O seu like descompromissado ou o seu compartilhamento engajado podem lhe render uma pesada pena por apoio ou apologia ao terrorismo se uma mudança na Lei Antiterrorismo for aprovada. O projeto está em debate no Congresso e pode ser aprovado nas próximas semanas.
A lei que pode transformar meras curtidas nas redes sociais em crimes contra a pátria nasceu após uma reportagem da revista Veja sobre um recrutador de brasileiros para o Estado Islâmico. Com medo de brasileiros “radicalizarem” e passarem a cometer atos terroristas como os extremistas do Islã, o senador gaúcho Lasier Martins, do PSD, apresentou em julho de 2016 um projeto para endurecer a Lei Antiterrorismo, que havia sido aprovada por Dilma Rousseff três meses antes, pouco antes do impeachment. Para Martins, a proposta sancionada por Rousseff – com muitos vetos – era “inócua”. Era preciso, segundo ele, endurecer a caçada aos terroristas.
Dois anos depois, a proposta, o PLS 272/2016, voltou à pauta – mas o contexto é bem diferente. Seu projeto ganhou novos contornos e, às vésperas do governo de Jair Bolsonaro, é o instrumento que faltava para o governo perseguir e prender opositores – ou “terroristas”, seja lá o que for classificado desta maneira. A lei, na prática, já poderia criminalizar movimentos sociais e manifestações de qualquer tipo, mas, se a nova proposta for aprovada, o cerco ficaria ainda pior.
Apoiado por Bolsonaro, o novo projeto caiu no colo do senador ultraconservador Magno Malta, do PR, aquele mesmo que conduziu a reza da vitória depois do resultado do segundo turno. Sem conseguir se reeleger para o Senado e já buscando preparar o terreno para o novo governo (do qual possivelmente fará parte como ministro), Malta aproveita o período de transição, em que as atenções ainda estão dispersas, para articular a aprovação do projeto às pressas na Comissão de Constituição e Justiça do Senado.
“A gente sabia que uma hora ele [o projeto de lei] ia efetivamente entrar em votação, esperando um momento favorável”, diz Camila Marques, advogada da Artigo 19, ONG que apoia o acesso à informação. “A eleição de Bolsonaro, que defendeu abertamente a inclusão de movimentos de luta pela moradia, por exemplo, na lista de grupos terroristas, criou exatamente esse momento favorável.”
Lasier Martins e Magno Malta miraram no Estado Islâmico – mas, na prática, podem afetar qualquer pessoa que se opõe ao governo. Entre as mudanças, está definido como terrorismo o ato de “incendiar, depredar, saquear, destruir ou explodir meios de transporte ou qualquer bem público ou privado, com o objetivo de forçar a autoridade pública a praticar ato, abster-se de o praticar”. Este trecho estava no projeto original aprovado em 2016, mas foi vetado por Dilma Rousseff. Outra mudança é a tipificação do ato de “louvar outra pessoa, grupo, organização ou associação pela prática dos crimes previstos” na lei – inclusive na internet. Uma moldura na sua foto de perfil do Facebook, por exemplo, em uma interpretação ampla – mas possível – da lei.
Cuidado com os eventos no FacebookComo relator, Magno Malta não apenas deu seu parecer favorável ao projeto, como ainda buscou torná-lo pior e mais perigoso a movimentos sociais, com o acréscimo de duas emendas.
A primeira altera o artigo que define o que seria terrorismo. O projeto original dizia que terrorismo é a “prática por um ou mais indivíduos dos atos previstos nesse artigo por razões de xenofobia, discriminação ou preconceito de raça, cor, etnia ou religião”. Malta acrescentou ao texto “ou por outra motivação política, ideológica ou social”. A manobra mira políticos e que pregam transformação social como o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) e o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), alvos preferenciais dos ataques do presidente eleito Jair Bolsonaro. Sabe a camiseta ou boné do MST? Então: pode ficar complicado desfilar com ela por aí.
A segunda alteração acrescenta a tipificação de “atos preparatórios” de um suposto ato terrorista. A redação proposta por Malta acrescentaria que “nas mesmas penas incorre aquele que, pessoalmente ou por interposta pessoa, presta auxílio ou abriga pessoa de quem saiba estar praticando atos preparatórios de terrorismo”. Como seria provada a intenção? Seriam usados posts na internet? Escrever, mesmo que de brincadeira, sobre a intenção de matar uma autoridade, incendiar o Congresso ou algo parecido, valeria uma condenação?
Se as sugestões de Malta forem aprovadas, barricadas com fogo, muito comuns em manifestações, poderiam ser consideradas parte de um plano terrorista, e qualquer manifestação popular poderia ser automaticamente enquadrada por suas motivações “política, ideológica ou social” – em especial se a polícia agredisse os manifestantes e os acusasse de reagir ou incitar.
Barricada em confronto entre servidores e a Polícia Militar no Rio em 2017 – com a lei, poderia ser ‘terrorismo’.
Ricardo Borges/Folhapress
O artigo alterado também trata de quem potencialmente auxilie em tais atos, podendo criminalizar quem meramente tenha contato com o suposto terrorista, como alguém que lhe venda algum material a ser usado em ato terrorista, ou alugue ou empreste uma casa ou um carro, mesmo que não faça ideia das intenções do suposto criminoso.
Mas piora: pode ser que você compartilhe um evento no Facebook, convocando para um protesto, e a manifestação tenha conflito, barricadas e vidraças quebradas. É o suficiente. Não apenas quem estava na manifestação pode ser acusado de participar de um ato terrorista, como quem compartilhou o evento, convocou ou incentivou a participação pode ser enquadrado na Lei Antiterrorismo por prática de “atos preparatórios”. Se você ainda comemorar posteriormente ou celebrar os que conseguiram sair ilesos ou desafiaram a polícia durante o protesto, estará em situação ainda pior – terá praticado “atos preparatórios” e ainda terá louvado “pessoa, grupo, organização ou associação pela prática” do terrorismo.
Um passo para a criminalização dos movimentos sociaisDurante os debates, o senador Randolfe Rodrigues, da Rede, alertou que o objetivo de Martins e Malta seria o de estender qualquer tipo de crime para os movimento sociais. “É um ato de censura, de combate ao direito de ir e vir e à liberdade de manifestação, conceituado na Constituição”, disse Rodrigues. O senador petista Lindbergh Farias classificou o projeto como um violento atentado à democracia. “Em cima desse texto, podem prender militantes de movimentos estudantis, movimentos sindicais, estamos criminalizando o MST”, afirmou.
A oposição pediu uma audiência pública e conseguiu travar, no dia 31 de outubro, a votação na Comissão de Constituição e Justiça no Senado. A intenção é tentar impedir que o projeto seja votado em 2018 – mas Bolsonaro já sinalizou, inúmeras vezes, suas intenções ao lidar com opositores e movimentos sociais, especialmente os que taxa como “esquerdistas”. “Vamos botar um ponto final em todos os ativismos do Brasil”, chegou a dizer, durante um ato na Avenida Paulista uma semana antes de ser eleito presidente.
Em entrevista para a Folha de S.Paulo, a historiadora Maud Chirio, pesquisadora sobre a direita brasileira, deu voz às preocupações dos movimentos: “Para mim, no dia 3 de janeiro de 2019 [dois dias após a posse de Bolsonaro], o MST e o MTST serão declarados organizações terroristas“. Com as modificações, este não seria um cenário difícil de se concretizar. De olho em um espaço no futuro governo, Malta faz o que pode para garantir um emprego em 2019.
Herança do PTEmbora nunca tenha sido usada para criminalizar movimentos sociais, a Lei Antiterrorismo é um legado da gestão de Dilma Rousseff, na época preocupada com os protestos que ocorriam no Brasil em junho de 2013 e em possíveis manifestações que poderiam bagunçar a Copa do Mundo de 2014 e as Olimpíadas de 2016.
O Brasil mal havia tido tempo de respirar após os grandes protestos de junho de 2013 quando, em novembro daquele mesmo ano, a comissão mista da Consolidação das Leis e Regulamentação da Constituição do Senado, presidida pelo senador Romero Jucá, do MDB, e pelo deputado federal petista Candido Vaccarezza, apresentou o Projeto de Lei do Senado 499/2013.
Dilma Rousseff e Thomas Bach, presidente do Comitê Olímpico Internacional, em 2015, quando o legado dos Jogos parecia só positivo.
Ricardo Borges/Folhapress
Nascia ali o embrião do projeto da Lei Antiterrorismo. O PL tipificava, já em seu primeiro artigo, o terrorismo como “o ato de provocar ou infundir terror ou pânico generalizado mediante ofensa à vida, à integridade física, à saúde ou à previsão de liberdade de pessoa”. O objetivo da lei era atualizar a antiga Lei de Segurança Nacional, aprovada durante a ditadura, e que seria insuficiente para lidar com o tema específico e cada vez mais discutido do terrorismo (como consta na justificativa do próprio projeto).
O país ainda tentava entender o que havia acontecido nos últimos meses de revolta social, mas os poderes da república estavam mais preocupados em garantir que junho nunca mais acontecesse – e, se acontecesse, que fosse ainda mais duramente criminalizado e reprimido. E 2014 era ano de Copa e logo depois, em 2016, viriam os Jogos Olímpicos – era importante, naquele contexto, impedir protestos que pudessem se tornar violentos.
A proposta foi criticada pela OAB, que considerava não haver “justificativa para que se promova a tipificação da conduta em lei específica” e contra movimentos sociais. Mas a nova lei foi desde o princípio apoiada por políticos da oposição e do governo. Se por um lado o então ministro dos esportes, Aldo Rebelo, do PCdoB, comentava que o que mais preocupava às vésperas da Copa de 2014 eram os crimes comuns e não o terrorismo, por outro, senadores do PT como Jorge Viana e Paulo Paim, defendiam a votação urgente do projeto.
O deputado petista Humberto Costa fazia uma oposição solitária à proposta. Declarou, na época, que “tem que ficar absolutamente claro que terrorismo é aquilo que representa, de fato, uma ameaça ao Estado, e ao regime democrático que leve a uma risco de ruptura. Não podemos pegar as manifestações sociais e classificar como o terrorismo”.
Passou a Copa do Mundo, e o texto seguia parado na Comissão de Constituição e Justiça do Senado em 2015. Quase ao mesmo tempo, no entanto, o governo apresentou na Câmara dos Deputados outro projeto, que alterou a Lei das Organizações Criminosas, e tipificou o crime de terrorismo, prevendo as penas mais pesadas de 15 até 30 anos em regime fechado.
O governo dizia que levou adiante a lei atendendo às cobranças do Grupo de Ação Financeira contra a Lavagem de Dinheiro e o Financiamento do Terrorismo, uma organização intergovernamental formada por 36 países, incluindo o Brasil, que exigiu uma tipificação para o crime de terrorismo. Especialistas, no entanto, viram a proposta como uma forma do governo federal ampliar o estado policial, que já estava em curso com a criação da Força Nacional de Segurança (pelo então presidente Lula em 2004) e a ocupação de favelas (como Maré e Alemão) pelo Exército.
O projeto passou como um relâmpago pela Câmara e Senado e se tornou lei em março de 2016, quando foi sancionado por Dilma Rousseff – a tempo das Olimpíadas do Rio de Janeiro. Rousseff vetou alguns dos artigos mais polêmicos, como o que considerava como atos de terror “incendiar, depredar, saquear, destruir ou explodir meios de transporte ou qualquer bem público ou privado” ou ações de “interferir, sabotar ou danificar sistemas de informática ou bancos de dados”, além da “apologia ao terrorismo”.
‘As disposições do projeto por si só não garantem que essa lei não seja usada contra manifestantes e defensores de direitos humanos.’Apesar disso, ativistas e especialistas ligados ao Escritório do Alto Comissariado das Nações Unidas para os Direitos Humanos apontaram para o perigo que a lei representava pela sua mera existência e a possibilidade de servir de base para futuras perseguições políticas.“As disposições do projeto por si só não garantem que essa lei não seja usada contra manifestantes e defensores de direitos humanos”, disse o representante da ONU Amerigo Incalcaterra. Eles apontaram esse cenário caso houvesse uma maioria capaz de alterar o texto e passar por cima dos vetos da então presidente – ou mesmo uma interpretação da lei pelas autoridades que levasse à criminalização de movimentos sociais e protestos, como alertou Guilherme Boulos na época. Dito e feito.
Imediatamente após a aprovação da lei, em 21 de julho, 15 suspeitos foram presos no Rio de Janeiro acusados de planejar um atentado terrorista durante as Olimpíadas em uma operação até hoje envolta em dúvidas e controvérsia. Oito foram condenados.
Na tentativa de obter total controle sobre as ruas após 2013 com a emergência de novos movimentos autônomos e descentralizados apostando no uso pesado de redes sociais, o PT de Dilma e Lula buscou formas de garantir sua segurança institucional com a certeza de que se perpetuaria no poder. O apoio de partidos aliados à direita (e mesmo opositores) não foi uma surpresa – era do interesse de diversas esferas do poder a aprovação de uma lei que limitasse protestos.
Mas a manobra poderá custar muito caro à esquerda e mesmo à população em geral, que passou a tomar gosto por sair às ruas em protestos independentemente do espectro político. “Somente uma resistência articulada é capaz de barrar os retrocessos e esses instrumentos de repressão e criminalização”, diz Camila Marques.
The post Na nova Lei Antiterrorismo, seus likes podem levar você para a cadeia appeared first on The Intercept.
Donald Trump moved to impede the Russia investigation on Wednesday by replacing Attorney General Jeff Sessions with a temporary successor, Matthew Whitaker, who argued last year that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be barred from investigating the president’s finances.
Attorney General Sessions says farewell to the Department of Justice. pic.twitter.com/DVwCr4hH5K
— Justice Department (@TheJusticeDept) November 7, 2018
By naming Whitaker, who has been serving as Sessions’s chief of staff, as the acting attorney general, Trump effectively appointed the former federal prosecutor to oversee the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s contacts with Russia, taking that responsibility away from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller after Sessions had recused himself from the matter.
Before he joined the Justice Department, Whitaker had argued last year in his role as a CNN legal analyst that the Mueller investigation needed to be reined in, writing in an opinion piece that “investigating Donald Trump’s finances or his family’s finances falls completely outside of the realm of his 2016 campaign and allegations that the campaign coordinated with the Russian government or anyone else. That goes beyond the scope of the appointment of the special counsel.”
“The Trump Organization’s business dealings are plainly not within the scope of the investigation, nor should they be,” Whitaker added in that August 6, 2017, op-ed. Referring to reports at the time that the special counsel probe had widened to focus on possible financial crimes, unconnected to the 2016 election, Whitaker wrote that it was time for the Justice Department “to order Mueller to limit the scope of his investigation.”
Whitaker also downplayed the importance of the investigation in a series of appearances on CNN in 2017. In July of that year, he argued that the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a lawyer connected to the Russian government and Donald Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was not evidence of collusion.
The same month, he said that while the promised dirt on Hillary Clinton offered by Russian friends of the Trumps turned out to be a “ludicrous” conspiracy theory about Russian funding of the Democrats, there was nothing improper about the campaign agreeing to the meeting. In politics, Whitaker said, “you would always take that meeting.”
Here's the new acting Attorney General in July 2017 defending Don Jr.'s decision to take the Trump Tower meeting with Russians offering "dirt" on Hillary Clinton: "You would always take that meeting."(via CNN) pic.twitter.com/qFAhnhSSJK
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 7, 2018
In another appearance the same month, Whitaker suggested that Trump could force Sessions out and replace him with an acting attorney general who would then have the power to hamper the special counsel by cutting the funding for his investigation.
“I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced,” Whitaker said, “and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.”
On Twitter in 2017, Whitaker also disparaged the Mueller investigation as a “lynch mob.”
Worth a read. "Note to Trump's lawyer: Do not cooperate with Mueller lynch mob" https://t.co/a1YY9H94Ma via @phillydotcom
— Matt Whitaker ?? (@MattWhitaker46) August 7, 2017
Trump’s “Wednesday afternoon massacre” alarmed Democrats, including Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Sally Yates, a former acting attorney general who was fired by Trump after she refused to defend his Muslim ban in court.
This is a move to take over the Mueller probe, aimed at quashing accountability. And it just so happens to occur hours after Democrats take one chamber of Congress.
The House and Senate should pass a law NOW to protect this investigation.
— Tim Kaine (@timkaine) November 7, 2018
We should not lose sight of why POTUS fired the AG – because he wants a political crony to protect him from the investigation of his own campaign.The rule of law is disappearing before our eyes. My column from a year ago when POTUS began trying to humiliate the AG into resigning. https://t.co/8ARr1A4GhQ
— Sally Yates (@SallyQYates) November 7, 2018
As the Washington Post correspondent Robert Costa noted, Whitaker is a friend and former political ally of one of the witnesses in the Mueller probe, Sam Clovis, a Trump campaign aide who had encouraged another advisor, George Papadopoulos, to travel to Russia and meet with Russian officials in August, 2016.
Here is the new acting AG Matt Whitaker and Sam Clovis.
They have been friendly in Iowa politics for years. Whitaker chaired one of his political bids.
Clovis has met with Mueller's grand jury, per Clovis
Clovis tells me "that's not relevant" & that M.W. has "high integrity." pic.twitter.com/uJ5L6tWqtE
— Robert Costa (@costareports) November 7, 2018
“We’re currently friends,” Clovis said of Whitaker in an interview with The Post on Wednesday. “I texted him congratulations today.”
Clovis also told Talking Points Memo on Wednesday that Whitaker had served as an informal advisor on his work for the Trump campaign. “He and I are very good friends, very close friends,” Clovis said. “He’ll fit right into this, he’ll be a great acting Attorney General.”
During the 2016 campaign, Whitaker, a former United States attorney, argued in an opinion piece that he would have prosecuted Hillary Clinton for using a private email server when she served as secretary of state. “According to FBI Director James Comey’s statement,” Whitaker wrote on July 5, 2016, “former secretary of State Hillary Clinton could have been charged with violating several different code sections, and he detailed the evidence that supports bringing criminal charges.”
“Yet, Director Comey’s judgment was that ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring the case,” Whitaker added. “I disagree.”
Several Democratic senators, including Chris Coons of Delaware and Kamala Harris of a California, a possible contender for her party’s 2020 presidential nomination, called for Whitaker to recuse himself from oversight of the Mueller investigation.
Given his previous comments about the investigation, Mr. Whitaker should recuse himself from oversight of the Special Counsel investigation during his tenure as Acting Attorney General.
— Senator Chris Coons (@ChrisCoons) November 7, 2018
Matthew Whitaker, the acting Attorney General, clearly wants to limit the Mueller investigation. He must recuse himself and legislation should be brought to the Senate floor to ensure Mueller’s investigation is protected.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 7, 2018
Given that he was appointed by a president who is already under investigation for obstructing justice by firing Comey, and has not been confirmed by the senate, some legal experts suggested that Whitaker might not have the legal authority to oversee the special counsel’s work.
One of them, Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, pointed out that Clarence Thomas had ruled recently that such an appointee could not exercise those powers.
Not clear to me a nonSenate confirmed mere Chief of Staff to AG can exercise the powers of AG (incl supervising Mueller).Trump’s own favorite Justice, Clarence Thomas, 3 yrs ago said he couldn’t. Regardless, any constitutionally conscientious Pres would never do this. More coming
— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) November 7, 2018
The Democratic activist group MoveOn announced nationwide protests on Thursday to defend the Mueller investigation.
BREAKING: The Nobody Is Above the Law network is calling for rapid-response protests at 5 PM local time on Thu, Nov 8 in response to Trump's moving oversight of the Mueller investigation in the hands of a lackey who has publicly strategized about how to stifle the investigation.
— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) November 7, 2018
Updated: Wednesday, Nov. 7, 6:10 p.m. Eastern Time
This report was updated with more reaction to Matthew Whitaker’s appointment as acting attorney general.
The post Jeff Sessions Replaced by Aide Who Said Mueller Should Be Barred From Probing Trump Finances appeared first on The Intercept.
Twenty-seven years ago, Anita Hill sat before a Senate committee and explained that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. At the time, only two women served in the upper chamber, and neither were on the Judiciary Committee.
The optics of Hill’s hearing, along with the events that led up to and followed it, drove a record number of women to action — and into the Senate.
In 1992, the year following the hearing, now famously known as the “Year of the Woman,” Americans voted four women into the Senate. That constituted a historic, 100 percent increase in the number of sitting women senators: Barbara Mikulski’s re-election pushed the total to seven (North Dakota’s first female senator Jocelyn Burdick, appointed to fill her husband’s seat after he died, did not run for re-election). That included the first African-American woman to serve in the chamber, Carol Moseley Braun. And it wasn’t just the upper chamber: The number of women in the House almost doubled from 30 to 48.
Amid another era of historic reckoning with sexual harassment and hostility toward women in the workplace, men are again falling out of positions of power. The #MeToo movement has taken down some 200 men from the worlds of government, corporations, and media. And women have been replacing them, almost one for one.
Though Democratic women have historically outnumbered their Republican counterparts, blue waves like the one that came to pass Tuesday excluded women more often than not.In politics, that’s a fact most evident in the massive number of women — 589 — who have run, or said they’ll run, in races this year for the Senate, House, and governor’s mansions.
Yet the wave of women candidates is not always what it seems. Election observers tend to conflate the advancement of women in electoral politics with Democratic gains. While women are certainly, if slowly, increasing their numbers in the legislative branch and across statehouses, the correlation between Democratic victories and victories for women hasn’t always been as strong as many think. This is true even in recent elections, as this year’s momentum for a clutch of Republican women shows.
Though Democratic women have historically outnumbered their Republican counterparts, blue waves like the one that came to pass Tuesday excluded women more often than not.
Photo: L.G. Patterson/AP
People forget what happened in 2006.
Americans were beginning to sour on the Iraq War in large numbers, and swing voters who backed President George W. Bush in 2004 were moving to support Democrats.
EMILY’s List, the well-known Democratic political action committee that supports pro-choice women, endorsed 43 candidates for Senate, House, and gubernatorial races. Nineteen won — four senators, 12 representatives, and three governors. In total that year, 148 women were elected to Congress, and six became governors. The push put Nancy Pelosi in the seat of the speaker of the House — the first woman to hold the position.
Pundits and analysts memorialized the win as a teachable moment for Democrats. It was a replicable model. The party picked up 32 seats and flipped both the House and Senate for the first time in 12 years, despite criticisms that the candidates who won were too centrist. Naftali Bendavid’s popular book, “The Thumpin’,” chronicled the then-chair of the moderate Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Rahm Emanuel’s successful strategy.
These pundits, though, miss one point.
While a record number of women served in the 110th session of Congress — as has been the case each Congress since — the legislative branch was still overwhelmingly male. In 2006, Americans elected eight men and two women — Amy Klobuchar and Claire McCaskill — to begin new terms in the Senate, bringing the chamber total to 84 men and 16 women. Of 53 newly elected representatives, 10 were women, bringing the House total to 361 men, almost five times the number of women at 74.
In 40 districts rated as competitive in 2006, men won all but eight of the seats between the parties — two of those went to Republican women. The majority that came in was also male-dominated: Women who mounted primary challenges that year were all but completely wiped out.
This year, women challenged their male counterparts in record numbers. “The women who are running are very well aware of the fact that they could lose,” said Julie McClain, EMILY’s List campaign communications director.
“EMILY’s List exists because we believe you get better policy outcomes when you have more women at decision-making tables across the country, at every level of government,” she said. “With more women running, you will get more women winning.”
Still, there are reasons — especially in 2018 — for people who want to see women in power, and not just in the Capitol, to be reasonably optimistic.
While Democratic waves haven’t always included women, what has endured is the growing number of women in the pipeline. “What we find so exciting about this cycle is that we’ve had more women than ever before, by several degrees, 1,000 degrees, reaching out to us for help running for office,” McClain said. “Both this year, but for cycles to come. Women who are making running for office part of their life plans.”
This year’s surge is an equal reflection of grassroots momentum that’s been building for decades, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., told The Intercept.
“Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the first African-American woman elected to Congress, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm,” Lee said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “She was elected 50 years ago on November 5. And we worked with a variety of women around the country to lift her legacy up and to encourage women, and African-American women, to run for office, to be involved in campaigns and in get-out-the-vote efforts.”
Lee pointed out that four women are poised to chair important House committees, and that three of them are women of color. Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, and Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., are in line to chair, respectively, the House Financial Services, Small Business, Science, Space and Technology, and Appropriations committees.
“We have an unheard of number, an unprecedented number of women of color running for state, local, and federal races this year.”After Rep. Robert Brady’s retirement from Pennsylvania’s 1st District earlier this year, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., is technically next in line to chair the House Administration Committee. She also serves as ranking member on the powerful Judiciary Committee, which will almost certainly be chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y. Lofgren’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
“We have an unheard of number, an unprecedented number of women of color running for state, local, and federal races this year,” Lee said. “And so I just think the moment is here where women say, ‘We’re not going back … and we’re going to run for public office,’” Lee said.
“I think it’s going to be women, really, quite frankly, who are going to take control of this country,” she continued. “Women are mounting races that are really unheard of. They’re smart, they have experience, and they’re bringing their perspective to policy, to their constituents, that has not been there. And they’re authentic.”
Photo: Eric Miller/Reuters
EMILY’s List followed the relative disappointment of 2006 by fervently backing Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House in 2008. Her eventual loss to Barack Obama in the Democratic primary sent the group looking for ways to regain its footing.
This year has changed all of that. The number of women in Congress is expected to reach another record at 117. At the time of publication, women won 96 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate, and nine women out of the 16 who ran are headed to governors’ mansions.
More than 250 women, including 83 incumbents, won primaries this year — 233 in the House and 22 in the Senate. And, according to McClain, hundreds more are waiting in the wings.
“We believe that with more women in Congress and more women in state legislatures, the way that we prioritize legislation will be more advantageous for women and families — which is sorely lacking,” she said.
At the state level, McClain continued, that means “adding more voices of women in other communities who have not always been equitably treated by their state and local governments.”
“By adding more women to the ranks of Congress, and then seeing more women who have been serving move up in the leadership,” she said, “we will see better policy outcomes.”
The post Women Built the 2018 Midterm Blue Wave — but the Last One Washed Them Out appeared first on The Intercept.
MAIS OU MENOS na metade do discurso da vitória de Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, na noite de terça-feira, a multidão começou a vaiar.
A energia na sala até aquele momento tinha sido de muita alegria. Ao contrário do que ocorreu nas primárias, quando a candidata então com 28 anos de idade soube de sua impressionante vitória sobre o veterano de 10 mandatos Joe Crowley, o evento esteve lotado desde o começo, com uma fila na porta. O grande espaço no bairro de Woodside, no Queens, em Nova York, estava cheio de jovens sorridentes vestindo as agora icônicas camisetas brancas e roxas de Ocasio-Cortez, complementadas com acessórios típicos da geração millennial: mangas enroladas, brincos enormes e, é claro, batom vermelho. Uma banda de flamenco ao vivo inspirou a dança. Mais tarde, integrantes da multidão acabaram formando pares ao som da música latina. A certa altura, enquanto eu conversava com a membro fundadora da Justice Democrats, Alexandra Rojas, a música mudou, e ela fez uma pausa, examinando o público. Sua mãe, comentou, provavelmente estava dançando em algum lugar. Aquela era uma música à qual ela não conseguia resistir.
Mas, na metade do discurso de vitória de Ocasio-Cortez, a política do mundo externo rompeu o fervilhante santuário do partido. A CNN havia anunciado a derrota de Beto O’Rourke para Ted Cruz, cujo rosto aparecia pendurado acima da sala em telas grandes, desviando temporariamente a atenção dos comentários de Ocasio-Cortez.
Demorou um pouco para Ocasio-Cortez perceber o que havia acontecido. Ela estava prestes a atingir um de seus pontos mais populares – destacando a lacuna entre a riqueza sem precedentes dos Estados Unidos e o apoio insignificante oferecido aos mais pobres da população – quando resmungos começaram a escapar da plateia.
“Neste momento, na nação mais rica da história do mundo, nossa maior escassez não é a falta de recursos…”, Ocasio-Cortez fez uma pausa e repetiu a fala antes de perceber que a multidão desanimada não estava reagindo às suas palavras, mas à tela acima de suas cabeças. “Ah, desculpe pessoal. Eu estava pensando tipo, ‘Nossa! O ambiente mudou rápido!’”
A multidão riu, aparentemente agradecida por um pouco leveza diante de uma derrota difícil. “Mas, sabem o quê?”, Ocasio-Cortez improvisou, sensível ao fato de que os presentes precisavam de consolo antes de continuar com o discurso que havia preparado. “O que precisamos fazer também é perceber que essas perdas de curto prazo não significam que perdemos a longo prazo. Não significam. Em 2018, deixamos o estado do Texas roxo. Foi o que fizemos este ano.”O público se animou novamente.
“Nós vamos virar aquele estado em nossa geração, posso dizer isso a vocês agora. Vamos virar o Texas. É só uma questão de tempo. Não devemos nunca ter medo. Nunca há qualquer luta que seja grande demais para ser lutada. Nós provamos isso este ano.” Ela continuou. “Quando defendemos as causas de nossos vizinhos e nossa dignidade econômica e apresentamos planos inovadores e ambiciosos para nosso futuro, não há estado além de nosso alcance e nenhuma comunidade além da vitória. Nós só precisamos continuar com isso.”
Depois disso, ela retornou ao discurso de vitória com mais facilidade do que políticos que têm feito discursos durante todo o tempo que Ocasio-Cortez tem de vida.
Foto: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
O QUE PODERIA ser visto como uma platitude vazia ressoou, ao contrário, como uma perspectiva muito necessária. Em uma noite cheia de duras derrotas, incluindo três corridas de governadores de alto nível com candidatos negros convincentes, era fácil esquecer que chegar tão perto da vitória em partes do país, antes consideradas impossíveis, representava um progresso em si mesmo.
O que a noite passada revelou foi que as trincheiras vermelhas e azuis que definem o campo de batalha político dos Estados Unidos são escavados superficialmente. No meio-oeste industrial, o recém-criado interior de Trump, os democratas em exercício chegaram à vitória. Sharice Davids, uma nativa-americana lésbica que também é lutadora de MMA, destituiu um republicano no Kansas profundamente conservador. Ocasio-Cortez e o senador Bernie Sanders foram ridicularizados por visitar, alguns meses atrás, aquele mesmo estado, que agora tem uma governadora democrata. Eles não azularam, mas estados como o Texas, o Mississippi e a Georgia ficaram roxos. E, como Ocasio-Cortez apontou, isso não é pouca coisa.
Na verdade, com muita frequência, os políticos falam sobre estados vermelhos e estados azuis – o interior de Donald Trump e os subúrbios de Hillary Clinton – como se a política de pessoas dessas comunidades fosse tão fixa quanto os distritos manipulados em que vivem. Desafiando essa lógica, o eleitor Obama-para-Trump se torna uma quimera despachada com o truísmo de que “é possível ser racista e votar em Obama”, enquanto a verdade inversa – que os eleitores racistas do Trump poderiam ser convencidos a votar novamente nos democratas – é repudiada por grande parte da classe de especialistas como uma tentativa de ceder aos fanáticos. Enquanto isso, apesar das pesquisas mostrarem o contrário, democratas brancos são enquadrados como sendo além do racismo: votar por um democrata parece absolvição suficiente.
Os não-brancos são achatados ao ponto da caricatura. A diversidade de um distrito torna-se uma abreviatura de seu progressismo – como se mais de um terço dos texanos latinos não votasse em Cruz – e as necessidades dos eleitores minoritários são percebidas como profundas, mesmo quando causas universais como “Medicare para todos” beneficiam muito mais alguns de nós.
Essa compreensão da política carece de imaginação e percepção. E, o mais importante, não funcionou. O trabalho da política não é apenas realizar prognósticos com base em pesquisas ou deduzir o que devemos acreditar de quem somos e favorecer adequadamente. É o trabalho de comunicação, de persuasão, de ouvir as pessoas e elaborar uma agenda que atenda às suas necessidades – e depois de transmitir esse plano em um nível humano que suplante o partidarismo. Este é talvez o trabalho mais singular e importante de um político: relacionar uma compreensão empática das preocupações do povo; não apenas respondendo às pesquisas, mas provocando um movimento que mude completamente os resultados.
Ouvir Ocasio-Cortez ser bem-sucedida nessa tarefa política essencial deve nos lembrar de como são poucos os políticos que estão à altura da tarefa.
Como ela me disse em entrevista ontem à noite: “Eu acho que quando ouvimos verdadeiramente as comunidades em que estamos concorrendo, [quando] estamos realmente nos conectando com as pessoas comuns no local, precisamos de uma mensagem progressiva para animar um eleitorado descontente que historicamente não votava. E então, o que espero que aprendamos, e o que espero que adotemos no futuro, é não ter medo de nossos valores – não ter medo de nos diferenciarmos do Partido Republicano e realmente nos comprometermos com a nossa visão”.
NA RAIZ da mensagem de Ocasio-Cortez sempre esteve o entendimento de que o que temos em comum é mais significativo do que o que nos divide. Esta não é uma observação banal de escoteiros destinada a descrever diferenças reais que exijam soluções políticas reais, mas sim uma visão baseada na realidade de que, apesar de nossa política, os americanos entendem intuitivamente que a dignidade humana deve ser inalienável. Como Ocasio-Cortez observou, depois de suas observações improvisadas sobre a vitória de Cruz: “Neste momento, na nação mais rica da história do mundo, nossa maior escassez não é a falta de recursos, mas a ausência de coragem política e imaginação moral.”
É preciso coragem política para pedir a abolição da Agência de Imigração de Alfândega dos EUA [ICE, na sigla em inglês] em um momento em que a imigração é o tema explosivo mais perigoso do país. E é preciso que a imaginação moral use o inegável poder da dignidade humana para alavancar o apoio à saúde universal e a um salário digno.
Se Trump nos ensinou alguma coisa, é que a ousadia é recompensada e a convicção pode ser sua própria moeda. Ontem, a autenticidade esteve na votação com todos os candidatos que renunciaram ao dinheiro da ação política corporativa, desafiaram a ortodoxia partidária com posições políticas progressistas e ousaram articular uma visão do futuro enraizada em valores em vez de pesquisas. O dia de ontem demonstrou que autênticos valores progressistas podem ajudar a redefinir nossa realidade política. E se Ocasio-Cortez pode mudar o espírito da Câmara da maneira como levantou os espíritos em Queens na noite passada, talvez acabe ficando tudo bem.
Tradução: Cássia Zanon
The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mostrou que valores progressistas autênticos podem redefinir a política appeared first on The Intercept.
Patricia Nelson was eager for a fresh start when she moved her family from Louisiana back home to Weld County, Colorado, in 2016. Soon after, Nelson’s friend encouraged her to come out to a meeting where Lisa McKenzie, an environmental chemist and epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health, was presenting her research on the health impacts of oil and natural gas drilling.
Weld County has one of the highest concentrations of oil and gas wells in the country — 23,000 within county limits. Its air quality carries an “F” rating from the American Lung Association, with infant mortality rates twice as high as those in surrounding counties. With around 50,000 active wells overall, Colorado just surpassed California to become America’s third-largest oil and gas producer after Texas and North Dakota.
“It was a crash course in fracking,” Nelson told me by phone. Colorado law, she learned, states that drilling operations have to be 1,000 feet away from school buildings, but that ordinance — known as a setback — doesn’t include surrounding school properties, like playgrounds or soccer fields. There, as McKenzie would explain, kids playing and running around breathe harder and heavier, increasing the amount of poisoned air that enters their lungs and bloodstream.
All of this hit too close to home: As she also learned, oil companies had just been approved to open 24 new drill sites near her then-4-year-old son Diego’s school, the kindergarten through third grade campus of Bella Romero Academy; the drilling would take place just behind the fourth through eighth grade campus, where her niece and nephew were students. The decision to drill near Bella Romero at all — where 87 percent of attendees are students of color, and 90 percent fall below the poverty line — was made after parents at an overwhelmingly white school refused to have the same rigs in their kids’ backyards.
Shocked by what she discovered, Nelson joined a coalition that would later become known as Colorado Rising and traveled around the state, telling people about the stakes at her son’s school. Colorado Rising’s work included a push for Proposition 112, a ballot measure to mandate a 2,500-foot setback zone between drill sites and homes, schools, and other vulnerable areas. That measure was defeated 57 to 43 on Tuesday night, in large part thanks to a full-fledged freakout by the fossil fuel industry, which, with $40 million, outspent Prop 112 proponents by at least 40 to 1.
“I guess the oil and gas industry is just another example of money buying elections.”“This is much farther than we’ve gotten before, and we’re no longer going to accept this industry bullying us,” Nelson told me last night, celebrating the fact that Prop 112 even made it on the ballot. “We had a pretty good shot, but they definitely had way more resources than we did. I guess the oil and gas industry is just another example of money buying elections.”
Environmental initiatives on the ballot elsewhere in the country, vehemently opposed by industry groups, also flopped. A ballot initiative in Washington state to levy a $15 per ton carbon fee on polluters and invest the revenue in job creation, green infrastructure, and more was defeated 56 to 44 thanks to over $30 million from the oil and gas industry. In Arizona, electric utilities spent $31 million against Prop 127, which would have upped the state’s renewable portfolio standard, requiring the power sector to generate at least half its power from renewables by 2030. The proposition was largely bankrolled by liberal donor Tom Steyer via NextGen America, which poured $24 million in support, but it failed resoundingly, garnering just 30 percent of the vote.
Photo: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post/Getty Images
Tuesday wasn’t an unambiguous win for the industry, though — even in Colorado. Amendment 74 — polling high before the election and far better than Prop 112 — would have allowed property owners to sue local governments and the state for any infringement on their profits, but fell short of the 55 percent of votes needed to be grafted into Colorado’s constitution. The campaign for Amendment 74 was small compared to the fight against Prop 112 but still sizable, with $11.2 million raised by backers — about $10 million from oil and gas — and $6.3 by opponents under the banner Save Our Neighborhoods.
Still, one clear takeaway from the midterms ballot initiatives is that fossil fuel money can buy elections. Apparently, $100 million can buy four of them. “They’re putting up big numbers,” said Edgar Franks, a Bellingham-based labor organizer who helped draft and campaign for I-1631 with the environmental justice group Front and Centered. “You can tell that where this is actually a threat to the way that they do business, because they know it’s going to work.”
While Washington Gov. Jay Inslee backed I-1631 — having failed to get his own carbon fee through the legislature this spring — his Colorado counterpart was on the opposite side of the fight in his state. Prop 112 failed amid opposition not just from the oil and gas industry, but also from now-outgoing Colorado governor and former oil industry geologist John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, along with governor-elect Jared Polis and his Republican opponent. The Colorado Democratic Party, however, supported it. Polis’s opposition was ironic, given that he himself had spearheaded the push for a 2,000-foot setback rule several years ago before eventually withdrawing it from the ballot.
Despite Polis’s opposition to Prop 112, Colorado Rising is cautiously optimistic about working with his administration, a position bolstered by the fact that Democrats managed to flip the state legislature last night. “Polis clearly understands that fracking is dangerous near communities,” said Micah Parkin, a board member of Colorado Rising and executive director of 350 Colorado. “He may not agree with us on 2,500 feet, but he clearly gets that it doesn’t belong near our children’s schools and homes and water sources.”
The bar for improving Hickenlooper’s record on extraction has been set pretty low. The outgoing governor had threatened to call a special lame duck session of the state legislature in the event of Prop 112’s passage.“ It’s incredibly undemocratic,” said Parkin in advance of the vote. “The very idea that he would think it’s OK to turn around and ignore the will of the people, when thousands of his own constituents have worked so hard.”
The statement wasn’t unprecedented for Hickenlooper. In 2013, he openly threatened to sue any city that banned fracking within its borders and in fact, did sue Longmont and Fort Collins after they implemented restrictions on fracking. The state’s suit also undermined the legal standing of three other bans and moratoria. “Topics like these,” Nelson told me, “are the ones that enable the true colors of our representatives to come out. It just shows that he’s never been on the side of the people, he’s been on the side of industry.”
Predictably, then, the fight over Proposition 112 got ugly. Oil and gas interests painted the measure as an attempt to ban fracking in the state, though it in fact only added on to policies that already exist, which require a 500-foot setback from homes and 1,000-foot setback from schools. In collecting signatures this summer to get Prop 112 on the ballot, canvassers were followed and surrounded by paid protesters. “It would be between two and four of us who would plan out where to collect signatures,” Nelson said. “We would get there and 15 or 20 minutes later, these kids would show up with their signs. Unless they were following us, how would they know where we were?” She suspects at least some of them were University of Colorado students and had awkward encounters with them around town after encountering them while petitioning.
A political consultant hired by Colorado Rising this summer to help collect signatures also walked out of the state with 15,000 signatures, which were only retrieved after the group filed a lawsuit to have them returned.
The industry also publicly — and knowingly — overstated the impact of the measure. As Denver’s 9News found from a leaked report that industry groups had seen a report from the consultancy RS Energy stating that their losses would be far less than what they projected out over airwaves. The industry-friendly state regulator, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, had instead claimed in July that some 80 percent of non-federal land in Colorado — the only land covered by Prop 112 — would be off-limits to drilling. Yet the RS Energy report shows that companies would maintain access to 61 percent of the state’s oil and gas reserves. That’s partially because although companies would be barred from drilling within setback zones, horizontal drilling techniques — where the well mouth is within permitted drilling areas — could still access minerals under off-limits areas from up to a mile away.
“People have tried so many different ways to protect themselves over the years, and this was the last recourse.”While it would have been the country’s most ambitious regulatory check on the fossil fuel industry, Parkin and Nelson both emphasized that Prop 112 was a kind of method of last resort. Those looking to place more regulations on the oil and gas industry had tried to get bills passed through the legislature and appealed to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission — all to no avail. “People have tried so many different ways to protect themselves over the years,” Parkin said, “and this was the last recourse.”
Photo: Ted S. Warren/AP
It was a similar story in Washington, where the legislature failed earlier this year to get a somewhat similar carbon tax measure through the legislature, falling short by “one or two votes.” A 2016 ballot initiative had failed to — by a margin of 20 percent — after drawing fire from the same groups now pushing for I-1631 over its lack of both investment in green projects and attention to the demands of climate and environmental justice groups. The campaign this time around was comparatively massive, drawing in a huge coalition of labor groups, indigenous communities, climate nonprofits, and more.
The biggest limiting factor to commonsense climate policies like Prop 112 and I-1631 isn’t either old school climate denial or bad design, but the sheer force of the fossil fuel industry’s seemingly endless capacity to pour money into elections. While theoretically supportive of carbon pricing and some vague sense of climate action, fossil fuel interests this cycle showed their cards: If it poses a threat to their profits, it’s going down. Fightbacks like the one posed to Amendment 74 are possible. Yet with Democrats taking the House — with several climate hawks now in their ranks — any push on climate there will have to reckon with the colossal funding might of the industry, and the kind of opposition Prop 112 faced from members of their own party sponsored by them.
On the heels of the latest IPCC report — which makes the need to decarbonize every sector of the economy painfully clear — there isn’t really an alternative to going toe to toe with those companies, no matter how much of a David and Goliath fight it might be.
“This isn’t over for me, personally. We have had a warning,” Nelson said, referencing that report, “that we either end our dependence on fossil fuels or things are going to get extremely rough for mankind. For me, it shows that it’s just about greed and money for this industry.”
The post The Fossil Fuel Industry Spent $100 Million to Kill Green Ballot Measures in Three States — and Won appeared first on The Intercept.
OS ELEITORES FORAM às urnas na terça-feira com uma crença esmagadora de que a economia americana está em boa forma e que o país está indo na direção errada. Esses eleitores se apresentaram em um número que o sistema eleitoral do país não estava preparado para lidar, com relatórios de scanners e máquinas de votação quebrados. Longas filas dobravam esquinas e entravam em estacionamentos, com eleitores esperando durante horas.
Quando os votos estavam sendo computados, ficou claro que haveria pouca clareza até o final da noite. Democratas, por trás do comparecimento histórico – produto de dois anos de trabalho pós-Trump organizando as bases – assumiram o controle de uma câmara legislativa que havia sido meticulosamente manipulada para assegurar que eles jamais seriam capazes de fazer isso. Os democratas também obtiveram ganhos importantes nas capitais dos estados, conquistando governos em Kansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan e Maine.
A energia liberal nos locais, quando não foi cancelada pelo comparecimento do Partido Republicano, deu aos democratas o controle total dos governos estaduais em Colorado, Nova York, Maine, Novo México e Illinois. Em Minnesota, a casa legislativa estadual azulou, assim como ocorreu na câmara e no senado de New Hampshire, enquanto os democratas conquistaram pelo menos 10 cadeiras na câmara estadual do Texas. A vitória em Nova York resultou não apenas na entrada da senadora Julia Salazar, mas também em pelo menos uma dúzia de senadores apoiados pelo Working Families Party, pondo fim a uma era da regra “três homens em uma sala” em Albany.
Também foram aprovadas grandes iniciativas eleitorais progressistas, com a mais histórica na Flórida, onde a Emenda 4 obteve bem mais do que os 60% necessários para restaurar o direito de voto às pessoas condenadas por crimes. Em outros lugares, os eleitores expandiram a Medicaid em Idaho, aumentaram o salário mínimo no Missouri e legalizaram a maconha em Michigan.
O fracasso em dar um nocaute em Donald Trump exacerbará as tensões dentro do Partido Democrata, dividido entre as alas progressista e centrista.No entanto, o presidente Donald Trump será capaz de examinar essa paisagem e reivindicar uma justificativa para sua retórica racista intensificada nas últimas semanas de campanha. O fracasso em dar um nocaute em Trump exacerbará as tensões dentro do Partido Democrata, dividido entre a ala progressista, que quer se apoiar em doadores pequenos e concorrer como o único partido livre de corrupção corporativa, e a ala centrista, que argumenta que somente com dinheiro corporativo e uma plataforma inofensiva os democratas podem tomar o poder.
COMO TUDO MAIS, os resultados da Casa foram misturados. Democratas de todas as partes concorreram como a classe mais progressista de desafiantes em uma geração. Mas os mais progressistas deles – aqueles que esperavam conseguir provar que uma mensagem ousada poderia levar distritos profundamente republicanos – falharam. Richard Ojeda perdeu em West Virginia; JD Scholten perdeu por 11 mil votos para o nacionalista branco Steve King em Iowa; em Omaha, Nebraska, Kara Eastman, que o partido nacional combateu nas primárias estava atrás até tarde da noite; em Syracuse, Nova York, Dana Balter, a quem o partido também combateu, perdeu sua chance; Leslie Cockburn perdeu na Virgínia rural; e Jess King perdeu na Pensilvânia rural.
Alguns dos candidatos de centro que o Comitê de campanha legislativa democrata combateu em primárias contestadas foram eleitos. Jason Crow saiu vitorioso no Colorado, e Elaine Luria perseverou na Virgínia, assim como Lizzie Pannill Fletcher no Texas – alinhando o tipo de vitória que vai encorajar a liderança do partido a continuar intervindo nas primárias contra candidatos considerados progressistas demais.
Ainda assim, a vitória apertada na Casa – foi uma onda azul, mas nenhum tsunami – deixa a líder da minoria Nancy Pelosi com pouca margem de manobra, e a natureza conflituosa dos resultados a pressionará cada vez mais a se afastar.
Foto: Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images
As mais acirradas disputas de governadores também ofereceram resultados difíceis para os democratas.
A corrida primordial para Trump, tanto por suas implicações presidenciais em 2020 e sua conexão pessoal com a disputa, foi na Flórida, onde Trump impulsionou o deputado Ron DeSantis nas primárias republicanas para o governo. As pesquisas mostraram o progressista Andrew Gillum com uma vantagem confortável sobre DeSantis, cuja retórica racista se igualava à do presidente, mas DeSantis foi declarado vencedor na noite de terça-feira. O ex-governador da Flórida Rick Scott, que está no cargo desde 2011 e declarou vitória em sua disputa pelo Senado dos EUA na terça-feira, está envolvido em várias controvérsias relacionados à supressão de eleitores.
Na Georgia, Brian Kemp, o republicano extremista encarregado de contar os votos como secretário de Estado, estava à frente de Stacey Abrams, apesar de a disputa estar no caminho de um segundo turno. Beto O’Rourke, do Texas, que havia representando as esperanças de última hora dos progressistas em todo o país, ficou cerca de 200 mil votos atrás do candidato da extrema-direita, o senador Ted Cruz.
No entanto, foi no Senado que os democratas sofreram os maiores reveses. O terreno era tão desfavorável ao partido, que os democratas conseguiram obter cerca de 9 milhões de votos a mais do que os republicanos nas eleições do Senado (ajudados pela presença de dois democratas nas urnas na Califórnia) e ainda assim sofrerem uma perda líquida de pelo menos três assentos – perdendo Dakota do Norte, Flórida, Missouri e Indiana, e conquistando Nevada. Mais uma vez, os resultados foram complicados: Os progressistas Sherrod Brown e Tammy Baldwin venceram convincentemente em Ohio e Wisconsin, respectivamente. E foi em Wisconsin que o rival dos democratas, o governador Scott Walker, foi eliminado.
Trump, democratas centristas e os progressistas do partido sofreram derrotas, mas cada um conseguiu apenas o suficiente para defender que a abordagem deles é a correta. E assim, continuamos.
Tradução: Cássia Zanon
The post Resultados da eleição americana dão pequena esperança aos progressistas appeared first on The Intercept.
Last night, Ben Jealous, the Democratic candidate for governor in Maryland, lost his race to incumbent Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, 56 percent to 43 percent. Jealous would have been Maryland’s first African-American governor and was running on one of the most left-wing policy platforms in the country,
Although polls had been showing Hogan with a significant lead for months, progressives hoped a strong blue wave on Election Day could bring about a major upset. After all, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-1 ratio in Maryland.
But Jealous didn’t lose because he ran on issues like “Medicare for All,” a $15 minimum wage, and legalizing marijuana. In fact, voters in Maryland largely agree with Jealous on his signature policy issues. A Goucher College survey released in mid-September found that 54 percent of Maryland residents hold a favorable opinion on “Medicare for All” or single-payer health care, with 33 percent holding an unfavorable view. Support for other key parts of Jealous’s plan polled even higher. Seventy-one percent of Marylanders support raising the statewide minimum wage to $15 dollars per hour, with just a quarter of residents against it. This was actually a substantial jump from February, when Goucher found 66 percent of Marylanders supported the $15 minimum wage. On legalizing marijuana for recreational use, 62 percent of Maryland residents support it, with just one-third opposed.
A Hobbled CampaignThe primary reason Jealous lost is that his campaign couldn’t pull in the necessary funds to compete effectively. Despite winning 22 out of 24 counties in the state’s crowded Democratic primary, the Jealous campaign’s own internal polling revealed that as of July, one-third of Maryland voters, and one-quarter of the state’s Democratic voters, did not know who Jealous was. He had never run for office before, but had earned the teachers union’s endorsement in the primary, which many believe helped secure him his June victory.
Meanwhile, Hogan started out with a big fundraising advantage and a high approval rating. Although Jealous assumed he could turn things around after Labor Day, by then it was too late to change the narrative.
At the end of August, Hogan had $9.4 million to spend for his re-election campaign, compared to Jealous’s mere $385,000. And the gap never closed. In the final two weeks of the campaign, Hogan had almost 12 times more cash than Jealous, or $3.3 million to the Democrat’s $275,000. Few people wanted to donate to a race that seemed uncompetitive, which in turn made it even less competitive as the weeks went on.
While Hogan’s campaign and the Republican Governors Association have blasted negative ads against Jealous nonstop since July, Jealous’s campaign didn’t run its first TV ad until mid-September, and the Democratic Governors Association didn’t run their first ad against Hogan until late October. Jealous couldn’t afford to compete on television, or even really through mailers.
The Jealous campaign understood that it needed to invest more in on-the-ground organizing to make up for the complacency that gripped Democrats in 2014, when Hogan eked out his upset victory. So this year, 70 Democratic organizers were hired to work across the state, compared to 15 field organizers for the state’s Democrat-coordinated campaign in 2014.
But even Jealous supporters noted that his campaign was making it difficult to rally support for his team. On his campaign website, there was nowhere for supporters to order lawn signs, bumper stickers, or other paraphernalia to demonstrate support — unlike on Hogan’s website, where such ordinary purchases were made prominently visible and available. Supporters had to ask around to learn that they had to show up in person at a campaign office to get any swag. That information wasn’t even available on the website.
And while Democratic candidates across the country have been leaning on new media platforms like viral two-minute online-only campaign ads, the Jealous campaign relied predominantly on awkward and less popular tools like Facebook Live.
Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP
The Washington Post has been writing favorably about Hogan for years, so much so that a reader wrote a letter to the editor in June asking, “Seriously, has Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) changed his name? Apparently so, at least according to The Post. In nearly every reference to the governor, The Post’s writers insist on referencing him with a new first name of ‘popular,’ as in the popular Maryland governor.”
As a result, it was unsurprising when the Washington Post gave its endorsement to Hogan, praising him for having the “agility and sense to govern as a moderate — that disappearing breed of American politician.” The Post dismissed Jealous’s plans as mostly “politically unrealistic” and “unwise.” But more staggering was the Baltimore Sun, which endorsed Jealous in the primary but endorsed Hogan in the general election, despite literally acknowledging in its own endorsement that Hogan’s “actions in office have too often treated [Baltimore] as an afterthought, if not with outright contempt.” (Hogan’s decision to cancel the Red Line light rail, a project that had been in the works for a decade and to which the federal government was going to contribute $900 million, was a disastrously cruel move for the long-neglected city.)
Outside Maryland, the national press was also largely uninterested in Jealous’s general election challenge, especially when compared to the attention paid to Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, black candidates running to be Georgia’s and Florida’s first African-American governors, respectively. The Maryland race was deemed uncompetitive, and thus less exciting to cover.
During the primary, most of Maryland’s Democratic establishment lined up behind Rushern Baker, the outgoing county executive in Prince George’s County. (Kevin Kamenetz, the county executive for Baltimore County was also a frontrunner, and had raised more money than other candidates in the primary, but he died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest six weeks before the election.)
After Jealous won, several dozen Maryland Democrats announced their support for Hogan, though most were older white men who hadn’t served in office for years. Others had received political appointments from the governor, or had records of supporting Republican candidates in the past.
Jealous did end up securing endorsements from the Democratic Party’s current elected officials, but some were much slower to voice their support, and many remained muted in their enthusiasm. The long-serving state Senate president, Mike Miller, was a prime example. He was guarded in his support for Jealous, while being enthusiastic in his praise for Hogan’s work. Ike Leggett, the outgoing executive of affluent Montgomery County, at first withheld his endorsement of Jealous over tax issues that he said would hurt his wealthy constituents. When he finally did endorse Jealous in in mid-October, he did so in the world’s most half-hearted way. When the Washington Post asked him if Jealous would be a better governor than Hogan, Leggett declined to say yes. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I’m simply for the Democratic nominee.” About 45 percent of Montgomery County ended up voting for Hogan.
It’s unlikely that vocal enthusiasm from Leggett and Miller could have really changed Jealous’s fundraising numbers in a substantial way, but they certainly didn’t help.
Jealous also tamped down enthusiasm from some otherwise natural allies. Despite running on one of the most progressive platforms in the country, he didn’t even try to court some of the newly established Democratic Socialists of America chapters or get their endorsements. He also upset a lot of leftists over the summer, when he disavowed socialism in a way that not even Barack Obama did during the eight years he was blasted for being on the left. After Hogan called Jealous a “far-left socialist” in an interview, a different reporter followed up by asking Jealous if he identified as a socialist. Jealous responded, “Are you fucking kidding me?” The Republican Governors Association funded a TV ad this summer that featured Jealous saying, “Go ahead, call me a socialist,” cutting off the rest of his sentence, in which he went on to say, “It doesn’t change the fact that I’m a venture capitalist.” The Jealous campaign demanded that local stations pull the ad for being false and too misleading.
Hogan’s schtick of acting moderate was largely successful, in part due to the light press coverage his administration has received over the past four years. Over the summer, for example, he earned glowing national headlines by recalling Maryland’s four National Guard troops from the southern U.S. border — thus appearing to be someone willing to stand up to Trump and his family separation policy — but his actual record on immigration was far more hostile and overlooked. Hogan also moved to the left when he felt he needed to politically: In July, he announced a new student debt relief plan and announced he would no longer take donations or an endorsement from the National Rifle Association. In 2014, he took the gun lobby’s money and endorsement, and also received an A- rating.
It also helped that while Maryland voters are generally Democratic, they’re not always very progressive. Fifty-six percent of Marylanders think their state taxes are “too high,” and Hogan spent the bulk of his campaign emphasizing that he’d continue to cut taxes and that Jealous would significantly raise them. While the Jealous campaign was banking on major turnout in the city of Baltimore to push him over the edge, in the end, nearly one-third of Baltimore went for Hogan, up from 22 percent in 2014.
In the Maryland legislature, however, Democrats maintained their veto-proof majority. Republicans had targeted eight Democratic seats and hoped to flip five, but failed. Baltimore’s three largest suburban counties will now also be led by Democrats, with Anne Arundel and Howard counties flipping blue.
The post Why Ben Jealous Lost the Maryland Governor’s Race appeared first on The Intercept.
The systemic, nationwide voting problems plaguing Tuesday night’s midterm elections in the United States appear all the more disgraceful — and deliberate — when compared to the two remarkably efficient national elections that were conducted in Brazil just last month.
That a country poorer than the U.S., with a much shorter history of democracy, can hold such seamless, fair, participatory, and efficient elections proves that the opposite outcome in the U.S. — massive voter disenfranchisement, multi-hour voting lines, pervasive machine malfunctions, and elections that are not decided until weeks after the fact — are very easily avoided and thus likely intentional.
4.5 hour lines in GA
1,200 ballots tossed in KS
Tribal IDs rejected in ND
This is voter suppression we're seeing in 2018pic.twitter.com/Q5DuJHBh1c
— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) November 6, 2018
Brazil’s national elections are comparable in size to the U.S.’s. Although Brazil’s population is slightly less than the that of the U.S. — which is the world’s third-most populous country at roughly 325 million, while Brazil is in fifth place with roughly 210 million — Brazil has mandatory voting, a lower voting age (16), and automatic voter registration for citizens, which means vote totals are comparable. In Brazil’s October 28 run-off presidential election, roughly 110 million votes were cast, in the same range of last night’s U.S. vote total.
Yet Brazil’s elections are plagued by virtually none of the problems that mar the credibility of U.S. elections year after year. On October 7, Brazil held the first round of its presidential elections, which, like in the U.S. midterms, also included electing an entirely new lower house of federal Congress and a portion of the federal Senate, as well as governorships and state house races in all 26 Brazilian states and the federal district.
Like all Brazilian elections, the October 7 national vote was held on Sunday, the day the fewest number of people have to work, ensuring maximum voter participation. Polling closed at 5 p.m. All of the votes were fully counted, and all the results fully known, by 8:30 p.m. that night. There were no lingering unknown outcomes, weeks of uncounted votes, widespread claims of voter disenfranchisement, multi-hour lines that spread around blocks, or obstacles to registering.
The October 28 run-off, which elected Jair Bolsonaro as president and also decided the run-off races for governor in multiple states, was even smoother. Votes are electronically counted all day, but the totals are not released until the last poll closes. By the time the last state closed its polls, at 6 p.m., more than 90 percent of the votes were already counted, and the totals were instantly released. Thus, the outcomes of the presidential race and most of the gubernatorial races were known within minutes after the polls closed, and they were all fully determined within two hours of the polls closing.
Then, there’s the issue of voter participation. Voting is legally mandatory in Brazil: Every citizen over the age of 16 is automatically eligible to vote, and those over 18 are required to do so, facing a trivial fine for failing to do so (absent a valid justification). They are free to vote for “none of the candidates” or leave their ballot blank, but it is a legal duty. Still, in the last election, roughly 20 percent of voters violated that law and abstained from voting. But that means that 80 percent of the adult population voted — a far higher participation rate than any election in the U.S.
That’s because everything about the structure of Brazil’s election system, set forth in the 1989 constitution it enacted after it exited its military dictatorship, is designed to maximize, not suppress, voter participation. All citizens are automatically registered. Voting is mandatory. The elections are held on Sunday, ensuring that working people have the fewest barriers to voting, instead of in the middle of the week. Machine voting is uniform throughout the country’s 27 states.
Brazil generally, and its politics specifically, is plagued with countless grave problems, as I’ve reported on over the last several years. It’s a country beset by a convergence of hideous political, social, and economic crises caused by a broken ruling class, all exacerbated by severe wealth inequality.
But that’s the point. If Brazil — an extremely young democracy with far less wealth than the U.S. and intense political, economic, and social pathologies — can hold basically efficient, seamless, fast, vibrantly participatory, and smooth national elections on a massive scale, as it did twice last month, then so, obviously, could the U.S.
The fact that the U.S. last night did not, and does not, do so suggests quite strongly that this “failure” is actually deliberate. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez frequently noted about the arcane and hidden voting systems in New York, including purposely holding primary elections to ensure as few votes as possible, incumbents use voter suppression as a key tactic for remaining in power, and for preventing marginalized groups from participating:
Voter suppression in NY is rampant and repressive.@NYGovCuomo is acting in the interests of Wall St, Big Pharma, and luxury developers by allowing 1.8 million New Yorkers to languish without representation.
Right in line with GOP tactics to suppress ppl of color at the polls. https://t.co/fsUaixkqrv
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) January 23, 2018
Every two years in November, people in the U.S. watch with horror and outrage as they see endless lines, people being turned away from voting booths, rampant technological malfunctions, and vote counts that linger for weeks with no certain outcome. Those emotions quickly dissipate, and thus, the same problems repeat themselves every two years.
There should be no doubt that all of this is quite deliberate, and fixable with relative ease. That Brazil, plagued by an endless stream of systemic political and social problems, can nonetheless hold national elections that are so efficient and fair, proves that all that is missing in the U.S. is the desire to fix this.
The post The Efficiency of Brazil’s Elections Is a Stark Contrast to Voter Suppression and Deliberate Chaos in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.
About halfway through Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory speech Tuesday night, the crowd started booing.
The energy in the room up to that point had been jubilant. Unlike her primary watch party, at which the then-28-year-old learned of her stunning upset over 10-time incumbent Joe Crowley, this event was packed from the start, with a line at the door. The large space in the New York City neighborhood of Woodside, Queens, was filled with smiling young people in Ocasio-Cortez’s now-iconic purple and white campaign T-shirts, accessorized with millennial flair: rolled sleeves, oversized earrings, and, of course, red lipstick. A live flamenco band inspired dancing. Later, members of the crowd occasionally paired off as Latin music rang out. At one point, while I was talking to Justice Democrats founding member Alexandra Rojas, the music shifted and she paused, scanning the crowd. Her mom, she anticipated, was probably dancing somewhere. This was a song she couldn’t resist.
But halfway through Ocasio-Cortez’s victory speech, the politics of the outside world breached the ebullient sanctum of the party. CNN had called Beto O’Rourke’s loss to Ted Cruz, whose face hung above the room on large screens, temporarily tipping attention away from Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks.
It took a beat before Ocasio-Cortez realized what had happened. She had been about to hit one of her more popular points — highlighting the gap between America’s unprecedented wealth and the paltry support offered to the poorest among us — when groans escaped from the crowd.
“Right now, in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, our greatest scarcity is not a lack of resources —” Ocasio-Cortez paused and repeated the line before realizing that the dispirited crowd wasn’t reacting to her words, but to the screen above their heads. “Oh, sorry guys. I was like, ‘Whoa! Room turned fast!’”
The crowd laughed, grateful, it seemed, for some levity in the face of a hard-felt defeat. “But, you know what?” improvised Ocasio-Cortez, sensitive to the fact that the crowd needed comforting before she continued with her prepared remarks. “What we need to do as well is realize that these short-term losses do not mean that we have lost in the long run. It does not. In 2018, we turned the state of Texas purple. That’s what we did this year.” The crowd rallied.
“We are going to flip that state in our generation, I’ll tell you that much right now. We will flip Texas; it’s just a matter of time. We should never be scared. There is never any fight that is too big for us to pick. We proved that this year.” She went on. “When we advocate and champion the causes of our neighbors and our economic dignity, and come with innovative and ambitious plans for our future, there is no state beyond our grasp, and no community beyond victory. We just need to keep at it.”
With that, she slipped back into her victory speech more seamlessly than politicians who have been giving speeches for as long as Ocasio-Cortez has been alive.
Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
What could have come off as an empty platitude resonated instead as much needed perspective. On a night filled with hard losses, including three high-profile governor’s races featuring compelling black candidates, it was easy to forget that coming so close to victory in parts of the country long deemed irredeemable represented progress in and of itself.
What last night revealed was that the red and blue troughs that define America’s political battleground are shallowly dug. In the industrial Midwest, newly minted Trump country, incumbent Democrats cruised to victory. Sharice Davids, a lesbian Native American, who is also a mixed martial arts fighter, ousted a Republican incumbent in deep-red Kansas; that same state, which Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders were ridiculed for visiting just a few months ago, now has a Democratic governor. They didn’t go blue, but states like Texas and Mississippi and Georgia did go purple. And as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, that ain’t nothin’.
In fact, too frequently, politicians talk about red states and blue states — Donald Trump country and Hillary Clinton suburbs — as though the politics of people from these communities are as fixed as the gerrymandered districts they live in. Defying this logic, the Obama-to-Trump voter becomes a chimera uneasily dispatched with the truism that “one can be racist and vote for Obama,” while the inverse truth — that racist Trump voters could be convinced to vote for Democrats again — is dismissed by much of the pundit class as an attempt to pander to bigots. Meanwhile, despite polls showing otherwise, white Democrats are framed as being beyond racism: Voting for a Democrat seems absolution enough.
Nonwhites are flattened to the point of caricature. The diversity of a district becomes a shorthand for its progressivism — as though over one-third of Latinx Texans didn’t vote for Cruz — and the needs of minority voters are perceived as only skin-deep, even while universal causes like “Medicare for All” stand to benefit some of us much more.
This understanding of politics lacks imagination and insight. And importantly, it hasn’t worked. The job of politics isn’t just poll-based prognosticating, or deducing what we must believe from who we are and pandering accordingly. It’s the work of communication, of persuasion, of listening to people and crafting an agenda that meets their needs — and then of conveying that plan on a human level that supersedes partisanship. This is perhaps the most singular and important job of a politician: relating an empathic understanding of the people’s concerns; not just responding to polls, but sparking a movement that shifts poll results altogether.
Listening to Ocasio-Cortez succeed at this essential political task should remind us how few politicians are up to the task.
As she put it to me in an interview last night, “I think that when we truly listen to the communities that we are running in, [when] we are really connecting with the everyday people on the ground, it requires a progressive message to animate a disaffected electorate that has not historically come out. And so what I hope we learn, and what I hope we adopt moving forward, is to not be afraid of our values — to not be afraid of differentiating ourselves from the Republican Party, and really committing and doubling down to our vision.”
At the root of Ocasio-Cortez’s message has always been the understanding that what we have in common is more significant than what divides us. This is not a trite kumbaya observation intended to paper over real differences that require real political solutions, but rather an insight rooted in the reality that despite our politics, Americans understand intuitively that human dignity should be inalienable. As Ocasio-Cortez ultimately noted, following her impromptu remarks on Cruz’s victory: “Right now, in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, our greatest scarcity is not a lack of resources, but the absence of political courage and moral imagination.”
It takes political courage to call for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a time when immigration is the country’s most perilous third rail. And it takes moral imagination to use the undeniable power of human dignity to leverage support for universal health care and a living wage.
If Trump has taught us nothing else, it is that boldness is rewarded, and conviction can be its own currency. Yesterday, authenticity was on the ballot with every candidate who forsook corporate political action money, challenged party orthodoxy with progressive policy positions, and dared to articulate a vision of the future rooted in values instead of polls. Yesterday showed that authentic progressive values can help to redefine our political reality. And if Ocasio-Cortez can shift the spirit of the House the way she lifted the spirits in Queens last night, we might just be alright.
The post In Victory, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Showed That Authentic Progressive Values Can Redefine Political Reality appeared first on The Intercept.
From state legislative races to the House of Representatives, progressive candidates made a dent in the 2018 election season, and will be relatively well-represented in federal and state-level governments next year. But it’s not just elected office: Left-wing activists also made their voices heard through ballot initiatives across the country. On Tuesday night, progressives walked away with some wins and some losses on that front.
They made gains for Medicaid expansion, public education, and voting rights. But they lost other battles, like on criminal justice reform, nurse-to-patient ratios, and universal home care. What follows is an incomplete list of the results of noteworthy progressive ballot measures.
Volunteers from around Idaho gather on the steps of the Idaho Capital Building after gathering over 70,000 voter signatures petitioning for an initiative for Medicaid expansion be placed on the November election ballot.
Photo: Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman via AP
Idaho voters passed a ballot measure Tuesday night to expand Medicaid, meaning that 62,000 low-income and mentally ill Idahoans will now have access to health insurance. Medicaid expansion is also expected to stabilize many of the state’s rural hospitals that have been struggling financially.
Idaho was one of 17 remaining states to not take the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion, and state lawmakers had been killing efforts to expand it through the legislature for several years. The Urban Institute estimated that Idaho would be forfeiting $3.3 billion in federal funds over 10 years by not expanding the program. Frustrated with the lack of progress, a grassroots movement organizing under the banner Reclaim Idaho rallied to put the measure on the ballot.
Arizona Prop 305: School VouchersArizona voters defeated an expansion of private school vouchers, casting their ballot against legislation signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in 2017. The ballot measure — put forth by a grassroots coalition opposed to the legislation — was poorly worded, made especially confusing by the fact that the legislation refers to vouchers as innocuous-sounding “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.” Still, opponents were able to convince voters that the voucher-like subsidies would drain needed resources from already underfunded public schools, as the state has already cut $4.56 billion from its education budget since 2009.
The majority of money currently being spent on the state’s school voucher program has gone to fund students who would otherwise attend wealthy and high-performing school districts, according to three separate investigations by the Arizona Republic over the last three years. Opponents of Prop 305 argued that the voucher-like programs subsidize the rich and hurt poorer schools.
Maine Question 1: Universal Home CareIn what would have been the first for the nation, Maine voters instead rejected a proposal to establish a universal home care program for seniors and people living with disabilities. The measure would have provided long-term care to adults 65 years and older in their homes at no cost to the individuals and their families. It would have been funded by a new tax on high-earners. Maine has the oldest population in the country, and the waiting list to receive home care services stretches into the thousands. The number of Maine residents over the age of 65 is expected to double by 2030. Question 1 would have addressed both the shortage of home health care services and improved job quality for home care workers.
The measure was opposed by the state Republican Party, as well as national and state business interests. It was supported by senior citizens, unions, veteran groups, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. (The measure was also supported in part by the Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm created by Pierre and Pam Omidyar, who fund The Intercept.)
Louisiana Amendment 2: Unanimous Jury DecisionsThanks to a ballot measure that voters approved last night, Louisiana joins 48 other states in requiring a unanimous jury vote to convict someone with a felony. (Unanimous jury decisions are constitutionally required for federal convictions, but states can choose whether to enact this protection in their jurisdictions.) In Louisiana, an individual could be found guilty with just 10 of 12 jurors — or 83 percent — voting for conviction. Advocates have long argued that this is discriminatory, pointing to the law’s blatant Jim Crow roots. Non-unanimous juries not only weaken the power of black jurors, but they also heighten the risk of a wrongful conviction. (The only remaining state to have non-unanimous jury decisions is Oregon, though Oregon requires a unanimous vote for a murder conviction.)
Criminal justice reform in Louisiana has bipartisan support, and Amendment 2 was supported by the state’s Democratic and Republican parties, as well as a host of organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, and the Urban League of Louisiana.
Photo: Dale G. Young/The Detroit News via AP
Michigan voters approved a ballot initiative to establish an independent citizen commission to lead the state’s redistricting process, thereby wresting the power to draw voting maps from politicians. The proposed commission would be comprised of four Republican voters, four Democratic voters, and five independents.
Michigan is one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the country, and Republicans have commanded nine of the state’s 14 congressional seats in every election since 2010, despite Democrats earning far more votes statewide some years. Republicans denied manipulating voting maps, but emails released this summer as part of a federal court challenge revealed that GOP operatives intentionally drew the maps in their favor.
Proposal 2 was led by Katie Fahey, a recycling program coordinator from Grand Rapids who, in the days after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, sought a cause that could unite her loved ones across the political spectrum. She launched Voters Not Politicians and spent the next year working with volunteers to canvass the state in support of signatures. The measure was challenged by well-heeled opponents, like the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and it survived a near-death blow at the state Supreme Court in July. Voter in Michigan said yes to fair election maps, just in time for 2020 redistricting.
Amendment 4 in Florida: Voting Rights RestorationFlorida voters approved Amendment 4, a monumental ballot initiative that amends the state’s constitution to restore the right to vote to an estimated 1.5 million Floridians. Florida’s history of disenfranchising citizens with felony convictions dates back to Reconstruction, when states, especially Southern states, began searching for ways to undermine the new civil rights afforded to African-Americans, like universal male suffrage required by the 15th Amendment. In 1868, Florida enacted a new constitutional provision to indefinitely ban formerly incarcerated people from voting, and 200 years later, 1 in 10 eligible Florida voters have been effectively barred from casting a ballot. The ban has disproportionately impacted black voters; more than 20 percent of otherwise eligible African-Americans have been barred from the voting box.
Amendment 4 required 60 percent approval to pass and sailed to victory with more than 63 percent. The grassroots push for a constitutional amendment came after several unsuccessful efforts to change the law through litigation and was led by Desmond Meade, an ex-offender who completed a 15-year prison sentence for a felony. Amendment 4 excludes those who have committed murder or a sex offense — carveouts that supporters felt were necessary for its political passage.
Question 1 in Massachusetts: Nurse-to-Patient RatiosIn Massachusetts, voters weighed in on a ballot initiative to limit the number of patients who can be assigned to a single bedside nurse at one time. Nurses in the state — as well as across the country — have long advocated for such nurse-staffing ratios, saying that they can’t do their jobs safely or effectively when they have too many patients to manage at once. The only other state to have a nurse-staffing limit is California, which has been on the books since 1999 and in effect since 2004. The hospital industry bitterly fought California’s law then and has successfully thwarted other attempts since.
On Tuesday night, the hospital industry won again, with Massachusetts voters rejecting the measure. Despite research showing that California’s nurse-staffing limits improved care and contributed to a significant drop in mortality, the hospital industry mounted an aggressive opposition campaign, blasting ads around the state suggesting that Question 1 would lead to a spike in health care costs, reduced health care services, and even hospital closures. Opponents also insisted that taxes could dramatically go up, using cost estimates that assumed huge amounts of wage inflation despite Massachusetts having no nursing shortage. By the end, even many nurses opposed Question 1, with some saying they felt great pressure from their employers to vote no.
Ohio Issue 1: Neighborhood Safety, Drug Treatment, and Rehabilitation AmendmentIn a major loss for criminal justice reformers, more than 60 percent of Ohio voters rejected a measure to reduce drug penalties and send fewer people to prison. Issue 1 would have allowed individuals caught with illegal drugs to face a misdemeanor charge, which is punishable by up to six months in county jail, rather than a felony charge, which could lead to prison time. One out of every 25 adult Ohio residents are currently under correctional supervision, and over a third of people return to prison within three years of being released.
Issue 1, which was supported by a host of progressive organizations and the powerful Chan Zuckerberg advocacy group, would have allowed prisoners to reduce their sentences by up to 25 percent, through taking advantage of educational, work, or rehabilitative opportunities while incarcerated. Money saved by reducing the prison population will be redirected toward funding drug treatment programs and trauma care for crime survivors.
The measure was opposed by the state’s Republican Party, the state’s Chamber of Commerce, and a host of legal organizations, like the Ohio Bar Association, the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, and the Ohio Chief Probation Officers Association.
The post Progressives Win on Medicaid Expansion, Public Education, and Voting Rights Through Ballot Initiatives appeared first on The Intercept.
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Politicians love to tell us every election is the “most important of our lifetime.” With Donald Trump in power, it rings true for many voters. This week on Intercepted: Journalist Chris Hedges has spent the past 15 years trying to ring the alarm about the dangers of the U.S. political system and the impact of a corporate and financial coup d’etat that happened long ago. He talks about the growing power of “Christian fascists,” predicts a major financial crash, and offers ideas on how to fight back. In 1923, a year after Mussolini took power in Italy, one radical and visionary woman saw his rise for what it was and warned of the grave dangers the world would face if fascism spread. Her name was Clara Zetkin. Acclaimed writer and actor Deborah Eisenberg performs a selection of Zetkin’s writing, which was recently published as a book, “Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win.” Also, new music from the incredible visual artist and musician Lonnie Holley, who is out with a new album called “MITH.”
Join Michael Moore, Jeremy Scahill, and Marshall Curry for a special post-election screening and discussion about the rise of hate crimes and right-wing political violence in the age of Trump on November 9, in New York City. Tickets are available here.
Transcript coming soon.
The post Chris Hedges on Elections, “Christian Fascists,” and the Rot Within the American System appeared first on The Intercept.
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The most important, historic, and consequential midterm election of our lives is over. It wasn’t quite a blue wave, but the Democrats, while unable to win the Senate, did, as predicted, take back control of the House for the first time since 2010. That means that your health care, if you have some, is a little safer, climate change might finally get some attention from lawmakers, and — wait for it — Donald Trump might finally be held to some account. We might not get impeachment, but we will get investigations, hearings, and maybe a tax return or two. If this midterm election, which was far from free and fair, teaches us anything, it’s that the Democrats, now in charge of the House, have to make democratic reform a political and legislative priority. We need to pass a new voting rights bill, end gerrymandering, lower the voting age, make Election Day a public holiday or move it to a weekend, and get statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. Mehdi Hasan is joined by Rep. Barbara Lee, MSNBC host Chris Hayes, and Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory to digest the election results and discuss voter suppression — and where the democrats go from here.
Transcript coming soon.
The post Midterms Special: Who Won, Who Lost, and What Will Happen Next? appeared first on The Intercept.
Voters went to the polls on Tuesday with an overwhelming belief that the American economy is in strong shape and that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Those voters surged to the kinds of numbers that the nation’s electoral system was ill-equipped to handle, with reports of broken scanners and voting machines. Lines stretched around corners and into parking lots while voters waited for hours.
As the ballots were being counted, it became clear that there would be little clarity by the end of the night. Democrats, on the back of historic turnout — the product of two years of post-Trump grassroots organizing — seized control of a House of Representatives that had been meticulously gerrymandered in order to assure that they would never be able to do just that. Democrats also made major gains in state capitals, winning governorships in Kansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maine.
The liberal energy on the ground, when it wasn’t canceled out by GOP turnout, gave Democrats full control of state governments in Colorado, New York, Maine, New Mexico, and Illinois. In Minnesota, the state House flipped to blue, as did both the New Hampshire state House and Senate, while Democrats flipped at least 10 seats in the Texas statehouse. The New York win ushered in not just incoming state Sen. Julia Salazar, but also at least a dozen senators backed by the Working Families Party, putting an end to an era of “three men in a room” rule in Albany.
Major progressive ballot initiatives were approved, too, with the most historic in Florida, where Amendment 4 got well more than the 60 percent it needed in order to restore the right to vote to people convicted of felonies. Elsewhere, voters expanded Medicaid in Idaho, raised the minimum wage in Missouri, and legalized weed in Michigan.
The failure to deliver a knockout blow to Donald Trump will exacerbate tensions within the Democratic Party, torn between its progressive and centrist wings.Yet President Donald Trump will be able to survey that landscape and claim vindication for his ratcheting up of racist rhetoric in the final weeks of campaigning. The failure to deliver a knockout blow to Trump will exacerbate tensions within the Democratic Party, torn between its progressive wing, which wants to lean into small-dollar donors and run as the only party free of corporate corruption, and its centrist wing, which argues that only with corporate money and an inoffensive platform can Democrats take power.
Like everything else, the House results were mixed. Democrats across the board ran as the most progressive class of challengers in a generation. But the most progressive of them — the ones who were hoping to prove that a bold message could carry deep red districts — fell short. Richard Ojeda lost in West Virginia; J.D. Scholten lost by 11,000 votes to white nationalist Steve King in Iowa; in Omaha, Nebraska, Kara Eastman, whom the national party fought against in the primary, was trailing late into the night; in Syracuse, New York, Dana Balter, whom the party had also battled, lost her bid; Leslie Cockburn lost in rural Virginia; and Jess King lost in rural Pennsylvania.
Some of the centrist candidates that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fought for in contested primaries won their races. Jason Crow emerged victorious in Colorado, and Elaine Luria persevered in Virginia, as did Lizzie Pannill Fletcher in Texas — lining up the kind of wins that will embolden party leadership to continue intervening in primaries against candidates that are deemed too progressive.
Still, the narrowness of the Democrats’ House win — it was a blue wave, but no tsunami — leaves Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi little room to maneuver, and the conflicted nature of the results will put increasing pressure on her to step aside.
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The most-watched governors’ races also offered tough results for Democrats.
The paramount race for Trump, both for its 2020 presidential implications and his personal connection to the race, was in Florida, where Trump boosted Rep. Ron DeSantis in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Polls showed progressive Andrew Gillum with a comfortable lead over DeSantis, whose own racist rhetoric equaled that of the president’s, yet DeSantis was declared the winner late on Tuesday night. Outgoing Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who’s been in office since 2011 and declared victory in his race for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, has been embroiled in several controversies related to voter suppression.
In Georgia, Brian Kemp, the extremist Republican in charge of counting the votes as secretary of state, was ahead of Stacey Abrams, though the race is headed for a runoff. Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, who had been a vessel for the last-minute hopes of progressives around the country, fell just about 200,000 votes short of beating the extreme, right-wing Sen. Ted Cruz.
Yet it was in the Senate where Democrats suffered the greatest setbacks. The terrain was so unfavorable to the party that Democrats managed to win some 9 million more votes than Republicans in Senate races (helped along by the presence of two Democrats on the ballot in California), yet still suffer a net loss of at least three seats — dropping North Dakota, Florida, Missouri, and Indiana, while picking up Nevada. Again, the results were complicated: Progressives Sherrod Brown and Tammy Baldwin won convincingly in Ohio and Wisconsin, respectively. And it was in Wisconsin that the Democrats’ nemesis Gov. Scott Walker was knocked out.
Trump, centrist Democrats, and the party’s progressives each suffered defeats, but each won just enough to be able to make the case that their approach is the right one. And so, on we go.
The post The Midterm Results Gave Everybody Just Enough to Keep Fighting appeared first on The Intercept.
In the space of a single, dizzying day, the president of the United States confronted his party’s loss of the House of Representatives (putting him at risk of subpoenas, investigation, and even impeachment). In a rambling, combative news conference, he alternately reached out to his Democratic opponents and lashed out at them, threatening to investigate them.
And finally, as if all that were not enough, he fired his long-suffering attorney general, replacing him with a subordinate who is on record as having argued that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election should be curtailed in scope or budgetarily starved into oblivion.
Even by the rollicking, ripsnorting standards of Donald Trump’s Washington, it was quite a Wednesday, one that when the history of his presidency is written seems destined to live in Instagram infamy. Fasten your seatbelts: dangerous curves—or a constitutional crisis?—dead ahead.
[Read: Trump fired his most effective lieutenant]
Trump began the day with a wee-hours tweetstorm of self-congratulation “on our Big Victory last night,” ignoring that Republicans lost control of the House for the first time since 2010, and Democrats picked up governorships in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Kansas that would be crucial to his reelection. Soon enough, he followed that up with a threat to use his party’s slightly increased Senate majority to fire back at any congressional investigation of him. “Two can play that game!” he insisted.
But it was in his post-election White House news conference in the East Room that Trump really seemed to jump the shark. He congratulated victorious Republican candidates, then mockingly singled out by name losing ones who had shrunk from accepting his help. He praised Nancy Pelosi as deserving a return to the speakership, saying, “There are many things we can get along on,” including infrastructure and the environment, but warned that if Democrats began flooding him with subpoenas, all bets would be off in a “warlike posture,” and he would blame them for gridlock, adding, “I know more than they know.”
He once again insisted that he would refuse to release his tax returns as long as he is under “a very continuous audit.” “They’re extremely complex,” he said. “People wouldn’t understand them.” Asked how he saw himself as “a moral leader,” the president modestly averred, “I think I am a great moral leader and I love our country.”
[Read: Forcing out Sessions is an attack on accountability]
At one point, he sharply cut off one black journalist who tried to ask about voter suppression in the midterms (“Sit down, please. Sit down. I didn’t call you. I didn’t call you.”), and he took great offense when another asked if his campaign rhetoric and embrace of nationalism had encouraged white supremacists, snapping, “That’s a racist question!” When foreign journalists posed questions in accented English, he scrunched up his face and complained that he could not understand them.
Still, all that was pale prologue compared with his sudden afternoon ouster of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the latest move in his slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre of nettlesome subordinates that began with his firing of FBI Director James Comey 18 months ago. Indeed, not since Richard Nixon’s infamous firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on a Saturday evening in October 1973 has a president so electrified the capital (or the country) by seeming to dance so near to the edge of autocratic behavior.
Trump had the unquestioned power to demand Sessions’s resignation, of course, and in one way or another had been threatening to do so ever since Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation early in Trump’s administration. “He took the job and then he said, ‘I’m going to recuse myself.’ I said, ‘What kind of a man is this?’” Trump asked in an interview with Fox News earlier this year. Not the kind of man Trump wanted on his team, to say the least.
But the dramatic firing seemed, at a minimum, to contradict—or at least cast doubt on—Trump’s own words at his news conference, when he said, “I could fire everybody right now,” but added, “Politically, I do not like stopping it.” He once again attacked the investigation as marred by conflicts of interest and insisted, “But you know what I do? I let it go on. They are wasting a lot of money. I let it go on because I do not want to do that.”
[Read: Trump is about to get a rude awakening]
It is a measure of the strange political bedfellows that Trump has made that his firing of Sessions—a hard-line conservative on immigration, civil rights, and law enforcement, and the first sitting senator to endorse his presidential candidacy—produced muted sympathy from unlikely quarters. “Attorney General Sessions has led an unprecedented attack on the Constitution and our civil rights,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Yet, today is not a day for celebration. Sessions’s forced resignation follows unprecedented intimidation from President Trump. The president’s blatant disregard for the independence of the country’s chief law-enforcement officer undermines the rule of law in America.”
Democratic congressional leaders were even more emphatic. “Protecting Mueller and his investigation is paramount,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, adding that any interference would “create a constitutional crisis.”
That Sessions’s interim successor will not be Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—the usual next in line, and the current overseer of the Russian probe—but Sessions’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, only raised the level of concern. That is because Whitaker, before joining the Justice Department last year, had suggested publicly that Mueller’s inquiry would be overstepping the terms that authorized it if it looked into Trump’s personal business dealings. Whitaker also suggested that instead of ending the investigation outright, Rosenstein might simply starve it of funds.
At twilight, scores of Justice Department staffers gathered in the headquarters’ courtyard off Pennsylvania Avenue to salute a ruddy-cheeked Sessions as he left the building for the last time, his eyes seeming to glisten with tears in the bright television lights. In a final humiliation, word leaked out that it was White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, not Trump himself, who had informed Sessions that the president was demanding his resignation, and Sessions’s own brief note to the president made it quite clear that he was leaving only “at your request.”
In his news conference, Trump once again insisted, as he had in a recent television interview, that he sometimes wishes he had used a softer tone in the recent campaign. “I would love—I would be very good in a low tone,” he said. “I would love to have an even, modest, boring talk. I would be very honored by that. But you know what, when you have to fight all the time because you are being misrepresented by the media, you cannot do that.”
If Donald Trump has ever delivered an “even, modest, boring talk” in his life, no public suggestion of it has surfaced. Certainly, there is nothing in the 656 days of his presidency to date to betray any intention to do so. And based on his latest breathtaking performance, it seems a safe bet to say that there probably never will be.
Sessions Out: Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017—handed in his resignation just a day after the midterm elections, forced out by President Donald Trump. His new replacement has in the past expressed skepticism about the reach of the Russia investigation—which he’ll now oversee. While there’s no denying Sessions has been an efficient lieutenant for Trump’s policy priorities, his relationship with the president has been on the rocks for some time, and many of Trump’s evangelical allies disliked him as well. Also of note: Stock prices for cannabis companies spiked after the announcement of Sessions’s resignation.
Postmortem: Which party was most successful in pushing their candidates—and policies—in the 2018 midterms? Depends on who you ask. “Lost?” one GOP strategist boasted to McKay Coppins. “What are you talking about? We may have our largest Senate majority in history.” Meanwhile, Democrats picked up seven governor’s seats—though they fell short of what they’d hoped for. And voter turnout this year was high, with celebrities like Taylor Swift stepping out to encourage first-time voters. But will these voters stay engaged?
Snapshot
The pro-Trump brothel owner Dennis Hof, renounced by many in his own party, was elected to Nevada’s state legislature on Tuesday. What’s notable about this race is that the 72-year-old Hof died nearly a month ago. Deceased candidates have been endorsed for political office, and then voted in, more often than you might think. (Debra Reid / AP)Evening ReadAmerica’s political divides cut many ways. But one other widening gulf is the partisan divide among college-educated white voters and non-college-educated ones:
There’s a question that splits Americans neatly in two. Every year, on its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks Americans whether they “think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?” Fifty percent of Americans say that it’s gotten better in this year’s poll, and 47 percent say that it has gotten worse.
But for white voters, the answer to that question is split by education level. Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse. When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past.
What Do You Know … About Science, Technology, and Health?1. Amazon is said to be considering these two cities to host its major new headquarters, though several other cities around the U.S. see themselves as still in the running.
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2. This small planet, first documented closely by the Mariner 10 spacecraft in the 1970s, has a liquid core that comprises more than 60 percent of its volume, compared with our planet’s 15 percent.
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Jeff Sessions was unfit to serve as attorney general of the United States. He had lied about his civil-rights record, claiming that he’d desegregated schools in Alabama when he hadn’t, as he later admitted under oath. He and his surrogates misled the public by insisting that he had begun his political life campaigning against the segregationist Lurleen Wallace, without mentioning that her GOP opponent was also a segregationist. He exaggerated his role in the prosecution of the Ku Klux Klansmen who lynched Michael Donald. He praised the racist 1924 immigration law that targeted nonwhites, Eastern and Southern Europeans, and Jews. He was rejected for a federal judgeship for allegedly calling a black attorney a “boy” and a civil-rights attorney a “race traitor.” On every crucial question of civil rights in the past 40 years, Sessions has been on the wrong side.
He also misled the Senate, under oath, about his contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign, then lied about having lied. If his record opposing basic constitutional rights for marginalized groups were not disqualifying, his rank dishonesty should have been.
As attorney general, Sessions rolled back civil-rights enforcement, failing to file even a single voting-rights case in a country where the Republican Party has settled on disenfranchisement of rival constituencies as a tactic for winning elections. He failed in his duty to prevent the president from attempting to influence the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and then aided the president in presenting a patently false justification for firing former FBI Director James Comey over that investigation. In virtually every consequential way, Sessions should go down in history as one of the worst attorney generals ever to hold the office.
[Read: What Sessions’s resignation means for Robert Mueller]
Yet in one important sense, Sessions’s forced departure is alarming. Sessions, for all his flaws, envisioned the position of attorney general as an office that should resist political pressure from the White House, and one whose ultimate loyalty is to the Constitution. It was that view that caused Sessions, under pressure, to agree to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. This runs contrary to the central tenet of Trumpism, which holds that the highest loyalty is not to the public, the nation, or the Constitution, but to Donald Trump. The president was enraged that Sessions’s recusal meant that he could not control the investigation himself. He will not make that mistake with his next choice of attorney general.
Trump’s losses in the midterms will not make him more cautious; they will only make him more dangerous. Trump’s only true ideological commitment is to his racially exclusive vision of American citizenship. His authoritarianism is more instinctive than ideological, closely tied to his desire to enrich himself and his allies without facing legal consequences. If the only way the president can save his own skin or that of others implicated in his corruption is to violate the rule of law, then he has no compunctions about doing so. With Democrats in charge of the House, the president is no doubt confident that he can blatantly break the law and still convince his supporters, sealed in an impenetrable bubble of pro-Trump propaganda, that he did no such thing. Protecting the rule of law will fall to a Republican majority in the Senate whose willingness to do so is deeply in question.
Indeed, the president said as much during his press conference Wednesday morning, warning that if House Democrats looked into this campaign or his finances, he would retaliate. “They can look at us, we can look at them, and it will go back and forth, and it will probably be very good for me politically,” Trump said. “I can see it being extremely good politically, because I think I am better at that game than they are, actually.”
[Read: Trump repeatedly threatens retaliation against Russia investigators]
The racial element of Trumpism is an essential one, but so is this: Trump believes that he and his friends and allies are above the law. There is no act they could commit that would warrant prosecution or sanction. At the same time, there is no act committed by his critics or rivals that could not be subject to prosecution, should he so choose. It is not simply that the president does not believe in the rule of law. It is that he believes the law is a shield that protects him, and a sword that can be used to impale his enemies. Nothing has made this clearer than his constant demands for prosecution of his critics, and his decision to issue federal pardons to men like Dinesh D’Souza and Joe Arpaio, whose violations of the law he regards as trivial because they are pro-Trump sycophants.
This is not how things are supposed to work in a democracy, and certainly not in the United States. But with Sessions gone, Trump will be looking for a replacement who sees the law the way he does: as a set of rules that applies to his enemies but not to himself or the charmed circle that surrounds him. The danger to American democracy did not subside with House Republicans’ defeat in the midterms. It has only grown.
The day after Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives, Donald Trump threatened retaliation against lawmakers who “waste Taxpayer Money” by scrutinizing him and his administration, and boasted of his power to end Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Then, late on Wednesday, he announced the resignation of the man at the helm of the department responsible for the Mueller probe: Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Representative Adam Schiff, one of the top Democrats preparing to investigate the president, had a response at the ready. On Wednesday, he tweeted: “We will protect the rule of law.”
[Read: The 7 most dumbfounding moments from Trump’s post-election press conference]
Now, with power shifting in Washington and the president seemingly prepared to intensify his fight against the Russia investigation, Schiff is poised to play a key role in the coming struggle.
When I spoke with Schiff, currently the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and the most likely chair of the committee in the next Congress, just ahead of the election, he didn’t indicate that Democrats would be deterred by the president. Investigations, he argued, are vital to the national interest.
“Within our committee, we certainly have a compelling interest in making sure that U.S. policy … is not driven by leverage that the Russians have over the president,” Schiff told me. “There have been credible allegations that the Russians may have laundered money through the Trump organization, and if that’s the case, then we need to be able to look into it and be able to tell the country, ‘Yes, this is true,’ or ‘No, this is not.’ But I think it would be negligent not to find out.” (“I keep hearing things about investigations,” Trump observed during a press conference on Wednesday. “They got nothing, zero. You know why? Cause there is nothing.”)
Schiff noted that Deutsche Bank, which was recently fined for failing to prevent Russian money laundering, loaned Trump money when other banks wouldn’t; that Donald Trump Jr. once spoke of money pouring into the Trump Organization from Russia; and that the president sold a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008 for more than twice what he had paid for it only several years earlier.
[Read: America needs an entirely new foreign policy for the Trump age]
The congressman declined to detail the next steps of a possible investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, but indicated that he sees the work as correcting the failures of the House Intelligence Committee’s earlier Republican-led probe. That inquiry existed alongside investigations by Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee, and petered out last spring amid partisan acrimony.
Schiff offered one example of a theory about the president that he would seek to verify: Whether or not Trump was on the other end of a call that Donald Trump Jr. placed to a blocked number in June 2016. That call happened while his son was in the midst of arranging a meeting with Russians affiliated with the Kremlin who were peddling damaging information about Hillary Clinton, a detail that Democrats first flagged last spring as a point for further inquiry.
“We know the president used a blocked cellphone during the campaign, and so naturally we sought to subpoena the phone records to determine whether the president, despite his protestations to the contrary, was knowing and approving of this meeting with the Russians to get dirt on his opponent,” Schiff said, without elaborating on the source of the claim that Trump frequently used a blocked number. “The Republicans refused. They said, ‘We don't want to know.’ And that's the attitude they have taken during their role in the investigation.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Trump used a blocked number during the campaign, or on the other allegations and concerns Schiff mentioned.
[Read: Do liberals have an answer to Trump on foreign policy?]
The scrutiny from a Schiff-led committee and others may intensify the Russia probe. But he plans to dig even deeper.
“It's going to be important for Congress to ensure that U.S. foreign policy is being driven by U.S. national interests and not by Trump family finances,” Schiff said, in reference to the president’s business ties to Saudi Arabia and his pro-Saudi policies, such as backing the kingdom in its confrontation with neighboring Qatar. “The president has not truly divested his family’s interests or been the least bit transparent about it,” the congressman said, and lawmakers need to “make sure we’re protecting the country.”
Schiff envisioned wide-ranging examinations of uncomfortable subjects for the Trump administration: whether North Korea is really taking steps to denuclearize as part of the president’s diplomacy with Kim Jong Un, for instance, and the dangers generated by the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
One area where the Democratic agenda in the House could dovetail with Trump’s, however, is in confronting the economic and security threat posed by China. “Is China using its manufacture of electronics to corrupt our supply chain, to turn our supplies into backdoors for espionage purposes?” Schiff asked. “The theft of big data, like we had with [the U.S. Office of Personnel Management] and the use of data analytics: Is that allowing China to gain a competitive advantage?”
A larger—and, at the moment, more amorphous—project of the Democrat-controlled House may be to articulate and to actualize an alternative to the clarion call of America First. Schiff pointed to the challenges that rising authoritarianism is posing to liberal democracy everywhere, from Brazil to Hungary to Turkey to the Philippines.
“This rise of authoritarianism is one of the most serious national-security threats facing the country,” Schiff argued. “We have a president who makes common cause with autocrats, and has made the United States unrecognizable to a lot of our allies.”
“I think it's going to be vitally important that Congress step into the void and become the champion of democracy and human rights,” he told me, “because that role’s been abdicated by the president.”
American Christian leaders did not like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned the day after the midterm elections at the president’s request. Not just progressive Christians who abhor the Trump administration: Many of President Donald Trump’s staunch evangelical allies, along with more moderate conservative leaders, also found Sessions lacking in his role. This is curious, because Sessions is himself a conservative Christian who promoted a religious-right brand of politics. And he spent much of his time in office supporting conservative religious causes.
Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University and one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, has been a loud and public critic of Sessions for some time. Falwell often tweeted about him, and once remarked that Sessions, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former FBI Director James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and others, should all “rot in the same jail.”
Strangely @jeffsessions appeared unannounced at @LibertyU the night before the 2016 election on a bus tour. I told students but could get almost none of them to come hear him. Could it be our students were the first to see he was a phony pretending to be pro- @realDonaldTrump ?
— Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) August 2, 2018Falwell disapproved of Sessions because he recused himself from oversight of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential Trump-campaign collusion, Falwell told me in a phone interview on Wednesday. And he disagreed with Sessions’s refusal to investigate Russia collusion “on the Democratic side,” as he described it. But he also seemed to take issue with the attorney general’s character.
“I think he’s part of the deep state,” Falwell said. “I think he’s an establishment guy ... It doesn’t mean he’s not conservative and hasn’t done some good things—he has. But he can’t get past being an establishment loyalist.”
Falwell maintained that he discussed these views with Trump a number of months ago. But he also said that the other members of Trump’s informal evangelical advisory council—who are often invited to meet with the president, take part in photo ops, and dine at the White House—disliked Sessions as well. “That’s been a topic of conversation any time I’ve spoken to any of them in the last year and a half or so,” Falwell said.
Johnnie Moore, the advisory council’s de facto spokesman and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me there was “widespread dissatisfaction across the board from the conservative, evangelical elements of Trump’s base who believed Sessions to be weak and ineffective.” Notably, Moore added, Sessions alienated the “more moderate end of [Trump’s] evangelical base, who were dissatisfied with some of his enforcement actions, his visceral opposition to criminal-justice reform, and the tactics he supported for handling illegal immigration.”
Other Trump advisers had different reasons for their disapproval. He was seen as an obstacle to one of the main goals of the evangelical advisory group: instituting prison reform. And immigration, in particular, made Sessions unpopular among many conservative Christian groups. Sessions invoked the ire of a number of pastors, progressive and conservative alike, when he quoted the Bible to justify his department’s policy of separating families and children at the border.
The political arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, along with other Christian advocacy organizations, signed a letter condemning Sessions’s family-separation policy. “The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children,” it stated, “could be devastating and long-lasting.” Six hundred members of Sessions’s own denomination, the United Methodist Church, initiated a formal censure process against him over this policy, although that effort was later dropped.
During his tenure, Sessions positioned himself as the face of the Trump administration’s religious-freedom policies, but that apparently wasn’t enough to counteract the negative perceptions of staunchly conservative groups. Just months ago, he convened a summit on the topic, and promised to oppose “a dangerous movement, undetected by many, [that] is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom.”
He created a new task force designed to ensure that the Justice Department was upholding and enforcing religious protections across America. He acted as an emissary to religious conservatives in particular, and was welcomed by groups including the Orthodox Union.
Some conservative Christians may have supported these initiatives, but they were seen as destructive in progressive Christian circles. At a recent luncheon, two Massachusetts-based pastors were escorted out after they interrupted a speech Sessions was giving. “Brother Jeff, as a fellow United Methodist, I call upon you to repent, to care for those in need,” said Will Green, the pastor of Ballard Vale United Church in Andover. The pastor was walked out by officers as he recited a Bible verse. Another pastor, Darrell Hamilton II of Boston, stood up. “I thought we were here to protect religious liberty, sir,” he said as he himself was removed from the luncheon. “I am a pastor of a Baptist church, and you are escorting me out for exercising my religious freedom.”
It’s not clear whether Trump’s evangelical advisers influenced his decision to fire Sessions, although their disapproval could not have helped the attorney general’s case. Whether Christian leaders saw Sessions as an enemy of Trump or the symbol of Trump’s most divisive policies, they were united in their rejection.
“It was obvious for a long time Jeff Sessions was on his way out,” said Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia megachurch pastor who is one of Trump’s advisers. “I think most of us in the faith community felt he was a good man, but not an effective attorney general.”
Jeff Sessions is gone, and marijuana advocates—and the businesses that serve them—are celebrating. Forced out by President Donald Trump, Sessions tendered his resignation as the attorney general on Wednesday afternoon, and his departure has signaled the fall of a major political roadblock to more widespread legalization. In response, stock prices for cannabis businesses have leapt.
Nasdaq’s Alternative Harvest Marijuana ETF, a fund that bundles tradable assets for the cannabis industry, was up 5.6 percent in the hour after the Sessions announcement, with a peak share price of $36.97—a nearly $2 gain for the fund. On the day, the fund was up more than 7 percent at the close of trading.
Individual cannabis-company stocks are also seeing the effects of Sessions’s departure. According to CNBC, the Canadian company Tilray got a boost of 30 percent in the day’s trading, along with jumps of more than 8 percent for both Canopy Growth and Aurora Cannabis. All of these companies continued to see gains in the immediate extended-hours trading.
[Read: A Silicon Valley pot deal]
People in favor of legalization were already having a good week. As a result of Tuesday’s midterm elections, Michigan became the the tenth state in the country to legalize recreational marijuana use, Illinois elected a legalization-minded governor, and voters in Missouri and Utah voted to legalize medicinal cannabis. On top of that, Representative Pete Sessions (no relation to Jeff) of Texas lost his seat in the House of Representatives, where his position at the head of the Rules Committee allowed him to block votes on marijuana amendments. That position will now be held by a Democrat as the party retakes control of the House.
That Sessions’s resignation alone prompted such sharp gains in an already promising week for cannabis investors demonstrates just how big of an obstacle he represented to advocates’ hopes for continued legalization. His fierce opposition to marijuana use and normalization was one of the most well-known arcs in his career. In April 2016, he proclaimed in a Senate hearing that “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” and he argued that it was a gateway drug for abuse of substances like cocaine and heroin, even linking it to America’s growing opioid epidemic. (Some research suggests, to the contrary, that access to marijuana could reduce some opioid use.)
Under Sessions, not only had efforts to legalize marijuana at the federal level for even medical use been stymied, but the Department of Justice reversed Obama-era enforcement guidelines. Those rules instructed federal law enforcement not to interfere with states allowing marijuana sales, which have always been in violation of federal law. The differences in state- and federal-level marijuana legality have proved a growth issue for the cannabis industry—for example, they can create legal and logistical problems for business owners when it comes to things like corporate banking.
Trump has appointed Sessions’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, as his acting replacement. It’s unclear how long Whitaker could be in the role or who might replace him, and what that person’s thoughts on cannabis legalization might be. Republican policy makers generally oppose it, though a majority of Republican voters have been found to support legalization. But for now, weed investors appear to be breathing—or inhaling—a sigh of relief.
The fastest way to reveal a nation’s priorities is to take a look at its budget. Where money is allocated, improvements and expansions are made; where costs are cut, institutions and policies wither. In America and other similar democracies, political candidates campaign on budget promises, but it can be difficult to maintain transparency—and enforce accountability—once a politician is elected into office.
“Budgets are the essence of what government does,” says a woman at a community meeting in Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s short documentary, Public Money. “We’re cutting out out the rhetoric about budgeting and allowing community members to make direct decisions about money in our community.”
The woman in the film is talking about participatory budgeting, an innovative democratic process that has been underway in New York City since 2011. Once a year, citizens in participating Council Districts across the city propose and vote on how to spend $1,000,000 in their neighborhoods.
“It results in better budget decisions,” the New York City Council’s website reads, “because who better knows the needs of our community than the people who live there?”
Participatory budgeting was first introduced at a large scale in Porto Alegre, Brazil. “For over 25 years, there have been all kinds of massive improvements in city infrastructure, and especially improved conditions in poorer neighborhoods,” Sterrenberg told The Atlantic. Today, there are more than 1,500 participatory budgets around the world.
Public Money, from Meerkat Media Collective, follows one cycle of the participatory budget process in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Residents are tasked with proposing project ideas, such as building a community center in the local library, installing security cameras in the park, and fixing potholes in the streets. Committees workshop, debate, and ultimately vote for their favorite projects, which—once deemed viable by the city government—go to the ballot. A public vote is held, and the prevailing projects are funded.
“I have heard participatory budgeting referred to as a ‘gateway drug to democracy,’” Sterrenberg said. “When people are asked how they would like to spend their tax dollars and are given an option to directly implement that binding decision themselves, it really inspires a different way of thinking about our governments and our cities.”
While Sterrenberg admitted that the process is not a “silver bullet to fix our democracy,” he believes that participatory budgeting promotes civic engagement and provides an “encouraging alternative model” of how to conduct a civic process.
“After my experience with participatory budgeting,” he said, “I think it's a crucial ingredient in building a new kind of government that better reflects the community it serves.”
Yesterday, voters overwhelmingly passed a measure to grant funding to expand participatory budgeting across New York City.
The paradox of Jeff Sessions’s tenure as attorney general is that no member of Donald Trump’s administration was so beleaguered and disparaged by the president, but no member got as much done.
Even as he endured persistent verbal abuse from Trump, Sessions steamed forward on a range of conservative social-policy priorities, aggressively reorienting the Justice Department’s stances on immigration, civil rights, and criminal justice, among other issues. In an administration plagued by incompetent and ineffective figures, Sessions was a paragon of efficacy—a distinction that horrified his many opponents, but did nothing to win Trump’s trust or affection. The White House announced Wednesday that Sessions was resigning. The attorney general’s letter was not dated, and stated that he was stepping down at the president’s request.
[Read: The strange, slow-motion defenestration of Jeff Sessions]
Nothing illustrates Sessions’s effect as much as immigration policy. When it came time for Trump to pull the plug on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, as he had promised he would during the 2016 campaign, the president got cold feet, but Sessions was happy to be the public face of the withdrawal. It was Sessions who tried to follow through (unsuccessfully) on Trump’s threat to cut off funding to sanctuary cities. It was Sessions who issued new guidance to immigration judges. And, most prominent, it was Sessions who went to the border to announce the Trump administration’s decision to separate migrant children from their parents. Sessions openly said the plan to split families up was intended to deter migrants, even as other administration officials said otherwise. The policy was met with widespread and appropriate horror, and Trump eventually pulled back—but he had backed the plan before that, and Sessions had followed through.
Sessions also led the charge to slow or reverse bipartisan momentum on criminal-justice reform. He reversed Obama-era guidance that instructed prosecutors not to seek the harshest penalties for drug offenses. He worked to block criminal-justice-reform efforts in Congress, drawing the ire of senators and representatives and eventually Trump himself. He took a harder line on marijuana legalization at the state level than the Obama Justice Department had. Where the DOJ had begun using its muscle to force local police departments to reform in cases of abuse, Sessions not only pulled back but tried to reverse existing reform agreements and made clear that police would receive a blank check from his Justice Department.
Sessions also rolled back a range of civil-rights protections. He ratcheted down voting-rights protections. He rescinded guidance to schools designed to protect transgender students. The DOJ also backed suits brought by Asian American students against universities, arguing that their affirmative-action policies were discriminatory.
[Read: The end of civil rights]
In the midst of all of this, Sessions was subject to an almost constant stream of attacks from the White House. His relationship with Trump fell apart quickly after Sessions announced, in March 2017, that he would recuse himself from any matters involving Russia.
Trump was irate. “Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself,” Trump told The New York Times in July 2017. “So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have—which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.”
Trump also attacked Rod Rosenstein, whom Sessions had picked as his deputy, suggesting (falsely) that Rosenstein was a Democrat and that no one knew anything about him. The attacks continued for months. Not since President Andrew Johnson fired Edwin Stanton in 1867 had a president so publicly feuded with one of his own Cabinet officials.
By summer 2017, it was clear that Sessions’s days were numbered. The Washington Post reported that he had offered to resign at least once, and it’s astonishing that he lasted so long.
[David Frum: Trump’s attack on accountability]
One reason Sessions seemed content to withstand Trump’s disparagement was that he was able to move forward on many of his own policy goals. Sessions had long been an outlier in the Republican Party, especially on immigration; he was also far more open about his culture-war instincts on issues like sexuality and voting rights.
But these weren’t just Sessions’s pet issues. They were Trump’s as well. Hard-line immigration policies, giving police free rein, fighting phantom voter fraud—these were all signature Trump projects. Sessions had been the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump, and Trump took from him a range of policy concepts—especially on immigration—as well as a top adviser, Stephen Miller. But Sessions’s stewardship of those projects didn’t return him to favor with Trump, who, according to Bob Woodward’s book Fear, called Sessions “mentally retarded” and a “dumb Southerner.”
It’s instructive to compare Sessions with two other administration figures: Scott Pruitt and Don McGahn. Pruitt, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was a disaster, an almost cartoonishly corrupt Cabinet official. But it took months of damaging headlines and congressional pressure to finally push Pruitt out. Meanwhile, he was surprisingly ineffective at actually enacting Trump’s environmental policies, attempting bold moves but repeatedly getting smacked down by courts for cutting corners.
Sessions had far more in common with McGahn, the former White House counsel. Like Sessions, McGahn came from the outer edges of the Republican Party, lacking the pedigree and connections of more establishment players. Both men rose to prominence in the Trump White House in a way they would not have under any other president. When McGahn’s departure was announced in August, I wrote that he’d been the most effective person in the West Wing, through his stewardship of judicial appointments. But Trump disliked and distrusted McGahn, and seemed eager to have him gone.
Of course, the same issue poisoned both Sessions’s and McGahn’s relationships with Trump: the Russia investigation, and especially Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s takeover of it. Trump was angry that neither man had protected him. He raged at Sessions’s lack of “loyalty” and complained that Attorney General Eric Holder had “totally protected” Barack Obama. (What he meant by that is unclear.) He twice instructed McGahn to fire Mueller, and McGahn twice refused, once threatening to resign.
Now both are gone. During a press conference Wednesday, Trump said he could remove Mueller at any time (a debatable assertion), but with Sessions gone, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker assumes control of Mueller’s probe. Whitaker was outspokenly critical of the special counsel’s inquiry before joining the administration, so Trump may now have a leader of the Justice Department who is more pliable on the Mueller front. But the president is unlikely to find an attorney general who will do as much to move his priorities forward as Sessions did—and the new attorney general will come into the job knowing that loyalty and efficacy aren’t enough to garner favor with Trump.
The most surprising thing about Wednesday’s resignation of Jeff Sessions is that it did not happen sooner. President Trump has long been furious with his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and has had the power to fire him at any time. Trump’s decision to oust Sessions also removes Rod Rosenstein as acting attorney general for the purposes of the Russia investigation, leaving the fate of Special Counsel Robert Mueller uncertain. This drives home an essential truth about all independent investigations of the presidency: Their outcomes aren’t determined by the prosecutors or evidence alone, but by the public’s reaction to what it learns, and to how presidents choose to react.
Americans are deeply committed to the maxim that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Even the most expansive proponents of executive power do not dispute this bedrock principle, which distinguishes constitutional democracy from monarchy. Yet no law required Rosenstein, as acting attorney general, to appoint an outside prosecutor when credible evidence emerged that the president’s 2016 campaign may have colluded with the Russian government. When Rosenstein elected to appoint such a prosecutor voluntarily, no law barred Trump from shuttering the investigation to protect his family, his friends, or himself.
Special prosecutors like Mueller serve as catalysts for democracy. Their high visibility makes it easier for the American people to monitor presidential misconduct and to hold the president accountable for his actions. But special prosecutors, no less than presidents, can misuse their power. To temper this danger, Trump retains the authority to dismiss Mueller at any time. If he exercises that power for a corrupt purpose or out of simple caprice, Mueller has no legal recourse. But he is not totally defenseless. Trump must ultimately answer to the American people. This can be a potent check, but it is also a fragile one.
President Ulysses S. Grant appointed the first special prosecutor in 1875 to investigate a corruption scandal that threatened to engulf his administration. Ever since, both Democratic and Republican presidents have appointed special prosecutors and permitted them to operate with unusual independence from presidential oversight. In short order, this became a standard method for quelling political scandals. By appointing an outside prosecutor, the president could signal confidence in his own innocence and reaffirm his commitment to the rule of law.
This long, mostly forgotten history holds important lessons. Special prosecutors can do much to safeguard the rule of law under the right conditions. They are also fallible. Many have been stymied by the formidable difficulties of investigating a sitting president and his friends, whose political incentives change once a special prosecutor has been appointed. Grant testified as a character witness on behalf of his beloved and corrupt chief of staff Orville Babcock, thwarting Babcock’s prosecution for bribery. Henry McGrath, an attorney general under Harry Truman, outright refused to answer the questions of Special Prosecutor Newbold Morris, who was investigating corruption in the tax division of the Justice Department. The special prosecutors investigating Teapot Dome, the 1920s-era corruption scandal, were forced to pay expenses out of their own pockets for long stretches.
A few special prosecutors, such as Bill Clinton–era Independent Counsel Ken Starr, have lost their sense of proportion or been carried away by monomaniacal zeal. Yet this is the exception. Far more frequently, the specter of a power-mad special prosecutor has operated as a weapon of presidential propaganda with little foundation in fact. President Trump’s ceaseless cries of “witch hunt” are but a hyperbolic echo of the supporters of Grant, Clinton, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon.
The most important lesson of this history is that special prosecutors are incapable of saving us from ourselves. If Trump thinks he can fire Mueller without suffering serious political fallout, he has the power to do it. Three previous presidents have exercised this power. Grant and Truman, both lame ducks nearing the end of their term, escaped without serious consequence, though their parties suffered electoral losses. Nixon lived to regret it.
Ultimately, only the American people can decide whether the president is above the law. In the present circumstances, this question may seem like a purely partisan one. Those who like Trump will be tempted to view legal restraints on his power as a cumbersome nuisance. Those who dislike him will take the opposite view. All Americans, however, have a profound stake in preserving the “government of laws and not of men” passed down to us by previous generations.
The alternative is a system in which the president is “the only one that matters,” to quote Trump’s revealing self-description. That sort of despotism is just what the American founders fought a revolution to overthrow. It is also what many of our ancestors fled their home countries to escape.
Of course, special prosecutors are not the only actors in our constitutional system charged with safeguarding the rule of law. Many other institutions play important roles—or can do so, if they choose. These include Congress, the courts, and even the federal bureaucracy. But these institutions are not self-activating. If they are to perform their intended function, the people need some kind of early warning system, so they know when to press their elected representatives and other institutional checks into action. Special prosecutors can play this role very effectively, but they require popular—and, to at least some extent, bipartisan—support.
This might seem like an impossibly tall order in today’s polarized political climate, but there is a close historical precedent. In 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected by what was then the largest popular vote margin in American history. He won 18 million more votes than George McGovern and began his second term with an approval rating of 67 percent. Yet when Nixon fired the first Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in October 1973, the public reaction was so swift and ferocious that Nixon was forced to appoint another genuinely independent special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, within a week.
It was Jaworski’s investigation that ultimately forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. By that time, Nixon’s public approval had fallen to 24 percent. In other words, tens of millions of Nixon voters had changed their minds about him because of the evidence unearthed by the Watergate special prosecutors. What has happened before can happen again.
Whether Trump pays a similar price for ousting Sessions will go a long way toward determining Mueller’s fate. In the end, it is up to the American people, who will get the democracy they deserve.
Scott Walker’s eight-year run as the union-busting conservative governor of Wisconsin ended on Tuesday night, and Kansas voters rejected Kris Kobach’s bid to take his hard-right views on immigration and voter fraud to the most powerful perch in Topeka. In Maine, voters replaced the combative and uncompromising conservative Paul LePage with a Democratic woman, Janet Mills, running on a message of collaboration.
In all, Democrats on Tuesday captured seven governorships held by Republicans for the past four or eight years, reversing a swell that had given the GOP a record 70 percent of the nation’s executive mansions as recently as 2016. The Democrat J. B. Pritzker ousted Republican Governor Bruce Rauner in Illinois, and Democrats won open seats in Michigan, New Mexico, and Nevada. They now hold 23 of the nation’s 50 governorships, with Republicans likely to control the remaining 27 once all races are called. Democrats also flipped six state legislative chambers and gained hundreds of seats nationwide. In New York, Illinois, Colorado, Maine, and Nevada, Democrats now hold control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature.
[Read: The Democrats’ most radical election victory was in the states.]
But the gubernatorial elections were not all Democrats had hoped for, and they fell short of capturing the top jobs in an outright majority of states. Democrats were unable to mount strong campaigns against a trio of Republican governors in deep blue states: Charlie Baker in Massachusetts, Larry Hogan in Maryland, and Phil Scott in Vermont all won reelection easily.
In a potentially ominous harbinger for the 2020 presidential election, Democrats lost races they aggressively targeted in the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio, and Iowa. In Florida, Andrew Gillum’s narrow defeat to the Donald Trump ally Ron DeSantis, despite Gillum holding a lead in most polls, was particularly stinging for progressives. And in Georgia, Stacey Abrams was fighting on Wednesday to get into a runoff election against the conservative secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who was just above the 50 percent threshold needed for an outright win.
[Read: Stacey Abrams is still waiting for an unlikely miracle.]
But the seven Democratic gains in governorships were the most for either party in a single year since 1994. Depending on the state, these wins will allow the party to either block conservative policies or implement progressive proposals on the state level that stand little chance of success in Washington’s divided national government.
They’ll also be crucial bulwarks in the party as it prepares for state-by-state redistricting fights after the 2020 census. In Wisconsin and Kansas, for example, the Democrats Tony Evers and Laura Kelly will be able to veto maps drawn by Republican state legislators and negotiate less gerrymandered districts.
“For the first time in a long time, a majority of Americans will now have Democratic governors working for them,” Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, told reporters on a conference call. He noted that the seven states Democrats gained include 38 million people, giving the party a gubernatorial majority in population if not in states.
In addition to picking up seats from Republicans, Democrats defended all of their own governorships that were up for election on Tuesday night. Governors Andrew Cuomo in New York and Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania cruised to reelection, while in Colorado, Jared Polis joined Oregon’s Kate Brown (who also won reelection on Tuesday) as the nation’s only LGBTQ governors. Polis became the first openly gay man to win a statehouse. In Connecticut, the Democrat Ned Lamont narrowly avoided the party’s only net defeat, as he edged out the Republican Bob Stefanowski. Lamont’s win came 12 years after the liberal businessman made national headlines for defeating Senator Joe Lieberman in a Democratic primary, presaging Lieberman’s move rightward.
Republicans did make one gain. In Alaska, Mike Dunleavy beat former Democratic Senator Mark Begich to capture a governorship that the independent Bill Walker has held since 2015. Walker ended his reelection bid a few weeks ago when it became clear that he and Begich were splitting the anti-GOP vote.
[Read: America, now more divided than (almost) ever]
In Kansas, Wisconsin, and Maine, the elections could give new momentum to efforts to expand Medicaid. Voters in Maine approved the expansion in a ballot measure last year, but LePage slow-walked its implementation by opposing legislation to fund it. In Michigan, the election of Gretchen Whitmer could speed up the enactment of a major infrastructure package, Inslee noted.
Beyond the policy implications, none of the Democratic victories was sweeter for the party than those in Wisconsin and Kansas. Walker had been a conservative superstar when he won the governorship of the Badger State in 2010, and promptly worked with Republican legislators to enact sweeping restrictions on the bargaining power of public-sector labor unions. He defeated a Democratic recall effort in 2012, won reelection in 2014, and, before the rise of Trump, was a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Evers, the Democratic state superintendent of schools, ran on a kitchen-table platform focused on education, health care, and infrastructure.
Walker conceded on Wednesday, as Evers led him by around 30,000 votes, or 1.2 percent, with all precincts reporting. Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, greeted Walker’s defeat with a statement comprising all of six words: “Scott Walker was a national disgrace,” he said.
[Read: Even Scott Walker says he’s “at risk” in Wisconsin.]
Kobach’s loss in deep-red Kansas was even more of an upset, despite polls that showed the race between him and Kelly neck and neck. The two-term secretary of state and close Trump ally was just as polarizing in Kansas as the president is nationally. He made a name for himself as a crusader against both illegal immigration and voter fraud, instituting a strict voter-identification law in Kansas and serving as the chairman of the president’s commission on election integrity. Trump empaneled the commission to investigate his unsubstantiated suspicion that millions of illegal ballots cost him the national popular vote in 2016, but in an embarrassment for Kobach, he disbanded it after states refused to submit voter data as requested.
Kelly won in Kansas by four and a half points, despite the presence of an independent candidate, Greg Orman, who Democrats feared would cost them the election. Her victory continues Kansas’s tradition of switching parties in the governor’s office every eight years, but it owes as much to the legacy of former Governor Sam Brownback, the conservative who left office deeply unpopular after Republicans in the state legislature rolled back his signature tax cuts.
In Kansas, Wisconsin, and Michigan, a Republican majority in the legislature will limit a leftward lurch under new Democratic governors. But by defeating Walker and Kobach, in addition to their wins in five other gubernatorial states, Democrats have not only curtailed the careers of two conservative stars—they will have reshaped the policies and the political landscape of those states for the four years to come.
Updated on November 7 at 3:47 p.m. ET
The first Cabinet casualty of the midterm elections is Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Sessions tendered his resignation on Wednesday, ending his tumultuous tenure atop the Justice Department that was marked both by a sharp rightward shift on criminal-justice, civil-rights, and immigration policy as well as the constant public browbeating he received at the hands of a president who regretted appointing him to the job.
In a letter to the president, Sessions made clear it was his choice to leave. “At your request,” he began, “I am submitting my resignation.” His departure—whether voluntary or not—was widely expected after the midterm elections in which Democrats recaptured the House majority while Republicans expanded their advantage in the Senate. Trump named Sessions’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, to serve as acting attorney general.
The move could have immediate repercussions for the investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. To Trump’s eternal frustration, Sessions recused himself from overseeing the federal probe into whether the Trump campaign in 2016 colluded with the Russian government. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was in charge of Mueller’s investigation, but with Sessions out, responsibility will fall to Whitaker as acting attorney general. Last year, before he joined the Justice Department, Whitaker wrote in a CNN op/ed that Mueller would be overstepping his bounds if he began looking at the president’s personal finances.
The larger GOP margin in the Senate is especially important because Trump might now have the votes to confirm a new attorney general. Before the election, Republicans had warned Trump not to replace Sessions when they did not have the votes—a deficit that was due to the political blowback that would come if the president tried to oust Sessions in a transparent bid to curtail the Mueller investigation.
Sessions’s departure likely will be the first of several in the Cabinet and the senior White House staff. Reports of a looming shakeup have circulated for weeks, and Trump did little to douse them at a press conference on Wednesday. “It is no great secret,” he said. “A lot of administrations make changes after the midterms. For the most part, I am very very happy with this Cabinet.”
Trump already has to fill one vacancy created by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s announcement last month that she would leave her post at the end of the year. The president is expected to name a new nominees in the next few days.
Sessions will be the eighth Cabinet-level official to leave a post during Trump’s first two years in office. Several have resigned or been fired in scandal, while two, former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, secured promotions as part of the shuffling.
The Cabinet shuffle still pales in comparison to the high turnover among the White House senior staff, which has seen the departures via resignation or firing of the chief of staff, the chief strategist, the press secretary, multiple communications directors, and other top officials.
All the changes have kept the Senate busy confirming new Trump nominees. But Trump will have an easier time confirming replacements come January, when the Republican majority expands from 51-49 seats to either 53 or 54 as a result of gains made in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Department of State
Manuel Balce Ceneta / APOriginal secretary: Rex Tillerson
Trump’s replacement: Mike Pompeo
Reason for change: Tillerson had been on the outs for months with Trump. He reportedly called him “a moron” in a meeting last summer, and the two diverged on key policy issues and global hot spots like Iran, Russia, and North Korea.
Background: Trump plucked Pompeo out of relative obscurity as a three-term congressman from Kansas when he nominated him to lead the CIA. Pompeo has loyally toed the president’s line on everything from intelligence matters to the question of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Before running for Congress, Pompeo served in the Army and then started an aerospace and private-security firm.
Government experience: A little over a year as CIA director, and six years in the House before that
Why Trump likes him: Pompeo is loyal. Trump and Tillerson disagreed on several important issues, including the Iran deal, the decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and, more recently, the president’s approach to North Korea. Trump told reporters that by contrast, he and Pompeo have “a very similar thought process.”
Liabilities: Pompeo is a staunch conservative who quickly built a reputation as a partisan Republican in the House. He won confirmation as CIA director on a 66–32 vote, but Democrats and even a few Republicans will press him on how tough he’ll be on Russia as secretary of state.
Chances of confirmation: The Senate confirmed him on a vote of 57–42 on April 26.
Mike Segar / ReutersDepartment of the Treasury
Secretary: Steven Mnuchin
Background: He’s a banker. Specifically, Mnuchin is a former senior executive at Goldman Sachs and a hedge-fund manager who bought the failed mortgage lender IndyMac from the government in 2009. He spun it off into OneWest and sold it for a huge profit five years later. Mnuchin is also a Hollywood producer whose credits include Avatar, American Sniper, and the X-Men movies.
Government experience: None
Why Trump likes him: Spot the pattern yet? He’s a successful businessman. But perhaps equally as important, Mnuchin was a relatively early convert to the Trump cause and joined the campaign as national finance chairman back in April, just as the Republican was shifting from relying on his own funds to setting up a more traditional fund-raising apparatus. Mnuchin made clear early on he wanted the Treasury job, and Trump rewarded him.
Liabilities: Goldman Sachs and foreclosures. Economic populists saw Mnuchin’s nomination by a candidate who ran against Wall Street and the “rigged” system as the ultimate betrayal. If Trump criticized Hillary Clinton for the speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, how can he turn around and pick a man who got rich there for Treasury secretary? Moreover, while Trump hailed Mnuchin for his business savvy in making a boatload off IndyMac at the depth of the Great Recession, Democrats grilled him for the foreclosures that resulted and highlighted stories like that of an 89-year-old widow who blamed hounding by the bank for her husband’s death.
Job status: Solid. Mnuchin has annoyed Republicans in Congress at times, but he rarely if ever breaks with Trump in public and appears safe in his job.
Alex Brandon / APDepartment of Defense
Secretary: General James Mattis
Background: Mattis is a four-star Marine Corps general who led U.S. Central Command from 2010 to 2013. He commanded forces in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Mattis also worked with General David Petraeus to produce the field manual on battling counterinsurgents in Iraq.
Government experience: Forty-four years in the military, though none in civilian posts
Why Trump likes him: For a guy who once said he probably knows “more about ISIS than the generals do,” he certainly likes hiring them for top positions. Mattis is known as a straight shooter and a voracious reader, and Trump has gushed that he is “the closest thing to George Patton that we have.” Like Trump, Mattis is someone whose blunt talk occasionally crashes through the line of political correctness, and he has criticized the Obama-administration stance toward Iran and its strategy across the Middle East. Trump seems to value his opinion: He told The New York Times that he was “impressed” when Mattis pointedly told him that torture does not work, though it did not change the president-elect’s support for the practice. Trump also seems fond of his nickname, Mad Dog.
Job status: Safe. Trump appears to love Mattis, Republicans see him as a stabilizing force, and Democrats don’t mind him, either.
Mike Segar / ReutersDepartment of Justice
Original attorney general: Jeff Sessions
Trump’s replacement: Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker
Background: Sessions represented Alabama in the Senate for 20 years, building up a record as a staunch critic of illegal immigration and expanded legal immigration. He’s been a conservative all around, opposing the Obama administration at nearly every turn. Before his election to the Senate, Sessions served as a federal prosecutor and then as Alabama attorney general. He might have had a lifetime appointment to the federal bench had the Senate not rejected his nomination in 1987 over allegations that he made racist comments and praised the KKK while criticizing the NAACP and the ACLU.
Government experience: Extensive. He served in the U.S. Senate since 1997 and held public office in Alabama beginning in 1981.
Why Trump likes him: He doesn’t anymore, but originally it was loyalty. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump’s candidacy. Sessions’s top aides also worked in the Trump transition and his policy adviser Stephen Miller eventually went on to serve as senior adviser to the president. Sessions has made his name opposing comprehensive immigration reform and citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and Trump adopted similar positions that helped vault him to the top of the GOP primary field.
Liabilities: Sessions’s liabilities in 2018 are entirely different than when Trump nominated him. Then, he faced a firestorm over his record on civil rights and immigration, as well as racist comments he reportedly made in the 1980s. Now he has drawn Trump’s unceasing ire for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and for, in the president’s view, slow-walking or stalling probes of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and the FBI. Trump’s animosity toward his attorney general has turned many Republicans in Congress against Sessions, some of whom have demanded his resignation.
Job status: Sessions resigned on November 7 and Trump named his chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, as acting attorney general.
Department of Homeland Security
Jose Luis Magana / APOriginal secretary: John Kelly
Trump’s replacement: Kirstjen Nielsen
Reason for change: The DHS job opened up when Trump brought in Kelly to replace Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff.
Background: Nielsen served as chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and then followed him to the White House when Trump named him his own chief of staff. During the Obama administration, Nielsen ran her own cybersecurity-consulting firm.
Government experience: She previously held senior staff jobs in the Bush administration.
Why Trump likes her: The more operative phrase might be: Why Kelly likes her. The chief of staff brought her into DHS, then the White House, and was instrumental in her being named his successor at DHS. Since winning Senate confirmation on a 62–37 vote in December, she has helped formulate Trump’s immigration proposals and defended the hard line he has taken in negotiations over extending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Job status: Considering how new she is in the job, probably pretty safe for the time being.
Department of Health and Human Services
Jacquelyn Martin / APOriginal secretary: Tom Price
Current secretary: Alex Azar
Reason for change: Price resigned under pressure in late September after spending more than $400,000 in taxpayer-funded travel bills for taking chartered flights all over the country. The scandal angered Trump, who was already unhappy with Price over Congress’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Background: Azar was a safe and entirely conventional choice as Price’s replacement. He served in senior positions at HHS under President George W. Bush before becoming a top executive at Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company.
Government experience: More than six years at HHS during the Bush administration, first as its general counsel and then as deputy secretary
Why Trump likes him: Trump has tended to go with safe picks after resignations or withdrawals, and Azar fit that bill. He was experienced in health policy and though he faced opposition from most Democrats, he survived the confirmation process without much trouble and won approval on a 55–43 vote.
Liabilities: Azar’s ties to the pharmaceutical industry could run into conflict with Trump’s stated desire to bring down prescription-drug prices. But so far, the president hasn’t made a serious push to overcome Republican and industry opposition to taking on Big Pharma.
Job status: As the newest member of Trump’s Cabinet and so far free of scandal, he’s secure for now.
Joshua Roberts / ReutersDepartment of Housing and Urban Development
Secretary: Dr. Ben Carson
Background: The conservative former Trump rival for the Republican presidential nomination has no formal experience in housing policy. He’s a retired neurosurgeon renowned for pioneering a procedure to separate conjoined twins. But what Carson brings to HUD is the personal experience of having grown up poor in Detroit. He has written and spoken extensively about his upbringing, saying that his hard work and passion for reading, along with the firm encouragement of his single mother, helped him to escape the poverty of the inner city.
Government experience: None
Why Trump likes him: Again, loyalty. Carson endorsed Trump after he dropped out of the presidential race, and though he wasn’t his most effective surrogate, he stayed with him through the ups and downs of the general election. Trump lambasted him during the primary, mocking his childhood struggle with what Trump described as “a pathological temper.” The two have long since patched things up, however. Carson was pegged for a Cabinet post early on, but it figured to be the Department of Health and Human Services, given his deep experience in medicine. Trump and Carson do appear to share an up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy toward combatting poverty, where government programs play a smaller role than they do now.
Liabilities: Carson joined several other Trump Cabinet officials in being the subject of unflattering reports over government spending. He shelled out more than $31,000 on a dining set for his office after a senior HUD official reportedly complained that “$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair” in acting out redecorating orders from Carson’s wife.
Job status: Shaky of late. Carson was reportedly one of four Cabinet members whom John Kelly reprimanded in private meetings over the poor optics of their lavish spending habits.
Mike Segar / ReutersDepartment of Energy
Secretary: Former Texas Governor Rick Perry
Background: Perry served three and a half terms as the governor of Texas, succeeding George W. Bush after he became president. He then ran for president twice, failing to win the Republican nomination in 2012 and then again in 2016. His experience in energy-rich Texas would, on the surface, seem to make him a natural fit, but the Energy Department is actually more of a national-security agency that’s responsible for designing and protecting the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. The past two energy secretaries were award-winning scientists.
Government experience: Three and a half terms as governor of Texas, a short stint as lieutenant governor, and eight years as Texas agriculture commissioner
Why Trump likes him: Perry is another example of a Republican who fought bitterly with Trump only to make amends. Early in the 2016 race, Perry was actually more confrontational with Trump than any other Republican. He gave an entire speech devoted to attacking him in July 2015, during which he said Trump was “a cancer on conservatism.” But Perry was out of the race a few months later, and he came around to Trump once he secured the nomination and campaigned for his election.
Liabilities: “Oops.” As Democrats reminded the public to no end, the Energy Department was the Cabinet post that Perry infamously forgot he wanted to eliminate during a Republican primary debate in 2011. Though embarrassing, that comment has faded as Perry has gone about his job with relatively little controversy over the past 14 months.
Job status: Safe. Despite having twice run for president himself, Perry has been one of the most under-the-radar Cabinet officials. In Trump’s government, that’s good for job security.
Alan Diaz / APDepartment of Labor
Trump’s pick: Alexander Acosta
Background: Acosta is a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, having served as head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division and later as a U.S. attorney in Florida. He also served for a year as a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and for the past eight years as dean of Florida International University’s law school.
Government experience: Extensive. Acosta served in the federal government for nearly the entire George W. Bush administration in a variety of roles.
Why Trump likes him: Acosta has a sterling academic and legal pedigree, having graduated from Harvard and clerked for future Justice Samuel Alito when he served on a federal appellate court. Trump reportedly also wanted a Hispanic in his Cabinet, and while that may have not been an overriding factor, Acosta’s nomination did check that box. Finally, as Trump noted, Acosta had already won Senate confirmation three times, and after the failure of his first labor nominee, Andrew Puzder, the president needed someone who could get the job.
Liabilities: Democrats asked about Acosta’s time in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, which overlapped with the scandal over the politicization of the hiring of U.S. attorneys. As David A. Graham wrote, Acosta’s deputy was Bradley Schlozman, who was faulted by an inspector general’s report for inappropriately considering politics and ideology when screening federal prosecutors. But Acosta was not formally rebuked, and that decade-old controversy did not derail his confirmation.
Job status: Secure
Previous nominee: Andrew Puzder, who withdrew on February 15
Lehtikuva Lehtikuva / ReutersDepartment of Transportation
Secretary: Elaine Chao
Background: As labor secretary for the full two terms of the George W. Bush administration, Chao brings more civilian experience in the federal government than anyone else in Trump’s Cabinet. Before that, she directed the Peace Corps and led United Way. During the first Bush administration, Chao also served as a deputy secretary in the department she is poised to lead.
Government experience: Extensive: see above
Why Trump likes her: While Trump surely appreciated Chao’s deep experience in government and Washington, there was probably another factor in his decision to nominate her for transportation secretary: Chao is married to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and a man who holds wide sway over whether Trump’s agenda makes it into law. In particular, she’s been a key player in Trump’s push for an expensive infrastructure package.
Liabilities: Virtually none. Given her government experience and obvious qualifications for the post, Chao might be the least controversial of any of Trump’s choices so far. Her selection even won praise from Vice President Joe Biden.
Job status: Safe. Chao has taken on a bigger role with Trump finally pushing his long-awaited infrastructure proposal in Congress. And with the president no longer openly warring with Chao’s husband, the Cabinet meetings are probably less awkward.
Andrew Harnik / APDepartment of Education
Trump’s pick: Betsy DeVos
Background: DeVos is a longtime philanthropist and Republican donor, and the former chairwoman of the state party in Michigan. She’s been a major advocate for education reform centered on expanding charter schools and private-school vouchers. She led the advocacy group American Federation for Children, which pushes for increased school choice for parents. The New York Times reported on her successful effort to kill legislation in Detroit that would have imposed tougher accountability standards on charter schools.
Government experience: None
Why Trump likes her: Trump has shown that he favors plucking people from the private sector who will come in and shake up a government agency, and DeVos fits that bill. She has strong support among Republican school reformers, especially those who favor both expanding charter schools and vouchers. (Democrats favor the former but not the latter.) She is further to the right on education than two other women Trump interviewed: Eva Moskowitz, a charter-school leader in New York, and Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the Washington D.C. public schools.
Liabilities: DeVos barely won Senate confirmation on a 51–50 margin that needed a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence. She hasn’t had an easy time since, facing protesters at speeches and during school visits. Most recently, she struggled to handle tough questions about public education during an interview with Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes.
Job status: Shakier than before. White House officials were reportedly “alarmed” at DeVos’s performance on 60 Minutes, although with so much else dominating the headlines, that stumble could easily blow over.
Jim Urquhart / ReutersDepartment of the Interior
Trump’s pick: Former Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana
Background: Zinke was a Republican member of the House who had just been reelected to his second term. He had been expected to run for the Senate in 2018, but at least for now, he’s heading the Interior Department. Zinke served for more than 20 years in the Navy SEALs before entering politics, earning numerous medals. In Congress, he has opposed the sale of federal lands but supported mining and drilling on them.
Government experience: Two decades in the military and two years in Congress
Why Trump likes him: Trump was, not surprisingly, impressed with Zinke’s military background, and the congressman reportedly impressed Trump’s son Donald Jr., an avid sportsman who was influenced by the recommendation of the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
Liabilities: Like others in Trump’s Cabinet, Zinke has drawn criticism and scrutiny from ethics watchdogs over his travel spending habits.
Job status: If Trump decides to clean house of scandal-plagued Cabinet officials, Zinke could be in trouble. But he has been a favorite of Trump’s adult sons, giving him possibly a little added protection in the administration.
Albin Lohr-Jones / APDepartment of Commerce
Trump’s pick: Wilbur Ross
Background: Another billionaire, Ross is the chairman of a private-equity firm that he founded and later sold. For 25 years, he led Rothschild Inc., where he made a reputation as a turnaround specialist who bought up and restructured steel, textile, and mining companies, among other industries.
Government experience: None
Why Trump likes him: The two businessmen go back many years together and share a critical view of U.S. trade policy in the past two decades. Ross, who specialized in turning around manufacturing firms, served as an adviser to Trump during the campaign. Ross, the president-elect said in nominating him, “is a champion of American manufacturing and knows how to help companies succeed. Most importantly, he is one of the greatest negotiators I have ever met, and that comes from me, the author of The Art of the Deal.”
Liabilities: Ross has been in and out of favor with Trump, and he was roundly mocked in the press after reports emerged that he had a habit of dozing off in meetings. But his stock rose when Trump sided with him and Trade Adviser Peter Navarro over Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn in the debate over tariffs.
Job status: At least until Trump changes his mind on tariffs, Ross is probably safe.
Mike Segar / ReutersDepartment of Agriculture
Secretary: Sonny Perdue
Background: Perdue is the former governor of Georgia, having served two terms ending in 2011. An immigration hawk, he grew up on a farm and earned a doctorate in veterinary medicine.
Government experience: Two terms as Georgia governor and a decade in the state legislature
Why Trump likes him: Trump took a while to pick an agriculture secretary and went with a drama-free southerner whose cousin David Perdue is one of the president’s closest allies in the Senate.
Liabilities: The pick initially irked Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who wanted Trump to select a midwesterner for the nation’s top farm job. But Perdue had a smooth confirmation process and has been a low-key Cabinet member since.
Job status: Safe
Department of Veterans Affairs
Department of DefenseOriginal secretary: Dr. David Shulkin
Trump’s first replacement: Dr. Ronny L. Jackson
Current secretary: Robert Wilkie
Reason for change: Shulkin, the only Obama-administration holdover in Trump’s Cabinet, appeared to be off to a strong start, as he received praise from the president. But over time, he drew criticism from conservatives pushing for the privatization of veterans’ health care. His relationship with his own staff also began to crumble, eventually leading to an armed guard being posted outside his office.
Background: Trump picked Wilkie in May after his first choice to replace Shulkin, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, withdrew his nomination amid allegations of workplace misconduct. Wilkie served in several senior positions at the Pentagon before Trump asked him to lead the VA on an interim basis after Shulkin’s ouster. With his nomination in May, the president picked him to have the job permanently.
Government experience: Wilkie has had a long career in Washington, first advising former Senator Trent Lott before joining the National Security Council and then the Defense Department under President George W. Bush.
Why Trump likes him: The president didn’t say much about Wilkie during his surprise announcement of his nomination. But presumably he likes his long experience in government and wanted a steady hand who could have a smooth confirmation after the failure of his first choice, Jackson.
Status of nomination: Confirmed on July 23 on a 86–9 vote
Key sub-Cabinet positions
Jonathan Ernst / ReutersAdministrator, Environmental Protection Agency
Original administrator: Scott Pruitt
Trump’s pick: Vacant; Andrew Wheeler named as acting administrator
Background: Pruitt was the attorney general of Oklahoma, and in that position he led the conservative legal fight against the Obama administration’s agenda to combat climate change. Along with other Republican attorneys general, he sued to stop the administration’s climate rules—a case that is still pending in federal court. Like Trump, he has voiced doubts about the science behind climate change and its connection to manmade activities.
Government experience: Six years as Oklahoma attorney general, and eight years in the Oklahoma state Senate
Job status: Pruitt resigned on July 5.
Kevin Lamarque / ReutersAmbassador to the United Nations
Trump’s pick: Former Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina
Background: Haley has been considered a rising Republican star ever since she won election as governor of South Carolina in 2010. She gave her highly sought-after endorsement to Marco Rubio in the GOP presidential primary, and she was seen as a likely vice presidential pick if Rubio had won the nomination. But Rubio didn’t, and Trump’s early selection of Haley as his nominee for UN ambassador was a bit of a surprise. She has no formal foreign-policy experience, but her background as the conservative daughter of Indian immigrants undoubtedly appealed to Trump.
Government experience: Six years as South Carolina governor, and another six as a state legislator before that
Job status: Leaving at the end of the year
Zach Gibson / APDirector, Office of Management and Budget
Trump’s pick: Former Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina
Background: Mulvaney was a hard-line conservative in the House and a founding member of the Freedom Caucus. He was a frequent critic of former Speaker John Boehner and voted for budget and debt proposals that called for steep spending cuts across discretionary- and entitlement-spending programs. The question is whether his support for overhauling Medicare and Social Security and his resistance to major increases in defense spending will conflict with Trump, who took opposing views on the campaign trail.
Government experience: Six years in the U.S. House and four years as a state legislator in South Carolina
Job status: So secure he has not one top job but two: Trump installed him as the interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Director, CIA
CIA / APOriginal director: Mike Pompeo
Trump’s replacement: Gina Haspel
Reason for change: Trump elevated Pompeo to replace Tillerson as secretary of state.
Background: Haspel would be the first woman to serve as CIA director. She worked closely with Pompeo in over a year as deputy director, but she has a checkered past in the CIA: She oversaw the torture of a terrorism suspect in 2002 and then took part in an effort to destroy video evidence of the activity, according to The New York Times.
Government experience: Haspel spent 30 years in the CIA before rising to deputy director and, upon Senate confirmation, director.
Status of nomination: Confirmed on May 17
There is by now a familiar pattern to President Donald Trump’s news conferences: He loudly proclaims his victories and deal-making prowess; dismisses reporters he believes are unfair to him; and rails against policies he doesn’t like. And so it was on Tuesday—with an addition: The president had trouble understanding anyone with a foreign accent.
Taken in isolation, the exchanges at Tuesday’s presidential news conference could be understandable. The news conference was, at times, boisterous, with reporters shouting questions out of turn, which could of course have made it difficult for the president to focus. Or perhaps he simply has difficulty understanding speakers from other backgrounds—many people encounter and struggle with accents they don’t understand.
Read: [The 10 most dumbfounding moments from Trump’s post-election press conference]
But it’s what Trump does next that exhibits a pattern of the president’s tendency to distance himself from people from other backgrounds. He has reportedly mocked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s manner of speaking; is said to have mocked the accents of Asian trade negotiators; and has used an exaggerated Spanish accent to say “Puerto Rico.” (Nor is this tendency restricted to foreigners. During a previous news conference, he told ABC’s Cecilia Vega, “You’re not thinking. You never do.” That was after he had misunderstood her question.)
Tuesday’s exchanges began with a question from Nadia Bilbassy-Charters, a reporter for the TV network Al Arabiya, who asked Trump about whether the election victories of Democrats Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota were a “rebuke” to Trump’s policies. Both women are Muslim and Omar, who came to the U.S. as a refugee, wears a hijab.
Trump’s initial response: “I do not understand what you are saying.”
Bilbassy-Charters subsequently elaborated on her question and the president provided a nonanswer. (“You look at the employment and unemployment numbers for African Americans and Asian Americans or Hispanic Americans, they are at an historic high.”)
Trump later called on a reporter from Japan and told him to say “hello to Shinzo” Abe, the Japanese prime minister. The reporter’s question: “How do you focus on trade and economic issues with Japan? Do you ask Japan to do more?” Trump’s reply: “I really don’t understand you.” Later, after he apparently did understand the reporter, Trump complained “that Japan does not treat the United States fairly on trade.”
[Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point]
Finally it was the turn of the reporter from Lebanon’s Murr Television, who asked about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s pledge to buy Iranian oil in defiance of U.S. sanctions.
“Who said that?” Trump asked.
“President Erdoğan. Turkey,” the reporter replied.
“I know. I know,” Trump said. “I just can’t understand” you.
To be fair to Trump, it’s not just foreign accents he has trouble understanding. Politico reported in August that Trump disliked Jeff Sessions, who quit as attorney general Tuesday, because he “doesn’t have [an] Ivy League pedigree” and because he “can’t stand his Southern accent.”
President Donald Trump has forced out Attorney General Jeff Sessions just one day after the midterm elections and after nearly a year of berating him for recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation. Sessions’s temporary replacement—Matthew Whitaker, his chief of staff—is now effectively Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s new boss. But he’s expressed repeated skepticism over the scope of Mueller’s inquiry in the past, raising immediate questions about whether he will try to limit it.
Trump, who has been unsparing in publicly castigating his own Cabinet official, had been hinting that he would ask for Sessions’s resignation following the elections. Privately, Trump has reportedly called him an “idiot” and said that hiring him was a mistake. He first asked Sessions to resign following Mueller’s appointment to lead the probe in May 2017, according to The New York Times, but then wouldn’t accept his resignation.
[Read: Trump goes to war with Mueller]
Legal experts and political strategists who have either worked directly with the president or observed his behavior from afar attributed Trump’s reluctance to fire Sessions to two major considerations: fears in the White House that the move would cost the president support among GOP voters and members of Congress, who generally like and support Sessions, and the risk of provoking further allegations of obstruction of justice—both of which could deepen the challenges already facing the administration.
Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, told me that Trump’s decision to oust Sessions and replace him with Whitaker probably wouldn’t be considered an obstructive act in and of itself. But it could add to the “totality of the circumstances” surrounding a series of moves Trump has taken to try to stymie the Russia investigation since early last year, Honig said, including his firing of former FBI Director James Comey and his attacks on Sessions.
David Kris, a founder of Culper Partners who served as the assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s National Security Division from 2009 to 2011, said it was “obvious” that Trump was motivated “by his well-expressed feelings of dislike toward the Mueller investigation. There can be no serious question about that.” Kris, like Honig, said that ousting Sessions and appointing Whitaker “could be another element in a bill of particulars” used by prosecutors to specify the ways that Trump “has used the powers of the presidency toward a corrupt end.”
With the midterms out of the way, however, Trump evidently feels freer to make changes to his Cabinet, regardless of how it may be perceived by investigators who have been closely examining his behavior for signs of corrupt intent with regard to the Russia investigation over the last 18 months.
[Read: The lingering mysteries of a Trump-Russia conspiracy]
Whitaker will be the acting attorney general until a permanent replacement is nominated, Trump tweeted on Wednesday, and he’ll be overseeing the Mueller investigation directly in his new post. While he has touted Mueller’s character—“There is no honest person that sits in the world of politics, in the world of law, that can find anything wrong with Bob Mueller,” he told CNN last year—he seems to have already formed an opinion on the probe itself. In a tweet, Whitaker said an article that characterized Mueller’s investigators as a “lynch mob” was a “must read,” and he told CNN that if Sessions were fired, his replacement could “reduce” Mueller’s budget in such a way that it would grind his investigation almost to a halt. He also shared an article on Twitter that explored the process by which Trump could fire Mueller, said in a radio interview that “there is no criminal obstruction-of-justice charge to be had” against Trump, and defended the Trump campaign’s decision to meet with Russian nationals to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton—a meeting Mueller has been closely examining.“You would always take the meeting,” Whitaker told CNN last year. “You certainly want to have any advantage, any legal advantage you can.” Whitaker is also friendly with Sam Clovis—a key grand-jury witness in the Mueller probe—and chaired his state-treasurer campaign in 2014.
Whitaker most clearly expressed his view of the Mueller probe in an op-ed last year, writing that the inquiry had gone “too far,” and arguing that the president’s personal finances were a “red line” that the special counsel had come “dangerously close to crossing.” (Mueller subpoenaed the Trump Organization earlier this year, but it is not clear which documents his team had requested. ) Whitaker added that “investigating Donald Trump’s finances or his family’s finances falls completely outside of the realm of his 2016 campaign and allegations that the campaign coordinated with the Russian government or anyone else. That goes beyond the scope of the appointment of the special counsel.”
[Read: The partisan, nihilist case against Robert Mueller]
In reality, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave Mueller a fairly broad mandate when he appointed him following Sessions’s recusal in May 2017: Mueller was free to investigate not only Russia’s election interference and potential coordination between Trump’s campaign and Moscow, but “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” as well. Mueller has also been farming out aspects of the investigation to prosecutors in New York and Washington, D.C., that don’t fall squarely within his mandate.
Moreover, intelligence and law-enforcement experts—as well as sitting members of Congress—have pointed out that the question of whether Russia has any kind of financial leverage over the president is highly relevant to determining whether Trump could have been coerced into conspiring with Moscow’s election interference in 2016. Indeed, several of the Justice Department and FBI officials who have investigated Trump’s campaign—and who have been attacked by Trump directly—have extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.
David Laufman, a former high-ranking DOJ official who oversaw parts of the Russia investigation in his role as chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, said Trump’s “installation of a political loyalist who previously questioned the merits of the special counsel investigation must be viewed precisely for what it is: a preliminary assault on the special counsel's latitude to complete his essential work and by extension on the rule of law.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday, following Sessions’s resignation, that Whitaker “should recuse himself from” the Russia probe “for the duration of his time as acting attorney general” given his previous comments “advocating defunding and imposing limitations on the Mueller investigation.” Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, who is set to chair the House Oversight Committee when the new Congress convenes next year, called Whitaker’s supervision of the Russia probe “wholly inappropriate” and told the Justice Department to preserve documents in preparation for an inquiry into his appointment. House Democrats could also opt to subpoena Whitaker to testify under oath once they take power in January.
Trump’s move could still backfire. Without the administration’s protection, Sessions may now find himself both more vulnerable and more inclined to cooperate with Mueller, who has been investigating a period last summer when Trump privately discussed firing Sessions and attacked him in a series of tweets. At one point, the FBI opened an investigation into whether Sessions perjured himself in congressional testimony when he said he had no contact with Russians during the campaign.“It’s possible that Sessions will now be either angry or, at a minimum, no longer feel any need to curry favor with the president,” Kris said. Sessions’s conversations during the campaign with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and the Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos have been closely scrutinized by the special counsel, moreover, and Sessions’s campaign-era interactions with Trump would not be covered by executive privilege, Kris noted.
Sessions had mostly laid low in the face of the president’s taunts, but he’s not shied away from defending himself when necessary. “I took control of the Department of Justice the day I was sworn in,” he said in August. “While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action.”
“Jobs, not mobs,” was President Donald Trump’s slogan in the 2018 midterm elections. With the election behind him, the president has opted instead for a move toward constitutional and political disorder likely to destabilize the whole economy, jobs and all.
In the first minutes after the coerced resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday, the plan has begun to take shape. The new acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, has seized control of the Mueller investigation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, NBC News reported. And then the acting attorney general will be positioned to squeeze the investigation out of existence, perhaps by cutting its budget, perhaps by shrinking its jurisdiction.
[Read: What Sessions’s resignation means for Robert Mueller]
Voters cast their ballots for a Democratic House to impose accountability on the president. His own first thought, instead, was to elude the little accountability previously imposed upon him—and it seems that in Whitaker, Trump has found the character willing to help.
Many shrewd Democrats and intelligent well-wishers had wanted to open the next Congress by emphasizing close-to-the-voters issues, notably health care and immigration. Ethics and oversight could wait a little. But the president has other ideas. He is a walking constitutional crisis, and emboldened by extra Senate seats, he has lunged for the path of confrontation.
And worse may loom ahead. Remember, under present law, a special counsel delivers his report to the attorney general, not to Congress. Whitaker may try to stifle it. Whitaker may try to impede further indictments, especially if the president’s eldest son or others close to him face legal jeopardy.
Democrats may have wished to address bread-and-butter issues first, ethics and Constitution later. This most unethical and anticonstitutional president has other ideas—and he still sets the agenda for the nation and for Congress.
This Sunday, November 11, 2018, will mark the passing of 100 years since the end of World War I—the “war to end all wars.” In 1918, on “the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month,” in a forest near the French city of Compiègne, French, British, and German leaders met and signed an armistice that officially ended a horrific conflict that claimed the lives of more than 16 million people over four years. Earlier this month, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, inaugurated a series of commemorations of the centenary, combining messages of remembrance with warnings about the recent growth of nationalism in the world. Also, be sure to see the Fading Battlefields of World War I.
Democrats conquered in the House on Tuesday night, picking up more than enough seats to secure a majority in the chamber. In Iowa alone, two GOP congressmen were unseated by women challengers.
But, at the end of the night, from under all the dust and rubble, emerged Steve King.
King, the Iowa Republican whose nativist rhetoric has brought a lot of unusual attention to the state’s Fourth Congressional District, didn’t exactly soar to victory: His opponent, Democrat J. D. Scholten came closer than any of King’s previous eight Democratic opponents, propelling a 19-point swing toward the Democrats from 2016. But it wasn’t enough.
[Read: Steve King’s improbable ascendance ]
That’s for two reasons: First, it’s a really Republican district, the reddest in the state. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton here by 27 percentage points in 2016. Second, King has been in Congress for 16 years. “People know him,” says the state Republican strategist David Oman. “Iowans love stability.”
King’s history of inflammatory remarks dates back more than a decade, but for most people, it was the “cantaloupes” comment that put him on the map. In 2013, King famously told Newsmax that for every child of undocumented immigrants “who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” At the time, House Speaker John Boehner called the comments “deeply offensive and wrong,” but King stood by them.
But since then, King has amped up his incendiary comments. Last year, he tweeted in support of the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, writing that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” (For this, King was praised by the former KKK grand wizard David Duke). In July, he retweeted a British white nationalist and self-described “Nazi sympathizer.” These actions sparked criticism from the GOP leaders House Speaker Paul Ryan and Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann, and prompted Scholten, a paralegal and former professional baseball player, to launch a campaign against him.
King was still expected to coast to victory in 2018. But that changed after the mass shooting in Pittsburgh in late October—when 11 Jewish worshippers were killed in an apparent anti-Semitic attack. Many on the left blamed President Donald Trump and other Republicans for stoking tensions with their nativist rhetoric. In the days after the shooting, King, who had just returned from a meeting with a member of a Nazi-linked party in Austria, was questioned about how his own comments could be contributing to violence.
The Republican Steve Stivers, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, denounced his rhetoric. “We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior,” Stivers wrote in a statement. Three major agriculture businesses subsequently said that they would no longer support King, and Scholten’s campaign received an immediate influx of cash.
For all that, though, King managed to hang on—albeit by his slimmest election margin ever. He beat Scholten 50 to 47 percent last night to win a ninth term in office.
How’d he do it? The residents of Northwest Iowa voted for him in spite of it all.
The district, which covers the northwest and north-central parts of the state, is mostly rural and overwhelmingly white, and King is a good ideological fit. Northwest Iowa, which has been referred to as the state’s “Bible belt,” is highly religious, and its voters are very socially conservative: They support King’s views on abortion and gun control. King also sits on the House Committee on Agriculture—farming is a major industry in the district—and has successfully sold himself as the enemy of big government.
“People know that he will sometimes pop off or say something that’s extreme, or even quite troublesome. But those other reasons cause them to stay with him,” Oman says. Plus, he says, many people point to how King presents himself in person and on the campaign trail. “One-on-one it’s really hard not to like the guy,” he adds. “He’s whip-smart, and he’s got a good sense of humor.”
That’s the sense I got from my interviews this summer with several King supporters. “He represents the morals and ethics of his district, not so much the outspoken voice,” said Bill Tentinger, a 69-year-old farmer and pork producer from outside Sioux City. Like most of King’s supporters, Tentinger wants his congressman to be pro-life, prioritize agriculture, and advocate for strict immigration laws. But still Tentinger sees some daylight between him and his congressman. “I’m not totally in step with Congressman King on his immigration comments,” Tentinger told me, noting that he wouldn’t support King “if we’re going to round up all the immigrants and ship them out of here.”
King may have escaped defeat, but going into 2020, he’ll have to tread carefully. Democrats came within spitting distance of the seat for the first time in years, and Scholten now has a state, and national, platform if he decides to run again. But while other scandal-plagued politicians might consider toning down their rhetoric to bolster their election chances, King probably isn’t one of them.
“There are districts where you can pretty much go out into the middle of the street and shoot someone, and you’ll get reelected,” said Steffen Schmidt, a political-science professor at Iowa State University, explaining King’s staying power. “Oops, I guess somebody else said that.”
The blue wave that crested over the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday was just large enough to usher in a Democratic majority for the first time in eight years. Because the president retains extraordinary powers to manage international affairs, foreign policy and national security may seem like the least likely areas to look for change in the new era. But Democrats may well force a shift in Washington’s approach to the world.
First and most obvious, they could make their presence felt on trade. President Donald Trump will face an early test when he seeks passage next year of the United States–Mexico–Canada Trade Agreement, the successor to NAFTA. Democratic support for the pact (especially among members from farm states), particularly in light of Trump’s threat to withdraw from NAFTA, is probable but uncertain.
[David Frum: Beto’s loss was a blessing in disguise for Democrats].
In trade talks with Japan, a Democratic House may induce the administration to seek higher labor and environmental standards to attract sufficient support, especially if Trump also hopes for subsequent deals with the European Union and the United Kingdom. And Representative Richard Neal, likely the incoming chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means, has already signaled his opposition to any deal with the Philippines, given Manila’s human-rights record.
Second, the administration should expect more pressure to enforce Russia sanctions, and perhaps add more. Along the same lines, the House will take a closer look at past and present Russian meddling in U.S. elections. These investigations could be constructive, and closer House-Senate cooperation would go a long way toward presenting a united political front in the face of Moscow’s continuing efforts to undermine American democracy.
Third, Democrats in the House may seek to condition weapons sales to Saudi Arabia on progress in ending the Yemen war, and to highlight human-rights abuses in places such as Burma (also known as Myanmar).
Fourth, the Democratic House may insist on lower defense spending. Trump has already announced that he’ll request a Pentagon budget for the next fiscal year that is some $16 billion lower than the current level. A Republican Congress would likely have pushed the number back up, but Democrats may reduce it further. Representative Adam Smith, who will chair the House Armed Services Committee, has publicly said that defense spending is too high. If the Democratic House and the Republican Senate are unable to work out a new budget deal that covers fiscal years 2020 and 2021, the “sequestration” spending caps will kick back into effect.
[Carol Anderson: Brian Kemp’s lead in Georgia needs an asterisk].
One area that will likely not change is the U.S.-China relationship. The president encounters pushback on nearly every other foreign-policy issue—his approaches to North Korea, Iran, trade, NATO, North America, and more have each generated angst and counterreactions. Both Democrats and Republicans, however, have largely welcomed Trump’s more confrontational approach to Beijing, and the business community has offered quiet support.
While many lawmakers disagree with the president’s objectives—focusing on the trade deficit, for instance, instead of unfair investment rules, the manipulation of state-owned enterprises, forced technology transfer, and the theft of intellectual property—they generally concur on the need for a reckoning. Beyond economic matters, Democrats, Capitol Hill Republicans, and the administration are all concerned about Beijing’s conduct in the South and East China Seas, its deteriorating human-rights practices (including reeducation camps in Xinjiang), and its military modernization. Trump therefore has a relatively free hand to remain tough on Beijing. Indeed, worries that he will cut a symbolic trade deal and relax the pressure currently exceed anxiety about the dangers of a U.S.-China confrontation.
Taking a bird’s-eye view, the Democrats’ House victory may also affect how America is perceived in the world. Our traditional, democratic allies, who followed campaign developments closely, may be relieved that the American electorate has delivered a check on a leader that they view as impulsive and unpredictable.
Yet the newly divided government will do nothing to quell concerns that the United States is politically dysfunctional: unsure about its international role and riven by tribal divisions that impede its ability to project power. It’s conceivable, but improbable, that the two major parties will work together on a series of bipartisan deals. More likely is greater gridlock, deeper disagreement on national identity and standing, and an increased inability to inspire international support.
Our political leaders would do well to embrace a modicum of cooperation; the possibility that they will not is why the world focused so intently on an off-year election.
Shortly after news outlets began officially projecting that Republicans would lose control of the House of Representatives Tuesday night, I emailed the GOP strategist Brad Todd to ask why he thought his party had lost.
“Lost?” he responded, almost immediately. “What are you talking about? We may have our largest Senate majority in history.”
He was overstating things a bit, but his sentiment was not unique. At the end of an ugly 2018 campaign season, Republican strategists told me the election results were unlikely to prompt much introspection within their party—let alone a course correction. Far from the blue-wave repudiation of Donald Trump that some were predicting earlier this year, the midterms yielded decidedly mixed results for the president’s party.
Republicans lost control of one chamber of Congress, while expanding their majority in the other. They suffered a net loss of at least six governorships and several state legislative chambers, but beat back Democratic insurgents in some of the country’s most high-profile races.
[Read: How Senate Republicans will use their new power]
Party strategists acknowledged that losing the House was a significant setback, effectively killing the GOP legislative agenda for the next two years, and opening the door to an onslaught of subpoenas aimed at the White House. But they also noted that such a loss two years into a president’s first term was not uncommon historically—and it could have been worse.
“We are all in Republican politics for three reasons: to cut taxes, pick judges, and kill our enemies abroad,” said Todd, who is also the co-author of the book The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. “You can do two of those with the Republican White House and a GOP Senate. And we did the other one last year.”
Of course, this rosy attitude might look less than prescient come next year, depending on how much damage House Democrats do to Trump with their expected investigations. But many on the right are betting that Democrats will go too far on that front—and Todd predicted that their majority would be “short-lived.”
“I am comforted by the fact that the people who are now running [the House] are complete lunatics and will remind Americans why they have no business being anywhere near power,” he said.
Asked how the election would influence congressional Republicans’ relationship with Trump, Terry Sullivan—who ran Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016— responded, “To quote the brilliant political strategist and philosopher Pete Townshend, ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’”
For both parties, Sullivan said, “the predictably muddled results of last night don’t give any guidance on the effectiveness of ‘Trumpism.’ Some places it works and some places it doesn’t … Both sides declare victory. Both sides’ supporters believe they’re right. And so it goes.”
[Read: America, now more divided than (almost) ever]
As I wrote earlier this week, the president tightened his grip on the Republican Party in 2018 as Trump-averse candidates across the country lost primaries to outspoken champions of MAGA-dom. That trend continued Tuesday night, as Republicans got slaughtered in suburban districts where the president is unpopular, but thrived in conservative Trump country—producing a smaller, but more purely Trumpian, GOP caucus in the House.
Trump may not be completely without Republican dissenters. Senator-elect Mitt Romney, who’s headed to Washington from his adoptive home state of Utah, has pledged that he will continue to speak out against the president when he feels the need to.
But even GOP strategists who say they are repulsed by Trump’s toxic effect on conservatism aren’t getting their hopes up for a widespread Republican revolt as they look toward the 2020 presidential campaign.
“The lesson will be ‘Stand with Trump,’” one such party strategist lamented to me. He said he thought there was a strong case to be made for a “serious bipartisan ticket in 2020 against Trump and a more liberal Democrat,” arguing that it “would do really well in the suburbs, and might be the only thing to change the current political environment in the country.” But he also acknowledged that within the GOP, there is “no oxygen for a primary challenge to Trump outside of New Hampshire.”
When it comes to Trumpism, the strategist said, 2018 made clear what members of his party will do: “They will double down.”
During a news conference from the White House, President Donald Trump struck a combative tone after the midterm elections Tuesday, mocking candidates who distanced themselves from him and placing blame on the media for dividing the country.
Here are some of the most noteworthy moments:
1. Trump mocks candidates who distanced themselves from him.
Trump: For the most part I didn’t campaign for the House, but I did actually make a special trip for Andy Barr because he was in a very tough race in Kentucky—and he won. That was a very tough race. The polls were all showing that he was down, and down substantially, and he won. And that one I did do. Pete Stauber of Minnesota, great guy, he’s new and ran a fantastic race. On the other hand, you had some that decided to stay away. “Let’s stay away.” They did very poorly. I’m not sure that I should be happy or sad, but I feel just fine about it.
Carlos Curbelo, Mike Coffman—too bad, Mike. Mia Love—I saw Mia Love. She called me all the time to help her with a hostage situation. Being held hostage in Venezuela, but Mia Love gave me no love, and she lost. Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia. Barbara Comstock was another one. I think she could have won that one but she didn’t want to have any embrace. For that I don’t blame her. But she lost, substantially lost. Peter Roskam didn’t want the embrace. Erik Paulsen didn’t want the embrace. And in New Jersey, I think he could have done well, but didn’t work out too good, Bob Hugin. I feel badly because I feel that is something that could have been won, that’s a race that could have been won. John Faso. Those are some of the people who, you know, decided for their own reason not to embrace, whether it’s me, or what we stand for, but what we stand for meant a lot to most people.
2. Trump shows support for Nancy Pelosi.
Trump: I want to send my warmest appreciation and regards to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. We really worked very well together. We have been working very well together. We actually have a great relationship; people just don’t understand that, which is fine. And also to perhaps—it looks like, I would think, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And I give her a lot of credit. She works very hard and she’s worked long and hard. I give her a great deal of credit for what she’s done and what she’s accomplished. Hopefully we can all work together next year to continue delivering for the American people, including on economic growth, infrastructure, trade, lowering the cost of prescription drugs—these are some of the things that the Democrats do want to work on, and I really believe we will be able to do that.
3. A heated exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta
Acosta: Your campaign had an ad showing migrants climbing over walls and so on—
Trump: Well that’s true. They weren’t actors. They weren’t actors. Well, no, it’s true. Do you think they were actors? They weren’t actors. They didn’t come from Hollywood. These were people—this was an actual, you know, it happened a few days ago and—
Acosta: They are hundreds of miles away, though. They are hundreds and hundreds of miles away. That is not an invasion.
Trump: Honestly, I think you should let me run the country, you run CNN, and if you did it well, your ratings would be much better. That’s enough. That’s enough.
Acosta: One more question—
Trump: That’s enough. That’s enough.
Acosta: If I may go ahead, on the Russia investigation, are you concerned that you may have indictments—
Trump: I am not concerned about anything with the Russia investigation because it’s a hoax. That’s enough. Put down the mic.
Acosta: Are you worried about indictments coming down in this investigation?
Trump: I’ll tell you what, CNN should be ashamed of itself, having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person and should not be working for CNN. Go ahead.
Acosta: I think that’s unfair.
Trump: You are very rude. The way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible and the way you treat other people are horrible. You shouldn’t treat people that way.
4. Trump refuses to answer questions on voter suppression.
Reporter: Mr. President, if it is unfair to the country and is costing millions of dollars, why don’t you just—
Trump: Give him the mic, please. I’ve answered the question.
Reporters: [inaudible]
Trump: I’ll give you, I will give you voter suppression. You just have to—sit down, please. Sit down. I didn’t call you. I didn’t call you. I didn’t call you. I’ll give you voter suppression. Take a look at the CNN polls, how inaccurate they were. That’s called voter suppression. Go ahead, please.
Reporter 1: Thank you, Mr. President—
Reporter 2: In Georgia, sir—
Trump: I am not responding. I am responding—
Reporter 2: In Georgia, sir, in Georgia—
Trump: Excuse me, I am not responding to you. I am talking to this gentleman. Would you please sit down?
Reporter 2: [inaudible]
Trump: Excuse me, excuse me, would you please sit down? Please go ahead.
Reporter 1: Thank you, Mr. President. Now that the House of Representatives—
Trump: Very hostile—it’s such a hostile media. A very hostile media. It’s so sad. You ask me about—no. You rudely interrupted him. You rudely interrupted him.
5. Trump says he’ll meet with Kim Jong Un next year.
Trump: The sanctions are on. The missiles have stopped. The rockets have stopped. The hostages are home. The great heroes have been coming home. Mike Pence was in Hawaii, where the … one of the most beautiful ceremonies that anyone’s seen for the fallen, these are great heroes.
Very important when I was running a lot of people, as many years ago as it was, in many cases grandchildren, but they were asking about that—they’re coming home, and they are being provided to us as we speak. But I’m in no rush, I’m in no rush. The sanctions are on. I read a couple of times and I’ve seen a few times where they say, “He has done so much.” What have I done? I have met … Now, I would love to take the sanctions off. But they have to be responsive, too. It’s a two-way street. But we’re not in any rush at all, there’s no rush whatsoever. You know, before I got here, they were dealing with this for over 70 years. I guess on a nuclear front for 25 years. That is a long time.
I have been there. I probably left Singapore four or five months ago. And we made more progress in that four or five months than they made in 70 years. And nobody else could have done what I have done. I’ll say this very simply. We are in no rush. The sanctions are on, and whenever that is. But that meeting is going to be rescheduled.
6. Trump on anti-Semitic incidents: “It’s very sad to see it; I hate to see it.”
Reporter: We’ve been talking about division and the division that exists in this country right now. Some of the statistics are disturbing, I think to just about everyone. Anti-Semitic incidents have increased by 57 percent since 2016. Hate crimes are on the rise. Why do you think that is? And what will you do about it as president?
Trump: It’s very sad to see it; I hate to see it. And as you know I’ve done more, in fact if you were with us the last time we met, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that this president has done more for Israel than any other president. Those words. Those exact words. Jerusalem, protection, working together. So many different things. But the big thing is Jerusalem. You know many, many presidents have said they are going to build the embassy in Jerusalem. Never happened. Make it the capital of Israel. Never happened. Never happened. But it happened with me. And quickly. And not only did it happen; we built the embassy. That would have taken another 15 or 20 years and cost probably billions of dollars. And we did it for a tiny amount of money. It is open. Nobody has done more for Israel than Donald Trump. And the nice part is that it is not me saying it. That is Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Reporter: But what about the divides in this country? What about healing the divides in this country?
Trump: Well, we want to see it healed. And one of the things I think can help heal is the success of our country. We are really successful now. We’ve gone up $11.7 trillion in worth.
7. Trump calls a question “racist.”
Reporter: On the campaign trail, you called yourself a nationalist. Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists. Now people are also saying—
Trump: I don’t know why you’d say that, it’s such a racist question.
Reporter: There are some people that say that now the Republican Party is seen as supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric. What do you make of that?
Trump: I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that. I just don’t believe—well, I don’t know, why do I have my highest poll numbers ever with African Americans? Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African Americans? I mean, why do I have my highest poll numbers? That is such a racist question. Honestly, I mean, I know you have it written down and you’re gonna tell me. Let me tell you—that is a racist question.
Reporter: [inaudible]
Trump: You know what the word is. I love our country. I do. You have nationalists and you have globalists. I also love the world. I don’t mind helping the world. But we have to straighten out our country first. We have a lot of problems. Excuse me, but to say that, what you said, is so insulting to me. It is a very terrible thing that you said.
8. Trump claims Obama allowed “a very large portion [of] Crimea to be taken.”
Reporter: What do you intend to say, sir, to President Xi and to President Putin when you meet with them later this month?
Trump: Well, I have a good relationship with both. I know President Xi better, but I think I have a very good relationship with both. I actually had a very good meeting in Russia that you people didn’t agree with, but that’s okay, it doesn’t much matter obviously, because here I am.
Reporter: You mean Helsinki?
Trump: But the fact is that I had a very, very good meeting, a very, very good meeting with President Putin. And a lot was discussed about security, about Syria, about Ukraine. About the fact that President Obama allowed a very large part of Ukraine to be taken. And right now, you have submarines off that particular parcel that we’re talking about.
Reporter: That was President Putin who annexed Crimea, sir.
Trump: That was President Obama’s regime. That was during President Obama, right? That was not during me.
Reporter: But it was President Putin, sir, who did the annexation—
Trump: No, no, it was President Obama that allowed it to happen. Had nothing to do with me.
9. Trump says he’ll use executive power to get through his immigration agenda.
Reporter: Former President Barack Obama famously said that he had a pen and phone to use executive power on issues like immigration. Do you see yourself using executive power to get some of your immigration agenda done?
Trump: I do. I do. I think that some of it, I can use executive power on some. Not all. I mean, he certainly used it. He used it on DACA. He said something to the effect of “I am not allowed to do this, it’ll never hold up, but I’m doing it anyway.” And he did it, and they found judges who approved it. We also found judges that didn’t approve it, so it is obviously going to be determined in the Supreme Court. And if the Court rules in favor of what President Obama thinks they should rule, which is what they said, then I will probably have a deal with the Democrats in a very short period of time. We were very close to having a deal until we got that very strange ruling.
Reporter: You also made promises about immigration during the campaign. And I want to know if you’re going to follow through with them.
Trump: Which one are you talking about?
Reporter: Birthright citizenship. Are you going to sign an executive order to ban—
Trump: Well, we are looking at it very seriously.
Reporter: Yes or no—
Trump: And I believe we have the absolute right, but that is another case that will be determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Reporter: Are you going to send 15,000 troops to the border?
Trump: You’ve been reading the same documents as I have, you know exactly what I’m doing. You know exactly what I’m doing.
10. Trump says he won’t release his tax returns—for now.
Reporter: So, point-blank, Democrats go after your tax returns—will you try to block that, or will you allow them to have it?
Trump: Well, look, as I’ve told you, they’re under audit. They have been for a long time. They’re extremely complex. People wouldn’t understand them. They’re done by among the biggest and best law firms in the country. Same thing with the accounting firms. The accountants are a very, very large, powerful firm from the standpoint of respect—they’re highly respected. Big firm. A great law firm; you know it very well. They do these things, they put them in. But people don’t understand tax returns. Now, I did do a filing of over 100 pages, I believe, which is in the offices. And when people went and saw that filing and they saw the magnitude of it, they were very disappointed, and they saw, you know, the detail. You get far more from that, and I guess we filed that now three times. But you get far more from that than you could ever get from a tax return. But when you are under audit—and I’m on a very continuous audit because there are so many companies and it is a very big company, far bigger than you would even understand, but it’s a great company. But it’s big and it’s complex, and it’s probably feet high. It is a very complex instrument. And I think that people wouldn’t understand it, but if I were finished with the audit, I would have an open mind to it, I would say that. But I don’t want to do it during the audit. And really, no lawyer, even from the other side, they say often—not always, but when you are under audit, you don’t have, you don’t subject it to that. You get it done and then you release it. When that happens, if that happens, I would certainly have an open mind to it.
Reporter: So if the audit is still on, you will not turn over the tax returns?
Trump: When it’s under audit, no. Nobody would. Nobody turns over a return when it is under audit.
There’s a unique tradition in Montana. Once every decade since 1948, voters have taken to the polls to give the state’s colleges a report card and decide whether or not they want to tax themselves to support the institutions. The tax, known as the six-mill levy, is a small charge on property that helps fund higher education. It provides about $20 million in funding for the state’s public colleges each year.
The tax referendum has passed every time it’s been voted on since 1948, but this year the result wasn’t as certain, and education advocates feared the worst. But the measure ended up passing with 62 percent of the vote, the first time there has been an increase in support for it in four decades.
Montana’s referendum was seen as a bellwether of whether distrust of higher education would translate directly into decreased funding—and its passage was taken as a positive sign for colleges. But the question of why it passed is an interesting one. And one that institutions may do well to pay attention to as state funding for higher education continues to dry up.
Montana is already below the per capita national average on higher-education spending, Thomas Harnisch, a policy director at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, told me. And if the referendum hadn’t passed, the defeat would have been a blunt blow to higher education in the state. “This ballot measure was one way to guard against potential cuts in program quality or tuition increases,” Harnisch says.
[Read: American higher education hits a dangerous milestone.]
The primary reason for concern: Distrust in higher education. Last year, a Pew survey found that the majority of Republicans lacked strong confidence in higher education. And in a deep-red state such as Montana, where support for this 70-year-old tax has fallen decade over decade since 1978, that distrust could have meant $20 million less for the public universities.
“The political climate just seems so uncertain,” Bob Brown, a former state senator who is a member of the advocacy group supporting the tax, told me on Tuesday, before the election. “Before, we’ve been able to showcase what our universities have done in Montana,” he said, but “people were angry and seem to want to break things right now.” And he was worried that the thing they would break would be higher-education funding.
But the voters didn’t break anything, and that’s likely a reflection of a phenomenon that other polls have found: Even though Americans—particularly Republicans—distrust higher education, they’re fond of their local colleges. And one reason people love the colleges near them is that they see the good the institutions are doing, Brown says, and disassociate them from the national higher-education enterprise. And that may have helped propel Montana’s tax to reauthorization.
As an example, Brown cited the research that the state’s institutions do on seeds. “The more conservative, rural parts of Montana—maybe the parts of Montana most inclined to vote against the levy—could point to the fact that we did some wonderful research in drought-resistant and cold-resistant seeds,” he said. “That’s put a lot of money in a lot of farmers’ pockets.”
[Read: Tuesday showed the drawback of Trump’s electoral bargain.]
The victory in Montana might be instructive for other universities. One of the major themes of last night’s election was the partisan divide over education among white voters. The Republican Party is now solidly the home of white voters without a college degree. And that might mean that the Republican concerns over the value of college will be increasingly shaped by those who have not attended one. But Harnisch says enhancing the image of colleges as “economic drivers” may stem some of that animosity.
On Tuesday night, a man dubbed “America’s most famous pimp” was elected to Nevada’s state assembly, despite owning several brothels, facing an investigation into rape allegations, and also being dead.
In the lead-up to the election, Dennis Hof explicitly fashioned himself after President Donald Trump. He vowed to “make Nevada Nevada again,” and beat a three-term incumbent in a June primary with an off-message strategy that advocated for educating teens about oral sex over restricting access to abortions. All of which is to say, Hof was a thorn in the side of the Nevada Republican establishment. Until last month, when he died in his sleep of unknown causes and became the party’s best shot at holding on to the state-assembly seat in a deep-red district.
After Hof won his primary this summer, the Nevada Assembly Republican Caucus declined to endorse or support any candidate in his race. Dean Heller, one of the U.S. senators from Nevada, and several other prominent Republicans were quick to denounce Hof. But the day after Hof was found dead in his brothel, The Nevada Independent reported that the state GOP had reversed course and had begun planning a campaign to ensure the district’s voters voted for the late candidate anyway—all so that the seat was sure to remain in Republican hands.
[Read: America is divided by education.]
Under Nevada law, the responsibility of replacing a deceased winning candidate falls to the commissioners of the county or counties the candidate was elected to represent. The replacement must be of the same political party as the winner. By a strange turn of events, then, Nevada Republicans seem to have gotten the best of both worlds: A brash candidate did the work of motivating the base and attracting press coverage to what would have otherwise most likely been an unremarkable local election, but legislators themselves will never have to deal with the candidate’s unbecoming ways in Carson City.
The past few decades have been rife with examples of posthumous electoral victory. Many of these races end up in the realm of the macabre because ballots have already been printed by the time a candidate passes away; also, the death-defying campaigns are often aided by the deceased’s surviving political allies.
In 2016, Oceanside, California, reelected its city treasurer by a 6 percent margin a month after he died of natural causes. Between his death and his election, he received a ringing endorsement from Jerry Kern, a sitting city-council member: “Vote for him anyway” so the city council could appoint a replacement and avoid dealing with his activist opponent, whom Kern considered a troublemaker.
Jenny Oropeza, a California state senator from a heavily Democratic district, died in October 2010. A week later, the California Democratic Party paid for a flyer to be sent to voters urging them to reelect Oropeza regardless. Oropeza won 58 percent of the vote, triggering a special election in which a Democratic candidate ultimately won. (Appointment systems like the one in Nevada are in place to fill vacancies in only 22 state legislatures; 25 states rely on special elections, and the remaining three use a hybrid system.)
In Pennsylvania, James Rhoades, a Republican state senator, won reelection weeks after dying in a car crash in 2008. Rhoades’s opponents temporarily halted their campaign in a show of respect, but the Rhoades campaign pressed on almost immediately with TV and radio ads encouraging residents to vote for the dead candidate. Rhoades won in a landslide, and a Republican pulled a similarly dramatic victory in the special election that followed.
Then, in 2012, in Alabama alone, two elections were won by candidates who were no longer living. Since the 1970s, at least two posthumous winners of congressional races have been replaced by their wife. This is far from a complete list: Other famous deceased victors include Patsy Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress, and Bill Nojay, the New York State assemblyman who committed suicide the day he was supposed to turn himself in to the FBI.
Hof appears to be this year’s only posthumous election winner. (Scott Maclay, a candidate for sheriff in Spokane County, Washington, who legally changed his name to mock his opponent, died in a motorcycle accident in September; he received 13 percent of votes.) But he wasn’t the only dead candidate to play a role in the 2018 midterms.
In 1972, an Alaska state senator named Don Young lost a U.S. House race to the incumbent, Nick Begich, who had disappeared on a campaign flight—but who had not been declared dead—three weeks before the election. Young won the special election to replace Begich. Now Young appears to have won election to his 24th term as Alaska’s only representative in the House. He’s the chamber’s longest-serving member.
“TAYLOR SWIFT FAILS TO ELECT DEMOCRAT,” blares a Drudge Report headline, voicing one common reaction to Marsha Blackburn’s win for Tennessee’s Senate seat over Phil Bredesen, whom Swift endorsed. Another viral—if gross—line, tweeted by The Federalist’s Sean Davis: “Taylor Swift’s streak of terrible choices in men continues.”
There it is, the tangible evidence of the risks that come for celebrities speaking out on politics. Swift famously kept quiet about who she supported in the 2016 election, and one plausible reason would be that she wanted to avoid the sorts of jeers she’s receiving today. But when she broke her partisan silence a month ago with a call on Instagram to elect Democrats in Tennessee, she did so knowing that neutrality had its drawbacks too: The left had been blasting her as out of touch and cynical for staying mum on issues of huge consequence.
Often the power of celebrities in politics gets over- or understated. Those who say that stars might as well shut up and smile ignore findings such as that of researchers who calculated that Oprah, by endorsing Barack Obama, might have earned him a million votes in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Other research has shown that some star activists end up energizing voters on the side they’re opposed to. In every case, insisting that an entertainer failed or succeeded in getting someone elected is silly. No outcome has a single cause, and if there was any celeb who measurably swung races this time, it was Donald Trump.
[Read: Taylor Swift’s post-‘Reputation’ approach to politics]
Swift and a bevy of other stars did take the Democratic side for the midterms, with an emphasis on candidates who themselves achieved a level of political celebrity by strongly contesting seats that have been historically Republican. Beyoncé weighed in with a late-on-Election-Day shoutout to Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, the punk-rock progressive who nearly booted Ted Cruz from the Senate. Rihanna spoke out for Florida’s Andrew Gillum and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, charismatic black politicians who fought uphill battles and ended up with national fame, if not statewide office. Potential voters in such hotly watched races had Oprah and Will Ferrell knocking on their doors.
But the partisan plugs were often secondary to that theoretically bipartisan effort for democracy’s sake: getting disengaged people to pick up ballots. Swift spent the bulk of her social-media energy by simply cheering her teen and 20-something fans on to the polls, with her Instagram story turning into a colorful scrapbook of voters-slash-Swift-listeners across the U.S. “I’m seeing a lot of underestimation of young voters in this new generation who now have the right to vote just in the last couple of years,” she said in an Election Day video. “But these are people who grew up post-9/11. They grew up with school-shooting drills at their schools. These are people who want to vote.”
[Read: Taylor Swift’s savvy, smiley Instagram voter drive]
A modest youth wave did materialize: In a year of generally elevated turnout, people younger than 29 composed 13 percent of the electorate, up from 11 percent in 2014. Though a significant increase, it wasn’t enough to propel the youngest demographic out of its historical spot as the least likely to vote. Still, the bump in Millennial and Gen Y ballots—which tend to go Democrat—surely helped with flipping the House. (Swift’s favored candidate in Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional District, Jim Cooper, won by a large margin.)
Swift hasn’t yet commented on Tuesday night’s results, but the question now facing her—and other celebrities looking to make a lasting difference—is whether her push for youth engagement will continue. The first-time voters she spurred on are also first-timers to the emotional experience of waking up after a mixed-results election, one in which victories are partial and the most optimistic projections on both sides have been dashed. Keep moving toward what you believe in, tune out the naysaying—isn’t that what “Shake It Off” is about?
The midterm elections delivered a less than fully satisfying result for Democratic voters, but an ideal outcome for the Democratic Party.
For Democrats, Election Night must have felt like the world’s slowest championship baseball game. Runner on base; runner on base; strike out; runner on base; run scored; fly out—and so through the night.
Almost every candidate in whom Democrats at the national level invested emotional energy—Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida, Stacey Abrams in Georgia—appears to have lost. Almost every detested Republican appears to have survived: Devin Nunes, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, even Duncan Hunter, a California Republican under indictment.
[Carol Anderson: Brian Kemp’s lead in Georgia needs an asterisk]
This was not a night of cleansing, righteous fire. It was, instead, an election that accomplished three necessary things.
First, the 2018 vote delivered enough Democratic success to introduce some oversight and accountability into the federal government after two years of executive impunity. The House Intelligence Committee will resume protecting Americans rather than covering up for Russians.
Second, the vote administered enough Democratic disappointment to check the party’s most self-destructive tendencies. If Beto O’Rourke had eked it out in Texas, Democrats might well have nominated him for president in 2020, almost guaranteeing a debacle. There is no progressive majority in America. There is no progressive plurality in America. And there certainly is no progressive Electoral College coalition in America.
Third, the vote reminded all concerned Americans how very, very difficult will be the struggle to preserve and restore liberal democracy after Trumpocracy. The American system of government has always mixed majoritarian and anti-majoritarian features. It should not have surprised anyone that as the United States evolved toward being a “majority minority” nation, the anti-majoritarian features of its democracy have gained ascendancy over the majoritarian ones.
[Read: The harsh truth exposed by the midterm election]
For three-quarters of a century, the United States expanded and equalized voting rights. In 1913, the U.S. Constitution was amended to allow for the direct election of U.S. senators, rather than relying on corruption-tainted state legislatures. Votes for women followed in 1920; Supreme Court decisions against all-white primaries came in 1944 and 1953, and in 1962 against favoring rural over urban voters in state legislatures. Next was the 1964 constitutional amendment forbidding poll taxes; then the Voting Rights Act of 1965; votes for 18-to-21-year-olds in 1971; and a sequence of often misdirected but democratically intended reforms in presidential primaries, election finance, and the operations of Congress from 1972 onward. And then the pendulum reversed.
When the Electoral College and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 produced the first non-plurality presidency since the 19th century, the outcome seemed a freak. But in the years since, the freakish has become the familiar.
You may deplore this, but between now and 2020 you will not change it. In the interim, you must adapt. That means devising your political plans for the terrain you have, not the terrain you might wish for. The names Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy still thrill Democratic hearts. But Obama and Kennedy were realists, who regularly disappointed and vexed their most liberal supporters. Senator Barack Obama voted for ethanol subsidies and regularly went AWOL from political tussles over gun control. Obama was no Beto—which is why Obama actually won his U.S. Senate race in 2004. Beto enthusiasts are today recalling that Abraham Lincoln lost a Senate race in 1858 before winning the presidency in 1860. They are not recalling the innumerably more numerous politicians who failed to win a Senate race before not winning the presidency.
It may not be right that the middle of the country exerts radically more political weight than the coasts, or that white votes typically count for more than nonwhite votes. Right or not, those things are true, at least for now, and as long as they remain true, political realists must reckon with them. If 2018 offered a promise of at least some restraint on the Trump presidency, it also yielded a reminder of the hardest facts of American life and politics. Be guided by that reminder—the struggle for liberal democracy is too real and too dangerous for hearts undirected by heads.
ATLANTA—Late on Election Night, in a ballroom at the Hyatt Regency hotel, Red Bull cans clinked against shoes on the floor. Journalists in a tight media pen scrambled to refresh pages and shared snacks, teen organizers smuggled in pizza, and some exhausted veterans rested their joints on couches outside. A DJ played R&B and hip-hop, and the songs lifted people up—until they didn’t. Even Cameo’s “Candy” fell flat. The chants and cheers and dances that had filled the room died down to a constant, nervous buzz.
Around 2 a.m., Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, took the stage. “Tonight we have closed the gap between yesterday and tomorrow, but we still have a few more miles to go,” she told the crowd to cheers. But even those cheers seemed muted. As of daybreak the next morning, the gap remained. The Georgia Democrat has thus far refused to concede in the state’s governor’s race, saying that she wants to wait until all the provisional and absentee ballots—which appeared to heavily favor Democrats, and had already cut Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s lead by half—are counted. Major outlets have so far refused to call the race in favor of Kemp, a prudence in an election scarred deeply by myriad irregularities. But the fact is, Kemp now leads the race by 150,000 votes, which is outside the margin for both a recount and a runoff.
[Carol Anderson: Brian Kemp’s lead in Georgia needs an asterisk]
Regardless of the exact mathematics of her situation, it seems clear that if Stacey Abrams is to fulfill her dream of a more progressive Georgia, one that can solve deep structural issues of poverty, mortality, and discrimination, she needs a Hail Mary.
Tuesday’s election might not be resolved on Wednesday or even Thursday. On a press call Wednesday morning, the Abrams campaign indicated that the final count might not be certified by counties until next week. The counting of leftover ballots and the resolution of numerous Election Day discrepancies, such as the use of provisional ballots for valid voters during the early-vote period, might take a while. Those failures—several of them in areas with high proportions of black voters—could ultimately be the story of the election. On Tuesday, there were reports of long lines in several precincts around the state, and ProPublica reports that elections officials struggled to handle high turnout. One location in one of the busiest parts of Atlanta was given only three voting machines to begin with. Multiple polling places in Gwinnett County faced electronic issues with voting machines, and students in the Atlanta University Center reported being unlawfully turned away from their precinct. Amid all the reports of voting hurdles, in the evening on Tuesday, federal district court judges ruled that several precincts would stay open past 7 p.m., the originally mandated closing time, to accommodate voters.
In the press call Wednesday, the Abrams campaign said that Abrams was about 15,000 votes behind the threshold for a runoff, with about that many outstanding mail-in ballots left to be counted. If Abrams’s team can’t push Kemp’s vote share below 50 percent with the late returns—which would trigger a runoff election—they hope to thin the margin to the 1 percent they need to call for a recount. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the results from some 100,000 or so mail-in and absentee ballots in Democratic-leaning counties are still forthcoming, and Abrams would need to pick up about 25,000 votes from those ballots.
If the election came down to a recount, the major roadblock for Abrams’s campaign would be that given his current position as secretary of state, Kemp would be the one to recount his own narrow win. He would be responsible for adjudicating challenges, and during the recount process, many of the actions taken to ameliorate or solve discrepancies in ballots would be up to his discretion. His critics have denounced his conflicts of interest in administering his own election, and one organizing group has filed suit in the Northern Georgia federal district court to force him to recuse himself from a recount.
[Read: The Georgia governor’s race has brought voter suppression into full view]
But embracing long odds is a natural outcome for a campaign that has cloaked itself in the language of a moral majority, and has railed against voter suppression and Kemp’s election tactics as the only factors that could stop its momentum. “When you chose me as your Democratic nominee, I made you a vow,” Abrams told her supporters Tuesday night. “In our Georgia, no one is unseen, no one is unheard, and no one is uninspired.” Those words encapsulated a bold campaign strategy from the candidate attempting to be the first black woman governor in America’s history. Instead of sprinting to the middle in an attempt to win over just enough white moderates to keep it interesting, she predicated her strategy on embracing an openly liberal platform, keeping her identity front and center, and betting on so-called unlikely voters: low-propensity voters who are eligible but don’t vote, or haven’t in multiple elections.
Tuesday highlighted the inherent risks to that strategy. Low-propensity voters are those who tend to be most affected by long lines and problems with election infrastructure, and the most likely people to have to file provisional ballots. They lead inherently less-stable lives than reliable voters, and are difficult to poll and target. They include people such as the organizers I met on the Westside of Atlanta, many of whom were black men who’d served time in prison. “I served 15 years in federal prison, and when I came out I couldn’t get a job,” said Ricky Brown, who launched an unsuccessful bid for city council last year and runs a job-placement firm that specializes in getting jobs for people with felonies. “We tell people to vote the Westside way, voting for people that are gonna be for us.” But, as Brown told me, that effort is difficult, especially since people with felonies often erroneously believe that they will never regain the right to vote, and are never contacted by party organizing machines.
[Read: The ghosts of the 1960s haunt the Georgia governor’s race]
Even the reliable voters among the Abrams coalition faced the tough realities of voting in Georgia. In the predominantly African American neighborhood of Peoplestown, just south of downtown Atlanta, I spent time at the Barack & Michelle Obama Academy, where scores of mostly elderly black voters shuffled in and out. Two of the voting machines appeared not to work, and polling volunteers struggled with the protocol for processing people with disabilities. One of the voters, a 79-year-old woman who said her name was Lucille, told me that she always voted, and that this time she was voting for Abrams. “I voted for Obama,” she told me, “and if Stacey wins, we gonna celebrate.” But she had no car, and without a ride from a campaign volunteer, she would not have been able to cast a ballot at all.
Abrams’s blackness and the historic nature of her candidacy weren’t the only reason those voters turned out on Tuesday. Her policy platform rested on proposals that would address the state’s deep poverty, along with its enduring inequality along race and class lines. In an election year when exit polls indicated that health care was the biggest single issue across the country, her proposal to expand Medicaid to all low-income adults in the state had polled well across every constituency going in to the election. That plan would provide a lifeline to poor mothers and black mothers especially, in a state where maternal and infant mortality for black women are the highest, or among the highest, of any state. She also called for criminal-justice reform and living wages across Georgia, and she promised to fight for the “common-sense gun reforms,” such as universal background checks and mental-health supports, that have become the party line for Democrats in recent years.
With the Abrams campaign, supporters and organizers envisioned a state that could be more than what it was. In Abrams, they were given a choice to embrace the components of the state’s history that had provided a cradle for the nonviolent civil-rights movement, as opposed to the components that adopted a Confederate battle flag in that movement’s nascence. They hoped that her plan would reduce the burdens of mortality and poverty on the rural reaches of Georgia. They hoped that her rhetoric embracing immigration and stressing racial equality would be both a local and national salve for the rising bigotry and xenophobia of Trumpism. And above all, they hoped that Abrams’s goal to expand the electorate and actually turn out disengaged or disenfranchised voters would be a counter to a GOP strategy that has become the standard-bearer for voter suppression in the post–Shelby County v. Holder era.
They are still hoping. Georgia Representative and civil-rights hero John Lewis told the ballroom Tuesday night, “It’s gonna be long, but don’t give up. Don’t get lost in a sea of despair. Keep the faith. We can win, and we must win. Be hopeful. Be optimistic. There’s a lot of votes out there, and they just need to be counted.” As Abrams added later, “There are voices that are waiting to be heard across our state.”
[Sam Wang: The long-term solution to voter suppression]
It remains to be seen if those voices will be enough, this time. But although moral victories are often nothing more than paper-thin bits of narrative in a political system where might indeed makes right, some real takeaways exist for Abrams and her team, regardless of the outcome. Georgia might not be ready this time, but early returns from her team do seem to show an electorate that was enthusiastic and broad in a way that looked somewhat like the presidential electorate, a good sign for Democrats in a state that is becoming more purple in those contests. And, as LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright of the Black Voters Matter Fund—who’d been critical in flipping Alabama during the 2017 Senate special election—wrote in The New York Times, single election cycles are not necessarily enough to mobilize disengaged black voters. They need to continue to be empowered and contacted to become committed voters. In that regard, the Abrams campaign could be seen as a beginning, and not an end.
Still, the end of this election will be bitter, if it is in sight. From my observation, the energy among black enclaves and on the ground on Election Day recalled nothing more than the same day in 2008, when as a sophomore at Morehouse College I watched masses of students celebrate Barack Obama’s election as the first black president. In a time when naked bigotry emanates from the White House and specifically repudiates Obama’s significance within those communities, if Abrams cannot prevail, the letdown will be considerable. If she can pull off an eleventh-hour miracle, it will be exhausting and hard fought, and would likely drag on into the winter.
We’ll soon know which of those outcomes is likely. Right now, supporters are attempting to follow the lead of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was at Abrams’s event in support. “Be cool, be calm,” she told the room, sometime after midnight. “Because you’ve done all that you could do.”
It’s fashionable in the Donald Trump era to decry political “tribalism,” especially if you’re a conservative attempting to criticize Trump without incurring the wrath of his supporters. House Speaker Paul Ryan has lamented the “tribalism” of American politics. Arizona Senator Jeff Flake has said that “tribalism is ruining us.” Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has written a book warning that “partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War.”
In the fallout from Tuesday’s midterm elections, many political analysts have concluded that blue America and red America are ever more divided, ever more at each other’s throats. But calling this “tribalism” is misleading, because only one side of this divide remotely resembles a coalition based on ethnic and religious lines, and only one side has committed itself to a political strategy that relies on stoking hatred and fear of the other. By diagnosing America’s problem as tribalism, chin-stroking pundits and their sorrowful semi-Trumpist counterparts in Congress have hidden the actual problem in American politics behind a weird euphemism.
[Read: America is divided by education]
Take Tuesday’s midterm elections. In New York’s Nineteenth Congressional District, the Democrat Antonio Delgado, a Harvard-educated, African American Rhodes scholar, defeated the incumbent Republican John Faso in a district that is 84 percent white, despite Faso caricaturing Delgado as a “big-city rapper.” In Georgia, the Republican Brian Kemp appears to have defeated the Democrat Stacey Abrams after using his position as secretary of state to weaken the power of the black vote in the state and tying his opponent to the New Black Panther Party. In Florida, the Republican Ron DeSantis defeated the Democrat Andrew Gillum after a campaign in which DeSantis’s supporters made racist remarks about Gillum. The Republican Duncan Hunter, who is under indictment, won after running a campaign falsely tying his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, who is of Latino and Arab descent, to terrorism. In North Dakota, Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp lost reelection after Republicans adopted a voter-ID law designed to disenfranchise the Native American voters who powered her upset win in 2012. President Trump spent weeks claiming that a caravan of migrants in Latin America headed for the United States poses a grave threat to national security, an assessment the Pentagon disagrees with. In Illinois on Tuesday, thousands of Republicans voted for a longtime Nazi who now prefers to describe himself as a “white racialist”; in Virginia, more than a million cast ballots for a neo-Confederate running for Senate.
[Read: How to teach white kids about race ]
A large number of Republican candidates, led by the president, ran racist or bigoted campaigns against their opponents. But those opponents cannot be said to belong to a “tribe.” No common ethnic or religious ties bind Heitkamp, Campa-Najjar, Delgado, or the constituencies that elected them. It was their Republican opponents who turned to “tribalism,” painting them as scary or dangerous, and working to disenfranchise their supporters.
The urgency of the Republican strategy stems in part from the recognition that the core of the GOP agenda—slashing the social safety net and reducing taxes on the wealthy—is deeply unpopular. Progressive ballot initiatives, including the expansion of Medicaid, anti-gerrymandering measures, and the restoration of voting rights for formerly incarcerated people, succeeded even in red states. If Republicans ran on their policy agenda alone, they would be at a disadvantage. So they have turned to a destructive politics of white identity, one that seeks a path to power by deliberately dividing the country along racial and sectarian lines. They portray the nation as the birthright of white, heterosexual Christians, and label the growing population of those who don’t fit that mold or reject that moral framework as dangerous usurpers.
The Democratic Party, reliant as it is on a diverse coalition of voters, cannot afford to engage in this kind of politics. There are no blue states where Democrats have sought to make it harder for white men without a college education to vote, even though that demographic typically votes Republican. Democratic candidates did not attack their white male opponents as dangerous because four white men carried out deadly acts of right-wing terrorism in the two weeks prior to the election. Democratic candidates for statewide office did not appeal to voters in blue states by trashing other parts of the country considered to be conservative. Democratic candidates who ran for office did not advertise their willingness to use state violence against groups associated with Republican constituencies.
I am not arguing that the Democratic Party or its members are particularly virtuous. A little more than a century ago, it was the Republican Party that was reliant on a diverse coalition of voters, and the Democratic Party that rode white rage to power. Rather, I am saying that when a party’s viability is dependent on a diverse coalition of voters, that party will necessarily stand for pluralism and equal rights, because its survival depends on it. And when a party is not diverse, it will rely on demonizing those who are different, because no constituency exists within that party to prevent it from doing so, or to show its members that they have nothing to fear.
[Carol Anderson: Brian Kemp’s lead in Georgia needs an asterisk.]
In the Trump era, America finds itself with two political parties: one that’s growing more reliant on the nation’s diversity, and one that sees its path to power in stoking fear and rage toward those who are different. America doesn’t have a “tribalism” problem. It has a racism problem. And the parties are not equally responsible.
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