the year.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California is vice ranking member on both the Administration and Judiciary committees; she’s positioned to chair Administration following the retirement of Pennsylvania Rep. Robert Brady.
South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn announced Wednesday that he’d run again for majority whip, a seat he held from 2007 to 2011. And Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., said he’d run to replace Clyburn as assistant Democratic leader.
Also contested is the coveted leadership position as chair of the Democratic Caucus. Reps. Barbara Lee of California and Hakeem Jeffries of New York are in the running to replace Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, who earlier this year lost his re-election bid to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., at a press conference on medical cannabis research reform on April 26, 2018.
Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP
“That’s gonna be a really competitive race,” lobbyist Mike Williams told The Intercept.
Williams is a partner with United by Interest, a lobbying firm started earlier this year to leverage the growing size and influence of groups like the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses, in the service of corporate clients, both of which are being bolstered by the record number of women and people of color entering Congress. UBI recently signed with the American Petroleum Institute, the lobby for Big Oil.
As for who else he thinks might pitch a run to lead the Democratic Caucus, “That is the $64,000 question,” Williams said. “I think everybody’s holding their cards close to the vest because they want to figure out what’s up for grabs, and what deals are gonna get cut.”
Those dynamics are becoming increasingly complicated as the caucuses are set to pull more weight in the next session. Those competing influences will play a role in how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi positions herself in the fight, Williams said. Pelosi is confident in her path to the speakership despite a significant number of the freshman class who have said they won’t support her.
“Maybe she wants to throw her weight in behind somebody else at a different caucus’s behest,” Williams told The Intercept. “All of those things are in play right now.”
Williams, for his part, is joining other lobbyists seeking to make the most of the growing potential in both caucuses. While Williams plans to lobby the CBC for the American Petroleum Institute, another firm, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, is forging a connection to the caucus in partnership with former Missouri state Rep. Don Calloway and his firm, Pine Street Strategies. The firm represents the Environmental Defense Fund, but also a slew of corporate clients, including the National Bankers Association, a lobbying group for minority and women-owned business.
K Street firms have long employed lobbyists they call “CBC specialists,” whose mission is to find CBC members willing to sign onto legislation, or letters to regulatory agencies, and give progressive cover to a corporate agenda. Many of the members of the incoming class of freshmen, however, have vowed not to take corporate PAC money and made cleaning up Washington central parts of their campaigns. What comes of the collision between those twin dynamics will determine what the next House is able to produce legislatively.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP
Committee chairs are less powerful than they once were, but the person with the gavel still sets the agenda and determines which bills to consider, what issues to hold hearings on, and who will testify at those hearings. In some cases, they have subpoena power. House Democrats have said they won’t hold leadership elections until after December 5, but women and people of color are slowly building momentum to expand their stake in the chamber. Unless their colleagues launch challenges, legislators in the position of ranking member or with the most seniority usually ascend to chair without issue. Pelosi has said she doesn’t anticipate any deviations this year from the standard process, according to Democratic committee staffers.
The current Congress is already the most diverse in history, across both chambers — if you don’t count legislative staffers. Only six out of 40 top House aides aren’t white, according to a September report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank focused on issues impacting communities of color. In 2015, the center found similarly poor showings among Senate staffers, underscoring a persistent inability within the legislative branch, regardless of party, to build offices that reflect both the country and constituents.
But the next Congress stands to break new records. And members are itching for change.
On November 1, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Cedric Richmond, called for an African-American representative to take “at least one of the top two positions of elected House Democratic leadership,” i.e., House speaker or majority leader. House leadership has not directly addressed the request since the chamber flipped Tuesday.
The letter was initially reported as representing the views of the CBC as a whole, but it was a solo letter sent from Richmond’s office.
Clyburn’s campaign also distributed materials this week outlining his strategy to build “a new model for African-American engagement and turnout, initially deployed in special elections in 2017, including for Doug Jones’s historic victory in the Alabama Senate race.” Clyburn is the only one of the top three in leadership positions to have so far drawn a challenger, Rep. Diana Degette, D-Colo.
Congressional leaders and aides interviewed by The Intercept say they want to push for stronger oversight of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, compelling secretaries to attend more hearings on issues ranging from the influence of industry at the Department of Interior to the Department of Education’s regulation of for-profit institutions. Staffers say they’ll also advance issues related to sexual harassment in the workplace, workforce development, health care access, raising the minimum wage, climate change and environmental justice, and Indian country.
Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP
If Barbara Lee is elected to lead the Democratic Caucus, she would be the first woman of color to ever hold the position. (Rep. Linda T. Sánchez withdrew her bid Thursday after a federal grand jury in Connecticut indicted her husband, James Sullivan, for allegedly stealing federal grant money.)
Similar firsts are expected throughout the chamber.
Eddie Bernice Johnson would be the first person of color, and the first woman, to chair the Science, Space, and Technology committee. She pushed a bill earlier this year to address sexual harassment in STEM fields, and plans to improve STEM education for women and minorities to create a stronger pipeline into the industry.
“It’s been a big deal for her, her whole career,” an aide told The Intercept, referencing discrimination Johnson faced as a black nursing student. As a young woman, she was barred from attending nursing school in her hometown of Waco, Texas, because of her race. “She’s always tried to make sure that underrepresented groups drive U.S. innovation.”
Nita Lowey would be the first woman and the first Jewish person to chair the Appropriations committee. “She has served in Congress for quite a while now. And she’s been on the committee for 26 years,” an aide said in a phone interview with The Intercept. Lowey oversaw foreign assistance as chair of the State and Foreign Operations subcommittee from 2006 to 2010.
In addition to negotiating a new two-year deal to lift budgetary restrictions imposed by the 2011 sequestration, Lowey wants to reverse the efforts of the current majority to use “appropriations bills as a way to limit women’s access to reproductive health care, defund Planned Parenthood, cut Title X family planning, [and] reduce resources for teen pregnancy prevention.”
“I think with her in the chair, that stops,” the aide said. “We’ll write bills that instead actually promote women’s access to health care. And that would include internationally.”
Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., speaks on the separation of immigrant families during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on July 10, 2018.
Photo: Alex Edelman/Getty Images
As chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, Raúl Grijalva, a former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says he would use the legal tools at his disposal to hold Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke accountable for ongoing ethics scandals surrounding his office, something he says his colleagues in the majority have failed to do.
“Me being a Latino in charge of the environment, I think 10 years ago that would have been unheard of,” Grijalva told The Intercept in a phone interview. “It’s a positive, and I think, in the long term, a very integrative and educational experience for the American public. Because people of color and women can chew gum and walk at the same time.”
Grijalva easily won his district, which he’s led since 2003. His opponent, Nick Pierson, a former financial adviser to the health insurance industry, said Grijalva was “not a good example of a Mexican.” Both are of Mexican descent.
Grijalva is unopposed in his path to chair the committee, which he says “has deteriorated” over the past two years “from a coequal branch that does oversight, that pushes on accountability, to basically just being there as cheerleaders for the administration, and for Zinke in particular.” He called out the Interior secretary for replacing career professionals with key advisers from the gas, oil, and mining extraction industries.
Chairing the committee would be an opportunity “to be strong about demanding information,” Grijalva said. That includes “Zinke on one end,” as well as “what I perceive to be conflicts of interest throughout that department in terms of who makes decisions. And some level of corruption that hasn’t been truly clarified. So, we have to look at that.”
“The oversight that the majority has done has been about how horrible the Endangered Species Act [is]. That’s not oversight,” he added.
Grijalva criticized his Republican colleagues for not taking seriously mounting ethics questions clouding the Interior Department. He said the minority had to initiate investigations into Zinke’s Montana land deal with Halliburton chair David J. Lesar. “We had to raise the issue,” he said, “and then asking the inspector general, who then referred it to Justice. And that was work we had to do on our own. That shouldn’t be the case.”
He also raised questions about little-understood plans to reorganize the department — “some whim of Zinke’s,” according to Grijalva.
“He has not provided to the minority, or I’m assuming to the majority either, what the rationale is, what the cost is, what the impact is, how it’s gonna work. And we want to revisit that before any effort is made to fund that,” Grijalva said.
“My belief is that that’s industry that’s in charge right now of the Interior Department. Industry has a role, but they don’t have the sole role. And right now they have the sole role.”
On the policy side, Grijalva said, he wants to focus on “how we build the budget for Interior. How we reclaim the conservation ethic for our public lands and waters. And conservation extending to species and to the public process which is NEPA,” referring to the National Environmental Policy Act, which Grijalva described as “deteriorating and undercut now for two years.” He has criticized Chair Rob Bishop, R-Utah, for proposing that NEPA’s environmental review requirements be waived to expedite recovery efforts in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
The congressman said the committee has also supported “the dumbing down of science.”
“If you look at the mission statement and the goals of the majority this previous session, the word climate change was scrubbed from the whole thing,” he told The Intercept.
“We’re dealing with issues of the environment, of our land and our water, of our species,” Grijalva said. “That requires science and fact. And certainly the idea of climate change, and what role the public assets of land and water play in mitigating and adaptation for that.”
As the committee stands now, “We have one mission for our public lands and public assets including water. And that is extraction, and nothing else,” Grijalva said. “It’s always been a multimission, multipurpose idea that this committee has worked on, and I want to get back to that.”
Grijalva also plans to work with the House Energy and Commerce committee on various environmental justice issues, including restoring the land removed from Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument — which the state itself supports — and protecting the federal ban on uranium mining around the Grand Canyon, a measure the Supreme Court recently declined to review.
The Arizona congressman said that as chair, he would also heighten the profile of Native constituents in his district, nearly half of which is on Native American tribal land. “I think they’ve been diminished in status, and we want to raise that back up again,” Grijalva told The Intercept. He wants to bring the committee on Indian, Insular, and Alaska Native Affairs to its full capacity at 56 staff members — it currently has only 26.
Photo: Toya Sarno Jordan/Getty Images
Bobby Scott would be the second African-American to chair the Education and Workforce committee, following a pioneering civil rights leader. New York Democrat Adam Clayton Powell, whose parents were of multiracial heritage, chaired the Committee on Education and Labor in 1961, which predated the committee as established in its current form.
When you have a “more diverse group of people at the table, you tend to get better policy,” a Scott aide told The Intercept during a phone interview. Scott’s office said he would take a strong stance against the Trump administration’s approach to for-profit education if elected chair.
“I would expect a great degree of oversight in that area,” the aide said, criticizing “a long track record, both among congressional Republicans and the Trump administration, of prioritizing these for-profit institutions over the students that too often are harmed by predatory behavior.”
In December 2017, the committee majority proposed the PROSPER Act, a measure that would cut $15 billion in student federal lending programs and reduce regulations on for-profit institutions, according to a February analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
“There are a number of senior officials in the Trump administration who have come from for-profit institutions, or for-profit lobbying companies” the aide continued, “and there’s a conflict of interest angle there.” The committee has only called Education Secretary Betsy DeVos before one hearing this year.
The committee is also tasked with leading the charge to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. That means allocating future federal funding for colleges and universities and tackling the second worst segment of consumer debt in the country: federal student loans.
At the K-12 level, Scott’s constituents can expect continued pressure on the Department of Education to comply with Obama-era federal laws holding states accountable for addressing the achievement gap, his office said. He also wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025.
As the first woman to chair the Financial Services committee, Maxine Waters would prioritize heavier regulations on the financial industry, her office said, along with issues of affordable housing and homelessness. Over the past several terms, she has battled with other members of the CBC who serve on the committee and are closer to banking interests, over the committee’s direction.
Bennie Thompson’s office doesn’t expect a challenge to his path to chair the Homeland Security committee. He was the first person of color to chair the committee from 2007 to 2010. He’s also the only Democrat from Mississippi.
His office criticized Republicans on the committee for lack of oversight, something they say Thompson will change in the next session. Topics to watch in hearings that could start as early as February include immigration, disaster response, and election security.
Ranking member Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., speaks during a House Small Business Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on June 27, 2018.
Photo: Zach Gibson/Getty Images
Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., is in line to be chair of the Judiciary subcommittee that oversees the federal courts, and he has pledged to continue to investigate whether Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury during his confirmation process, or continue to probe areas where the Trump administration and Senate Republicans stopped short, he told The Intercept.
Rep. John Lewis of Georgia is ranking member on the Ways and Means subcommittee on oversight, where he’s been vocal this year on redesigning the IRS. His office declined to discuss any pursuit of the chair position.
Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois is in line to chair the Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on information technology. That’s only if she doesn’t end up moving to the Energy and Commerce committee to focus on her office’s priorities in STEM and workforce development, according to Communications Director James Lewis.
IT is currently the only House committee in which both the chair and ranking member are people of color — should Kelly take the chair position, she’d be replacing Texas Republican Will Hurd.
“That would be pretty significant, given all the conversation around tech diversity and inspiring women and people of color to go into STEM,” Lewis told The Intercept in a phone interview.
As chair, Kelly would focus on the role that Facebook and Russian-backed hackers played in the 2016 presidential election.
“We work really well with Mr. Hurd. We don’t think the problem is Mr. Hurd. We think it’s his bosses,” Lewis explained, referring to Rep. Trey Gowdy, chair of Oversight and Government Reform. Kelly and Hurd both agree that workforce training is necessary to grow jobs in an economy in which artificial intelligence plays a larger role.
As chair of the Veterans’ Affairs committee, Mark Takano would continue to bring attention to the issue of veterans deported from the United States, which is poorly understood, his office says, because there isn’t much data. Takano wants to make sure the changing population of veterans, which each year includes more women and minorities, has appropriate services to address their needs. He also plans to target deficient oversight of for-profit educational institutions that prey upon veterans as part of his joint work on the Education and Workforce committee.
Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush is expected to chair the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy, where he is currently vice ranking member, spokesperson Ryan Johnson wrote in an email to The Intercept. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., will chair the committee.
Rush’s office said he plans to work on clean and sustainable energy technology, particularly in rural communities, and moving an infrastructure package to improve the electric grid and upgrade old water pipes made of lead, as well as natural gas pipelines. “His other priorities would include promoting a 21st-century energy workforce that reflects the diversity of the nation, and highlighting the economic benefits, as well as the positive national security implications, of addressing the issue of climate change,” Johnson wrote.
Elijah Cummings, positioned to chair the committee on Oversight and Government Reform, did not respond to requests for comment. His office put out a statement Wednesday indicating plans to “investigate the real reason” for Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s termination the day after the midterm elections.
The post House Committee Leadership Is About to Get a Lot Less White. What That Means Remains to Be Seen. appeared first on The Intercept.
“Miracles of stylistic invention,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, the chair of the 2018 Man Booker Prize judging committee, called all six finalists this year. Daisy Johnson—who at 27 was the youngest writer ever to make the short list—pulls off several marvels at once in Everything Under (her debut novel, no less). She coins words, channels outlier voices, and fractures chronology. The result is an uncanny update of ancient storytelling on a primal theme: Are our fates “coded into us from the moment we are born”?
Johnson’s narrator, Gretel Whiting, is a reclusive British lexicographer in her early 30s with a secret past. “Living like demons or animals out where no one could get to them,” she and her enthralling, witchlike mother, Sarah, spent years on a boat moored in the canals of Oxford. And then one day, without warning, Sarah put 16-year-old Gretel on a bus, alone, and vanished. When the novel opens, Gretel has at last tracked down Sarah, now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Neither woman is sure how much of their outlandish history she wants to dredge up. At the same time, neither can forget a river phantom they named the Bonak and a rare visitor to their boat, a girl turned boy who was in flight from parents and dire predictions.
Is escape possible? The question keeps breaking the surface of these mesmerizing pages. Steeped in the Oedipus myth and dark fairy-tale enchantment, Johnson’s world is also indelibly her own.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “Cover to Cover: Everything Under.”
“My God, are we gonna be like our parents?” That’s the fear voiced by one of the five motley high-school students locked in detention in John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club—and that’s the crucial question underlying most movies about adolescents coming of age. The onscreen antics of teenagers might take the form of giddy flirtations (Grease), drunken ramblings (Dazed and Confused), or feisty self-renaming (Lady Bird), but the kids’ objectives are usually the same: to fashion an identity by rebelling against the authorities—and expectations—that raised them. This quest is, however, circular. The losing of virginities and conquering of cliques may require transgressions in the moment, but by the time the credits roll, the teens have generally started prepping for a productive adulthood against which their own children might someday revolt.
For some kids, though, rule-breaking is less a route toward self-definition than a requirement built into existence. That’s the reality recognized by a recent crop of popular films centered on the queer teen, a figure who until now has been cinematically marginal: casually stigmatized in crass banter, relegated to playing sidekick in someone else’s rites of passage, or claiming the foreground only for small art-house audiences. The first major-studio movie about adolescent gay romance, Greg Berlanti’s spring hit, Love, Simon, uses teen-comedy tropes to portray homosexuality as no big deal in a well-off, relatively woke slice of America. But other recent films, set in less tolerant places and eras, hint that integrating queerness into a schema that has been overwhelmingly straight isn’t so simple.
Two prominent depictions of Christian gay-to-straight “conversion therapy,” the star-studded Boy Erased and the Sundance winner The Miseducation of Cameron Post, forgo the notion of puberty as a full-circle journey. So, in more oblique ways, did Moonlight, the Best Picture winner at the 2017 Oscars, and the 2018 Best Picture contender Call Me by Your Name. Whether persecuted or nurtured by their surroundings, queer teens fundamentally flip the Breakfast Club script: Their fear is not that they’ll become their parents, but that they face a future in which that isn’t a possibility. If that sounds potentially freeing, it is also, in these movies at least, a special kind of terrifying.
In literature and elsewhere, the go-to queer narrative is the coming-out story, which might seem well suited to the on-screen LGBTQ teenager on the brink of autonomy. After all, high-school movies are always, on some level, about outing: The protagonist struggles—nervously or defiantly or both—to announce who she really is to the world. But the queer teens now taking center stage are understandably gun-shy about this rite. Almost in passing, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird highlights the difference in what’s at stake. For Saoirse Ronan in the title role, bucking the dutiful-teen image is a performative thrill; her boyfriend (Lucas Hedges), who she discovers is gay, isn’t ready to upend parental expectations in what feels like a more irrevocable way.
Putting that apprehension in the foreground, this year’s gay-teen movies summon external forces to yank identity struggles into the open. In Love, Simon, Simon (Nick Robinson) is blackmailed by a classmate who discovers the secret Simon had hoped to keep through high school—and the kid eventually outs him anyway. Family members, peers, and school staff rally in support of an almost caricatured romantic-comedy finale for Simon: Young lovers ride a Ferris wheel, happily ever after. Simon never dreamed he’d remain in the closet; he just wanted to time his emergence to his arrival at college. That the mortifying disruption of this plan turns out to be kismet is not unlike what happens to the straight teens of Sixteen Candles and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, who have their private crushes revealed against their will.
The recent conversion-therapy movies redraw the blueprint more radically with the simple recognition that for a lot of queer youths, exposure really can spell catastrophe. In Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, set in the 1990s, the title character (Chloë Grace Moretz) is furtively hooking up with another girl at prom when the car door is flung open by Cameron’s male date. In Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, Jared (Hedges again), the Arkansas son of a hard-line preacher (Russell Crowe), diligently resists acting on his same-sex attractions—but is still outed, in extremely traumatic circumstances, when he goes to college in the early 2000s. The unmasking of these characters doesn’t represent a capstone of self-actualization; it kicks off a communal effort to constrain who they might become—to stop same-sex attraction before it “gets worse,” as one Boy Erased church elder puts it.
Change, usually the liberating mantra of coming-of-age movies, represents oppression and conformity in these films: It’s what the Christian brainwashing camps insist is possible for gay teens, something very near the opposite of the discovery of a true self. The comic pop-culture trope of the regimented high school morphs into a grimmer setting of hapless yet powerful adults and trapped kids. Even the homework is a perverse twist. For The Breakfast Club’s crew, being forced to write an essay about “who you think you are” offers each teen a pretext to break out of a stereotyped public image. But mandatory self-analysis, when truly futile, begins to resemble torture: Jared must annotate his family tree with the sins of his forebears (alcoholism, gambling, gang affiliation), and Cameron draws an iceberg showing all the supposedly malign influences below her surface (enjoyment of sports, lack of positive female role models). “How is programming people to hate themselves not emotional abuse?” Cameron asks.
Seeing through the quacks in charge and confirming the truth of their own desires—which both of them ultimately do (Jared with the eventual support of his mother)—isn’t a prelude to fruitful rebellion or an upbeat transition away from home. Jared the earnest church kid frets about his parents’ love more than anything else. Cameron takes on light punk airs, joining ranks with the pot-smoking skeptics in the program she’s sent to, but she’s not fighting the system to achieve acceptance. Though both characters end up as runaways of sorts, they don’t seem to be running toward any particular adulthood they may be dreaming of. Survival has to come first.
Set further in the past, the breakout queer-teen movies of the previous two years each consider—from opposite perspectives—how a person’s initial environs might follow them forever. In Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, the black youth Chiron (played in turn by Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) suffers bullying and parental abuse as he grows up amid Miami drug dealers and addicts in the 1980s. Moments of grace and fellowship are precious, and he’s shown acting on his same-sex desires in only one fleeting teenage encounter. In his high-school years, he does rebel—but by savagely beating a classmate, making a display of masculinity that brings him in line with the heterosexual status quo. Years later, he hasn’t diverged from the script that shaped his youth—he’s become a drug dealer—and whether he may belatedly be ready to pursue his desires is left open. Life itself may have erased this boy.
A contrast to Chiron in so many ways, the white and wealthy Elio (Timothée Chalamet) of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name avails himself of a few different scripts over one blissful ’80s summer in the Italian countryside. Like a stereotypical 17-year-old, he sneaks around in pursuit of sex behind his worldly parents’ backs, at first with girls and soon with Oliver (Armie Hammer), the handsome graduate student spending the summer at his family’s villa. Yet what looks like brave same-sex exploration on his own terms is suddenly cast in a very different light at the film’s close: Elio’s father indicates that he’s been aware of the affair all along. In fact, he’s been jealous of it, having yearned in vain for similar experiences.
Can Elio be who his father wishes he’d been? The film holds out, for a moment, the utopian possibility that a queer kid could be propelled forward by the possibility of fulfilling unmet parental dreams, rather than disappointing deeply entrenched ones. Yet a shadow flits across that uplifting prospect. Elio is soon heartbroken to learn that Oliver, who has returned to his grad-student life, is marrying a woman. “You’re so lucky,” the older man tells the younger one over the phone while reflecting on their tryst. “My father would have carted me off to a correctional facility.” In the film’s pointedly open-ended final scene, Elio just sits and cries. Presumably he’s contemplating the mystery of his future, one in which the men who might have been his role models appear to have surrendered some part of themselves. Even in Elio’s liberation, there’s no clear path for him to walk.
Most teen stories, of course, are open-ended on some level. Puberty breaks everyone’s life in two, and what comes after graduation is necessarily unwritten. But for gay kids, a ready synthesis between the old order and the new sexual self doesn’t obviously await. Willingly or not, they’re swept into an unfolding historical saga. These characters thus come to inhabit their misfit status—a dislocation that’s permanent and deep, rather than fleeting and cosmetic—reluctantly, quietly, and often with gestures toward external conformity.
In look and feel, these movies mimic their muted heroes. Mostly gone are the hijinks and raunch of typical teen comedy, eclipsed by struggles to belong that tend toward stately, notably pretty melodrama. A sensitive camera eye helps capture teens’ interiority, a social vista, and the chasm between them. Yet the critic D. A. Miller has convincingly argued that mainstream gay movies’ “mandatory aesthetic laminate, which can never shine brightly enough with dappled light,” is also a sop: meant to make homosexuality palatable for a broad audience.
Certainly it’s curious that in an age of unprecedented visibility for LGBTQ communities, the queer teens chosen for the cinematic spotlight appear so allergic to, well, seeming gay. Simon is self-mocking as he at one point indulges in a daydream of being accompanied by a rainbow-clad cheering squad when he leaves the closet, and he keeps the only out kid at school—sardonic, femme, and black—at arm’s length. Elio pokes fun at the flamboyant older gay couple who visit his parents, and Jared’s arrival into a life of writing New York Times op-eds and attending Brooklyn dinner parties is shown glancingly, in an epiloguelike time jump. Whether the implied assimilationist impulse reflects the filmmakers’ or the characters’ caution is up for debate. Either way, the caution serves as a reminder: There’s a reason slogans like “It gets better” have tried to give queer kids the kind of optimistic narrative arc that pop culture has offered straight teens for so long.
And even in their mannered quietude and their relegation of politics to subtext, these films carry a disruptive message. Boy Erased ends with Jared telling his dad that he, not Jared, is the one who needs to change. When Simon’s father repents for all the gay jokes he’s told over the years, the gesture is warm but wan. The parental apology suggests why coming of age feels so heavy in these movies: It’s the world, not just the teen, that’s struggling to mature.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “The Queer Coming-of-Age Movie Arrives.”
The feds are coming for your crème brûlée. In an announcement scheduled for next week, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to roll out new restrictions on the sale of e-cigarette and vaping products, according to The Washington Post. The reported changes will be an aggressive next step in the agency’s ongoing effort to curb vaping’s explosive popularity with American teens, and they’ll remove many super-popular flavored products from a majority of the brick-and-mortar locations where they’re currently sold in the United States.
Before vapers start hoarding their preferred pods, though, consider that the changes are complicated, to put it mildly. The restrictions, which a spokesperson for the FDA would not confirm, will reportedly apply to the closed-pod systems particularly popular among teens, but not to refillable tank vapes. The ban will affect flavored products, except for mint and menthol, because those flavors are also widely available in conventional cigarettes. The flavored pods will be removed from convenience stores and gas stations, but big-box stores and grocery stores seem to still be able to sell them, in addition to vape and tobacco shops.
The incredible specificity of these new rules is a way for the FDA to balance vaping’s potential harm to teens with the need to make safer cigarette alternatives available for people who already smoke. It’s an intricate, complicated maneuver aimed at protecting two separate groups whose best interests are at odds. Essentially, the FDA is trying to use federal law to solve a mango-flavored trolley problem.
[Read: Some e-cigarette flavors may be more harmful than others]
At the heart of the controversial rise of teen vapers is Juul Labs, a California-based company whose exponential growth in recent years has given it a 73 percent market share in the $2.5 billion American e-cigarette market. Like cigarettes, vapes draw their nicotine from tobacco, but instead of lighting up, users get their hit from a liquid sold in both closed pods and refillable tanks, depending on which brand’s system they choose. That liquid is then heated, creating the vapor that gives the product category its name.
Juul has sold millions of its ultra-popular vapes, which use a closed-pod system. The only way to use one is to buy its refills, which have been available both in stores and online. The pods come in tobacco-flavored versions and ones with additives that create sweet or fruity flavors, which have been a particular target of critical ire for their potential appeal to underage vapers. But on Friday, CNBC reported that in response to the FDA’s expected changes, Juul will soon announce plans to voluntarily remove all of its flavored products from most brick-and-mortar stores. It’s unclear if that includes vape and tobacco shops. (The company declined a request for comment.)
Since its 2015 launch, Juul has been an object of particular fascination among teens. At first, the company’s ads had a far brighter, more youthful feel. Now, as an apparent concession to regulators and critics, its ads feature only people over age 35 who have actually quit cigarettes by vaping. Despite the change in advertising demographics, the brand’s small, slender vapes look like flash drives and charge via USB, which makes them ultra-portable and, for teens, easy to conceal from parents and teachers.
Vape juice (its actual name!) contains tobacco derivatives, so its sale is legally restricted to people age 18 and over. Juul’s website verifies a shopper’s age during account creation. According to experts, though, that isn’t enough to keep the product out of teens’ hands. Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, a developmental psychologist and professor of pediatrics at Stanford University, says that teens vapers’ first stop isn’t at stores. “The majority of youth get their products from each other, and second from smoke or vape shops. Youth are not getting them from convenience stores,” she says.
Because of the lucrative black market in teen social circles, even if the products are removed from most brick-and-mortar locations, it would only take an enterprising underage teen with a helpful older sibling (or simply an 18-year-old high-school senior) to keep a whole school stocked up on Juul pods. Moreover, Halpern-Felsher says her recent research indicates teens like the mint and menthol options—the ones the FDA will reportedly allow to remain widely available in stores—just as much as the fruitier flavors. “We need to ban flavors across the board, in all areas of sales,” Halpern-Felsher says. “This is a good first step, but it’s not enough.”
Chyke Doubeni, a professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Pennsylvania, echoed Halpern-Felsher’s call for further availability restrictions. “It is crucial to reduce the ease with which these products can be obtained,” he says. Doubeni’s past research has shown that when young people perceive tobacco products as readily available, they’re more likely to use them.
Despite vaping’s cultural reputation as a bad habit for misbehaving teens, its defenders are concerned about overregulation for completely different public-health reasons. Greg Conley, the president of the American Vaping Association, agrees with Halpern-Felsher that teens often buy vape products from one another, but he instead sees that as a reason not to bother regulating the products out of convenience stores. “This reported move by FDA Commissioner [Scott] Gottlieb will only make it harder for adult smokers to switch to a far less harmful alternative,” he told me. “Not every town has a vape shop, which means for many smokers, it’ll be easier to pick up a pack of Marlboros or Camels.”
Although unflavored vape products would still be widely available in stores under the new FDA restrictions, Conley says that’s not enough for current smokers to get the maximum health benefits. Halpern-Felsher is less convinced by that argument. “Gottlieb keeps saying we need flavors to help adults quit, but there’s no evidence that flavors help adults quit smoking cigarettes,” she says.
[Read: The electronic future of cigarettes]
These competing concerns leave the FDA trying to thread a particularly tricky needle: How do they get these products into the hands of the people who need them, while keeping them away from people who don’t already smoke? Vaping in general does show promise as a diversion product, even for hard-core smokers, a group of people who historically have a very hard time quitting a very dangerous habit. Because of the relative novelty of e-cigarettes, there’s no long-term data on what kind of health impacts vaping might have (and there’s little consumer transparency about what’s actually in vape juice), but medical professionals are generally doubtful that it could be worse for active smokers than continuing to smoke.
The vaping industry is in a unique spot. It can’t market its products as explicitly intended for smoking cessation, because that would open manufacturers up to the more stringent FDA regulations for medical devices instead of those for tobacco products. It also can’t market its products as a recreational option to the demographic that seems most eager to adopt them, because it’s illegal to sell tobacco to teens.
So now the FDA must try and steer the trolley that’s barreling toward an increasing number of consumers. Because vaping started out as recreational (and because cigarettes, a much more harmful recreational product, show no signs of ever being banned), it seems unlikely that regulators will push the vape industry onto an explicitly medicalized path anytime soon. And if e-cigarettes remain a consumer product, at least some teenagers are likely to get swept up by their USB-powered gleam. Moderate restrictions can reduce potential harm, but they can’t completely stop the teen entrepreneur in fourth period.
If you were to travel to the early 1800s and strike up a conversation with a European scientist about climate, they would begin by asking why you hadn’t read your Aristotle. First sketched by the philosopher in his fourth-century B.C. treatise Meteorologica, the model that sprang from the ancient Greek concept of klima divided the hemispheres into three fixed climatic bands: polar cold, equatorial heat, and a zone of moderation in the middle.
This understanding of climate as a static property of the Earth’s surface structured European thinking well into the 19th century, and it followed that the collection of atmospheric data, while perhaps useful for weather forecasting or navigation, had little to do with the planet’s overall condition.
Only in the 1850s did this ancient climatology began to lose its grip on the European scientific imagination. As the Yale historian Deborah Coen reveals in her inspiring and inventive new book Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale, we owe the foundations of modern climate science to a forgotten cadre of Central European Earth scientists. The result of their research was a novel paradigm that Coen calls “dynamic climatology.” In this view, climate was not a stationary quality so much as a lively process of energy circulating through the atmosphere, the outcome of complex interactions over time among global and local forces. For the most part, this vision of climate is still our own.
[John F. Ross: How the West was lost]
It is not incidental that the Habsburg Empire, a once-grand and wide-reaching imperial state that unraveled in 1918, employed these pioneering researchers. Coen proposes that in response to the empire’s notoriously convoluted legal structure, its climatologists began to develop a modern, multi-scalar way of thinking about climate—as well as a powerful storehouse of tools for communicating their research to a vast imperial public. This is an arresting story about how politics can shape even the loftiest of sciences.
Azaleas played a surprisingly large role in the new conception of climatology. In the late 1800s, Anton Kerner Ritter von Marilaun spent a not-insignificant amount of his time studying the plants. Specifically, Kerner, a botany professor at the University of Innsbruck, wished to understand their distribution: why the flowers he found growing along an Alpine riverbank could also be found farther afield and at lower elevations. The most immediate explanation was that their seeds had been washed away by springtime snowmelt or carried by mountain winds.
Yet Kerner gradually came to believe something more radical. Isolated pockets of azaleas, he argued, were indicators of a changing climate: As the valleys had warmed over thousands of years, certain populations of Alpine flora had, over generations, colonized the mountainside in search of cooler temperatures and greater moisture. The plants left behind at lower elevations, or foundlings, hinted at “the advance of a given species in one or another direction,” Kerner wrote, “the retreat and extinction of others in historical times.” In his hands, flowers were a tool for slipping along scales of space and time, stepping outside the human frame of things to imagine how climate had slowly changed in the past—and might again in the future.
Dynamic climatology flourished in the Habsburg lands partly due to the empire’s exceptionally diverse natural environment. The state’s topography ranged from Kerner’s Alpine pastures to the shores of the Adriatic, from Carpathian peaks to the Hungarian steppe. As the Habsburg climatologist Julius Hann commented, “Nature has made it easy for the inhabitant of Austria-Hungary to cultivate climatic research.” Beginning in the 1850s, that research included government-sponsored weather stations and field studies in which intrepid scholars logged measurements of temperature, rainfall, wind speed, and seasonal growth. That data slowly fed into a new picture of the global climate.
The new field of climate science was also particularly well suited to the empire’s labyrinthine political and legal arrangements. This was not a unified nation-state, such as France or the United States, so much as a tangled web of nations, ancient sovereignties, and local principalities, assembled over centuries via smart marriages and successful wars. In ways that would have been foreign to their colleagues in other states, Habsburg climatologists were compelled by the empire’s hybrid structure to navigate different scales of time and space on a daily basis. As imperial-royal scientists, for example, Kerner and Hann were both civil servants and independent scholars. They were tasked with gathering new knowledge about local communities and regional landscapes while also contributing to the universal project of modern science—and to the empire’s global reputation. As a daily exercise in scaling, Coen writes, the Habsburg lands “proved good to think with” for field scientists keen on relating local climatic conditions to emerging models of global atmospheric circulation.
Dynamic climatology also promised to resolve a political dilemma for its imperial masters. As the 19th century drew to a close, the Habsburg empire struggled most of all with its own purpose. During an age of nationalism and democratization, what was this cosmopolitan, aristocratic empire for? To whom did it belong? Why should it deserve the loyalty of its citizens?
The Habsburgs needed to transform considerable linguistic and political diversity into a feeling of imperial unity, to make local experience meaningful as part of the whole. The state’s existential challenge was an intellectual quandary for climate scientists such as Kerner and Hann, who spent their careers explaining how and why flowering azaleas and other local phenomena mattered for the planet’s climate in general. In other words, and this is the hinge of Coen’s masterful argument, scaling was a salient political problem no less than a scientific one for the researchers and rulers of Habsburg Europe.
In the Habsburg view of climate, tiny details and local variations were part of a planetary system of exchange and balance. Interactions among air masses, for instance, were framed not as struggles or battles but as cases of atmospheric mixing and equilibration. In pamphlets, atlases, encyclopedias, and newspapers, new climatological maps of Central Europe allowed Habsburg citizens to see the full territory at a glance and appreciate how harmony could arise from local diversity. Offering a vision of the empire as a healthy and robust zone of circulation and flux, dynamic climatology became what Coen calls “the ecological justification for Habsburg unity.”
Today, our main climate challenge is not scientific understanding so much as storytelling: how to convey what climatologists are learning about our planet’s health in a way that is imminent and real for ordinary people. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its bombshell report in October, the Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan challenged journalists to “tell this most important story in a way that will create change,” to find a way of translating technical or abstract climate science into human dimensions. We are, after all, creatures of relatively brief life spans and local attachments, reckoning with a process of global scope set into motion by those who came before us that mostly threatens those to follow.
From disastrous hurricanes born overnight to the asphyxiating smoke of uncontrollable wildfires, extreme weather is rendering our knowledge of the changing climate ever more immediate and experiential. But even this may not be sufficient. As The New York Times recently reported, the damage wrought in Georgia by Hurricane Michael left local climate skepticism intact.
[Read: The dawn of a new era in science]
We might look to the climate pioneers of Central Europe for help. After all, these men invented a bevy of new techniques for conveying the significance of climatology to the general public. Kerner’s ingenious use of Alpine azaleas to register profound but imperceptibly slow change is an obvious candidate. In a beautiful chapter titled “The Floral Archive,” Coen reminds us that living plants “bridge the temporal scales of human history and geohistory” by triggering sensory experiences as well as strong memories: the scent of cedar, the smoothness of an arbutus trunk, the warmth of autumn leaves.
The most inventive Habsburg creation was climatography: an interdisciplinary style of nature writing that combined information about overall climatic trends with an almost poetic attention to tiny details and a sense of physical motion. This was literature that tried to convey to nonexpert readers, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke later observed, “how much splendor is revealed in the smallest things, in some flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, or a birch leaf … The small is as little small as the big is big.”
In one sense, at least, we are still like the Habsburgs: Our environmental problems are not so easily separated from our political ones. It’s impossible not to sense the ebbing strength of facts and figures in our public life, the rise of feeling and instinct as our chief ways of knowing and acting. This, most of all, is what the climate scientists of Habsburg Europe have to tell us: not that we should start creating climatographies or floral archives (though it wouldn’t be a bad idea), but rather that any collective action depends upon our ability to manage what Coen calls “the emotional work of scaling,” the visceral responses generated by the business of understanding and responding to climate change. If we can channel the ingenuity of the Habsburg climatologists, we might just stand a chance.
When a Maryland police officer found out that his daughter had become addicted to opioids, he resorted to the same solution he had for other drug addicts: throwing her in jail. Nick Varner had spent decades incarcerating people for drug possession, though he soon learned that locking his own daughter up wouldn’t cure her addiction—in fact, he now worries it may have led to her eventual death from overdose. The Atlantic video producer Jeremy Raff documented the family’s story and wrote about the difficult lessons Varner learned by watching his daughter struggle with opioids.
Even though parents are less likely to spank their children today than they were in the past, researchers have estimated that 80 percent of children in the U.S. are spanked at least once by the time they reach fifth grade. Scholars and doctors are in agreement that the practice doesn’t help children—in fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced on Monday that it is taking a strong stance against spanking. Physical punishment doesn’t change kids’ behavior, says the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker—yet the practice still persists.
HighlightsIn this past election cycle, the Atlantic assistant editor Saahil Desai noticed an unusual trend: a spate of Americans denouncing their political-candidate relatives in op-eds or TV ads. He spoke with people who chose to publicly condemn their kin despite the risk of tattered family ties.
Bridesmaids have long been a staple of the wedding experience, complete with matching dresses and perfectly done hair, writes the Atlantic associate editor Caroline Kitchener. However, the number of bridal party members has slowly crept up over the years; while the average American wedding today has five bridesmaids, it’s common for some weddings to have upwards of 10 and sometimes as many as 50. While the role of bridesmaids is purely symbolic, Kitchener writes, it’s a way of signaling to the wider world the depth and sheer number of a bride’s friendships.
Dear TherapistEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a reader asked a question that’s been haunting them for the past decade. The reader’s father sexually abused them as a child, and now they don’t know whether to tell family members who may deserve to know about the father’s behavior but are also known “fabulous gossips.”
Lori’s advice: Prioritize your comfort, and don’t forget you can choose to only share part of your story with your family. And make sure you ask yourself what you hope will happen after telling your family.
These questions are important for you to answer because sometimes people hope that by telling the people who should have protected them, these people will take their heads out of the sand and provide some form of healing. Sometimes that happens, but in case it doesn’t, it helps to go into the conversation with a different orientation: that the telling is being done just for you—for the psychic relief in letting the secret out, and of not colluding in the family’s fiction but instead shedding the helplessness and taking action, of which this telling might just be a first step.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
“Hi, I’m Chucky. Wanna play?” His blue eyes and adorable bibbed overalls were deceiving. Tack on the freckled cheeks and playful red hair, and it was hard to imagine this toy as the embodiment of evil. Possessed by the spirit of a fictional serial killer named Charles Lee Ray, the doll unleashed a bloodbath in the 1988 horror film Child’s Play. At the time, Roger Ebert called the movie slick and clever, noting that it “succeeded in creating a truly malevolent doll. Chucky is one mean SOB.”
I was 14 when the film came out. At the time, dolls filled every corner of my childhood bedroom. But I was never genuinely frightened of them—let alone imagined one of them attacking me with a switchblade—until I saw Child’s Play. Any scary movie can cast mundane objects in a sinister light, as The Ring did for wells and as It did for red balloons. But Tom Holland’s film turned Chucky into a chilling and iconic villain who went on to star in six more movies. Today, Child’s Play is a reminder that dolls have been a mainstay of the genre for decades, in part because of how they tap into fears about corrupted innocence and bodily possession. At their best, creepy-doll movies underscore the notion that however plasticine or artificial the conduit, the evil and horror on display is inherently human.
In the tense opening scene of Child’s Play, viewers meet Ray, a voodoo-practicing psychopath known as the Lakeshore Strangler. After a short chase, Ray is shot by cops inside a toy store and left for dead. “Oh God, I’m dying,” he cries out—one of the movie’s most quoted lines—before performing a ritual that transfers his mind and soul into a nearby doll. His desperate final moments reveal a cunning and methodical personality; Ray is a character without an ounce of morality who’s willing to project his malicious intents onto a child’s plaything. Soon after, a peddler finds the toy and sells it to a single mother named Karen (Catherine Hicks), who gives it to her young son, Andy (Alex Vincent).
It doesn’t take long for Ray’s twisted spirit to emerge. Chucky befriends Andy, encouraging the boy to do things like skip school and repeat foul language. But these acts are mild compared to the doll’s ultimate goal: continuing Ray’s murder spree. Ray’s physical form may be removed from the equation, but his traits—his deep voice, maniacal laugh, and nasty humor—live on in Chucky. When I first watched Child’s Play, there were moments when I’d forget Chucky was a doll. I ricocheted between seeing Ray in every swing of Chucky’s blade and seeing Chucky as a toy that was simply much too human.
Dolls like Chucky often meet the Freudian description of the uncanny, or a quality where something that was once familiar has become strange. “The more lifelike a doll, the more likely it is to be unsettling to people,” said Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College who has written extensively on the science of phobias and creepiness. He refers to this concept as the “uncanny valley,” or the bizarre middle ground between “cute, but not quite human” and “fully human.”
Chucky and Andy in a scene from Child’s Play (Everett Collection)When something falls within this narrow band—such as a doll that behaves like a person, even if it doesn’t necessarily look realistic—it can prompt feelings of revulsion rather than attraction. “The fact that mannequins, ventriloquist dummies, and creepy lifelike dolls frequently show up in horror films is no accident,” McAndrew said. Though Chucky has cartoonish features, he feels unexpectedly human, thanks to Ray’s memorable appearance in Child’s Play’s first scene.
Like with Ray, Chucky’s many violent crimes are intentional and sometimes even premeditated. The doll has a humanlike intelligence; even when he’s seemingly trapped, he manages to outwit those around him (and when he cannot outsmart his enemies, he resorts to black magic). Part of the way he exerts his control over Andy is by feigning lifelessness when adults are around, so that Chucky’s many misdeeds—turning on the TV, committing murder, causing a gas leak—are blamed on Andy. Eventually suspecting Andy has gone insane, his mother checks him into a hospital for observation, which was perhaps the most frightening consequence of Chucky’s manipulativeness for younger viewers like myself. It isn’t until halfway through the movie that Andy’s mother picks up the box that the toy arrived in. The batteries fall out; the doll’s ghastly secret is revealed.
Chucky is far from the first cinematic effort to depict dolls as creepy. One of the earliest examples of the doll-horror genre, The Great Gabbo (1929), sees an egocentric ventriloquist slowly consumed by his delusions. Eventually, his only means of expression is through his wooden dummy, Otto. Even though Gabbo himself is technically the monster—a mentally unstable narcissist who demeans his female assistant—Otto becomes the one that audiences are meant to fear. Otto’s gaping eyes and frozen smile give him a sickly look—but it’s when he appears to speak on behalf of his master that he crosses into uncanny territory.
After The Great Gabbo came Dead of Night (1945), Devil Doll (1964), Magic (1978), and a handful of other flicks that followed a similar premise: A deranged ventriloquist runs afoul of his dummy’s homicidal urges. At the heart of many of these films was a kind of sublimation, where the human characters have ugly subconscious impulses that they themselves cannot act on—because they fear punishment, guilt, or shame—but that they easily carry out through their dolls. Since the dolls are inanimate, they cannot question their master’s motives or leave. Despite this initial helplessness, many dolls become even more powerful, and more devious, than their puppeteers. By the late 1970s, the trope of the evil ventriloquist doll had become well established.
Then, Dolls hit the screen in 1987, a year before Child’s Play. Dolls features a group of stranded motorists who take refuge in a roadside mansion inhabited by an old dollmaker and his wife. Unbeknownst to the visitors, the exquisitely handcrafted creations are alive and willing to protect their creators at all costs. When night falls, the dolls attack the guests, while the older couple cackle in the shadows. Dolls essentially cut the cord between human operator and wooden dummy and gave horror-movie fans one of their first forays into independently motivated dolls—those that seemingly could move and think on their own, even when possessed. But Dolls fell short of making its rampaging toys believably threatening. In one scene, which should’ve been among the most traumatizing, a group of toy soldiers forms a brigade and shoots a woman. Yet, given their tiny size and clunky movement, the dolls feel inconsequential, a shortcoming that persists for the film’s 80 minutes.
Child’s Play succeeded where its predecessor failed, striking a nerve with mainstream audiences. It helped that viewers got to witness the exact transformation that turned Chucky evil, and the film traces his arc from a “Good Guys” brand doll meant to entertain kids to a serial-killer proxy who exploits them. “Dolls appearing in horror films have made [dolls] into a sort of horror fetish item, one that can be associated with animism [the attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena] and sympathetic magic, where a doll can be animated with human characteristics through magic or haunting,” Peg Aloi, a critic and media-studies scholar, told me. Chucky easily fits this description—he’s a toy imbued with a soul who, through Ray’s expertise with voodoo, can behave like a person.
Unlike the creatures in Dolls, Chucky has a singular identity. He also looks more like a human child, in size and appearance. In this way, Chucky resembles another, newer horror doll that audiences know by her first name: Annabelle, arguably the second most famous scary doll in cinema. The 2013 horror smash The Conjuring, directed by James Wan, first introduced viewers to Annabelle, a vintage porcelain doll based on a toy from the ’70s who was said to be possessed. Like Chucky, Annabelle was designed with exaggerated childish features: rosy cheeks; big, colorful eyes; pigtails; and charming clothing. But neither is presented as cute.
A scene from 2014’s Annabelle (Warner Bros. / Everett Collection)The iconic first scene of The Conjuring in some ways recalls the opening sequence of Child’s Play, establishing a visceral fear of its doll from the start. The newer film begins with a black screen and people talking in the background. At first, it’s hard to make out what they’re saying. Then, a close-up of a doll’s eye appears on the screen. There’s a wound on Annabelle’s stained cheek, her pupil is split, and the paint on her lips is smeared. Even before Annabelle’s whole face has come into view, she’s a disturbing sight: Her doll-like features bear the marks of real-world harm. The demon toy played a relatively small part in the movie but made enough of an impression to get her own spinoff, Annabelle (2014), and a prequel, Annabelle: Creation (2017).
Both Annabelle and Chucky are good examples of how scary dolls draw power from their symbolic association with youth. “I think dolls are synonymous with childhood innocence, and now, as adults, seeing them come to life in mischievous and murderous ways is terrifying,” said Al Lougher, the director of the indie psychological thriller The Dollmaker. The short film follows a couple grieving the loss of their young son. They turn to a dollmaker who creates crude imitations of deceased loved ones, but the reconstruction he makes of their child only torments the parents further. In this case, the doll lulls the parents into a dreamlike state where they begin to see the toy as their actual, living child. Though the doll isn’t possessed, it acts as both an emotional bandage for the couple and as a mirror for their pain. As Jud from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary would say, “Sometimes dead is better.”
Still, some things won’t die, as is the case in the final act of Child’s Play. Chucky is repeatedly beaten, stabbed, shot, and finally burned alive by the police detective Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon). The doll’s charred remains lie on the floor. He’s dead—or so audiences think—until suddenly he jumps to his feet and runs out the door, paving the way for a sequel and a legacy.
After the original film, which was a more conventional horror work, the franchise crept toward dark humor (with Child’s Play 2 and Child’s Play 3) before veering into horror comedy (with Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky). This tonal shift can be seen as a sign of how delicate the line between haunting and silly can be when it comes to humanoid toys. These things, after all, aren’t inherently fear-inducing. Child’s Play set the standard for cinematic dolls as objects that are both menacing on their own terms—with their vacant grins and distorted features—and also as reflections of a darkness that’s much more human than many viewers will want to believe.
They said it couldn’t be done and, in the end, they were right. Texas had been a one-party state for years. It’s true that the state’s motley, virtually nonexistent opposition party, hardly worthy of the same name as its national counterpart, had put up strong showings in the state in the last few presidential elections, and that the incumbent was a highly polarizing figure whose naked ambition and peculiar personal style caused many in his own party to disparage him behind closed doors, but none of that was enough. That November, Republican John Tower lost to sitting Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson 41 to 58 percent.
But that performance, which looked pathetic to outsiders, looked like an opportunity to the Republican Party of Texas, because things work differently under one-party rule. In the special election next year to fill LBJ’s seat after his elevation to the vice presidency, Tower ran again, caught his opponent flat-footed, and narrowly beat him. Over the years, the state changed, and so did the nation. Republicans started running, and then winning. And here we are.
You could fill a book with the differences between the Texas Democratic Party in 2018 and the state GOP in 1960, just as you could fill a book with the caveats necessary to write any article that suggests there’s anything at all of interest to national observers about Texas Democrats. Many of those caveats have real weight, and I don’t think I’d put any meaningful amount of money on the proposition that the Texas Democratic Party is going to start seizing the levers of power anytime soon.
[David Frum: Beto’s loss was a blessing in disguise for Democrats.]
But while the strong results the party scored across the board in Texas this year aren’t the end of the status quo, they just might be the beginning of the end. If we’re going to ask whether Texas might “turn blue”—the wrong question anyway, but let’s entertain it—it makes sense first to think about how Texas “turned red,” and how the state’s Democratic party got this weak in the first place. What happened in the state on Tuesday, from the marquee Senate contest between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz down to the election for Harris County tax assessor, reflects that broader history. But the way many talk about Texas does not.
In fact, Texas has never “turned” anything. The Republicanization of Texas took nearly a half century to enact—it wasn’t until 2003 that the party completed its takeover of state government by winning control of the Texas House, after a particularly helpful round of gerrymandering, and didn’t reach its contemporary peak for another decade. The most commonly cited statistic about Texas politics is that no Democrat has been elected to a statewide nonjudicial office since 1994, which is true, but it’s also true that Democrats held a trifecta until that year. The party wasn’t fighting to hold on to its last outposts 25 years ago, but experiencing wild swings between favor and disfavor while struggling to maintain internal cohesion amid a fair amount of corruption and incompetence.
Ann Richards’s 1994 loss of the governor’s mansion to a young George W. Bush turned out to be a fateful blow, but it wasn’t half as devastating to the party as the next gubernatorial campaign in 1998, when Bush blew out the Democrat Garry Mauro by 37 points and the GOP took control of redistricting. Nor was it as crucial as the next 16 years, when the famously well-coiffed Rick Perry kept dominating the party in good and bad climates. Each subsequent drubbing of Democrats became more of a dark joke.
The effect of all that losing was to kick the structural supports out from under the Democratic Party one by one. The business lobby stopped donating to Democrats except to buy small favors in the legislature. Democratic donors in the state started writing checks for national causes instead of local ones. The party’s brand as a perpetual loser became a drag among swing voters and a disincentive for base voters to turn out. Why bother? Talented Democrats in the legislature quit, because there was no future for them, and the slates of Democratic candidates running statewide grew weaker and weaker.
[Read: Beto O’Rourke’s national celebrity was his undoing.]
Most damaging of all, the young people who make the party work behind the scenes went into exile. Many of the party’s up-and-coming strategists moved to D.C. or California or purple states, where they could be of help and lead fulfilling lives, or they stayed here and got out of politics entirely. Working for the party here became a kind of social work, a charitable endeavor performed at personal cost by people with a high tolerance for pain. All these things became their own drain on party performance, in a vicious cycle.
But some of that damage could be repaired quite quickly. A strong performance, even if it’s a loss, sends a signal to interested parties that things might just be changing. That’s something like what Tower did in 1960 and 1961. His initial loss didn’t discourage him, but neither did it make Republicans think that they were on an inexorable march to dominance. It simply made clear that the party could bide its time, be smart, and pick off races when it could.
That might just be—with a very strong emphasis on might—what happened to Texas Democrats in 2018. I’ve written elsewhere about what the results up and down the ballot look like for the party, but there are a few things to briefly note. One, Democratic statewide candidates scored extraordinary results. O’Rourke’s losing margin, which sits at about 2.6 points, was substantially better than the performance of many of this cycle’s incumbents, including Claire McCaskill in Missouri, who lost by 6 points; Joe Donnelly in Indiana, by 7.5 points, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, by 10.8 points; and Dean Heller in Nevada, by 5 points. Those were supposedly the tightest races in the country.
But Cruz wasn’t the only Texas Republican who struggled. Firebrand Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick won reelection by only about 5 points, and indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton won by about 3.6 points against a first-time candidate who ran a campaign that got little help from anybody. That’s not supposed to happen in blood-red Texas, and it’s possible only because Republican-leaning voters crossed over in specific races in a way they never had before.
It’s not just those races—the tide lifted everyone. Consider what would happen in 2020 if Texas Democrats won every congressional and legislative seat they won this year, plus every district they lost by less than 5 points. (This is, of course, a mental exercise, not a likely outcome.) The Texas congressional delegation would then consist of 19 Democrats and 17 Republicans, and the Texas state House would be tied 75 to 75. The Texas state Senate—speaking hypothetically, because seats won this year are not up for reelection in 2020—would contain something like 15 Democrats to 16 Republicans.
[Read: The Democrats’ Deep-South strategy was a winner after all.]
That’s in large part because Republicans gerrymandered Texas to make the most of its suburban vote, and the suburban vote abandoned Republicans this year. Suburban counties around Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Houston either went blue completely or delivered greatly diminished returns for Republicans up and down the ballot.
Here come the caveats—the Democrats have to actually make something of this opening. The planets might not line up this way again. Suburban anger has to persist. Much of this was possible because of O’Rourke and his money, and it may not be possible without him. (Though it has been repeatedly noted by O’Rourke’s allies that there happens to be another Senate seat up in 2020, currently held by Republican John Cornyn.) All this might well be a one-off. But if it turns out to be part of even a weak trend line, it’s not sustainable for the Republican Party here.
No one is more surprised to be writing this after the election than me, who consistently told people in the run-up to the voting that I thought O’Rourke would underperform the polls and lose by 7 to 8 points. (Or, as I stipulated for the office pool, 5.75.) But if there’s one thing that became clear over the last two years, it’s that no one understands this terrifically weird state well enough to know what’s actually going on here from moment to moment.
The volume of terrible takes written about Texas in the last year could pack a landfill to overcapacity. But terrible takes are written about everything—it’s what people got specifically wrong about Texas that’s wonderful. When O’Rourke became a national media phenomenon, people started responding to the phenomenon instead of looking at the race, and that led them to some very strange places. One pre-postmortem, written before the race was mort-ed, was written with the fairly common premise that O’Rourke had moved too far left to attract Republican votes, and so he wasn’t going to win any. He had blown it early on.
Dead wrong, it turns out—it looks like some 400,000 people voted for both Abbott and O’Rourke. O’Rourke wasn’t a wild-eyed lefty or a dead-eyed centrist. He was a former small-business owner who came to Congress by beating a Democratic incumbent in his primary from the right, and who spoke passionately about liberal causes while mostly avoiding specific policy prescriptions. He was pro-immigration and pro-trade, which is to say that he had common cause with the left-wingers at the Texas Association of Business.
O’Rourke was a Texas liberal, a member of a long-standing political tradition. The main difference between O’Rourke and previous Democratic candidates is that people liked him a lot. When he spoke to crowds, he talked of our obligations to one another, patriotism, public service, and investment in public projects. It may have been momentarily shocking for political reporters to hear a Texan running for office talking about marijuana, or the principle of universal health care. But 53 percent of Texans support legalizing pot, according to polling from the University of Texas, and 46 percent say that they support a “single national health insurance system run by the government.” A broad semiautomatic weapons ban only pulls 40 percent, but you could make a case that Cruz is the one who’s more out of step—a significant majority of Texans favor requiring criminal and mental-health background checks for all gun sales, including private ones.
[Read: How both parties lost the Texas Senate race]
Issues have never been the issue for Texas Democrats, just the same as Democrats nationally. Their problem has been putting together a coalition, and O’Rourke’s charisma and positivity gave people on both the left and in the middle a reason to invest in him. After the election, Republican House Speaker Joe Straus, hunted for years by the far right, strongly hinted that he had voted for O’Rourke. He warned that the “Republican Party and the state of Texas are moving in opposite directions.”
That points to the delightful wrongness of another common line on the Texas Senate race this year. In April, Josh Kraushaar wrote in the National Journal that O’Rourke was demonstrating the “limits of base-first politics,” and that a much better model for Democratic success could be found in Phil Bredesen, the old blue-dog centrist running for Senate in Tennessee. Bredesen’s most notable act as governor was kicking a lot of poor people off Medicaid.
Well, Bredesen got pulverized—he lost Tennessee, a state that has elected Democrats a lot more recently than Texas, by more than 10 points, which is just a little better than how bland centrist Democrats have traditionally performed in Texas. The conventional wisdom about what Texans want is plainly incorrect. Which is not particularly surprising, really. Texans like big personalities and frank talk—the last Democrat the state elected, after all, was Ann Richards—or as Cruz himself likes to say, “bright bold colors, and not pale pastels.”
Something very strange happened here this year. Like Tower’s bid, the full payoff may not come for many years. But the state party now has what the Republican Party then needed more than anything else: A reason to start building in earnest. That’s not much, doubtless. But it just might be enough.
We all have books that have influenced how we make sense of the world. One of my favorites is Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History, a short book by the Canadian American historian William McNeill that was first published in 1985. I recently learned that McNeill died in the summer of 2016, not long after Britain voted to leave the European Union and shortly before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. It occurs to me that McNeill would have had a great deal to say about the reassertion of nationalism around the world, and I regret that he is not here to share his thoughts with us. This is not because I expect that McNeill would echo my own beliefs—indeed, I am confident he would not—but rather because his work might help reorient our perspective.
Though McNeill was very much a skeptic of nationalism, he taught me, in a roundabout way, to appreciate its virtues. Critics of nationalism often point to the fact that it is a relatively novel doctrine, and they’re not wrong to do so. What they tend to neglect, however, is that the same can be said of nationalism’s chief rival: the ideal of a cultural pluralism that is bereft of hierarchy. In liberal circles, “nationalism” is typically understood as a divisive, exclusionary force, usually in implicit contrast with some form of cultural pluralism, and so to identify as a nationalist is to declare oneself a chauvinist.
But as McNeill suggests, nationalism can be understood as a unifying alternative to a society built on polyethnic hierarchy, in which a series of hereditary ethnic castes live together in uneasy peace, usually with some dominating the others. It is polyethnic hierarchy that has been the norm throughout modern history, not national unity or egalitarian pluralism. One could argue that the dream of pluralism without hierarchy is at least as chimerical as that of an egalitarian nationalism built on the melting and fusing together of once-distinct groups, if not far more so. McNeill’s stylized history gives us a sense of what we’re up against as we try to build decent and humane societies amidst entrenched ethnic divisions, and why so many modern thinkers have embraced the politics of national unity.
Until around the mid-18th century, McNeill argued, ethnic-political unity in major civilizations from Europe to the Mediterranean to the Asian steppe “was often illusory and always fragile.” The 19th-century ideal of the homogenous nation-state, which took off with particular intensity in revolutionary France, was something of a historical anomaly, one that the epic demographic and ideological shifts of the bloody 20th century would begin to erase. Today we may find ourselves at another major turning point in the relationship between state and ethnos.
[Read: The everyday psychology of nationalism]
McNeill cites three factors that obstructed the formation of stable and cohesive national identities for much of recorded history. First, in the premodern period, the continuous conquest and reconquest of vast territories by rival bands of military nomads competing for resources ensured continuous ethnic mixing and upheaval, especially in major population centers. “The rise of nomadry as a way of life,” McNeill writes, “acted on the peoples of Eurasia like an enormous gristmill, grinding the peasant majority exceedingly hard since it was they who suffered plunder and paid taxes, sustaining their military masters and all the other occupational specialists who congregated in cities and maintained the arts and skills of civilization.”
The second fact of premodern and early-modern life that forced urban ethnic mixing was the prevalence of fatal infectious diseases in populous areas. Mortality rates were so high that cities were not able to sustain their population through reproduction alone, and while some of the labor shortage could be made up by organic migration from nearby rural areas, political elites more often than not resorted to the importation of ethnic “others” as slaves, helots, or serfs from their imperial peripheries. Even the classical city-states of Athens and Rome, sometimes regarded as model egalitarian liberal republics, would soon transform into mighty empires whose capitals were flooded with foreign-born ethnic outsiders who were politically and economically subordinate to the dominant class of Greek or Roman citizens.
Finally, different ethnic groups interacted with one another vigorously because of widespread economic exchange and missionary activity. Trade “gave birth to permanent communities of aliens in major urban centers,” and “the rise of portable and universal religions … provided an effective cultural carapace for trade diasporas, insulating them from their surroundings in matters of faith and family as never before.” The result is that across Eurasia, while ethnic homogeneity was common in the rural countryside, the cities that acted as the seats of political power and civilizational progress were defined by polyethnicity, or a hierarchy of ethnic castes. With notable exceptions, including in the Empire of Japan and early Macedon, few political elites “assumed that uniformity was desirable or that assimilation to a common style of life or pattern of culture was either normal or possible.”
[Read: A short history of “America first”]
According to McNeill, the first real approximations of national states in Europe—that is, political units that corresponded with ethnic boundaries—began to form in the late Middle Ages: “France and England, along with a fringe of others: Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Poland and perhaps Portugal as well.” But even these early quasi-states were not well defined or self-sufficient. The watershed event in the birth of nationalism as an idea was the French Revolution, which touched off an era of new and vigorous claims to ethno-national solidarity across the continent and beyond. McNeill cites four historical patterns that made this eruption possible.
The first was the influence of civic humanism. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, many European thinkers began to regard the classical political traditions of Greece and Rome as the pinnacle of human organization. As noted before, Greece and Rome had quickly become polyethnic empires, but 19th-century thinkers fixated on (a stylized version of) their early years, in which groups of men bound by the bonds of brotherhood created a single civic culture and determined their own destiny. A level of ethnic homogeneity in northern European towns made this ideal seem close enough to a reality that it took off with particular force, and “reformers of the eighteenth century [tried] to revive Roman republican virtue in all its glory.”
Starting around the mid-18th century, this intellectual change was paired with an equally revolutionary demographic one. Thanks to changes in disease patterns and new agricultural technologies, populations began to soar at a pace unprecedented in world history. The emergence of surplus labor in the countryside had two effects across Europe: First, the need for political elites to forcibly import labor from abroad was greatly diminished, and “even great cities like London and Paris could maintain an approximation to ethnic homogeneity.” Existing urban hierarchies were disrupted. Moreover, economic displacement in the countryside fomented political upheaval, and underemployed workers were an enthusiastic constituency for revolutionary and nationalistic movements.
Advances in literacy and communication, often propelled by Protestant missionaries, also played a role in increasing cohesion, as languages became “a powerful new basis for expanding and delimiting national boundaries and for communication within the national group so defined.” Linguistic commonality also promoted commerce tying together towns and the countryside, and helped state bureaucracies expand and deepen their links with the population in their jurisdiction.
[Peter Beinart: Trump is no patriot.]
The fourth factor in McNeill’s account of the rise of ethnic-political unity was military modernization. As in Rome and Greece, participation in the armed forces forged solidarity between citizens of European national groups, melting them together like no other experience could. And new military technology made national governments more capable of maintaining their borders, suppressing uprisings, repelling invasions, and cultivating commerce. The military primacy of Napoleonic France made other budding nations look to replicate its success. Ultimately, however, the military might of the 19th-century European nation-state would “undermine its own social basis” by producing a world not of states but of empires, and later of wars so devastating that they significantly reduced the prestige of the ethno-nationalist ideal.
Perhaps the most familiar chapter of McNeill’s story, at least in today’s political environment, is the rise of globalization that occurred after the world wars of the first half of the 20th century—the “accelerated mingling of diverse peoples within state boundaries that we everywhere witness in our own time, and specifically since World War I.” His key insight is to frame this rise of polyethnicity over the past century not as a new development, but as “a return to normal,” at least “as far as Western European nations are concerned.”
The most important reason for the pivot away from nationalism was ideological. The destruction of the First World War and the genocidal imperialism of the Second World War (which paradoxically included high levels of ethnic mixing in the form of Nazi slave labor) effectively discredited nationalism among European elites. This contributed to the creation of new international structures, like the European Union, that facilitated cooperation, immigration, and the fading of ethnic boundaries between nation-states. Another ideological spillover effect from the ethnic horrors of the war was that subnational ethnic identities gained renewed prestige.
As with the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, its decline in the second half of the 20th also had a strong demographic component. The enormous number of casualties from the war created a labor imbalance in Europe, which caused emigrations of large populations of people looking for work from southern European countries to wealthier northern ones. The Soviet Union also saw substantial internal relocation under Stalinism. And in the longer run, declining birth rates in Western countries, fueled by birth control, economics, and changing social norms, created a demand for more labor, and rising birth rates in the Middle East and global South provided the supply.
Finally, there are the trappings of globalization we are all familiar with: airplanes, tanker ships, and computers—“improvements in communication and transport that continually nibble away at once-formidable obstacles to human interaction at a distance.” Transnational commerce is now regulated by international structures like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. There is also a military dimension to the new globalization. (“Garrisons stationed permanently … on foreign soil constitute another significant form of polyethnicity.”) And, of course, McNeill was writing before the fall of the Soviet Union, which supercharged the global trend toward polyethnicity during the 1990s, as millions of people previously confined behind the Iron Curtain migrated to other countries across the globe and Cold War–era restraints on international movement of all kinds were lifted.
McNeill concluded his argument with a prediction that is darkly relevant to the present day: “Social strains and frictions are almost sure to increase within nations playing host to different ethnic groups; and sporadic resort to riot and even wholesale murder is likely.”
He also pointed to the fundamental challenge of polyethnicity throughout world history: “Efforts to sustain equality in face of actual differences in skill and custom have met with very limited success … Other civilized societies have almost always accepted and enforced inequality among the diverse ethnic groups of which they were composed.” These two observations point to the world-historical challenge confronting us: to navigate our polyethnic reality while keeping social peace and without compromising the nonnegotiable principles of equal citizenship. That is, to transition into a more diverse future without succumbing to the caste hierarchy of late-imperial Rome or to the bellicose nationalism of early-20th-century Prussia.
Does the future belong to egalitarian cultural pluralism, in which sharp group distinctions remain yet ethnic hierarchy somehow melts away? Or should we pursue a melting-pot nationalism, in which bright boundaries between groups blur over time, and civic equality and national unity prove mutually reinforcing? I’ve come to believe that the latter ideal is ultimately the more realistic and fruitful. But I’m keenly aware that the clash between these two visions won’t be resolved anytime soon.
Julia Davis is a comic genius, and by genius I mean she has a profound and uncanny gift for pinpointing the horrors buried in your subconscious mind and wrenching them out into the open. Teeth flossing, those tiny brown bits you sometimes find in raw eggs, the tampon scene from Fifty Shades of Grey—all these emerge in the first episode of HBO’s Sally4Ever, visceral and depraved. And it gets worse. Gluten-sparked gastrointestinal distress. Ferrets. That moment when someone picks up an acoustic guitar at an otherwise perfectly genial dinner party. These are the kinds of nightmares that Davis is primed to exploit.
It was Davis’s macabre brilliance that brought us Camping, the dastardly British comedy about a weekend away that was adapted by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner into a softer and substantially less funny version starring Jennifer Garner. HBO, which produced that adaptation, has imported Sally4Ever directly to American screens this time, which feels both necessary and potentially cataclysmic. I’m not certain U.S. viewers are—or will ever be—ready.
[Read: HBO’s ‘Camping’ is awful—but not awful enough].
Sally4Ever is about Sally (Catherine Shepherd), a woman so meek and so diffident that she communicates most of her emotions by blinking (Shepherd, to be clear, has gifted eyelids). Sally has been in a relationship for the past decade with David (Alex Macqueen), a man whose exclusively beige wardrobe is matched in atrocity only by the noises that he makes when he moisturizes his feet. Ten minutes of Sally and David’s relationship is enough to make you want to garrote yourself with the nearest cable; that Sally has somehow survived 10 years gives a sense of how superhumanly passive she is.
That is, until she meets Emma, played by Davis. Emma is a singer and sometime actress; Emma wears jackets made of red vinyl and has never met a boundary she couldn’t obliterate; Emma is a sexual libertine who draws Sally into a profound awakening. Emma is also demented, which becomes clear the minute she shows up at Sally’s house, eye makeup streaming down her face, and somehow kicks David out, like a particularly filthy cuckoo. Graphic sex scenes ensue, both mind-bogglingly creative and extremely uncomfortable (that low boom you hear in the distance is the Family Research Council’s brain exploding).
But Sally4Ever is more than just a cringe-comedy mille-feuille. Sally and Emma represent opposite extremes: Sally has buried every impulse and desire and need she’s ever had, while Emma has unleashed her id to the point of absurdity, rejecting all notions and mores for how people—particularly women—should behave. (“So, should I pause it?” is her response after David announces during a movie that his father’s just died.) She’s a monster of self-absorption and lies, but there’s something equally monstrous about Sally’s inability to protest, or to assert herself in even the most rudimentary way.
Davis’s comedy is bleak and frequently surreal (her résumé includes stints working with Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, and Chris Morris, whose shows Jam and Brass Eye seem to inform the tone and the fearlessness of Davis’s writing). Her use of grotesque caricatures feels raunchy in a dark and theatrical fashion, like Harold Pinter writing for Melissa McCarthy. Davis is completely unafraid to make jokes about celiac disease (a condition her father died from), colostomy bags, parental abuse, and kids on drugs (Emma is so diabolical that when she jokes that she’s given crack to a hyperactive little girl, you’re not entirely sure that she hasn’t).
The funniest moments in Sally4Ever, though, tend to be not so outrageous. They’re the way Emma pronounces “Pilates” (pill-ah-tez), and the face Sally makes watching David’s a cappella group sing George Michael’s “Faith,” and the robotic selfie stick that appears in one scene out of nowhere. They’re Emma’s attempt to rival David’s bereavement with a loss of her own (one of her friends, she weakly lies, has been “buffered by this bendy bus … just spread across the road like a stripe”). They’re the specific series of nasal exclamations David makes while dunking his tea bag. These interludes aren’t scandalizing so much as hilarious and horrifying in equal measure, just like Davis intended.
For the first time in eight years, Democrats have regained control of the House, picking up 32 seats with seven others still undecided. Even if all seven break for the Republicans, Democrats still have a healthy edge: They needed just 23 seats to assume the chamber’s majority.
In a previous analysis we published ahead of Tuesday’s vote, we described how four groups of voters were expected to play an outsize role in the election’s outcome. They’re voters who live in counties with distinct demographic and voting profiles: majority-minorities counties, majority-white suburban counties, pro-Trump counties with a manufacturing base, and counties that voted for former President Barack Obama in 2012 and then for Donald Trump in 2016.
Some of these areas saw shifts in the last presidential election that helped Trump win the White House. And this election cycle, an uptick in Democratic votes across all these areas likely helped Democrats take the House and succeed in a number of other statewide races.
Democratic support in the county groups increased by at least 2 percentage points, driven by a hefty nationwide increase in turnout compared with previous midterms. There had been indications of a surge in voter engagement ahead of Election Day. Early voting, for example, was much higher than in previous years in some areas of the country, and backlash to Trump’s presidency was expected to push many voters to the polls. According to estimates from the United States Elections Project, nearly 50 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, compared with 36.7 percent of voters in the 2014 midterm elections. And there were more Democratic votes cast this election than Republican votes.
Using data from three sources—the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS), an annual sampling of the U.S. population; the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment data for 2017; and the Associated Press’s election results—we’ve tracked how voting preferences for House candidates in the four groups of counties have changed over time, beginning with the 2012 election. (Figures also include uncontested and noncompetitive races.)
Here is a breakdown of those patterns.
Majority-Minorities CountiesThe data here reflect counties where minorities are in the majority—where the share of white, non-Hispanic residents is less than 50 percent, based on the ACS. Many of these counties are clustered in specific areas of the country, such as Southern California, Texas, and Alaska.
Electoral patterns in these areas remained relatively steady over the past three elections, with most voters consistently pulling the lever for Democratic House candidates. Turnout among Democratic voters in particular often dips in midterm elections, but organizers this year were well aware of this challenge and were pushing to mobilize voters accordingly. It’s unclear just yet whether those efforts were what helped Democrats in these counties, but the party’s support in 2018 surpassed that of the three previous election cycles. Democrats saw an increase of 3 percentage points in these areas compared with 2016.
The Democratic votes helped unseat Republican incumbents, contributing to the victories of Lucy McBath in Georgia, Lizzie Fletcher and Colin Allred in Texas, and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in Florida.
White Suburban CountiesThis year, Democratic support in majority-white suburban counties reached a whopping 42 percent, outpacing the past three election cycles. Republican support, meanwhile, dipped to 57 percent, lower than any previous year dating back to 2012. Challengers Sharice Davids in Kansas and Angie Craig in Minnesota won their elections thanks to Democratic votes in these counties.
Prior to the election, polls indicated that college-educated white women, many of whom live in the suburbs, were disillusioned by Trump and could tip suburban districts to Democrats. Compared with their male counterparts, these women disapprove of Trump at higher rates, and recent research had suggested that voters’ attitudes about the president correlate with their preferences in House and Senate races. Preliminary exit polls showed that women in general voted for Democratic House candidates by a 21-point margin.
Pro-Trump Manufacturing CountiesPresident Donald Trump visited some of these areas while campaigning for Republican candidates ahead of the midterm elections. These counties, which supported him in 2016, have manufacturing at the heart of their economies. Many of them are in the Rust Belt, a region Trump dominated in 2016.
The country’s manufacturing regions weren’t always a Republican stronghold. Support for GOP House candidates has grown since the 2012 presidential election—from 63 percent that year to 67 percent in 2014, and to 70 percent in 2016.
The question going into the 2018 election was whether this trend would hold. Since Trump took office, manufacturing industries have been “growing at their fastest rates since the financial crisis,” according to the Brookings Institution. But in the Rust Belt in particular, voters are wary of Trump’s trade policy, including his aluminum and steel tariffs. According to a recent Reuters report published ahead of the election, his policy had “become a thorny issue for congressional candidates as they [sought] to win votes.”
While Republican support still outpaced Democratic support, it dipped from 70 percent in 2016 to 68 percent in 2018. Democrats saw an uptick in support compared with previous years, from 27 percent in 2016 to 31 percent in 2018.
Obama 2012–Trump 2016 CountiesCompared with the other areas we analyzed, these counties—which voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016—saw the most dramatic shift from Democrat to Republican House candidates between the past two presidential elections. In 2012, 51 percent of voters backed the Democratic contender, compared with 46 percent in 2016. Just as support for Democrats dipped, support for Republicans increased, from 47 percent in 2012 to 50 percent in 2016.
But this midterm election cycle, Democratic support in these counties neared 2012 levels, with 50 percent of voters backing the Democratic contender. Support for Republicans, meanwhile, stood at 48 percent, 2 points down from 2016. The uptick in support for Democrats could be an encouraging sign for those in the party whose goal it is to wrest these voters back from Trump. The counties helped replace three Republican incumbents with Democrats: Max Rose and Antonio Delgado in New York and Abby Finkenauer in Iowa.
Ben Jealous lost. Andrew Gillum is heading to a recount. Stacey Abrams is chasing legal challenges that might give her a second chance in a runoff.
But a new generation of black politicians is already in place.
Tuesday saw the election of three new African American lieutenant governors, four new African American attorneys general, and seven new African American members of the House. (An eighth candidate, Steve Horsford, won back a seat he had previously held.) Other elections had reverberations lower down, like those of the 19 black women to county-judge spots in Texas, or that of the black woman who will now become the majority leader of the New York state Senate.
Most of these winners are under 40 years old. Most are the first African Americans elected to the jobs they now hold. And most seem likely to run for even higher offices down the line.
“We stand on this stage upon the shoulders of giants who had a vision that went beyond generations,” said Garlin Gilchrist II, the new lieutenant governor of Michigan, claiming victory on Tuesday night. “And it’s our generation’s responsibility to live up to that responsibility by having our imaginations exceed our expectations.”
[Read: The Democrats’ Deep South strategy was a winner.]
Gilchrist got into politics two years ago, after he tried to vote in the 2016 election, had a problem with his ballot at the local library, and was urged by the people around him to run for city clerk in Detroit to address those same access issues. He lost, but ended up making a big enough impression that Gretchen Whitmer picked him as her running mate over the summer, making him the first African American elected to the job in Michigan.* Not far away, Mandela Barnes, a 31-year-old former community organizer from Milwaukee, was elected lieutenant governor after two terms in the state assembly.
In public and in interviews, many of these new elected officials talk about the larger historical legacy they’re part of, and what policy problems they want to tackle now that they’ve won. “There is definitely the sense that there is a certain weight that comes with it,” Barnes said, referring to the responsibility of being elected in this moment as a young black leader. “And I accept it.”
They also talk about the racism and bias, implicit and explicit, that they faced during their campaigns. Barnes’s opponent suggested that he had kneeled during the national anthem when he hadn’t. Antonio Delgado, who took a GOP-held House seat in New York, is a Rhodes scholar with a Harvard Law degree who was tagged as a “big-city rapper” in campaign ads because of an album he put out in 2007. A negative ad about Aaron Ford, the Nevada state Senate majority leader who won the attorney general’s race there, questioned his qualifications and focused on charges he’d incurred for public intoxication while in college.
Ford said he hoped his election would help other black would-be candidates see past the “fear of making yourself vulnerable to your community, and to the voters.” But the attacks still clearly stung—he brought up the hits on his qualifications unprompted, and pointed out that he has five degrees, including a doctorate, and has been practicing law for 17 years.
“It would be naive not to think that implicit bias and implicit prejudice still don’t exist here. They definitely do,” Ford said. “I would hope that there is not a large segment of the population, but there is a segment of the population that has an aversion to voting for someone who looks different or comes from a different background than they do.”
Ford and others in the new class of African American leaders stressed that they don’t want to be known as the black attorney general or lieutenant governor or member of Congress. And they also emphasized the importance of bringing additional, needed perspectives into conversations around issues with particular resonance for many African Americans, such as criminal-justice reform and economic inequality.
“We don’t want policy to be made about us; we want policy to be made for us and by us,” said Juliana Stratton, who was elected lieutenant governor in Illinois.
Stratton said she’s looking forward to working with the other black lieutenant governors. Some conversations are already under way. Stratton pointed out that Justin Fairfax, the lieutenant governor of Virginia who was elected last year, came to campaign for her. Ford noted that he, Barnes, and the next attorney general of Illinois, Kwame Raoul, are all alumni of the historically black fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. Tish James in New York and Keith Ellison in Minnesota were also elected attorney general on Tuesday.
The new black members of the House are from all over the country, from Delgado in New York, to Lucy McBath in Georgia, to Colin Allred in Texas. Notably, they represent districts that are not predominantly black.
[Read: How straight-ticket voting by Democrats took out a leading Texas moderate]
Democrats in Washington, D.C., tried to encourage this trend. Meredith Kelly, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s communications director, told me the group spent $11.5 million supporting African American candidates over the course of the year. For the first time, almost all of them ran and won in districts that are not majority black.
Underwood said black candidates’ experience running in districts that haven’t had black representatives forced them to develop “our ability to reach out to different communities, and intentionally doing so.”
“We’re going to be able to work on all the black-caucus issues and priorities for African Americans to advance. We’re going to be able to work on the farm bill; we’re going to be able to work on gun reform,” Underwood said. “It’s an opportunity to work across the board, where we know we’re going to be able to have impact.”
As this new class of candidates begins preparing for higher office, it’s also trying to keep attention on Mississippi, where Mike Espy advanced to a runoff in the Senate race, which will be held at the end of the month.
Though few are high on Espy’s chances, they’re hoping the race might help mobilize and energize African Americans in the state and beyond.
“For someone like me, who spent the last 12 years in trying to get more candidates of color to rise, Tuesday was validation,” said Mike Blake, a New York assemblyman and the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Blake, who got his start working on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, is now running for New York City public advocate, a post left open by James’s election as attorney general.
“This was the epitome of going from a moment to a movement,” he said. “This was going from electing a candidate in Obama to a generation of candidates in one night.”
Barnes graduated from college in 2008 and got his start as a field organizer for Obama that year in Louisiana. Afterward, he worked as a community organizer for the same group in Chicago that had once hired the former president. Two weeks ago, he said, he was so overwhelmed seeing Obama campaign for him that his eyes are closed in the selfie they took together backstage at his rally.
He said 2018 will be the beginning of more races and, he predicted, more wins.
“There’s definitely further to go,” Barnes said, “and I think the door just got kicked in open on Tuesday.”
*An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the first African-American elected statewide in Michigan. It was Richard Austin, who first won as secretary of state in 1970.
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