To the Left?: Democrats think they can pick up governor’s seats in these states this midterm election. Meanwhile in New England, popular Republican governors of solidly blue states seem to be holding on to their leads. In Texas, strategies like strict voter-ID laws and redistricting have kept the GOP in power, Adam Serwer argues, detailing his own laborious process of registering to vote there for the first time. But that grip may be loosening. In Iowa, a state that’s traditionally purple but has swung right in the past few years, Democrats may be well positioned to take back some seats. (Plus: Wherefore art thou, moderate candidates for office?)
Iran Dealt: A round of U.S. sanctions on Iran officially went into effect Monday. (This past May, the U.S. exited the Iran nuclear agreement, made under the Obama administration in 2015.) In the past, Iran has played with a number of obfuscations and legalities to skirt U.S. sanctions and continue selling its oil. Here are a few potential efforts, though—spoiler alert—many of these evasions will likely fail.
Enemy of the Good: Perfectionism in all its forms seems to be on the rise, psychologists are finding—from holding high standards for others to a desire to live up to social expectations to the self-directed kind. Do “we strive for perfection, it seems, because we feel we must in order to get ahead”? What are some ways to combat the negative impacts of aiming for perfection?
Snapshot
What is the definition of “middle class” in America today? Is it best judged by household income, which can go further in Missoula, Montana, than in, say, Brooklyn, New York? “Today there can be no pretending that middle-class status is anchored by a single economic reality,” Caitlin Zaloom argues. “Instead, it is primarily an aspiration.” (Illustration by Katie Martin)Evening ReadDavid Frum debated Steve Bannon on stage in Toronto on the question of the future of Western politics—would it be populist, or would it be liberal?
Why share a platform, then, with Bannon, one of the most adept and successful of the challengers to all I hold dear?
I hoped to speak, first, to the small numbers of the genuinely undecided, to those who might imagine that populism offers them something. This is not true. The new populist politics is a scam and a lie that exploits anger and fear to gain power …
I hoped to speak, next, to the many people who see populism for what it is—and who resist it. Since the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 and the Euro currency crisis that began in 2010, the so-called populists have won election after election in this country and in Europe. Even when the anti-populists have won, as they won in France in 2017, they have won by dwindling margins. Countries that formerly seemed secure against populism, like Germany, have been trending in ominous directions …
I hoped to speak, finally, to those who see populism for what it is—and support it. I hoped to look in the face of their most self-conscious and articulate champion, Steve Bannon, and tell them: You will lose.
The audience voted before and after the two sparred, to determine who moved the collective needle of the room. From beginning to end, it was a strange and heated affair.
What Do You Know … About Education?1. The Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, who’s played up his HBCU bona fides this campaign season, graduated from this 130-year-old university based in Tallahassee.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. The share of ___________________ degrees at elite research universities dropped from 17 percent a decade ago to just 11 percent today.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. One federal survey found that 70 percent of American teachers assign homework that needs to be done online. That’s a difficulty for the ______ percent of U.S. households with school-age children who lack high-speed internet at home.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University / Humanities / 15
Dear TherapistEvery week, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions in the Dear Therapist column. This week, an anonymous reader writes in about a painful secret:
My parents divorced when I was very young, and afterward my father began sexually abusing me, which went on for years. I never told anyone in my family, and once I moved away from home I cut all contact with my father. I’m in my late 20s now, and my life is significantly better without him in it.
The problem is that my not talking to my father has started to raise questions. Recently my mother brought up the fact that I haven’t spoken to him in years and said something to the effect of “What could he possibly have done?” On the one hand, I’ve been through enough counseling to feel that I don’t owe anyone an explanation for not wanting a toxic person in my life, and bringing it up now, 10-plus years after the fact, wouldn’t change what happened. I’m also not emotionally prepared for the level of uproar it would cause if I started talking about it (my family are fabulous gossips).
On the other hand, I wonder if I should come forward. Many members of my mother’s family still have a friendly (if not especially close) relationship with my father, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt me a little.
Read Lori’s advice, and write to her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
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Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey)
Today in 5 LinesThe U.S. renewed the sanctions against Iran that were lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal, but issued “temporary” waivers to eight countries, allowing those nations to continue buying oil from Iran without penalty.
NBC and Fox News said they will no longer air an immigration ad from President Donald Trump that has been widely criticized as racist. Facebook said it wouldn’t allow the video to run as an ad on its platform, but individual users can still share it.
The deployment of National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border could cost at least $200 million, according to an estimate from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and figures from the Pentagon.
Trump is holding rallies in Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri to make his closing arguments ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Voters across the U.S. will head to the polls on Tuesday, the last of which will close at 11 p.m. ET. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow and Wednesday with special editions of the Politics & Policy Daily.
Today on The AtlanticFear and Loathing: Republican Representative Duncan Hunter of California is running the most anti-Muslim campaign in the country, writes McKay Coppins.
‘All Politics Is Local’: America’s current political culture focuses almost entirely on national-level issues and campaigns. Can these organizations shift voters’ attention to down-ballot races? (Emma Green)
How Far Have Democrats Moved Left?: There are more progressive candidates running than ever, but the most significant shift is among voters, not politicians. (David A. Graham)
A Twist in the Plot: David Frum agreed to debate against former White House strategist Steve Bannon about the false promise of populism. After the two faced off, things took a strange turn.
There’s Something Happening in Texas: Republicans in the Lone Star State have kept their majority by strategizing to disenfranchise black and Latino voters, argues Adam Serwer. But that won’t work forever.
‘The President’s Lies’: On the eve of the midterm elections, President Trump’s penchant for spreading falsehoods seems to be intensifying. (Vernon Loeb and Andrew Kragie)
Snapshot
A boy looks to the stage as President Trump speaks during a rally at the IX Center in Cleveland, Ohio. (Carolyn Kaster / AP)
What We’re ReadingDid Beto Blow It?: If Senator Ted Cruz’s Democratic challenger loses on Tuesday, it could be because he didn’t try to win over Republicans in a state as red as Texas. (Tim Alberta, Politico)
The Waiting Game: Farmers in the Midwest are hoping President Trump ends his trade war with China before their soybeans start to rot. (Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times)
What Is a Wave?: Democrats are in a good position to do well on Tuesday, but what, exactly, constitutes a blue wave? Sean Trende explains. (Real Clear Politics)
VisualizedHealth Care, Taxes, or Jobs?: Which are the most commonly discussed issues in your state? Check out this map. (Demetrios Pogkas and David Ingold, Bloomberg)
Sometimes it seems like Democrats and Republicans aren’t even speaking the same language. But when it comes to online advertising, there are some surprising similarities between the big topics for both parties.
The topic mentioned most often in Democratic ads on Google, according to an Atlantic analysis, is health care—which lags well down among the Republican topics. But the next two leading Democratic subjects are economic issues and President Donald Trump, similar to the Republican results. The figures are derived from an analysis of Google’s “Transparency Report,” which collects advertisements run on Google Ad Services, the largest online advertising platform. The numbers cover any actor who has spent at least $500 on ads, including candidate campaigns, party political-action committees, and independent advocacy groups.
The Democratic focus on health care, at roughly a quarter of ads run, is not surprising. As Annie Lowrey reports, the party has found health care to be a potent issue in the midterm elections, pointing to numerous Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Notably, a significant share of the ads about health care focus on preexisting conditions, a reference to Obamacare’s most popular provision. Despite their claims to the contrary, Republicans have sought to eliminate the measure, which guarantees that people with preexisting conditions can obtain insurance.
The next two issues, the economy and Trump, are a little more unexpected. Although Democrats are quick to note that economic gains are not widely distributed, most standard indicators point to a strong economy, from stock-market gains to job growth to wage increases. Traditionally, a strong economy favors the party that controls Congress and the White House. But Republicans have struggled to turn that good fortune into an effective messaging tool, and Democrats are running on the issue as well.
It’s the focus on Trump that’s most interesting. Sixteen percent of Democratic Google ads mention Trump, barely lower than the 20 percent of GOP ads that do. As NBC News reported, based on a Wesleyan University analysis of broadcast spots, Trump was surprisingly absent from Democratic ads on TV from mid-September to mid-October, appearing in just one in 10. (What’s more, only half of those were negative.) Online, it’s a different story, with Trump emerging as a major theme.
Given that Republicans are on the defensive on health care, and that Obamacare has grown more popular as it’s been on the chopping block, it stands to reason that it would be a more minor topic in GOP-placed ads—appearing in just 7 percent of them.
Republicans are seeking to capitalize on the positive economic news. Far and away the biggest economic topic is taxes. Late last year, the Republican-led Congress passed a large series of tax cuts, which they hoped would give the party a boost in the midterms. But those cuts have proven unpopular with voters.
The reasons for that are complicated. But surely one reason that the economy isn’t lifting Republicans as much as they’d like is the next biggest subject of ads: Donald Trump. The president remains unpopular and divisive, and Republican candidates for office have had to wrestle with how to deal with that. One option is to try to distance oneself from the president and appeal to voters turned off by him. But that’s a tactic that often comes up short—just ask the Democrats who tried to keep former President Barack Obama at arm’s length in 2010 and found themselves jobless. The second option is to embrace the president and hope that enthusiasm among Trump fans balances out the disadvantages.
What’s missing from advertising can be as telling as what’s there. Just 10 percent of Google ads from Republicans deal with immigration, even though Trump has tried to make it the focus of the campaign in the closing weeks. Republican candidates and their allies seem less eager to embrace that debate, perhaps reflecting the reality that Trump’s immigration views are not especially widely shared.
For the first four days of November, the streets of Toulouse, France, were transformed into a performance space for the massive robotic puppets Ariane and Asterion. The giant spider and 50-ton Minotaur were featured in the French street-theater company La Machine’s multiday show Le Gardien du Temple. Live music accompanied the giants as La Machine performers guided them through the “labyrinth” formed by the streets of Toulouse. Here, from the Agence France-Presse photographer Eric Cabanis, a few shots of the show and some of the more than 600,000 audience members.
In the fall of 2015, while rummaging through the fossil collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Matthew McCurry came across a very strange skull. It belonged to an extinct dolphin named Eurhinodelphis, and it was incredibly long. The braincase was only slightly bigger than McCurry’s outstretched hand, but the snout stretched farther than his entire arm. “I was amazed that something could have a snout that long,” he says.
Today’s oceangoing dolphins have snouts on the short side, ranging from the flattish bumps of orcas to the, er, bottle noses of bottlenoses. River dolphins like the Amazonian boto or the Ganges susu have much more distended snouts that can be almost twice as long as the rest of their skulls. But Eurhinodelphis’s snout is five times longer than its braincase. It looked like a dolphin that was trying to do an impression of a swordfish, or perhaps one that had told one too many lies. For good reason, its name literally means “well-nosed dolphin.”
McCurry, a paleontologist who normally works at the Australian Museum, found many similar species of dolphins within the Smithsonian’s vaults. Parapontoporia. Xiphiacetus. Zarhinocetus. Zarhachis. Pomatodelphis. All had long snouts, and some had more teeth than any other mammal on the planet—up to 350 in some species. “People have been describing these species for a long time,” says McCurry, “but no one’s really gone further than naming them and noting that they have a long snout.”
In these bizarre skulls, McCurry saw a mystery. Many aquatic animals, from river dolphins to gharial crocodiles, have evolved long, toothy snouts to help them catch fish. But why did these particular dolphins take their snouts to such an extreme? In a curious twist, these species weren’t all part of the same lineage. Rather, they evolved from short-snouted ancestors on at least three different occasions, all during the Miocene period between 5 and 23 million years ago. “There must have been something going on in their environment at the same time to drive their evolution,” says McCurry.
To work out what that was, he first had to understand how these animals used their snouts. Working with Nick Pyenson, the Smithsonian’s expert on prehistoric whales, McCurry used a medical scanner to create digital models of the skulls of several long-snouted dolphins. He then analyzed those models with techniques that engineers use to measure the strength of beams and girders.
He found that the dolphins could easily have swept their snouts through the water at high speed, stunning fish in the way that modern billfishes like swordfish do. The different species likely used different techniques. Some, like Zarhachis, had flattened snouts, and probably swept the water from side to side at stunning speeds, just like today’s swordfish. Others, like Xiphiacetus, had snouts that were circular in cross section; like today’s marlins, they sacrificed a bit of speed for the ability to attack in any direction.
Crucially, these long-snouted species arose during a time in the middle of the Miocene when ocean temperatures started climbing. In cold water, warm-blooded predators like dolphins have an advantage over cold-blooded prey like fish or squid, because they’re better at maintaining a high metabolism and swimming at high speeds. As the oceans warm, fish can move faster and the dolphins’ advantage disappears. Perhaps some of them regained the upper hand by evolving long snouts that could swiftly sweep through shoals of prey.
[Read: In a few centuries, cows could be the largest land animals left]
During the mid-Miocene, sea levels also rose, flooding the shorelines and creating a variety of new shallow habitats. This varied coastal world effectively gave dolphins permission to be weirder. Some evolved massive underbites and perhaps used their lower jaws to skim through mud. Others developed walrus-like tusks, which they could have used to extract buried shellfish. And still others, of course, evolved extremely long snouts.
But this extraordinary period of evolutionary experimentation ended when the Miocene gave way to the Pliocene. Temperatures fell, the climate became more erratic, and the planet entered into a series of cycling ice ages. Creatures that evolved during the more stable climatic heyday disappeared. “That explains why we don’t have these weird, long-snouted dolphins around today,” says McCurry.
Studies like these are important because they highlight how the shapes of animals are shaped by their environment, and how much diversity can be lost when that environment changes, says Karina Amaral from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, who was not involved in the study. “At a time when many people insist on ignoring our changing climate,” she adds, this kind of research can help to paint a clear—and concerning—image of the consequences.
Donald Trump has a habit of taking to Twitter first thing in the morning. So when he fired off a slew of tweets early one late-October morning, it wasn’t much of a surprise. “In Florida there is a choice between a Harvard/Yale educated man,” Ron DeSantis, he wrote, before vilifying DeSantis’s opponent, Andrew Gillum, who is vying to become the state’s first black governor, and just the fifth black governor in U.S. history.
Trump’s tweet was an example of the time-honored tradition of equating an Ivy League degree with a person’s bona fides for a position. But Gillum had a reminder for the president. “I am a graduate of THE Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU),” he responded the next day on Twitter. “An HBCU founded on October 3, 1887. Google it.”
[Read: Andrew Gillum is Florida’s homecoming king].
The exchange was interesting not least because the Trump administration has made a show of courting historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. And despite a number of public missteps, it has consistently pointed to its work with black colleges as one of its “wins” with the black community. These institutions, which were founded primarily after Reconstruction to educate black Americans who had been shut out of the rest of higher education, have had their fair share of struggles over the past few decades—budget woes, enrollment dips, and accreditation concerns among them. But they have seen a renaissance, of attention and enrollment, in the Trump era.
Another, perhaps unforeseen renaissance, however, has been the rise of black politicians who graduated from these colleges. In addition to Gillum, Stacey Abrams, a gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, and Mandela Barnes, a candidate for lieutenant governor in Wisconsin, both attended historically black colleges. The prospect of so many black-college graduates being elected to statewide office in the same year is unprecedented, Keneshia Grant, an assistant professor of political science at Howard University, told me.
Now, of course, there are HBCU alums across all levels of government. Senator Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University, and the mayors of Atlanta, New Orleans, and Birmingham—all of whom were elected in 2017—also attended HBCUs. And there have previously been governors who attended black colleges: In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the governor of Virginia and the first elected black governor in the United States. In the 1870s, there was P. B. S. Pinchback, who very briefly served as the governor of Louisiana. These candidates—Abrams, Gillum, and Barnes—are continuing that black political tradition.
[Read: Stacey Abrams’s prescription for a maternal-health crisis]
However, just as the sheer number of these candidates is different, so too is the energy behind them, particularly for Abrams and Gillum, says Grant—and it’s making them more popular with students at HBCUs. The politicians are vocal in boosting black colleges. They’re celebrities at homecoming. And they’re unyielding in their clap backs during debates.
“It changes the students’ engagement with the materials for the [candidates] to look like them and quote Migos. If you show a clip of a person who is a legitimate candidate who is good on policy and can talk about ‘walking it like he talks it,’” alluding to the viral clip of Gillum that references the lyric from the rap group Migos, “it just takes the lesson [in class] to another level.”
Abrams, Gillum, and Barnes are sending a message, says Walter Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans. “It’s a reaffirmation, not only for students but for families, that you can go to an HBCU and compete with anyone.” Kimbrough told me it’s important not only that the candidates attended a historically black college, but also that they’ve embraced it as a fundamental part of their identity.
And the candidates are taking up the mantle of defending black colleges as important institutions, he says. For instance, when Representative Cedric Richmond criticized Senator Bernie Sanders’s education plan for not mentioning HBCUs, Abrams tweeted her agreement: “HBCUs are vital for economic independence,” she wrote. And the institutions, which have struggled across sectors, both public and private, could use the boost.
While it’s unclear whether these black politicians will pull out victories tomorrow, their candidacies could still prove important for HBCUs. “I always tell people you can go wherever you want to go,” says Kimbrough. “We want people to go where there’s a good fit. But don’t just assume because the person went to an HBCU that they aren’t as good.”
Carly Simon summed up the musical subgenre of tunes about famous lovers with her 1972 riddle of a chorus: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.” When singers of breakup songs drop hints but don’t drop names, what is the listener to do but speculate? As tabloid media and the internet have intensified such guessing games, the art of the subtweet has only become more important, as seen in the career of Taylor Swift.
But Ariana Grande—perhaps taking inspiration from her far franker friends in hip-hop, like the frequent namer-and-shamer Nicki Minaj—is done being coy. Already, on her latest album, Sweetener, she broke with pop’s imperatives toward vagueness by titling one song “Pete Davidson,” after the SNL comedian she was then engaged to. Their relationship at that point was as intense as it was new, and perhaps accordingly, the song lasted only a little more than a minute. Grande rapped about him being her soulmate, and then violins joined in as she faded out, singing, “Gonna be happy, happy / I’ma be happy, happy.”
Alas, that relationship disintegrated in October. The breakup added to the list of meta-musical reasons to talk about (and maybe even pity) Grande following the terrorist attack at a 2017 concert of hers and the sudden death of the rapper Mac Miller, her most recent ex. Amid such setbacks, Grande has all along made a show of public resolve rooted in joie de vivre: Her bottom line is that love heals all. With one new single, she’s added a tough edge to that message—highlighting her ownership of not only the gossip, but also her romantic life, her growth as a person, and her career as a maker of catchily inspirational bops.
That song, “Thank U, Next,” appeared online Saturday night, and it’s got a doozy of a first verse. As reverberating chimes conjure a fairy-tale atmosphere, Grande sings:
Thought I’d end up with Sean
But he wasn’t a match
Wrote some songs about Ricky
Now I listen and laugh
Even almost got married
And for Pete, I’m so thankful
Wish I could say, “Thank you” to Malcolm
’Cause he was an angel
It’s a list of former lovers: the rapper Big Sean, the backup dancer Ricky Alvarez, Davidson, and Miller. One taught her “love,” one taught her “patience,” one taught her “pain,” she sings as she locks into a suspenseful melody. Then comes the fluttery, immediately catchy chorus. “Thank you, next,” Grande repeats, eventually arriving at a descending, carefree trill: “I’m so fucking grateful for my ex.”
This all might read as sarcasm, setting up a diss-y or dishy elaboration on the names mentioned in the first verse. But instead, Grande begins to sing about meeting someone new: “Her name is Ari.” With that, the point of the song is revealed to be the opposite of what it initially appeared to be. It’s about Ariana Grande, not Ariana Grande’s guys. Love, patience, and pain—all self-taught lessons, too.
This is a feminist rewriting of the public narrative—about a woman defined by, and perhaps even brought down by, men—pulled off with lightness. The vibe is sly and swinging; a high hat in the chorus makes like a drum crash during a stand-up roast. In the bridge, she envisions her wedding, at which she wants to have her mom by her side (“I’ll be thanking my dad / ’Cause she grew from the drama,” she sings, presumably referring to her parents’ divorce during her childhood). She only wants to get married once, but if “God forbid something happens,” she shrugs, at “least this song is a smash.” Very deft: classic pop romanticism, cut with shit happens realism, spiked with trendy swagger-as-empowerment.
The timing was deft, too. Last week, Grande criticized Davidson for joking about their breakup publicly, but this song—released minutes before SNL aired on Saturday—takes the lyrical high road. On “Weekend Update,” the perhaps chastened Davidson made a bland statement about him and Grande’s situation being “nobody’s business.” But Grande’s song acknowledges that it has become, for better or worse, everybody’s business—and insists that it’s going to be so on her own terms. Breezy and bold, “Thank U, Next” puts the gossip in perspective: However long her relationships have lasted, her life is a lot bigger than them.
“Major League Baseball has long been losing its grip on the title of America’s pastime,” Hayley Glatter wrote after the Red Sox won the 114th World Series. The game, she argued, is too long, lacks star power, and has been cannibalized by its crushing quest for metrics.
As a die-hard baseball fan, I think this is a great article. Baseball is genuinely at war with itself to keep the elements that its casual appreciators enjoy without sacrificing what its die-hard fans enjoy—at some point, it may just need to pick a side. I think it should probably pick the casual side: There are more casual fans, and diehards like me are just committed enough to grin and bear it.
But anyone who’s trying to get into the Red Sox specifically and struggles to because of the team’s “lack of a transcendent star” is defining “transcendent star” as someone who is as talented and famous as LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and maybe Tom Brady, if I’m feeling generous. If Mookie Betts isn’t meeting your criteria, I feel they are unreasonable criteria. He’s probably the second-best player in baseball, he’s charming, and he’s young, with his best possibly still ahead. Mike Trout would meet the criteria as well if he weren’t such a dud of a personality. Francisco Lindor is another strong candidate, though the smaller market won’t help him. Aaron Judge is a striking dude who smashes dingers.
Pace of play, confusing rules, hyper-granular managing and analytics, sure. But lack of star power is not something it looks like the MLB has to worry about.
Kyle Dawson
Brooklyn, N.Y.
I must respectfully and vociferously disagree with your assessment of the baseball played in this 2018 World Series—it has been nothing short of captivating.
Yes, I am a lifelong Red Sox fan, but even more than that, baseball has been a lifelong love (as it is for my 13-year-old and so many girls and boys and men and women I know). I found the series entirely transporting. And I’m convinced I am no outlier. The pitching and hitting were so brilliant, so evolved—and the margin for error so small, and consequences so large—that each pitch of every at bat was its own enthralling odyssey.
I’m a far cry from a baseball expert, but even I can see how the game is evolving in particularly evocative ways these days. I can’t avert my eyes from each pitch and swing. There are reasons it took more than seven hours for a team to emerge victorious in Game Three. Just as there are reasons home runs so often now dictate wins and losses. Even I can appreciate just how high the level of play has been—from pitch location and movement to swing speed and trajectory. It has been incredibly exciting.
To steal a line from the iconic Field of Dreams, I respectfully suggest: Perhaps if you’d experienced even just a little bit of what I see in the game of baseball these days, maybe you’d love it too.
Susan Gerson
Washington, D.C.
I agree with the author’s assertion that the game needs to be sped up. Here is how to do it:
1. Decide on a reasonable amount of seconds between pitches.
2. If, by that time, the batter is not ready to hit, call a strike.
3. If, by that time, the pitcher has not thrown the pitch or to a base to hold a runner, call a ball.
4. Each team may stop the pitch clock with a limited number of time-outs.
Baseball’s problem solved. You’re welcome!
Bob Tewes
Sandwich, Mass.
I consider myself a die-hard Red Sox fan and watched as many games as I could in the 1970s and ’80s. Today, not so much. For me, the biggest turnoff is player turnover. Only one member of the 2018 team played on the 2013 World Series team. I have a hard time relating to the constant coming and going of players.
Rick Conlon
Brandenton, Fla.
This age of lies, greed, haste, superficiality, inequality, and partisanship may be properly represented by the NFL, but give me baseball every time. As the temperature goes down and we start driving home from work in the dark of winter, I already miss baseball. I look forward eagerly to next year. Leave my sport alone.
Edward J. Szewczyk
Belleville, Ill.
I don’t know what to do except bemoan the fact that baseball just doesn’t seem well suited to today’s internet-shortened attention spans.
I sat through all 18 innings of Game Three and loved it! But then, I’m a grouchy old fart.
I will say that baseball’s current obsession with analytics reminds me of how bland, poll-tested politics has robbed that sphere of its vitality. And the unfettered greed of everybody in the sport is disheartening. I’d go to a lot more games if a beer didn’t cost so much.
One technical change that could improve the game: Move the fences back. MLB evidently thinks that fans demand lots and lots of home runs, but when every batter comes to the plate swinging for the fences, a lot of the game’s complexity and beauty is lost.
Rob Lewis
Langley, Wash.
I’m 61 and a lifelong baseball fan. Each October, I watch the World Series and am almost always satisfied. The Series doesn’t need the hype that always seems to surround the Super Bowl or NBA finals; the night games, the October chill, the faces of the players and managers in the dugouts are all compelling to me.
I admit that there are more pitching changes than I’d like, but one reason that teams such as the Red Sox, Yankees, and others play long games—which is a testament to their success—is that their hitters are patient and make pitchers work deep counts. The game lasts longer because of that, but I don’t see this as a flaw of the game itself.
I agree that the four wild cards have been an asset to the game, but I’m afraid that I don’t see eye to eye with you on limiting extra innings, on lamenting the lack of star power (another satisfying element of many past World Series has been watching a Steve Pearce or a Mark Lemke get locked-in and lift their team when the stars aren’t quite getting it done), or that we need a “livelier” version of the game. Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I just don’t see how this Series was bad for the game.
Mike Canning
Oak Park, Ill.
The article left out a major reason for declining attendance and viewership of major sporting events in general: the cost of tickets and media to view them.
Steve Rova
Lincoln City, Ore.
Playoff baseball is a “dreadful chore,” according to Hayley Glatter. No, the recent World Series was lots of fun: The 18-inning game that could have turned the tide for the Dodgers but didn’t; the clever pitching strategies by the Red Sox manager Alex Cora; the joyful home-run trots; the unexpected heroes. Fans, regardless of their loyalties, were privileged to witness one of history’s best baseball teams slug, throw, and think its way to victory. Great stuff for those who love the sport.
Jim McMahon
Honolulu, Hawaii
Patience and a respect for the past. This is what baseball has to offer the contemporary world, a valuable counterweight to the instant gratification and worship of the new that diminish modern life.
Yes, small tweaks can be made to improve the pace of play. But perhaps we should acknowledge that baseball is no longer and will not return to being America’s game (or Canada’s, for that matter); that it will have fewer fans as time goes on; and, that there will be less money made and fewer millionaire players. So what? Does everything have to be measured in terms of popularity and money? The cancer in our economic system is the fundamental assumption of growth. It will consume the planet and kill us all. Maybe growth isn’t the answer for baseball, either. Keep the game the same, settle for fewer fans, and manage the steady state instead of championing the malignancy of constant growth. Some say that baseball is a great metaphor for life. Perhaps, in settling, it can be a sobering metaphor for our collective future as well.
Brian Green
Thunder Bay, Ontario
Been following the Red Sox since the 1950s, and if it wasn’t for a DVR, I wouldn’t have seen the playoffs. How do you attract young fans when the pace of the game is mind-numbing, and the late starts east of the Mississippi make it impossible for them to stay up? This also includes old guys like me and most of the workforce. May not be as much fun as watching live, but next-day watching is less stressful.
Kevin O’Neil
Franconia, N.H.
8:15 p.m. EST is far too late for baseball to start.
Cassie Julia
Waterville, Maine
If you don’t like baseball, don’t watch baseball. That seems far more logical to me than trying to change baseball to appeal to people who don’t like to pay attention to anything anymore. Short attention spans and reality-television addiction are negatives, and certainly not things that should be enabled on a national level at the expense of a game that is nearly 150 years old.
Personally, I don’t watch much tennis, soccer, or darts. But I certainly don’t want any changes to be made to those games on my behalf. Just play on without me.
David Pye
Montreal, Quebec
I agree that something needs to be done about the pace of the game—maybe borrow another page from tennis, which recently instituted a “serve clock,” and institute a “pitch clock.” Another problem plaguing baseball is how the networks show the product. The majority of what is shown on TV is rotating close-ups of four things: the pitcher, the batter, someone spitting in a dugout, and random fans. How about swapping out one of those last two for a shot of the whole field?
John H. Campbell
Portland, Ore.
Jennifer Pelot Rysewyk wrote: Or, maybe it was because these were two big market teams with bloated salaries. Analytics aren’t killing this game. Neither is the duration of nine innings. It’s knowing if you don’t follow a large market team that can afford to rent the best players, you won’t have a chance. Until legitimate salary caps are in place, it’s just going to get worse.
Gayle Mills writes: Loved watching the games but I really wish that some of the games were during the daytime. This is for my grandson who would have loved to watch a game. Come on MLB !!!
Hayley Glatter replies:Make no mistake: The 2018 Red Sox were an incredibly talented and entertaining team. The two games I caught at Fenway Park this season were captivating and dramatic, and there’s nothing quite like spending an evening in the glow of Boston’s Citgo sign. Despite its skill level, however, I argued in this piece that the team is without a transcendent star. A lot of readers, Kyle Dawson included, disagreed with this assessment and pointed specifically to Mookie Betts as a counterexample. Betts is an undoubtedly dynamic player and, at just 26 years old, likely has many productive seasons ahead of him. But being a great ballplayer doesn’t necessarily mean he’s catching the attention of casual fans outside of New England.
Though it’s an imperfect measure of fame and influence, Betts has just 582,000 Instagram followers and 180,000 Twitter followers. The 76ers center Joel Embiid, meanwhile, has 3 million Instagram followers and 1.55 million Twitter followers; and the Giants running back Saquon Barkley has 1.3 million Instagram followers and 240,000 Twitter followers. Neither Embiid nor Barkley is the most famous player in his sport. But both are younger than Betts and have stronger name recognition than he does. Baseball players today are not any less talented than those who played in the past, but the sport is in a transition period as athletes like Betts and the Yankees’ Aaron Judge establish themselves. For now, the game is without a magnetic standard-bearer who can successfully energize casual fans and motivate them to turn on a game that their team isn’t playing in. Perhaps in a few seasons, Betts will be as prominent a household name in Boise as he is now in Boston. But it won’t happen overnight.
SAN DIEGO, Calif.—Congressman Duncan Hunter had a problem.
The California Republican was supposed to coast to reelection this year. A square-jawed ex-marine who inherited his father’s House seat in 2008, Hunter had won each of his past five elections by a wide margin. His district, a collection of inland San Diego suburbs, was solid GOP territory, and few campaign watchers expected that to change anytime soon.
But then Hunter got indicted.
On August 22, federal prosecutors charged the lawmaker and his wife with stealing $250,000 in campaign funds. In a 47-page indictment littered with galling details, the Hunters were accused of using campaign cash to fund lavish family vacations; to pay for groceries, golf outings, and tequila shots; and even to fly a pet rabbit across the country. To cover their tracks, the indictment alleged, the Hunters often claimed that their purchases were for charitable organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project.
The political backlash was swift and severe. Hunter was stripped of his committee assignments in the House. His fund-raising dried up, and Democratic money flooded into the district. When he tried to defend himself on Fox News, he exacerbated the crisis by appearing to pin the blame for the scandal on his wife.
[Read: Duncan Hunter’s indictment is a threat to the GOP House majority.]
Publicly disgraced, out of money, and facing both jail time and a suddenly surging challenger—what was an indicted congressman to do?
Eventually, Hunter seemed to arrive at his answer: Try to eke out a win by waging one of the most brazenly anti-Muslim smear campaigns in recent history.
In the final weeks of the election, Hunter has aired ominous ads warning that his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, is “working to infiltrate Congress” with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. He has circulated campaign literature claiming the Democrat is a “national security threat” who might reveal secret U.S. troop movements to enemies abroad if elected. While Hunter himself floats conspiracy theories from the stump about a wave of “radical Muslims” running for office in America, his campaign is working overtime to cast Campa-Najjar as a nefarious figure reared and raised by terrorists.
As multiple fact-checkers in the press have noted, these smears have no basis in reality. Campa-Najjar—a 29-year-old former Barack Obama aide who is half-Latino, half-Arab—is a devout Christian who received security clearance when he worked in the White House. His grandfather was involved in the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, but he died 16 years before Campa-Najjar was born, and the candidate has repeatedly denounced him.* (Growing up, Campa-Najjar became estranged from his father, a former Palestinian Authority official, and was raised primarily by his Mexican American mother.)
But facts do not appear to be Hunter’s chief concern. The political strategy here is self-evident: Feed on anti-Muslim prejudice to scare enough conservative voters into pulling the lever for the incumbent—indictment be damned.
California’s Fiftieth District hasn’t drawn much attention from horse-race obsessives this year. There are other races with tighter polls, other House seats more likely to flip. But what’s unfolding here in the suburbs of San Diego represents an unnerving microcosm of this campaign season: white Republicans frightened by cynical conspiracy-mongers; religious minorities frightened by the fallout; a community poisoned by Trumpian politics—and a bitter question hovering over the whole ugly affair: Will it ever get better?
Duncan Hunter is not an easy man to find these days. He rarely holds campaign rallies, and doesn’t attend town halls or debates. When I emailed his office asking for an interview, I was politely told my request would be added to the “list”—and then ignored when I tried to follow up.
Recent polls have shown that around half of the voters in Hunter’s district are sticking with him. But finding surrogates to talk on Hunter’s behalf proved as daunting as nailing down the candidate himself. Emails, phone calls, and Facebook messages to local conservative groups went unreturned. Not even Hunter’s former GOP primary challenger had nice things to say: Shamus Sayed, a Muslim businessman and longtime Republican, told me he found the congressman’s mudslinging “pathetic,” and that he planned to vote for “anyone but Hunter.”
To find an outspoken Hunter supporter, I turned to the land of the professionally outspoken: conservative talk radio. In a nondescript office building just outside La Jolla, I met Andrea Kaye, a drive-time host whose show is beamed out across San Diego County each night. A Louisiana transplant who bills herself on air as “dynamite in a dress,” Kaye takes pride in having her finger on the SoCal conservative pulse. I found her in the KCBQ studio preparing for her show. She wore big, gold hoop earrings and sipped from a mug made to look like a stack of frosted donuts.
Kaye blamed a climate of militant political correctness for Hunter’s lack of vocal boosters in the district. “It’s the ultimate bullying,” she complained. “You’re not allowed to ask questions about [Campa-Najjar] or you’re going to be called Islamaphobic.”
And that pesky indictment? The charges were troubling, she admitted. “But I always say, Innocent until proven guilty.” She’s been urging her listeners to reelect Hunter and then let the chips fall where they may once he’s back in Washington.
[Read: Democrats want to flip six seats in California.]
Kaye told me Hunter had likely been helped by a recent controversy that provided an important local backdrop to the current congressional race. Earlier this year, a group of parents sued the San Diego school district over an anti-bullying initiative aimed at creating “safe spaces” for Muslim students. Predictably, the lawsuit became a rallying point for right-wing culture warriors, who claimed the program—which included adding Muslim holidays to the calendar and teaching Islamic culture as part of the social-studies curriculum—was actually an effort to indoctrinate children with Islamist propaganda and make their schools “Sharia-compliant.”
While Kaye conceded that Hunter’s campaign probably went too far by labeling his opponent a “national security threat,” she insisted it was only natural for voters to demand serious scrutiny of Campa-Najjar’s background.
“There are multiple fronts of jihad,” she told me, her voice taking on a grave tone. “One is jihad through the sword, and the other is creeping Sharia.”
Hunter is not the only politician in America trying to win an election with Muslim-bashing. A recent report by Muslim Advocates, a civil-rights group based in Oakland, California, named 80 office seekers in federal, state, and local races across the country this year who have expressed anti-Muslim sentiments. (All but two are Republicans.)
The report’s author, Scott Simpson, told me Donald Trump—who made hostility to Muslims a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, going so far as to declare, “I think Islam hates us”—seems to have inspired a legion of copycat candidates in 2018. “There’s been this sort of wave of anti-Muslim candidates who are making the calculation that now is their time,” he said.
Simpson said some of these people are acting on bone-deep bigotry, while others are simply opportunists. But even if their stump screeds come off as “shrill and out of touch with reality,” he cautioned against ignoring them outright. “There’s a very coherent story that’s being told about Muslims … that’s actually really sophisticated.” At the core of this story, he said, is the idea that Islam is not really a religion, but a violent political ideology whose adherents want to take over the government and replace the Constitution with Sharia law. Simpson told me that of all the candidates he has tracked this year, Hunter is the one who has “most fully digested the conspiracy theory, and is repeating it back.”
Simpson was quick to point out the silver lining in his report: Of the 80 candidates he wrote about, only 12 are safely projected to win their election. According to the organization’s polling data, the vast majority of voters—including many conservative Christians—are put off by politicians who attack Islam. “This isn’t a winning strategy,” he said.
And yet, whether they win or lose, these candidates can end up leaving a trail of collateral damage in their communities. The Muslims I interviewed in Hunter’s district still remember how they felt the day candidate Trump called for a travel ban on their coreligionists. They remember the rabid cheers from his supporters, and the wall-to-wall coverage on TV, and the sinking dread they felt as he proceeded to climb in the polls.
“It was scary,” said Ellen Molla, a Muslim mother of three who lives in Escondido. “It was kind of a shock that there were so many people that supported that. In everyday meetings, I would never have guessed that my neighbors next door had a problem with me.” After Trump, though, she began to suspect they might.
Tasir El-Quolaq, a former U.S. federal agent who served in Iraq, has been registering Muslim voters in the San Diego area for years. But since Trump’s election, he’s noticed that some people at his local mosque are simply disengaging from politics. They feel like the process is rigged against them—and Hunter’s recent smear tactics have only added to the exhaustion. “We are always on the defensive,” El-Quolaq told me. “Always.”
[Read: The proud corruption of Donald Trump]
Meanwhile, the Islamaphobia on display in the modern GOP has been especially frustrating to Muslims who are politically conservative. “When we first came here, most of us sort of favored the Republican Party,” said Mohammed Kasabati, a retiree from Pakistan who moved to the U.S. decades ago. He noted that many Muslim voters hold socially conservative views, and belong to higher income brackets. In 2000, about 70 percent of them supported George W. Bush—and Kasabati still remembers the way that president defended the Muslim community in the wake of 9/11. Of course, Bush went on to lose Muslim support in the years that followed, with policies like the Patriot Act, which made it easier for the government to surveil Muslim Americans, and the war in Iraq. But Kasabati still thinks there could be a place in the GOP for people like him—if only Trump and his imitators would stop vilifying their faith.
“This is a country that was founded by people fleeing religious persecution,” Kasabati said. Was it really too much to ask that the party of religious freedom extend them the same courtesy now?
On a warm night in October, about 80 students gathered in a softly lit auditorium at the University of San Diego to hear Ammar Campa-Najjar and other panelists offer advice for minorities entering politics.
After weeks of pitching himself nonstop to Trump voters in his deep-red district, Campa-Najjar had built up a collection of cringe-inducing encounters—and now he seemed eager to unload them. He talked about the man who refused to shake his hand and called him a terrorist, about the supporter who suggested he shave his beard so he wouldn’t look so much like a terrorist. As he spoke, I wondered just how much time he’d been forced to spend on the campaign trail assuring voters that he didn’t want to kill them.
[Read: How American Muslims are trying to take back their government]
These interactions had clearly made him hyperalert. Even here—at the kind of event where he could comfortably riff on “toxic masculinity,” and get away with saying things like, “Fellas, we need to be more woke”—he couldn’t quite let his guard down. When another panelist said something about raising an “army” of allies, Campa-Najjar’s ears perked up. “See,” he cracked, “that’s something I could never say.”
After the event, we went outside and took seats at a table in the courtyard. Campa-Najjar looked every bit the well-coiffed congressional candidate—shiny hair, dark suit, flag pin—but he also exuded a kind of underdog exhaustion. I told him he looked tired. He told me he was.
The attacks of the past few weeks had left him indignant, but also darkly amused. He joked that if an Islamic terrorist ever actually encountered the two candidates together, he would likely take out the ex-Muslim apostate first. And for all the nonsense about Campa-Najjar being a potential “security threat,” he noted it was Hunter—the one under indictment—who couldn’t obtain a security clearance.
On the whole, Campa-Najjar said he was surprised by how ham-fisted Hunter’s strategy had been. “I thought there would be more finesse to it,” he told me.
Now, though, he was more confident than ever that victory was at hand. With Obama-esque audacity, he began ticking off all the reasons to be optimistic. The district was more diverse than many realized. “McCain Republicans” were repelled by the Muslim-bashing. While his own campaign was infused with idealism and “youth,” Hunter’s was cloaked in the stench of “desperation.”
Very soon, he assured me, the good voters of the California Fiftieth would reject the ugly politics that had permeated their community this year and send him to Congress.
Perhaps detecting my skepticism, Campa-Najjar tried to conjure an alternative happy ending. “And if we fall short,” he tried, “we proved that we exceeded expectations and that—” but then he stopped himself. He couldn’t do it.
“I think we’re going to win.”
* A previous version of this article mischaracterized the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics. We regret the error.
Since launching its original-film division with Beasts of No Nation in 2015, Netflix has had a single hard-and-fast rule about its movies: Subscribers never have to wait an extra second to see them. If a new project received a theatrical release, it would debut on the streaming service at the exact same time. This approach clashed with the fact that most theater chains want to screen their features exclusively. As a result, Netflix films have rarely played in cinemas, and when they do, it’s only as a nominal concession to Oscar rules that demand a theatrical release for movies to qualify for trophies.
This year, Netflix has the rights to Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s achingly personal new epic, which is being touted for huge success during awards season. In the coming months, the company will also release the latest film from the Coen brothers (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) and a sci-fi thriller starring Sandra Bullock (Bird Box). With those debuts, the studio’s rules are changing, signaling a potential détente between Netflix and theater exhibitors going forward. Roma will open in two theaters on November 21, gradually expand to more screens over the following few weeks, and finally hit Netflix on December 14.
For years, Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, has claimed that his “day and date” strategy, whereby movies get simultaneous digital and theatrical releases, is “going to be more and more accepted as part of the distribution norm.” There continues to be little evidence of that, mostly because Netflix doesn’t publicize detailed viewership data for its films. Certainly some Netflix projects, such as Dee Rees’s Mudbound and this year’s romantic-comedy hits Set It Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, have made waves with critics.
But the company has some $10 billion in long-term debt and hasn’t demonstrated that its model of pumping out content is eventually going to be more stable and profitable than the current theater model. Recent years have also seen a series of public fights over the future of cinema, like Netflix’s withdrawal from the Cannes Film Festival in May over rules barring movies without a planned theatrical release in France, or public skepticism about the company from figures like Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan. A more sustainable compromise may have finally arrived.
[Read: What Christopher Nolan gets right about Netflix]
Roma isn’t the only Netflix film that’s screening around the United States before becoming available online. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs will be in select cinemas for one week before hitting Netflix on November 16, and Bird Box will also have a one-week window of theatrical exclusivity in December. Roma’s three-week theatrical run is an acknowledgment of the film’s impressive cinematic qualities. Cuarón designed the project to take advantage of state-of-the-art Dolby Atmos sound technology, and now cineasts will have more of a chance to enjoy that presentation in full before streaming becomes the only option.
“Seeing Roma on the big screen is just as important as ensuring people all over the world have the chance to experience it in their homes,” Cuarón said in a statement. “Roma was photographed in expansive 65 mm, complemented by a very complex Atmos sound mix. While a movie theater offers the best possible experience for Roma, it was designed to be equally meaningful when experienced in the intimacy of one’s home.”
Some other Netflix projects vying for awards this year—such as Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King, and Paul Greengrass’s 22 July—got the nominal theater release required for Oscar consideration. But because the films went online the same day, they never had any chance of making real money at the box office. Netflix has always argued for the virtues of its widespread membership; it reported that 14 million people watched 22 July in the first three weeks after the film’s debut, more than would have been possible for a big-screen release. But the company’s new strategy is an admission that staggering a movie’s theatrical and online runs can offer the best of both worlds.
This revised approach is also a concession to major artists such as Cuarón, the Coens, and Martin Scorsese (who’s working on Netflix’s The Irishman, slated for a 2019 release). These directors make their movies to be seen in theaters—that is, and always will be, an intrinsic part of the medium, no matter how fancy televisions become. It’s not just about the size of the screen or the power of the speakers, but also about being cloistered in a space where you can’t look away, pause the action, or easily distract yourself with other devices.
If Roma scoops up some serious Oscar nominations (or even wins one or more statues), Netflix’s breaking its ultimate rule will have paid off. Garnering that kind of industry prestige will draw in other desirable filmmakers as the company presses forward in its efforts to become a major movie studio. A cessation of hostilities with theaters was the first step toward that goal, but more adventurous, big-screen storytelling from great directors may come next.
At the end of October, after the New York Giants had stumbled off to their second consecutive 1–6 start, the freshman general manager Dave Gettleman posted a figurative estate-sale sign on the team’s locker-room door and challenged his fellow GMs to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. With the October 25 deadline looming on the most hectic mid-season trade period in recent memory, Gettleman shipped Damon Harrison (an All-Pro defensive tackle playing the third year of a five-year, $46 million free-agent pact) to Detroit in exchange for a fifth-round pick in next spring’s NFL draft.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Gettleman also sent Eli Apple (an underachieving cornerback whom the Giants scooped up with the 10th overall selection in 2016) to New Orleans and yielded fourth- and seventh-round draft choices in that bargain, which pro-football followers greeted with a fair amount of head scratching at first. The longer the news lingered without a correction, the more Giants supporters and skeptics agreed: They traded away the wrong Eli.
Pity Eli Manning, maybe the least respected good quarterback there ever was. Despite his impeccable gridiron pedigree (Archie Manning, the much-beloved former Saints quarterback, is his father; Peyton Manning, the five-time league MVP and two-time Super Bowl champion, is his older brother), the 37-year-old Giants signal caller has never quite fit the role of fair-haired cornerstone to one of the NFL’s blue-blooded franchises. Who could forget how he barged into New York after a record-setting tear at Ole Miss, spurned the San Diego Chargers (the team that would pick him first in the ’04 draft), and forced one of the most consequential trades in NFL history?
[Read: The sheer absurdity of favoring Eli Manning over Peyton Manning]
From there followed four uneven seasons of drive-killing sacks and soul-crushing turnovers, each new error in judgment twisting Manning’s oft-ruddy game face into eminently meme-worthy expressions of slack-jawed bemusement. Even Tiki Barber, the Giants’ all-time rushing leader and a former teammate of Manning’s, piled on, describing one of the QB’s early attempts to take charge of an offensive meeting as “comical.”
Jump-cut to late in the 2007 NFL season: Just when it appeared as if regard for Manning couldn’t sink any lower, he led the Giants to four consecutive road playoff victories. They then defeated the unbeaten New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII in one of the biggest upsets in sports, with Manning making the play of the game on an improvised 32-yard heave, aka “the helmet catch.” And when his time-capsule-worthy moment seemed in danger of fading from memory as the Giants missed the playoffs in the next two seasons, and Manning’s humble claim to elite quarterback status became fodder for debate, he sparked another late-season win streak and shocked the Patriots—again—in Super Bowl XLVI.
It was in the wake of this heart-stopping performance, after which Manning was voted MVP of the championship game for a second time, that the conversation around Archie’s son and Peyton’s kid brother started to shift. ESPN’s Trent Dilfer hailed the Giants’ signal caller as “the poster boy for what a Hall of Fame quarterback should be,” while Manning’s NFL peers ranked him 31st among the league’s top 100 players for 2012, after leaving him off the list entirely in previous years. Even Manning’s nagging habit of underthrowing his receivers was reframed as the reboot of a once-trendy football fashion: the back shoulder pass.
The honeymoon lasted until the 2013 season. As if throwing a league-leading 27 interceptions as the Giants missed the playoffs after yet another 1–6 start weren’t bad enough, Manning was sued in 2014 by a group of memorabilia collectors who charged him with hawking fake “game-worn” helmets and jerseys. (The case was settled out of court last spring.) That annus horribilis could have been motivation for the Giants to start making serious plans for the future; instead, they doubled down, betting that Manning could enjoy the same late-career resurgence that his brother had in Denver.
[Read: The NFL off-season is full of quarterbacks. ]
And so the Giants paired Manning with a slick new play-caller named Ben McAdoo, and for a while the two worked well together. So well, in fact, that Manning—whose accuracy and touchdown-to-interception ratio improved so dramatically over the next two seasons that the Giants re-signed him to a four-year, $84 million extension in 2015 that also included a no-trade clause—recommended McAdoo for a promotion to head coach for the 2016 season. McAdoo would later repay this loyalty by dealing Manning the most stinging humiliation of his career.
After going from 11 wins his first year as head coach to a 2–9 start in 2017, McAdoo did the inconceivable: Not only did he bench Manning—who at the time boasted more consecutive appearances in the starting lineup than any other active NFL player—but he sat Manning for Geno Smith, a dual-threat quarterback who’d already flamed out spectacularly with the New York Jets. “It’s been a hard day to handle this,” a near-tears Manning told reporters upon learning of his demotion, “but [I’ll] hang in there and figure it out.”
And while that decision wound up getting McAdoo fired, along with the general manager Jerry Reese, many now argue they made the right call, citing Manning’s halting ability to exploit the rookie running back Saquon Barkley and the veteran wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. as proof. (The obvious subtext of this argument: Manning can’t throw it deep anymore.) Foremost among these second-guessers is Beckham, the three-time Pro Bowler who, in an ESPN interview on October 7 (with the rapper Lil Wayne at his side for some reason), insinuated that Manning was holding the team back. The Giants’ coach, Pat Shurmur, was quick to scuttle that theory and fine Beckham for his comments, but two weeks later, Shurmur was caught by ESPN cameras yelling “Throw it to Odell!” after Manning missed a clear chance to throw a touchdown to him in a game in which they were trailing by seven.
All that said, Beckham, and those aforementioned wisenheimers who say the Giants traded the wrong Eli, have it backwards. While it’s true that OBJ and Barkley rate among the league’s most explosive one-two punches, it’s also true that the Giants have played Manning behind some truly appalling offensive lines over the course of his 15 seasons. The team’s recent efforts to patch its protection holes—selecting the hulking Ereck Flowers ninth in the 2015 draft, signing Tom Brady protector Nate Solder to a four-year, $62 million contract in March—have thus far resulted in Manning getting sacked a league-high 31 times through eight games. Meanwhile, Barkley has rushed only for more than 100 yards in two games.
What’s more, the Giants haven’t done Manning any favors by not adding any backup quarterbacks who might actually light a fire under him. Instead, they’ve signed guys like Smith and David Carr—former starters who have buckled under pressure time and again. The leadership touted fourth-round rookie Kyle Lauletta and then, when he was arrested during the team’s bye week for nearly running over a police officer, moved on to hyping seventh-year journeyman Alex Tanney. If anyone’s holding the Giants back right now, it’s owners John Mara and Steve Tisch, for not trusting the process. (Likely, Manning doesn’t get benched and then reinstated without their say-so.) And it’s Gettleman, who had a ripe opportunity to find Manning’s replacement in this year’s draft but instead added Barkley, an incandescent talent who nonetheless plays a position with the league’s worst shelf life.
The Giants, despite Gettleman’s recent maneuvering, don’t figure to land a worthwhile Manning successor (or even a credible challenger) anytime soon. The 2019 draft already has pro quarterback evaluators “terrified.” In the past two years, they’ve seen seven of the best prospects for that draft leave school early. Many of those standouts who would have been in the class of 2019—like Mitchell Trubisky, Deshaun Watson, and Patrick Mahomes—have already gone on to become marquee NFL stars (in Chicago, Houston, and Kansas City, respectively). The three most intriguing prospects that remain—Oregon’s Justin Herbert, Missouri’s Drew Lock, and Auburn’s Jarrett Stidham—are still under-seasoned, scouts say. The best veteran quarterbacks all signed lavish free-agent deals last spring. And any attempt to move on from Manning before next season would cost the Giants at least $6.2 million in “dead” salary-cap commitments. Granted, that’s peanuts in the grand scheme of the team’s $164 million 2019 spending budget. But it’s enough to discourage the Giants from off-loading their most important player without a viable alternative.
New York might be stuck with Manning for at least another season, but is that such a bad thing? He has his coach’s support and a fresh vote of confidence from Mara. In other words, this is fine. For all of Manning’s obvious faults, no one can say he fell short of expectations. If anything, you can argue he had a better career than his more statistically prolific older brother (who could never quite solve the Patriots and was a loser in two Super Bowls), simply because he made more of his potential. Manning beat Tom Brady in the Super Bowl twice. And he’s brought home more Super Bowls than any other New York QB. Anything beyond that should be considered a bonus.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz.—After the 2016 election, Anna French gave up on politics. The 28-year-old had been in the Javits Center in New York City on election night to hear Hillary Clinton give her victory speech. She was deeply involved in nonprofit circles focused on women’s rights and international development; she and her friends had spent the months leading up to the election trading updates about the landmark presidential race.
Then, Clinton lost. “At that point, I had kind of lost hope, like it was a lost cause,” French told me. “I always felt like my vote didn’t count, even though I voted. I always felt like politicians are all the same.”
So when her mom, Felicia, floated the idea of running for the Arizona statehouse in 2018, well: “I just didn’t think it was a good idea,” she said. Her mom is always “very optimistic and idealistic,” she said. “I guess I was afraid that politics would be the thing that finally ruined that about her.”
Despite her daughter’s objections, Felicia French decided to run. At first, Anna agreed to help her out for a few weeks, which turned into a few months. Then she was hooked. “The further we went on the campaign, the more energized I got,” Anna said. “The people we were meeting … saw my mom as this person who could really create positive change.” The more she saw other people getting excited about a state-level election, she said, “the more I realized: Well, maybe this is the way we change it.”
Elections on this level have a different feel than multimillion-dollar national races. Candidates are less polished. Many of the issues are more immediate. With margins of victory sometimes as close as a couple hundred votes, it’s easier to imagine that every ballot could determine the outcome of races.
But for all the inspiration that state- and local-level elections might offer, candidates also face extraordinary challenges—including having to argue that their races actually matter. National issues seem to have become the center of American politics, expanding to take over even the most parochial races.
This year, a slew of organizations, volunteers, and nominees have tried to refocus voters’ attention on what’s happening in their states and towns. To succeed, they’ll have to transform an entire political culture in which voters are obsessively focused on Washington, intensely tribalized, and essentially ignorant of how government can powerfully shape their lives, starting at the statehouse.
Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to evangelize his view that “all politics is local,” but these days, it often seems like all politics is national. Local news coverage has collapsed and become increasingly centralized. President Donald Trump is at the center of every cable-news story. Research suggests that voters are less engaged and informed on local issues than national ones. And according to organizations working to influence state- and local-level races this year, faraway scandals have often been the central conversation when local candidates knock on voters’ doors.
A local Sedona artist, Polly Cullen, reached out to French after being inspired by her campaign and offered to create a piece of art for her. (Courtesy of Polly Cullen)In the rural areas of north-central Arizona, people often start political conversations with, “I’m a Republican, but …” according to French, who is running for the statehouse there as a Democrat. A lot of people are upset about state-level issues: Arizona’s low-ranked schools, for example, or the possibility that areas around the Grand Canyon will be opened up to uranium mining. But when French attends events, many people also share their perspectives on national issues that she would never be involved in as a state legislator: the way the U.S. Senate handled the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, or the Trump administration’s decision to separate parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s become worse and worse as the campaign goes on,” French said. “It does suck the oxygen, so to speak, out of the issues that we can [affect].”
[Read: Fighting for the right to vote in a tiny Texas county]
This year, national groups—especially on the left—have poured unprecedented resources into state and local elections. One of these organizations, Future Now Fund, has become a major funder in five states, including Arizona. “For years, narrow special interests have focused on states and it’s poisoned our entire democracy,” said Daniel Squadron, a former state senator in New York who runs the group. “We aren’t going to win the argument at cocktail parties in Washington, D.C. We’ll win it in state capitols like Phoenix by electing good people who are actually interested in improving lives.”
For Democrats in particular, this is a huge culture shift: Even before he left office, former President Barack Obama had started talking about Democrats’ fatal neglect of nonnational races—something for which he is partly blamed. According to the historian Julian Zelizer, Democrats lost upwards of 1,000 governorships and seats in state and federal legislatures during Obama’s time in office.
The premise of federalism is that government works best when it’s functioning at levels big and small; that politicians can be most effective and accountable when they are close to the people they represent. In practice, it can be difficult to see evidence of the connection between local politicians and their constituents—and easy to see why so many people seem to prefer national battles over state-level politics.
When French retired as an Army colonel in 2010 after 32 years as a nurse, a medevac helicopter pilot, and a senior medical adviser, she took on part-time gigs as a community-college instructor and a hospice nurse, and she volunteered for a regional search-and-rescue team. The 58-year-old has pepper-gray hair and an athletic build, and talks 10 times faster than she drives; she’s a rule follower, full of energy and newly found political fire.
In the past, French has been involved with environmental-advocacy efforts, and she has a special passion for endangered species like the Mexican gray wolf. But two summers ago, she decided to attend a boot camp hosted by a group called Emerge America, which trains women who are interested in becoming political candidates. The organizers were impressed by her résumé, and particularly her experience flying helicopters; for a while, she was the only woman in her flight-school class. Lead with that, French remembers them saying. “That’s badass.”
French long considered herself a Goldwater Republican: a career in the military, a fan of Ronald Reagan, proudly fiscally conservative. She switched her voter registration to independent around the time of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which she was deployed: She saw those wars as wasteful, she said, and by that point, “the Republican Party [had] left me,” particularly on climate and environmental issues. She only became a Democrat once she decided to run, because it made more sense to get the backing of a party.
Republicans hold all three state-legislature seats in Arizona’s sixth legislative district. In each district, voters can choose two candidates for the state House and one for the state Senate, and nominees from the same party will often run as a slate. The sixth is one of a handful of Arizona districts identified by Future Now Fund and other groups as potentially flippable in 2018. The district strongly leans Republican, but roughly one-third of voters aren’t registered with any party. That’s who French and her campaign have been trying to reach over more than a year of campaigning: the persuadable voters in the middle.
[Read: The midterms could permanently change North Carolina politics.]
From the beginning, French set the goal of reaching every part of her district, including tiny townships with barely 200 residents. When she’d visit rural areas, “people were shocked to see a candidate out there,” she said. Many people have no idea who their state representatives are, or even what their state legislators do; French has become an evangelist for voter registration. Especially in rural areas, she often asks conservative voters whether another candidate for statehouse has ever knocked on their door. No one has ever said yes, she told me.
As French has discovered, campaigning in a district like this is brutal. LD-6 stretches over a vast, Y-shaped area reaching from regions well below her rural hometown of Pine all the way up to the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. Traveling to different sections can take hours and hours of driving time. In the past, this has not been the “chosen district” for the state party, said one of French’s campaign managers, Sharon Edgar: The Democratic Party tends to pour its energy into the districts surrounding Phoenix, where a majority of its voters live. In the half-decade since the state’s districts were redrawn, the party has never been able to convince a Democrat to run here twice.
French has gotten some help from the state party: The Arizona Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, or ADLCC, sent several field organizers to her district. But she and the party have also disagreed. A party official advised French to refrain from listing her two master’s degrees and academic qualifications on her campaign materials, saying it would be “intimidating” or “not relatable” to the average person in the district. (French and her daughter said no.) The party also put a lot of pressure on French to do “call time,” which involves reaching out to potential donors and asking for money. After a few months of this, French flat-out refused to keep fund-raising this way, describing it as “demeaning.” She got by using money out of her military pension and attending house parties hosted by friends of friends of friends. According to state filing records, French has raised more than $135,000—more than four times as much as her opponent, the Republican incumbent, Bob Thorpe.
The past 14 months have been overwhelming, French said: “I haven’t had a day off since last year.” She has quit her two jobs, lost money on car mileage and meals, and faced her first attack ad. Normal life is impossible: She has no time for laundry or home repairs or grocery shopping. On her bad days, French often wonders to herself, “‘Why didn’t I just volunteer with Doctors Without Borders?’”
Still, despite everything, she would do it all again: She has pledged to run at least one more time, no matter what.
Felicia French and her daughter, Anna (Courtesy of Felicia French)There is an undeniable level of hype around the 2018 midterm elections. Huge numbers of first-time candidates, including women and people of color, are running for office this year. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into high-profile national races. And people who typically sit out non-presidential-election years, like young people, may turn out to vote in record numbers.
While some of this energy has been directed down to state- and local-level races, the infrastructure for supporting candidates for those offices tends to be much weaker than for those at the national level. Charlie Fisher, the head of the ADLCC, said his organization has only existed in its current form for two cycles: “Most progressives will concede that we really took our eye off the ball during the Obama years on the legislative level, and on the state level, period,” he said.
This year, roughly 30 ADLCC staffers are supporting candidates in six potentially competitive legislative districts, Fisher said. But it can be a struggle to get voters to connect, he added: “The national narrative gets so much airtime.” When cable-news networks give 24/7 coverage to big stories like the Kavanaugh hearings, he said, “folks tune in to that. And that’s where you get the national bleed into more localized conversations.”
French has benefited from some of these organizing efforts: She’s gotten a lot of small donations and support through the Sister District project, a progressive organization that often pairs volunteers in deep-blue states like California with candidates in contested districts. She has also been endorsed by national organizations like EMILY’s List and the AFL-CIO, which has brought in cash and other resources.
[Read: The reasons why Democrats have neglected local politics]
In October, a liberal think tank called Data for Progress selected another LD-6 Democrat, Wade Carlisle, for a list of candidates who would flip their districts if they won. The idea was to help fired-up Democrats direct their money more effectively: “People know instinctively, yes, I should do more stuff in my state. But no one knows what … they’re supposed to do,” said Sean McElwee, who helped organize the effort. Literally overnight, money from around the country flooded in to support Carlisle’s race, along with eight others on the initial list. “In one day, for a lot of these candidates, we have raised half of the money that they’ve raised the entire cycle,” McElwee said. “The marginal gains to be had from investing in these races are massive.”
Nothing went to French or to the other LD-6 Democrat running for the state House of Representatives, Bobby Tyler. Over the past year, French has out-raised both of her male running mates, likely in part because they both had to keep their jobs and she was able to quit hers. “Wade and Bobby are like brothers to me,” French said. “Just like any siblings, sometimes they get a little bit ahead, and you kind of wonder why, just like siblings do. But Wade needed the money.” The money came without any heads-up to the ADLCC. “I was, to be totally honest, a little surprised by that,” said Fisher, the head of the group. The whole episode seemed like an on-the-nose metaphor for the shaky bridge between local and national Democrats this year: The passion and energy are there, but the organization and infrastructure may need work.
On a recent autumn night in Flagstaff, Democrats gathered at a community center to celebrate some of the women running for office in 2018. French was invited to speak; although her comments were impromptu, she was comfortable and confident telling her story in front of the small crowd. After her remarks, the guests settled in for the second part of the event, which involved watching campaign videos of first-time female candidates. All of them were running for U.S. Congress, except for Stacey Abrams in the Georgia gubernatorial race, and January Contreras, who’s running for Arizona attorney general. French was there, at the bottom of the list, the sole statehouse candidate represented. Perhaps she made the list because she showed up like she always does, ready to shake one more hand.
Both French and her daughter are nervous about losing. “A big part of me is going to feel like I wasted a year,” Anna said. “It will be a blow, not just because it’s my mom, not just because I put all of these man-hours into it … I want to believe, like my mom, that we’re making progress socially.” Over fish tacos with Edgar, earlier that day, Felicia had confessed to feeling similarly: She told me she didn’t want to disappoint all the people who supported her with their time and money and votes. But this time won’t be wasted, Edgar assured her. The ground has been laid.
ATLANTA—Virtually every inch of the Forbes Arena at Morehouse College here was filled on Friday night when former President Barack Obama headlined a raucous campaign rally for Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who’s bidding to become Georgia’s first black governor.
But amid the mass of supporters, who filled the place to the rafters in every direction, the crowded hall still had room for a flock of ghosts from the civil-rights era.
Speakers conjured the names of Rosa Parks, who inspired the Montgomery Bus boycott; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, the three young volunteers murdered while trying to register black voters in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964; and Martin Luther King Jr., Morehouse’s most famous alumnus. Several summoned the memory of the 1965 march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, a connection made more visceral by the presence at the rally of Democratic Representative John Lewis, whose skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers after he led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
“I gave a little blood on that bridge in Selma,” Lewis reminded the audience at one point. “I almost died.”
This past was even more present than usual at Morehouse, a historically black college considered one of the cradles of the civil-rights movement, because the widening array of conflicts over voting rights in Georgia have revived memories of those fierce battles half a century ago. As Obama told the cheering crowd, “We have been at these kinds of crossroads before.”
More than any other contest this year, the Georgia governor’s race shows how, in a nation growing rapidly more diverse, the battle over access to the voting booth has reemerged as a central front in the struggle for equal rights.
[Read: Stacey Abrams’s prescription for a maternal-health crisis]
On one side is Abrams, a former Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives who is banking much of her campaign strategy on mobilizing large numbers of young and nonwhite voters who don’t usually turn out.
On the other side is the Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, who has faced a steady stream of lawsuits over policies that critics charge are unfairly disenfranchising voters, especially minorities and the poor. On Friday alone, separate federal courts ruled for advocacy groups in two different challenges they’d filed against local voting rules.
With polls consistently showing a virtual dead heat in the governor’s race, a narrow Kemp victory on Tuesday may ignite cries of outrage from many Democrats who believe that the state’s restrictive voting laws, and Kemp’s own decisions in implementing them, gave him a thumb on the scale. Kemp raised more red flags on Sunday when his office announced that it was investigating the state Democratic Party for unspecified “cyber crimes”—an allegation that Democrats immediately dismissed as “scurrilous” and an “abuse of power.”
However the election turns out, it has offered a chilling vision of an intensifying collision: between a Democratic coalition increasingly reliant on mobilizing minority voters and a preponderantly white Republican coalition determined to maintain strict limits on voting access on the grounds of preventing alleged fraud. The conflict is so intense that the state Democratic Party has hired what it believes to be the nation’s first full-time director of voter protection, who supervises a team of volunteer attorneys.
Kemp has refused calls (from former president and former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, among others) to step aside from his secretary of state position during the race, and he dismisses charges of voter suppression as a fabrication intended to motivate Democratic voters. “This farce about voter suppression … is absolutely not true,” he declared when the candidates debated late last month.
Despite all the questions over voter access, Georgia, like many states, is clearly heading for a very high turnout in Tuesday’s election. Almost 2.1 million people voted in the early balloting that ended Friday night, and that number is likely to drift slightly higher as the final absentee ballots arrive through Tuesday. That’s well over double the nearly 940,000 people who cast early ballots during the last midterm election in 2014. Georgia Votes, a website that tracks the statistics, reports that more than 785,000 of the early voters this year—nearly 38 percent—did not vote at all in 2014. Engaging those irregular voters has been a top priority of Abrams’s campaign. “That’s where we particularly look and we like what we are seeing,” says Seth Bringman, a spokesman for the Georgia Democratic Party.
Georgia’s early vote, in fact, is approaching the total number of votes cast through Election Day in 2014—roughly 2.6 million—suggesting that turnout in this election will vastly exceed the overall 2014 level. If neither candidate reaches 50 percent of the vote, which is possible given the presence of a libertarian candidate in the race, they will face an early December runoff under state law.
[Read: Voter suppression is the new old normal]
Even with this high level of participation, groups that monitor voting rights argue that Georgia has cultivated a thicket of obstacles obstructing other voters who want to participate. Under unified GOP control of the governorship and the state legislature, Georgia has been near the forefront of the Republican-led states that have erected a dizzying array of voting restrictions since 2010. That movement intensified after five GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices in 2013 struck down the requirement in the Voting Rights Act that the Justice Department approve voting-law changes in states and local jurisdictions with a history of discrimination. “Everything in the voter-suppression toolkit is in place in Georgia,” Andrea Young, the executive director of the state’s American Civil Liberties Union, told me.
New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice recently cataloged a list of Georgia policies that it says restrict voting access. Among them:
Interference with voter-registration drives: Before the 2014 election, Kemp’s office conducted an extensive investigation into New Georgia Project, a voter-registration group founded by Abrams in 2013, that critics said was intended to disrupt its operations. (The last-minute investigation of state Democrats that he announced Sunday is prompting similar concerns.) Later, New Georgia Project sued him when his office refused to process about 40,000 registration applications; the case was dismissed in October 2014, though the project did reach settlements with some of the affected counties. Aggressive purges of voter rolls: According to the Brennan Center’s calculations, from 2012 through 2016, Georgia purged 1.5 million people from voter rolls, twice as many as from 2008 to 2012. More recent figures show that the state has purged about one in 10 of its voters since 2016. Voting experts caution that not everyone purged is removed unfairly, but they contend that Kemp’s office has excised too many voters too indiscriminately. “In Georgia, the burden is constantly on the citizen to maintain their registration,” Young says. The state’s voter-identification law: Considered one of the nation’s strictest, it creates disproportionate hurdles for low-income voters, critics charge. Passed in 2005, the law went into effect in 2008 after a series of court challenges. The “exact match” law: The element of Georgia voting law that’s drawn the most attention has been the requirement that information on the voter-registration rolls exactly match existing state records. Any discrepancy, such as a misplaced hyphen in someone’s name, can result in a voter being placed on a pending list. About 50,000 Georgians, more than two-thirds of them black, are now in this position. And though the law allows them to cast a ballot if they provide identification at the polls, the concern is that their uncertain status may discourage them from voting—or that misinformed poll workers will prevent them from doing so. One of Friday’s federal court rulings overturned one aspect of the exact-match policy. Deciding against Kemp, District Judge Eleanor Ross ruled that new U.S. citizens placed into pending status because of discrepancies in state records must be allowed to vote if they show proof of citizenship, such as a passport. Other obstacles: The ACLU threatened legal action against officials in Randolph County after they attempted to close seven of the county’s nine polling places. The ACLU (on behalf of the Georgia Muslim Voter Project) also won the other suit decided on Friday: Over Kemp’s objections, a federal appeals court required county registrars to provide voters a chance to appeal if officials reject an absentee ballot because they believe that the signature on it does not match the corresponding registration form. The suit came after Gwinnett County, a rapidly diversifying area outside Atlanta, was revealed to be rejecting about one in 11 absentee ballots, far more than the state average.For Andrea Young, the state ACLU director, these fights are a throwback to issues that she thought Georgia, and the South more broadly, had resolved long ago. Andrew Young, her father, was a civil rights-pioneer, and she participated in the Selma march as a 9-year-old. “I made a point” of walking myself, she told me, refusing offers to ride in a car or to be carried. Now, she’s stunned to find herself walking into court over comparable issues so many years after that march, which helped trigger the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965.
“I very much feel that I’m facing similar issues that we thought would be resolved by the Voting Rights Act,” she said. “John Lewis and I were talking to some students the other day, and I observed that [we] both marched in Selma. We never dreamed that 50 years later we would still be fighting the same battles, and so we just have to persevere.”
Most agree that the obstacles to voting in Georgia today aren’t nearly as great as the barriers, such as the poll tax, that virtually excluded black Americans in the South before the Voting Rights Act. But the sense that the region’s history of racial conflict and exclusion is resurfacing in new forms suffuses the final days of this nail-biting governor’s contest.
At Friday night’s Morehouse rally, Eric Holder, a former attorney general under Obama, explicitly linked the current fights over voting access in Georgia to the bloody struggles of the 1960s. Citing Lewis’s fractured skull at Selma and the murdered young civil-rights workers in Mississippi, Holder declared: “We have a responsibility to honor that legacy … We dishonor that sacrifice … if we don’t get out and vote. There is a debt we owe … That debt is paid each and every Election Day.”
On Saturday morning, Reverend William Barber II, who has led the Moral Mondays campaign in North Carolina, headlined a “Moral Revival for Voting Rights” rally in Atlanta, at a church directly across the street from the state capitol. Barber, a volcanic speaker with a tumbling cadence reminiscent of King’s, likewise presented the fight over ballot access as a new stage of the struggle from the 1960s.
[William Barber II: America’s moral malady]
“There’s a lot of black blood and white blood and brown blood that was shed for the right to vote,” he told an audience of roughly 150 people at the Central Presbyterian Church. “So when somebody tries to suppress, deny, or abridge your right to vote … they are starting a blood fight. Not a fight of violence, but we must remember the martyrs … Too many people died, too many people struggled, for all of us to have the right to vote.”
Barber went beyond Holder in likening Kemp—who has echoed insular, Donald Trump–like themes on immigration and other cultural issues—to Lester Maddox, the segregationist who served one term as Georgia’s governor in the late 1960s.
“Georgia has already had a governor with extreme, radical, race-driven views,” Barber declared. “Lester Maddox was his name, and it didn’t work then. And Georgia doesn’t need any full or partial return to gubernatorial leadership that promotes discrimination, voter suppression, denial of health care, and blocking of common-sense gun control. You already had that, and it didn’t work then. Backwards is not where Georgia needs to go.”
Barber’s tough comparison might strike even some Democrats as too harsh. But his sharp words reflect the widespread sense in both parties that the Trump era is reopening questions about inclusion and civil rights, particularly access to the polls, that many thought had long been decided.
The conflict is growing as more Democrats, like Abrams, are centering their electoral strategy on maximizing registration and turnout among diverse voters—and as more Republicans, like Kemp, are adopting Trump-style racial appeals to white voters uneasy about those demographic changes. On Sunday, Kemp appealed more openly than ever to racial resentments by tweeting a photo of five black men, two of them carrying automatic rifles and others holding Abrams campaign signs, that he said were members of the “New Black
Panther Party.” Retweet, Kemp wrote, “if you agree that Abrams & the Black Panthers are TOO EXTREME for GA!” The heightened tension here this year may be only a preview of what’s ahead as inimical Democratic and Republican forces collide, not only in the South but in all corners of the country.
In an interview after his speech, Barber said that he believed the intensity of Republicans’ actions on voting rights reflects their awareness that the nation’s steadily changing demography will threaten their political strength. In Georgia, for example, demographer William Frey projects that as soon as 2020, minorities will represent a majority of the population under 30. These Republicans “know the handwriting is on the wall,” Barber told me. “In South Africa, they used to say, ‘Only a dying mule kicks the hardest.’ So that’s what you are seeing.”
For some who lived through the South’s convulsions in the civil-rights era, that’s a portrait of the future that too closely resembles the past. Cora Jane Pope, a white woman who grew up in Arkansas under segregation and now lives in Atlanta, was one of those in the pews for Barber’s rally. “He moved me to tears,” she said, “because I thought, Why are we doing this now? We’ve been doing this since the 1950s. I thought by now we’d be done.”
You’re on a plane. You’re on a train. You’re wheeling through American space, and you’re feeling it: the hum of the void, the up-for-grabs-ness of it all. Out here there’s no protection. Good customer service, if you’re lucky, but no protection. Out here there is only the crackling feral mind: dominance, appetite, predation, pitiless allegiance to the pack. Who are you going to read, in this condition? Henry James? No. You’re going to read Lee Child.
Rune FiskerSomeone, somewhere, buys one of Child’s Jack Reacher crime thrillers every 13 seconds. This is a celebrated factoid, and I believe it. An atmosphere of pullulating need surrounds these productions. At transportation hubs across the country, they are clutched and consumed by Americans in motion. Child, the pusher, bangs out a book a year. Born James Grant and raised in Birmingham, England, he went to J. R. R. Tolkien’s old school, and has seen Waiting for Godot at least 39 times. He has an industrial caffeine habit, and he smokes like a chimney. Heavy schedule, heavy fuel. Andy Martin’s fascinating Reacher Said Nothing, in which he literally sits in a room and watches Child write a Reacher novel, is also an account of him sitting in a room and watching Child go through coffee and cigarettes: 20-ish cups, a pack a day. And then, as the word count—and the pace—increases, sugar: Snickers bars and bowls of Sugar Smacks.
I read my first Reacher book along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, between New York and Boston, and I remember nothing about it except a sensation of empty velocity (with just a hint of train-clatter). It ran through me, leaving a clean and brilliant hole. Jack Reacher is a former military policeman turned super-drifter who roams America with only a toothbrush and the clothes he’s standing up in. Bus station to bus station, diner to diner. Nothing slows him down except a plot, because Reacher is a man for whom the phrase moral compass was invented: His code determines his direction. Where dwells unrighteousness, where redress is demanded, there goes Reacher. In The Midnight Line, it’s the glint of a West Point class ring in a pawnshop window, on “the sad side of a small town,” that detains him. The ring is sized for a woman. What proud West Pointer, wonders Reacher (who went there himself), would pawn her class ring if she didn’t have to? Is there a woman in distress, under duress, somewhere nearby? He must look into it. Something might need to be straightened out. And so, like children going into the Black Forest, we enter the realm of story, holding Reacher’s huge and dangerous hand.
Reacher sleeps with tough, attractive women, and he bashes up bad guys. Hit men, dealers, bullies, bodyguards, psychopaths, gunrunners, goons. Whomever. An infinite succession of guys. In Make Me,
Reacher stepped in and kicked the left-hand guy full in the groin, before the guy’s gun was even halfway out of its holster, which meant the right-hand guy had time to get his all the way out, but to no avail, because the next event in his life was the arrival of Reacher’s elbow.Physically, Reacher is immensely skilled and powerful; mentally, he’s a kind of rogue vacancy, a fugue on legs, a field of glittering blank attention in which reality discovers itself, detail by detail. Approaching the house of a bad guy in Persuader, he notes the varying pitch of “a far-off sprinkler turning slowly and hissing against a soaked sidewalk through sixty degrees of its rotation.” In Die Trying, chained up in a barn by kidnappers, Reacher shuts his body down “like a beach house in winter” and turns his mind into “a huge black space for thinking in.” Remember the Grateful Dead song about the headlight on the northbound train, the one that shines its light through the cool Colorado rain? That’s Reacher.
DelacortePast Tense, published in November, is the 23rd Reacher novel. As usual, Reacher is arrowing across America, materially and spiritually unencumbered, when he gets ensnared in a genre: It could have been assassination thriller (Personal, Without Fail), homicide procedural (Running Blind), or gangster blowout (Persuader). But this time it’s horror: humans hunting humans, elitists with bows and arrows stalking unarmed proles in a wood. As usual, the plot includes stretches of psychedelic dullness, in which Reacher’s egoless absorption in a process or data set—his strange, beetling focus on something (the local census, in this case)—makes the page blossom with boredom. But we go along with it; we assent, dazedly, to this level of teeming specificity. Every Reacher book I’ve read is about 100 pages too long. Somehow, I don’t care.
Intermittently, Reacher has a feeling-tone like Jack Kerouac’s: road-saddened. (Samuel Beckett’s famous mise-en-scène for Godot—“A country road. A tree. Evening”—is, let’s face it, not un-Reacheresque.) Reacher knows, for example, the desolation of American interiors. On a motel room in Without Fail: “Floral drapes, already closed. A floral bedspread, Scotchgarded until it was practically rigid. No-color bamboo-weave stuff on the walls. A cheap print over the bed.” And he has a novelist’s eye for character. Hitchhiking, as he often does, in Past Tense, he is picked up by a guy in a Subaru wagon. The guy is wearing “pleated chino pants and a crisp khaki shirt,” and he has a wedding ring.
Dressed by his wife, Reacher thought … But under the fine fabrics was a workingman’s body. A thick neck and large red knuckles. The slightly surprised and somewhat reluctant boss of something, Reacher thought. The kind of guy who starts out digging post holes and ends up owning a fencing company.His sharpest sense is his hearing. Reacher’s ear is bestially acute. In Past Tense something wakes him in the night, a noise below the threshold of consciousness, giving rise to some wonderfully empty Reacher poetry: “He padded naked out of bed and checked the alley through the window. Nothing. No glint of raccoon, no ghostlike coyote, no eager dog.” The unnamed vibration—a cry for help?—has tweaked his “primitive cortex.” Reacher has an ear because Child has an ear. Also from Past Tense: “West was dead ahead. A faint gray acre of grass, and then a wall of trees, low and black beyond it.” Three e-sounds—west, dead, ahead—followed for symmetry by three a-sounds: faint, gray, acre. But the e-sounds are flat, and the a-sounds lengthen out, giving off a dim glow, a grassy phosphorescence, as the eye-beam diffuses in the darkness. That’s assonance, dude, like Wordsworth did it.
A rare moment of human error, from The Midnight Line:
Reacher heard the snap of a catch. Afterward he recalled a split second of fast chaotic thought, like his whole life was flashing before his eyes, except it wasn’t his whole life, merely his mistakes of the last thirty seconds, explained and analyzed and ridiculed and exaggerated to a ludicrous degree.Reacher thought the guy was unarmed. He thought the guy was beaten. Wrong, Reacher. But look. The error is watched, enjoyed almost—“ridiculed”—by an indestructible seed of observing consciousness: Reacher’s atman, if you like. His headlight in the Colorado rain. Where this light falls, where the beam goes, is determined by bits of personal history, bits of circumstance. Jack Reacher: a bare-bones, operational definition of a self.
American space is bristling against your window, electric with uncertainty. Like Henry Rollins said, post–Black Flag: You have to be part animal, part machine. You need the sensorium of a panther and a brain like a search engine. You need Jack Reacher. Thirteen seconds pass, and another Reacher book flies off the shelf. Lee Child takes another drag on his Camel filter. And another gulp of coffee. And then he types another line. Maybe he thinks about going to see Waiting for Godot one more time. Puff. Slurp. Tap-tap-tap. A country road, a tree. Repeat, repeat. Until we’ve all quit this loop, and are reading and moving no more.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “The Propulsive Appeal of Jack Reacher.”
When the psychologist Jessica Pryor lived near an internationally renowned university, she once saw a student walking into a library holding a sleeping bag and a coffee maker.
She’s heard of grad students spending 12 to 18 hours at a time in the lab. Their schedules are meant to be literally punishing: If they’re scientists-in-training, they won’t allow themselves to watch Netflix until their experiments start generating results. “Relationships become estranged—people stop inviting them to things, which leads them to spend even more time in the lab,” Pryor told me.
Along with other therapists, Pryor, who is now with the Family Institute at Northwestern University, is trying to sound the alarm about a tendency among young adults and college students to strive for perfection in their work—sometimes at any cost. Though it is often portrayed as a positive trait—a clever response to the “greatest weaknesses” question during job interviews, for instance—Pryor and others say extreme perfectionism can lead to depression, anxiety, and even suicidal ideation.
What’s more, perfectionism seems to be on the rise. In a study of thousands of American, Canadian, and British college students published earlier this year, Thomas Curran of the University of Bath and Andrew Hill of York St. John University found that today’s college students report higher levels of perfectionism than college students did during the 1990s or early 2000s. They measured three types of perfectionism: self-oriented, or a desire to be perfect; socially prescribed, or a desire to live up to others’ expectations; and other-oriented, or holding others to unrealistic standards. From 1989 to 2016, they found, self-oriented perfectionism scores increased by 10 percent, socially prescribed scores rose by 33 percent, and other-oriented perfectionism increased by 16 percent.
A person living with an other-oriented perfectionist might feel criticized by the perfectionist spouse for not doing household chores exactly the “right” way. “One of the most common things couples argue about is the proper way of loading the dishwasher,” says Amy Bach, a psychologist in Providence, Rhode Island.
Curran describes socially prescribed perfectionism as “My self-esteem is contingent on what other people think.” His study didn’t examine the causal reasons for its rise, but he posits that the rise of both standardized testing and social media might play a role. These days, LinkedIn alerts us when our rival gets a new job, and Instagram can let us know how well “liked” our lives are compared with a friend’s.
In an opinion piece earlier this year, Curran and Hill argue that society has also become more dog-eat-dog. “Over the last 50 years, communal interest and civic responsibility have been progressively eroded,” they write, “replaced by a focus on self-interest and competition in a supposedly free and open marketplace.” We strive for perfection, it seems, because we feel we must in order to get ahead.
Michael Brustein, a clinical psychologist in Manhattan, says when he first began practicing in 2007, he was surprised by how prevalent perfectionism was among his clients, despite how little his graduate training had focused on the phenomenon. He sees perfectionism in, among others, clients who are entrepreneurs, artists, and tech employees. “You’re in New York because you’re ambitious, you have this need to strive,” he says. “But then your whole identity gets wrapped into a goal.”
Perfectionism can, of course, be a positive force. Think of professional athletes, who train aggressively for ever-higher levels of competition. In well-adjusted perfectionism, someone who doesn’t get the gold is able to forget the setback and move on. In maladaptive perfectionism, meanwhile, people make an archive of all their failures. They revisit these archives constantly, thinking, as Pryor puts it, “I need to make myself feel terrible so I don’t do this again.”
Then they double down, “raising the expectation bar even higher, which increases the likelihood of defeat, which makes you self-critical, so you raise the bar higher, work even harder,” she says.
Next comes failure, shame, and pushing yourself even harder toward even higher and more impossible goals. Meeting them becomes an “all or nothing” premise. Pryor offered this example: “Even if I’m an incredible attorney, if I don’t make partner in the same pacing as one of my colleagues, clearly that means I’m a failure.”
Brustein says his perfectionist clients tend to devalue their accomplishments, so that every time a goal is achieved, the high lasts only a short time, like “a gas tank with a hole in it.” If the boss says you did a great job, it’s because he doesn’t know anything. If the audience likes your work, that’s because it’s too stupid to know what good art actually is.
But, therapists say, there are also different ways perfectionism manifests. Some perfectionists are the sleeping-bag-toting self-flagellants, always pushing themselves forward. But others actually fall behind on work, unable to complete assignments unless they’re, well, perfect. Or they might self-sabotage, handicapping their performance ahead of time. They’re the ones partying until 2 a.m. the night before the final, so that when the C rolls in, there’s a ready excuse. Anything to avoid facing your own imperfections.
[Read: Alcohol as escape from perfectionism]
While educators and parents have successfully convinced students of the need to be high performing and diligent, the experts told me, they haven’t adequately prepared them for the inevitability of failure. Instead of praises like “You’re so smart,” parents and educators should say things like “You really stuck with it,” Pryor says, to emphasize the value of tenacity over intrinsic talent.
Pryor notes that many of her clients are wary she’ll “turn them into some degenerate couch potato and teach them to be okay with it.” Instead, she tries to help them think through the parts of their perfectionism they’d like to keep, and to lose the parts that are ruining their lives.
Bach, who sees many students from Brown University, says some of them don’t even go out on weekends, let alone weekdays. She tells them, “Aim high, but get comfortable with good enough.” When they don’t get some internship or award, she encourages them to remember that “one outcome is not a basis for a broad conclusion about the person’s intelligence, qualifications, or potential for the future.”
The treatment for perfectionism might be as simple as having patients keep logs of things they can be proud of, or having them behave imperfectly in small ways, just to see how it feels. “We might have them hang the towels crooked or wear some clothing inside out,” says Martin Antony, a professor in the department of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Brustein likes to get his perfectionist clients to create values that are important to them, then try to shift their focus to living according to those values rather than achieving specific goals. It’s a play on the “You really stuck with it” message for kids. In other words, it isn’t about doing a headstand in yoga class; it’s about going to yoga class in the first place, because you like to be the kind of person who takes care of herself.
But he warns that some people go into therapy expecting too much—an instant transformation of themselves from a pathological perfectionist to a (still high-achieving) non-perfectionist.
They try to be perfect, in other words, at no longer being perfect.
Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Dear Therapist,
My parents divorced when I was very young, and afterward my father began sexually abusing me, which went on for years. I never told anyone in my family, and once I moved away from home I cut all contact with my father. I’m in my late 20s now, and my life is significantly better without him in it.
The problem is that my not talking to my father has started to raise questions. Recently my mother brought up the fact that I haven’t spoken to him in years and said something to the effect of “What could he possibly have done?” On the one hand, I’ve been through enough counseling to feel that I don’t owe anyone an explanation for not wanting a toxic person in my life, and bringing it up now, 10-plus years after the fact, wouldn’t change what happened. I’m also not emotionally prepared for the level of uproar it would cause if I started talking about it (my family are fabulous gossips).
On the other hand, I wonder if I should come forward. Many members of my mother’s family still have a friendly (if not especially close) relationship with my father, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt me a little. My father has a new wife and new kids, and there’s certainly a vindictive part of me that wants to damage that under the guise of “They deserve to know.” I don’t have any reason to think my mother’s family wouldn’t believe me. And I know for a fact that there was at least one conversation between my mother, my father, and his mother about some concerns they had when I was in my early teens.
Should I let sleeping dogs lie, or is this secret something I need to share?
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
I’m so sorry that this happened to you, and I’m glad to hear that you’ve been able to talk about the abuse with a trusted therapist. I also sympathize with your current dilemma: Not telling anyone about a parent’s sexual abuse often makes the person feel even more alone in an already isolating experience, and tends to perpetuate the shame and confusion from the abuse even long after it has ended. At the same time, it can be difficult to decide whom to tell and why, because of some of the consequences you’ve anticipated in your letter. But whatever one chooses, because victims have such a lack of control during abuse, it’s important that they control the telling. In other words, this decision is about your comfort, a consideration that wasn’t given to you as a child. So let’s look at what would be helpful for you at this point in your life.
First, you’re right that you don’t owe anyone an explanation, but I don’t think that your choice is binary: say nothing or disclose everything. If you don’t offer any information to your family members about why you don’t speak to your father, they’ll probably fill in the blanks, often with inaccurate assumptions—that you’re angry about the divorce or that your father left and started another family; that you’re ungrateful; that you’re acting like a teenager in your 20s and will grow out of this in a few years. Whatever it is, you’re likely to be mischaracterized and misunderstood, blamed for something that isn’t your fault.
One option, if you’re not comfortable telling your family members about the abuse, is to give an explanation, revealing as much or as little as you’d like. You might say something like, “I know you want to know why I don’t talk to Dad. Please know that I’ve thought long and hard about this decision, but for reasons that are personal and that I’d rather not talk about—and that Dad is fully aware of—this is what I have to do. I hope you’ll respect my decision and trust that, even though I’d rather not share the details, it wasn’t a decision I made lightly.”
Remember that whatever you choose to say now doesn’t prevent you from sharing more information later. I say this because it’s clear from your letter that there’s also a part of you that wants your family members to know what happened. Yes, you want them to know what the man they remain friendly with did to you, and you want his new family to know as well, because it wouldn’t be fair for him to get away with his actions while you have been suffering their consequences. But I think you also want to come out of hiding and finally be seen after feeling so harrowingly unseen for all these years. It takes a lot of emotional energy to keep a painful secret, and when it comes to sexual abuse, the secret, like a toxic bond between the abuser and the abused, can keep you feeling imprisoned by the perpetrator’s power. In that way, the secret still controls you. But if the secret’s out, that bond is finally broken.
Of course, often in families—and it sounds like this might be the case in yours, given the conversation you mention—the secret isn’t a secret at all. Instead, a family culture exists in which keeping the secret protects not just the abuser, but the entire family system. Bringing the abuse to light threatens the status quo, and even if the family is split up, as yours is, keeping the secret could still preserve that equilibrium.
For instance, your mother or grandmother may not have wanted to believe any abuse was occurring, because as long as they told themselves that everything was fine, they wouldn’t have to report your father, which might have led to his conviction, a lack of child support, enormous embarrassment or shame in the community, or other consequences the family didn’t want to face. But in order to rationalize keeping the secret—in essence, sacrificing the victim—they pretend that the secret doesn’t exist.
I mention this because if you do tell your mother, it will help to first get clear about what you want her to know and why—and to be prepared if she’s unable or unwilling to give it you. For instance, do you have questions that you want answered, such as what your mother knew or suspected? Would you like her to express remorse in some way for not having done anything to protect you when she had concerns about what was going on? If she denies the conversation you mention, how do you want to respond? Would you like her to now stand by you and support you as you tell other family members (if that’s what you decide to do)? Do you wish that once you have this conversation, she and the rest of your family will also cut ties with your father and inform his new family of his abuse? How will you feel if they don’t?
These questions are important for you to answer because sometimes people hope that by telling the people who should have protected them, these people will take their heads out of the sand and provide some form of healing. Sometimes that happens, but in case it doesn’t, it helps to go into the conversation with a different orientation: that the telling is being done just for you—for the psychic relief in letting the secret out, and of not colluding in the family’s fiction but instead shedding the helplessness and taking action, of which this telling might just be a first step.
If you come around to that orientation, the question of whether and whom you should tell should seem easier to sort out. Maybe you’ll inform your family about the abuse, either gradually or all at once. Maybe you’ll consult an attorney and see what your options are (after all, there’s a chance that any children in his house are suffering as you did). Maybe a weight will be lifted by telling a trusted friend or romantic partner about your experience—somebody who doesn’t have stakes attached to believing you—and getting the supportive response you deserve. At this point in your life, you get to decide what you want to do with your experience, and as you continue to heal, that’s going to be far more important than how anyone in your family reacts to it.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
President Donald Trump’s low regard for the truth is, by now, well established. Yet his penchant for lying, about matters large and small, seems to be intensifying on the eve of a crucial election.
The Washington Post’s fact-checkers published their latest compilation two days ago, tallying 6,420 false or misleading claims in 649 days in office. That works out to almost 10 falsehoods a day. The president went into overdrive at his latest mega-rally, achieving in minutes what it normally takes him a full day to do.
[Read: What Trump doesn’t understand about the Central American caravan.]
In Chattanooga, before a packed stadium of hooting supporters, he began an animated, 45-minute oration this way: “This is one of the most important elections of our time. This is a big one. It will decide whether we build on the extraordinary prosperity that we’ve achieved for our nation or whether we let the radical Democrats take control of Congress and take a giant wrecking ball to our economy and our future.” And then came the misinformation:
“They want to raise your taxes by double and even by triple.” “They want to take away your health care [and] they want to impose socialism on our country.” “They want to erase America’s borders.” “Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal aliens to pour into our country.” “That’s an invasion of our country.”(Here, the crowd in excess of 10,000 people in the McKenzie Arena at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga began chanting: “Build that wall! Build that wall!”)
6. “The Democrats want to abolish ICE and turn America into a giant sanctuary city for gang members and MS-13 killers.”
7. “If Democrats gain power on Tuesday, they will try to raid your Medicare to fund socialism, you know that.”
8. “The Democrat health-care plan would obliterate Medicare and eliminate Medicare Advantage for more than half a million Tennessee seniors.”
9.“The Democrats’ plan to destroy health care also includes giving away your benefits to illegal immigrants, you know that.”
10. “As we speak, Democrats are openly encouraging millions of illegal aliens to break our laws, violate our borders, and destroy our nation in so many ways, and they want to sign them up for free welfare, free health care, free education and, most importantly, the right to vote. They want them to vote. Come on in and vote. They love them voting.”
11. “And Republicans will always protect patients with preexisting conditions. Please remember that.”
None of those claims is hard to debunk—but the last one, about Republicans always protecting preexisting conditions, speaks to a president and many other Republicans running for Congress who have simply become unmoored from the truth on health care, which polling shows is by far the No. 1 issue among voters.
Twenty Republican-led states are awaiting a federal-court ruling on a lawsuit aimed at demolishing the vestiges of the Affordable Care Act that remain in existence, including the hugely popular provision that prohibits insurance companies from denying insurance to people with serious medical problems or “preexisting conditions.” The Trump administration has filed a brief in support of the lawsuit. And just the other week, the administration issued a rule that makes it easier for states to begin offering watered-down insurance plans that do not include preexisting conditions, which some have begun doing.
[Read: The GOP is suddenly playing defense on health care]
But none of this has stopped Republican candidates for Congress in those 20 states, or the president himself, from claiming that Republicans will always protect the very thing they are now in court to abolish.
And so it went for Trump at the Chattanooga rally. In introducing Marsha Blackburn, the Republican Senate candidate from Tennessee, Trump said of her opponent, the moderate former Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen, who supported Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and has an A rating from the National Rifle Association:
“Marsha is running against a far-left liberal.” “The hand-picked candidate of Chuck Schumer.” (The two are not close.) “ Schumer begged Phil to run because he knows that Phil will always do what Schumer says and always, always do what Nancy Pelosi wants him to do. ” “Phil will block pro-Constitution judges.” “He will cut funding to our military and law enforcement.” “He will embrace a socialist takeover of health care.” “Phil totally supports the Democrats’ open-border madness.”“What’s that all about?” Trump finally said, ending his litany of Bredesen falsehoods. “If you want to stop the liberal agenda of high taxes and high crime, you need to vote for Marsha Blackburn.”
Trump’s prevarications are easier to count than to understand, in terms of their effectiveness as the election approaches. At his rallies, he is painfully easy to fact check. But among his base, as represented by those in attendance on Sunday night in Chattanooga, Trump’s performance played brilliantly and, among many, seemed to have been largely taken literally.
[Read: The 2018 midterms could kill the American moderate for good]
Leaving the rally for the 90-minute drive home to Knoxville, a couple who said they’d formerly registered as Democrats explained why they’re voting Republican. Kathy Kelly, a 52-year-old respiratory therapist, summed up her understanding of Democratic immigration policy: “It’s a free-for-all. Take everybody.” Her husband, the 62-year-old electrical system designer Steve Kelly, quickly added that “America is built on immigration” and later echoed Trump’s warning that many criminal migrants are coming to take free health care that American taxpayers will have to fund.
Kathy Kelly said she bet a lot of the 100 or 200 protesters outside the arena live in their parents’ basements, don’t work, and take welfare checks. “I would swear that some of them are being paid,” she said, echoing a common Trump line. They acknowledged they don’t have evidence to back up that assertion, but Steve Kelly brought up George Soros, the liberal billionaire donor who does fund Democratic political campaigns but is also targeted by pro-Trump and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.
After the rally, Kim and David Moore were sputtering with rage over what they saw as the press pen’s lack of respect for the president, citing faces that some among the TV reporters and camera operators made as Trump said the phrase “one nation under God.”
[Read: Why Trump is blaming the media down the homestretch]
The northern Georgia couple described concerns over what they believe Democrats want to do on immigration. “They don’t want border security,” said Kim Moore, a 50-year-old who works for an insurer coordinating Medicaid programs. “I think they would throw open the border,” said David Moore, a 48-year-old textile manager currently between jobs. They talked about the Trump administration’s family-separation policy as a reasonable response when parents break the law; they did not know that a first-time illegal border crossing is a civil rather than criminal violation, and they seemed to think all separated families had been caught crossing illegally, while many presented themselves to U.S. officials and asked for asylum.
How about health care? “They would give it away,” Kim Moore said, saying that Democrats want to pay for health care for people here illegally.
As Trump gets closer and closer to the election that could lead to his impeachment, he appears more and more willing to say anything, without regard for truth, to fire up his base. It worked for him in 2016, and, from the parking lots around the McKenzie Arena, it seemed to be working in Chattanooga. But it’s a risky strategy, because for every member of his base who believes the Democrats will destroy Medicare and allow undocumented immigrants to vote, the alarm bell rings even louder for Democrats. And independents who took a chance on Trump in 2016 no longer seem so willing to believe what obviously is not true.
This year, I voted in Texas for the first time. It was complicated.
Registering to vote was simple enough. The post office had a form I could print out with my personal information and change of address. Because I don’t own a car, I had to Lyft to the Bexar County Elections Department and turn in my registration. Although I was more than a week ahead of the deadline, the sheer number of new registrations meant that I was not in the system until weeks after the deadline had passed. I was able to check online and see that I was registered, although my registration card did not arrive until several weeks later.
Obtaining an ID was another matter. Texas has one of the strictest voter-ID laws in the country. It is very selective about which IDs are valid—the Republican-controlled state legislature determined that military IDs and gun licenses are fine, but employee and student IDs are not—and to vote I would have to obtain a Texas state ID. I could get a driver’s license if I turned in my license from Washington, D.C., from where I’d recently moved, and as long as I brought proof of citizenship, proof of my Social Security number, proof of identity, and proof of residency. So I brought along my passport, W-2s, bank statement, insurance statement, phone bill, and D.C. driver’s license. The employee at the Texas Department of Public Safety who signed the piece of paper that would serve as my temporary license was named “Borders”; he made a joke about not crossing him.
Texas billed me $35 for my new license; with transportation to and from DPS and the Bexar County elections office, the cost of my registering to vote in Texas topped $80.* For anyone who is missing any of those documents and would need to obtain them, the price would be far higher. I work from home, so I have the privilege of being able to visit these facilities during working hours, and I can afford both the cost of transportation and the necessary documents. I live in the city, so public facilities are not difficult for me to get to. For people with more traditional jobs or who have less disposable income, these barriers stand much higher.
[Read: Voter suppression is warping democracy]
Moreover, Texas has all but banned voter-registration drives, which is how many low-income and minority voters are registered, through laws that bar anyone but a deputy voter registrar in a particular county from registering voters in that county. If they tried to register a voter in another county, even they would be breaking the law. From trying to register to casting a ballot, it is hard to vote in Texas, maybe harder than in any other state.
That’s by design. Although Republican dominance of Texas long predates these new voting restrictions, their implementation is part of a national GOP strategy of maintaining political control through scorched-earth culture-war campaigns that target historically disfavored minorities and the disenfranchisement of the populations whose growth and influence could challenge that control. It is a consciously counter-majoritarian strategy for a party that wants to maintain its power indefinitely, even if most of the American electorate opposes it.
Immediately after the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Texas Republicans moved to implement a voter-ID law that would have the effect of making voting more difficult for Democratic-leaning constituencies. In 2014, a federal judge found that the law was an unconstitutional “poll tax” that deliberately discriminated against black and Latino voters, who were more likely to lack the required forms of ID or have a difficult time obtaining them. In response, the Texas legislature made the law slightly more lenient, allowing Texas residents to vote without ID if they sign a document stipulating, under penalty of arrest, that they faced a “reasonable impediment” in obtaining an ID. By 2018, the legal battle was over and Texas Republicans had won.
In-person voter fraud is rarer than getting struck by lightning. That said, the requirement that people prove their identity at the polls is reasonable. But there are many ways to do that even without requiring a photo ID—let alone skewing the list of acceptable IDs toward those that voters from one particular party are more likely to have. Under federal law, voters are required to prove their identity before voting in federal elections, but those requirements are more permissive than the ones adopted under strict photo ID laws, allowing voters to provide documents such as pay stubs and bank statements.
[Read: ]Voter suppression is the new old normal
“The reality is that in-person voter fraud is not a widespread problem. And the justification for these laws is really empty. And I think that’s a key part of the context here, when you think about the problem that the laws are designed to address,” said Max Feldman of the Brennan Center for Justice. “So with that background, though, I think that it’s important that the IDs required are widely accessible and are not possessed by one group at a significantly lesser rate than other groups.”
The Democrats’ defeat in 2016 ushered in a parade of pundits who argued that the party had failed because it had assumed demographics were destiny, and had relied too strongly on what they labeled “identity politics.” The truth is closer to the reverse. In Texas and other states, Republicans have sought to engineer the demographics of the electorate to be whiter and older, the better to run culture-war campaigns that scapegoat religious and ethnic minorities for the nation’s problems. The question is, how long can the Republican Party manipulate the political process to pursue an agenda on taxes, immigration, and health care that most of the country does not want?
“Texas has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country, and the elected officials who currently hold power want to keep it that way,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramírez, the director of Jolt, a Latino voting-rights group in the state. “They don’t want the people that make up this state to determine a new direction for Texas.”
Texas’s voter-ID law is part of that, but so is its redistricting process. The Texas delegation to Congress consists of two Republican senators, 25 Republican House members, and 11 Democratic House members. My cousin and I are both represented by Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat who has been in Congress so long that he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act and also voted to repeal it. My cousin lives in Austin; I live more than 70 miles away, in San Antonio. The district, two urban enclaves connected by a long, thin ribbon stretched between them, was ruled unconstitutional twice by federal courts, but was then upheld in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision this year. It is an obvious artifact of the effort to pack liberal whites and Latinos into one district, where they can’t threaten Republican dominance of the delegation.
[Read: How far have the Democrats moved to the left?]
“The Texas House, the Texas Senate, is majority Republican. The governor is Republican. The lieutenant governor is Republican. The attorney general is Republican. The whole state is a ‘red state.’ I’m not a politician, but it would make sense that these politicians who are in power would want to retain power,” said Edgar Saldivar of the Texas ACLU. “So what we’re seeing not just in Texas but across the country is an effort by state legislatures to make it more difficult for minorities, for poor people and people of color, to cast votes, because they might fear that they would lose power, if everyone had a fair and equal chance to vote.”
Texas’s population is 42 percent non-Hispanic white, or “anglo,” in Texas terms, and 40 percent Latino, but the electorate was 65 percent white in 2016, and only 21 percent Latino. White Texans are substantially more likely to be conservative, and Latinos are more likely to vote Democratic. The Latino population also skews younger, and younger people are less likely to vote. That helps explain the dominance of ultraconservative Republican lawmakers in the state: Texas’s electorate is far more conservative than its population as a whole. A majority of Texans (54 percent) believe that the federal government should ensure that all Americans have health-care coverage, for example, and Texans’ opinions on gun control, immigration, and abortion are more moderate than it might seem to outsiders. Texas has a reputation as a blood-red state, but if its electorate looked more like its population, it might be more of a light salmon.
So why don’t more Latinos vote? “There’s always this wrong perception of Latinos as the sleeping giant, when in reality it’s not Latinos’ fault that they’re not voting; it’s the party’s fault for not engaging Latino voters and making them see why they should vote,” said Emily Farris, a professor at Texas Christian University. “I think that’s true across the board, not just for Latinos but for a number of people.”
[Read: The next populist revolution will be Latino]
There’s also another, less-acknowledged factor in Republican dominance of Texas politics, alongside voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the failure of the Democratic Party to invest in engaging them. The economic barriers to voting in this state are so strong that it is simply harder for working people to vote, or to believe that if they do vote, their lives will change in meaningful ways.
“The government for a long period of time now has not reflected them or their values, and people need something to vote for,” Crystal Zermeño, the strategic director of the Texas Organizing Project, told me. “People are struggling in a state where it’s hard to be poor, it’s hard for them to see themselves in that process, when there’s not really a vision of what Texas can be.”
When liberals think about the future of Texas, they often look wistfully to California, whose demographics are broadly similar (its population is about 40 percent white and 40 percent Latino) in a reliably blue state. The California electorate is somewhat less white than that of Texas, with white voters casting 59 percent of ballots in 2016—but unlike in Texas, the white voting population is roughly evenly divided between moderates, liberals, and conservatives. California is toward the top of the list of states by voter turnout, while Texas lingers close to the bottom.
“We’re like evil twins,” said Sylvia Manzano, a voting expert at Latino Decisions. “Depending on who you ask, the other is the evil twin.”
[Read: Progressives rooting for a Latino surge might be disappointed]
I don’t mean to suggest that demographics are destiny—the differences between Texas and California illustrate the importance of organization, persuasion, and mobilization.
One of the key distinctions between California and Texas, activists and experts told me, is that while California Governor Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant initiative, Proposition 187, turned the state’s Latino voters against the Republican Party, until recently, Texas Republicans were considered moderate on immigration—the last U.S. president from Texas sought to pass legislation granting undocumented immigrants legal status, a proposal that would be a nonstarter in Trump’s GOP.
“Texas Republicans didn’t used to be that way. In fact, George W. Bush used to say, ‘I’m not going to be like California’ in reference to the hostile anti-immigration rules,” said Manzano. “It’s so interesting how saying ‘I’m not going to be like California’ has changed in terms of what that meant to a Republican politician in Texas.”
The mobilization against Prop 187 helped build a Latino turnout organization in the Golden State, while in Texas, neither party has made a similar organizational effort.
“There is more investment also in that state from progressives into voter registration and voter turnout that Texas does not yet have,” said Tzintzún Ramírez. “People compare us to California all the time and they say, ‘Oh, anti-immigrant laws were passed, and there was a backlash and the state turned blue,’ but what they don’t talk about is the long-term investment it took to make that happen.” The perception that the Democratic Party is waiting expectantly for Republican nativism to provoke a Latino voter boom, without ever investing in organizing the community, is a source of enduring frustration for the activists who work to increase Latino political participation. “[Beto] O’Rourke is doing as well as he is not because of the progressive infrastructure that has been built, but in spite of it,” said Tzintzún Ramírez.
[Beto O’Rourke grabbed a political third rail—and electrified his campaign]
Republican dominance of Texas, which traces back at least as far as 1994, the last time a Democrat held statewide office, predates the party’s recent push to restrict the franchise. But if the party believed that dominance would continue unchallenged indefinitely, those restrictions wouldn’t have been necessary. Demographics aren’t destiny, but the Republican Party has approached its counter-majoritarian social engineering under the assumption that they are.
“Texas is really emblematic of the rise of the Trump administration,” said Tzintzún Ramírez, “in that people are afraid that our demographics are changing, that people of color will become the majority nationally, and in Texas and California we already are.”
This is part of why Texas Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz are constantly invoking the specter of Texas turning into California—a more energized Latino electorate, and a more liberal, urban white population. Cruz once mocked his Democratic rival, Beto O’Rourke, by saying that Democrats “want us to be just like California, right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair."
It’s impossible to imagine a Democratic politician seeking statewide office mocking millions of people this way without it becoming a major scandal—think of the uproar over Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” remarks or Barack Obama saying Clinton’s primary voters were “clinging to guns and religion”—but Cruz’s remarks reflect his distinct fear that an influx of white liberals from California to Texas’ metropolises could blunt the Republicans’ advantage in the state. If Republicans believed that liberal-bashing could hold the state for them forever, they wouldn’t need to restrict the franchise. The highest percentage of Californians who leave the state go to Texas, and many of them have been younger and college educated. But it takes only one look at the Trump administration, whose most committed nativists have been Californians, to know that those leaving aren’t necessarily left-leaning.
Nevertheless, Cruz is already too late to stop silicon, tofu, and dyed hair from coming to Texas. There are two vegetarian restaurants in my neighborhood alone—and the last time I was at one of them, a group of uniformed military personnel came in and sat down at the table next to mine. The restaurant was bedecked with Texas iconography—including those ubiquitous signs with the Texan battle cry “Come and take it.” San Antonio has plenty of pickup trucks with Beto stickers, and homes with American flags on their porch and Beto signs in their yard. The liberal culture that Cruz and others consider antithetical to Texas is already here, and the synthesis exists without contradiction: It is inarguably blue, inarguably Texan, and not quarantined to Austin.
The red state–blue state dichotomy has always been reductive—every state has thousands, and in some cases millions, of people who fit the opposite mold. It is no coincidence that Barack Obama’s introduction on the national stage was a speech rejecting that very concept. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states,” Obama said at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. “We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.” It is such a simple sentiment—it feels almost dated in its charity and generosity—yet one that inarguably renders a picture of America closer to how it actually is than much political reporting or cable-news programming.
What makes this era different is the lengths to which Republican politicians are willing to go to set the rules to maintain their dominance in areas that are not as red as they would like them to be. The future of the Republican Party relies on its ability to prevent or deter people of color from exercising the franchise. And the more politicians manipulate the process, the more they need to reassure themselves that their voters are the only legitimate ones, that they would have won even if they hadn’t rigged the game.
“No matter whether a suppressive or discriminatory voting law ultimately affects the outcome of a race for political office: These laws can still be unconstitutional, and they still place a burden on people’s constitutional rights that should not be there,” said the Brennan Center’s Feldman. “That said, they can—excluding certain groups of people from the voting booth can obviously have an impact on what their representation looks like. And I think that at least some state legislators are well aware of that.”
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied to Congress about the process of adding immigration-status questions to the census; the questions stand to chill participation from Latinos and undercut Democratic-leaning areas. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, seeking a promotion to governor, engaged in one of the largest mass disenfranchisements in U.S. history, in an apparent attempt to blunt the influence of the Peach State’s black voters. Republican legislators in North Dakota, after an upset win by Democrat Heidi Heitkamp in the 2012 Senate race, passed a law designed to disenfranchise the Native American population that put her over the top. President Donald Trump, in a last-ditch effort to energize his base for the midterms, has promised to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, which would create a permanent, stateless, hereditary, nonvoting underclass for the first time since the nation abolished slavery.
Whatever happens on Tuesday, the Republican Party cannot govern forever with the support of a shrinking minority of the population. Eventually there will be a reckoning. Even in Texas.
* The original version of this story misstated the cost of a license in Texas. We regret the error.
San Francisco voters will decide in Tuesday’s election the fate of Proposition C, a measure that could generate $300 million in additional services for the homeless by increasing corporate taxes on the largest companies in the city. Contrary to expectations in one of the country’s most liberal cities, some progressive leaders are urging residents to vote no.
Historically, San Francisco has been at the forefront of liberal causes, such as the anti–Vietnam War protests or the LGBTQ-rights movement. San Francisco County overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 with almost 85 percent of the vote. Although the city prides itself on its progressive values, extreme wealth and poverty are on display, as homelessness is the city’s most visible problem. The endless shelter lines, panhandling on Market Street, and encampments across the city represent a fraction of the 7,500 homeless people who call San Francisco home, 58 percent of whom are unsheltered.
While disruption fuels the tech giants of Silicon Valley, the residual impact is widespread gentrification throughout the Bay Area. Companies like Twitter and Pinterest set up shop in the city after they were offered significant tax breaks, bringing with them thousands of jobs, but also exacerbating inequality.* In San Francisco, the median cost of a house is $1.57 million and the average salary for someone working in tech is $142,000, almost three times the national average. Over the years, as the titans of Silicon Valley have grown in wealth and unchecked power, the homeless have languished.
[Read: An app for ejecting the homeless]
“There’s an inadequate supply of affordable housing in the country,” said Nan Roman, the president and chief executive officer of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Roman declined to take a position on Prop C, but said people often forget that homelessness is a crisis, because it’s existed for so long.
If Prop C passes, companies with more than $50 million in gross annual receipts would see taxes on gross receipts increase by .175 percent to .69 percent. Businesses with more than $1 billion in gross annual receipts will pay 1.5 percent of payroll expenses.
Although the ballot initiative is a local matter, it has gained national attention because the billionaire CEOs Marc Benioff, of Salesforce, and Jack Dorsey, of Twitter and Square, have been arguing about it on Twitter. Benioff has spent the past month campaigning in favor of Prop C and stressing the moral obligation businesses have to their communities. Salesforce and Benioff have contributed about $7 million in support of Prop C, according to Fast Company. On Twitter, Dorsey said Square, his credit-card processing company, stands to pay more under Prop C than Salesforce. Companies that facilitate financial transactions will be taxed at a higher rate. Dorsey estimates that under Prop C, Square will pay $20 million more in taxes in 2019. Dorsey defended his position against Prop C by noting that the Democrat London Breed, elected San Francisco’s first African American mayor in a special election in June, also does not support the measure.
[Read: How can the U.S. end homelessness?]
In early October, Breed urged voters not to support Prop C. “I understand why Proposition C sounds appealing, and I know those who support it are well-intentioned,” Breed said in a statement. “I must consider the long-term impacts on our City, and thus, upon lengthy analysis and consideration, I cannot support Proposition C.”
Breed campaigned on battling homelessness and has made it a priority. So far, Breed says she’s added 50 new supportive-housing units and 125 short-term beds, in addition to $60 million in services for the homeless. Breed said the city is already spending around $300 million on homelessness without even auditing the expenditures. Breed also worries that businesses that established headquarters in San Francisco will leave rather than pay the new tax and take jobs with them. Democratic Councilman David Chiu and State Senator Scott Wiener, a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, don’t support the measure, either.
[Read: San Francisco still doesn’t know who its mayor will be.]
“I think it’s sensible legislation that is designed to help address the crisis in San Francisco,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, the director of the University of California at San Francisco’s Center for Vulnerable Populations. “The amount of human suffering in a city as wealthy as San Francisco is really unbearable and unsustainable.”
Dr. Kushel has spent the past 20 years treating the city’s homeless community and studying the causes and consequences of homelessness. Dr. Kushel, among other experts, believes the most effective way to combat homelessness is through permanent supportive housing, which is where San Francisco commits most of its funding. Supportive housing typically comes with substance-abuse treatment and counseling. It is not inexpensive, but costs far less than the persistent emergency-room visits that plague cities with chronic homeless populations.
In September, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a poll of 800 likely voters conducted by EMC Research found support for Prop C running 56 percent to 42 percent opposed, with 3 percent undecided. When pollsters clarified how much the measure would cost in taxes, support dropped by almost 10 points.
Elyse Lee, 24, reluctantly cast her ballot in favor of Prop C ahead of Tuesday’s election. “I don’t know if Prop C is the best way to do it, but I think it’s a step toward helping alleviate the homelessness issue,” Lee said. “I think the private sector does have some sort of responsibility to engage.”
* This article originally stated that Dropbox was offered a tax break. We regret the error.
The future of the Democratic Party looks a lot like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Once it was the party of patrician liberals like Franklin Roosevelt; now women, people of color, and voters in big cities are the demographics at the heart of the party.
The question is whether the future of the Democratic Party votes like Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described Democratic socialist. Her June victory over incumbent Joe Crowley in a Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat in New York City was perhaps the most heralded example of what has been described as a burgeoning leftist shift in the Democratic Party. For progressive activists, it’s a boon decades in the making; for moderate Democrats, it’s a political headache; and for Republicans, including President Trump, it’s both a worrying sign of creeping socialism and an effective bogeyman for rallying supporters.
“Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” an October 23 report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers warned. In a statement decrying the white paper, the Democratic Socialists of America said, “DSA agrees with the White House ‘socialism’ report in one respect — ‘socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse.’”
Despite all the noise, it’s hard to get a good grasp on what’s happening. It’s not just progressives who are ascendant. Before Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, the previous Democratic it-candidate for the cycle had been Conor Lamb—a moderate Democrat from rural Pennsylvania. Ocasio-Cortez and Lamb are likely to be colleagues in the House starting in January. Given the widely varying specifics of individual races, it’s hard to come up with useful comparisons to measure the leftist moment. Here’s what we can say: There’s clear leftward movement among Democratic voters on a range of issues, and there are more progressive candidates running than ever. But this doesn’t amount, at least yet, to the socialist groundswell that advocates pine for and critics fear. The actual policy positions, and number of leftist officeholders, will remain limited—at least for now. What happens in 2020 could be more telling.
With Democratic enthusiasm at high levels this year, there’s a heated debate about what’s motivating voters. The Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol recently told The Washington Post that members of the anti-Trump resistance “are going to revitalize the roots of the Democratic Party, and they are going to feminize it, but they are not going to turn into Bernie Sanders.” Time’s Charlotte Alter found much the same dynamic. “It’s not that the Democrats are being pulled left. It’s more that Democrats are being pulled local,” she reported. “And while ideas like ‘Medicare for All’ and ‘Abolish ICE’ have spread far beyond the party’s left flank, the anti-Trump resistance movement is ultimately more results-driven than ideological.”
Much of the strongest opposition to Trump does seem to emanate from the center-left, especially in cities and suburban areas. Many of its movers and shakers are people who have voted Democratic, but were never actively involved in politics—until the 2016 election activated them. According to a Brookings survey, 60 percent of Democratic primary voters cast their votes to express opposition to the president. Of course, that leaves almost 40 percent who voted for another reason. Although charismatic politicians like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez get the most attention, the most significant shift in the Democratic Party is among voters, not candidates.
According to Pew data, 46 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters now identify as liberal—up from 28 percent 10 years ago. Meanwhile, the percentage who say they’re moderates has dropped from 44 to 37. The number of conservatives continues to drop, too. But these changes most likely reflect the exodus of right-leaning Democrats as both parties become more ideologically homogeneous. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s been huge growth on the party’s left wing.
Then there’s the question of what it means to be “liberal.” Among progressive pundits, there’s a debate between “liberals” (for example, Obama Democrats) and “leftists” (progressives with more socialist inclinations). But Pew, which maintains the best longitudinal data, doesn’t subdivide that way, and it’s hard to know what voters mean when they self-identify as liberal. For example, support for LGBT rights was once a litmus test for American liberalism, notes Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report. Now that view is the consensus within the Democratic Party—and gay marriage is largely accepted among Republicans, too. So what is liberalism now?
“Is it the Bernie Sanders view on economic issues? Is it views on social issues?” Walters asks. “Can you have progressive views on social issues, but if you don’t agree with Bernie Sanders’s opinion on government size, are you not a liberal?”
Still, digging into Pew’s data on specific positions can provide a good sense of how Democrats are moving leftward on certain issues, especially immigration, economics, and race. Most astonishing is immigration. As my colleague Peter Beinart has reported, leaders in the Democratic Party have undergone a dramatic shift toward unalloyed support of immigration, including to a certain extent illegal immigration. But voters have moved as well. In 1994, just 32 percent of Democrats said that immigrants strengthened the country. Now 84 percent do.
On economics, three-quarters of Democrats say that the government doesn’t do enough to help poor people, up from half in 1994. Two-thirds say that government should regulate business more, again up from half in 1994. Conversely, in 1994, two-thirds of Democrats believed that people could get ahead if they were willing to work hard. Now only half do. The percentage of Democrats who believe that corporations make too much money is up 12 points. But the movement is not uniform. While the portion of Democrats who say that the government should do more to help the poor, even if it requires taking on debt, rose from 58 percent in 1994 to 71 percent in 2017, it is still below the peak of 77 percent, in 2007.
[Peter Beinart: How the Democrats lost their way on immigration]
There’s also dramatic movement on race, which may more than anything reflect the exodus of conservative whites as the Democratic Party becomes more minority-heavy. The percentage of Democrats who say that the government needs to do more to fight racism has risen from 57 to 81 since 2009. In 1994, four in 10 Democrats said that racial discrimination was the main reason black people couldn’t get ahead; in 2017, more than six in 10 did. White voters have moved especially dramatically, as Thomas Edsall notes: On both of these indicators, white Democrats are actually further left than black ones.
This is in large part because the whites who are members of the Democratic Party have changed. Non-college-educated whites have shrunk as a portion of the base by 20 percent, versus big gains from voters with at least a four-year degree, both white and nonwhite. The better educated voters are, the more likely they are to be more liberal. Assuming the party continues to change demographically the way it has, it’s likely to get only more liberal.
“I think there’s a significant shift,” says Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future and an adviser to Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. “You can see it in the war of ideas, where more and more Democrats at least nod their heads at Medicare for all. You even have President Obama saying it’s time for big ideas like Medicare for all and a jobs guarantee.”
If anything, the party’s candidates still appear to be to the right of the base—at the least candidates who win nominations. Brookings’s Primaries Project recorded the astonishing growth in the number of Democrats running for House seats this year—1,077, up from 646 in 2014 and 700 in 2016. (In contrast, the number of GOP candidates rose from 755 four years ago to 874 this year, a much more gradual increase.) Brookings’s Elaine Kamarck and Alexander R. Podkul categorized these Democrats as either “progressives” or “establishment” Democrats and found a roughly equal share of candidates. (Moderates compose a small and shrinking third wheel.)
That meant that a greater number of incumbent Democrats, many of them more establishment, faced primaries—45 percent, up from fewer than 28 percent in 2014. Yet despite the understandable attention paid to wins by Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, who defeated Representative Mike Capuano in a Boston-area district, most of the challenges fell short. According to the Primaries Project, “Compared to 2016, primary elections this cycle were actually slightly less competitive for incumbents.” Kamarck notes that efforts by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, while widely derided by progressives, had their desired effect of nominating establishment-backed candidates in close districts, with a 39-for-41 record.
Furthermore, Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley will both replace reliably progressive votes in the House, so while both are women of color and therefore more in step with the Democratic Party’s evolving demographics, they’re likely to end up largely the same on the issues. Otherwise, Brookings found, progressive candidates were more likely than their establishment colleagues to win nominations in more strongly leaning Republican districts—meaning that anything short of a blue tsunami is likely to leave them high, dry, and at home.
“Six months ago, a lot of Democrats were worried that the process was going to make the task of regaining the majority in the House more difficult by nominating some candidates in swing districts who were too progressive for those districts,” says Bill Galston, a colleague of Kamarck’s both at Brookings and in the Clinton White House. That hasn’t been the case, he says. “Progressive victories have been scored in places where almost any Democrat would be the odds-on favorite to win,” like in Ocasio-Cortez’s district.
Borosage dismisses the poor record of progressives challenging incumbents as beside the point. “This is the way movements work. Of course they would lose more,” he says. “The fact that they challenge puts people on notice. There’s no sitting congressperson who’s got any brain that doesn’t make a calculation: Am I vulnerable on my left? What do I have to do?”
The best place to measure leftward shift might be at the state legislative level. Not only are there more than 6,000 races—a more meaningful sample than the few high-profile contested U.S. House primaries—but it’s much easier for progressive, outsider candidates to run at lower levels, because there’s less money and institutional support required. And since most candidates for statewide and national office begin at lower levels, these races should give a good sense of where the Democratic Party’s grass roots are heading.
The problem is that with so many races, and so many specific circumstances in each race, grasping all of them is effectively impossible, but some ways to measure state-level action do exist. As I reported in August, hundreds of progressive first-time candidates are running for state legislatures around the country, many of them espousing strongly left-wing stances, and often emerging not from traditional Democratic Party structures but from social-activist groups and movements.
[Read: How a blue wave could crash far beyond Washington]
Some of the effects are visible even before the midterm ballots are counted. Virginia holds its legislative and gubernatorial elections in odd-numbered years, and in 2017 Democrats made a strong showing in races for the General Assembly, losing out on control of the House of Delegates only through a random drawing that resolved a tie. Many of the new members are strong progressives. A baker’s dozen won while refusing to take donations from Dominion Power, typically a major power broker in the state. The new crew also helped to push through an expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which had been stalled for years. In New York, the “Independent Democratic Caucus,” a group of renegade Democrats who caucused with Republicans, pulled the nominally liberal state’s governance to the center. Though the group disbanded earlier this year, six of its eight former members lost their primaries to more progressive challengers.
It’s impossible to precisely and concisely diagnose the cause of the Democratic Party’s current leftward movement. A good starting point is the 2008 financial crash and the resulting recession, which shook many Americans’ sense of security. The crash is often cited as a contributor to Donald Trump’s supposedly populist movement, but it also helped drive Sanders’s support. So did Barack Obama’s relatively moderate, corporate-friendly response, which created an opening for alternative visions of what the party could be. Meanwhile, the moderate and conservative Blue Dog Democrats were largely washed out of office in 2010. That cleared the intellectual field in the party and made intramural debates starker.
“The New Democrats,” says Borosage, referring to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and other establishment party leaders, “are still there, but they are remarkably bereft of any compelling ideas. It’s not a compelling ideological alternative. They’re just a little less.”
To be fair, some of the ideas that the new progressives are offering aren’t all that new. Medicare for all has a sheen of novelty to it, but as Kamarck notes, universal health care has been a stated goal of the Democratic Party for decades. But others are fresher, from marijuana legalization to a $15 minimum wage to a universal basic income.
Some of the shift may also be the result of a feedback loop between voters and candidates. For example, voters may have been attracted to Sanders in 2016 less for his avowed leftism and more for his bluntness, lack of polish, and perceived honesty as compared with Hillary Clinton. The political scientists Christopher H. Achen and Larry Bartels analyzed data from the 2016 American National Election Study and concluded that Sanders voters weren’t necessarily any more progressive than Clinton backers. That could change, though.
“Over time, some of the ideology rubs off on the adherents,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “They know they like Bernie Sanders, and over time they learn what Bernie Sanders stands for and they like that. There’s some lingering effect.”
[Read: Trump is radicalizing the Democratic Party]
But the 2016 candidate who did the most to push the Democratic Party leftward may not have been Sanders but Trump. Although the Pew data suggest a gradually more leftist Democratic electorate on a slew of issues, some of the most dramatic changes, as I have previously written, emerged shortly after Trump’s entry onto the political scene. Take immigration and race, two of the issues on which Trump was most outspoken as a candidate. The number of Democrats who say that racial discrimination is the main challenge to African Americans today jumped from 47 percent in late 2015, early in Trump’s candidacy, to 64 percent by June 2017. The portion saying that immigrants strengthen the country leapt from 66 percent a month before Trump kicked off his campaign to 84 percent by July 2017.
The scholars Norm Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann have concluded that although American politics is highly polarized today, the polarization has been asymmetric. While both parties have become more homogeneously conservative, in the case of the GOP, or liberal, in the case of the Democratic Party, there are more very conservative voters in the Republican Party than there are very liberal voters in the Democratic Party. One result of that rightward shift has been an increasingly gridlocked Congress, where the far right has become a powerful obstructionist faction—much to the chagrin of Republican Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan.
Democrats have not polarized as radically, but if they continue to become more liberal, could they produce a similar effect? Could the Congressional Progressive Caucus act as a mirror image to the House Freedom Caucus? Kamarck thinks that won’t happen, betting that the difference in ideology means even more progressive Democrats will be willing to compromise. Conservatives are willing to obstruct action in Congress because it’s congruent with their view that government action is suspect. Progressives are less able to justify stonewalling.
“Because Democrats are the party of government, they will not get too crazy. They will want to actually pass things,” Kamarck says. “You may get some radicals, but in the end if they really want health care for all, they’re going to be hard put to explain to their people why they voted down something that gave health care for, say, 83 percent.”
[Norm Ornstein: Yes, polarization is asymmetric—and conservatives are worse]
In other words, they’re going to have to compromise. The test of her theory will come after the election. In fact, some of the best questions about the future of the Democratic Party will only begin to be answered starting November 7. Those include considering who got elected; seeing how they behave in office; and then watching the way the 2020 presidential primary, which will start almost immediately, begins. Should Democrats fail to win control of the House, it will likely trigger a vast tremor throughout the party, with unpredictable results. (The Senate appears out of reach, though a surprise is possible.)
If candidates like Andrew Gillum, the very progressive Democratic nominee for Florida governor, win, it will provide proof that a left-wing candidate (and an African American one at that) can win in the South, tempering the “electability” argument that has sometimes lifted center-left Democrats. If Gillum loses—even if the race is close, and despite local factors—it could turn voters away from candidates like him.
And if Democrats do win the House, they’ll have to decide how to wield their newfound control. Most progressive legislation emanating from the House would be largely symbolic, since a Republican Senate and president would block any action. A Democratic majority would likely include a good number of seats won by Democrats in historically Republican districts, and certainly in districts that Trump won in 2016; it would also probably include a larger Congressional Progressive Caucus. If the more progressive wing of the party puts forward strongly progressive bills, will freshman Democrats who represent suburban districts where formerly Republican white women have flipped their votes balk, or will they go along? And if they go along, will they end up pulling their districts leftward with them, or simply doom themselves to one-term status? (An Axios analysis found that among 44 Democrats with a good chance to flip GOP districts, very few rule out voting for a Medicare for all bill, and some specifically affirm their support for it.)
Meanwhile, the scramble for the presidential nomination will be underway nearly from the moment the polls close on Election Day. There is already a crowded field of possible contenders, from lefties like Sanders and Warren to old-school hopefuls like Joe Biden, including everything in between. There are signs that some of the younger, less ideologically committed figures who are interested in the race are betting on progressive ascendancy. Borosage notes that Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, all of whom tended toward the center earlier in their careers, have already begun taking up progressive stances like universal basic incomes and abolishing ICE.
“As a national entity, the Democratic Party comes to life during the presidential nominating process,” Galston says. “To make a judgment about the party as a whole, one would have to make a prediction about the balance of power in that process.” And even then, he says, a shift is ratified only if a president wins reelection.
In other words, the Democratic Party is moving left, but it might not be clear quite how far left for two or even six years. The revolution is coming more slowly than its champions hope and its critics fear.
“We may not be Christian here, but we still pray,” said a woman dressed entirely in white as she addressed a large audience of African American women. Standing behind a lectern, speaking in the cadences of a preacher, she added, “I understand God more now, doing what I’m doing, than I ever did in the Church.”
The call and response that followed (“No one’s going to protect us but who?” “Us!”) was reminiscent of church—but this was no traditional sermon. The speaker, Iyawo Orisa Omitola, was giving the keynote address last month at the third annual Black Witch Convention, which brought together some 200 women in a Baltimore reception hall. The small but growing community points to the hundreds of young black women who are leaving Christianity in favor of their ancestors’ African spiritual traditions, and finding a sense of power in the process.
Over the past decade, white Millennials have embraced witchcraft in droves. Now a parallel phenomenon is emerging among black Millennials. While their exact numbers are difficult to gauge, it’s clear that African American pop culture has started to reflect the trend. In the music industry alone, there’s Beyoncé’s allusion to an African goddess in Lemonade and at the Grammys; Azealia Banks’s declaration that she practices brujería (a Spanish term for witchcraft); and Princess Nokia’s hit “Brujas,” in which she tells white witches, “Everything you got, you got from us.”
African American witchcraft originated in West Africa, the birthplace of Yoruba, a set of religious traditions focused on reverence for ancestors and worship of a vast pantheon of deities known as orishas. Those traditions accompanied West Africans who were brought to the Americas as slaves, and were eventually combined with Western religions, such as Catholicism, that many slaves were pushed to embrace.
By the early 19th century, Cuban Santeria, Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Vodou, and other syncretistic faiths had emerged as a result. In cities like New Orleans, voodoo (slightly different from Haitian Vodou) and hoodoo, which also descend from West African faiths, grew popular. These practices—which often involve manipulating candles, incense, or water to achieve a desired result—may have helped give slaves some sense of power, however minimal.
Modern black witches are practicing Yoruba-based faiths, with a few Millennial touches. They build altars to ancestors so they can seek their advice on everything from romance to professional advancement, cast spells using emoji to help banish depression, surround themselves with crystals in the hope that they will relieve stress, and burn sage to cleanse their apartments of negative energy.
Some hallmarks of Millennial spirituality are common to both white and African American witches. They’re typically disillusioned with hierarchical institutions—the Catholic Church, for example—and attracted to do-it-yourself “spiritual but not religious” practices such as the use of crystals. But the budding black-witch community also has unique traits, including a desire for “safe spaces,” a wariness of cultural appropriation, and a penchant for digital religion.
[Read: A design lab is making rituals for secular people]
Many black witches, nervous about practicing witchcraft openly, feel more comfortable meeting online than in person. Some fear they’ll be shamed by devout Christian parents, according to Margarita Guillory, a Boston University professor who studies Africana religion in the digital age.
“The internet is almost becoming like a hush harbor for these witches of color,” Guillory said, referring to places where slaves gathered in secret to practice their religions in antebellum America. Online, an avatar or a handle allows women to speak freely. A popular Tumblr promotes inspirational images of black witches and Facebook groups for the women have thousands of members each, while some have even developed smartphone apps.
Some young women at the Baltimore convention told me their parents had long hid their grandmothers’ or great-grandmothers’ involvement with witchcraft—a decision the Millennials resented, until they realized their parents may have felt the need to suppress any talk of magic because their ancestors were harshly punished for their rituals. New Orleans, for example, saw sweeping arrests of voodooists in the 19th century.
Monica Jeffries, a 28-year-old teacher who had playfully donned a pointed witch hat for the convention, grew up in the Apostolic Church, but she broke ties with it four years ago. She said her mother had “forced” Christianity on her. Jeffries sometimes calls home trying to figure out why. “I’m asking her questions about Christianity, and I’m like, ‘Why would you do this to us?’ She still can’t give me answers.”
Black Witch University gathers women for rituals (Janean L. Watkins / Urban Matrix Media)While some Millennials enter the black-witch community seeking answers, others are simply hungry for a place where they can belong. Mambo Yansa, a witch who grew up in Panama, told me witchcraft serves as a “safe haven” for some LGBT youth who don’t feel welcome in the Church. The number of online posts by and about LGBT witches attests to the overlap between queer and witch communities.
Empowerment was an unmistakable aspect of the Black Witch Convention. Replete with talk of sexual trauma, suppression, and self-acceptance, it felt like group therapy. Women cried or spoke in trembling voices as they described experiences of abuse.
“While the #MeToo movement is out there, there are still African American women out there who don’t have a voice. We are not represented,” Omitola said in her keynote. “One thing I know from studying African religions is, I have never seen one subservient goddess. So why are we sitting here thinking we have to be subservient?”
[Read: How much would you pay for a prayer?]
Omitola went on to differentiate between African witchcraft and “New Age shit,” like the witches who gather to hex President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But some of the black witches’ practices—astrology, say—are what the Pew Research Center considers New Age. In fact, a recent Pew study found that the rate of belief in New Age ideas is especially high among the communities that many convention attendees came from: historically black Christian denominations.
The study’s finding that New Age and Christian traditions often coexist in the same person was on full view at the convention. While some witches told me they were finished with Christianity, others said they still attend church, and argued that Christianity and African witchcraft are complementary, not mutually exclusive. As Omitola put it, “The Bible ain’t nothing but a big old spell book.”
For all the black-witch community’s openness to other religious traditions, they’re still deeply ambivalent about whether some people should be kept out. On the one hand, there’s a sense that they now have an easier time embracing their ancestors’ traditions because white Millennials have rebranded witchcraft as “cool.”
There is, however, a concern that white witches are appropriating African rituals they may not properly understand. “White women these days are making witches’ covens as something ‘fun’—it’s just fun for them,” Yansa said. “But in our tradition, witches have to be totally initiated to be considered a witch.” Initiation typically involves receiving oral instruction and hands-on training from an elder—the sort of embodied learning that, Yansa said, young witches don’t get when they rely too much on digital religion.
In-person gatherings like the Black Witch Convention are meant to serve as an antidote to that overreliance on internet culture. The Millennials I spoke to all said it was a necessary counterbalance—but they also emphasized how much they value the highly individualized, DIY rituals they practice back home.
“The Church is oppressive for a lot of black women,” said Tamara Young, a 32-year-old government program analyst. “But these African traditions empower women. They’re empowering you to have a hand in what you’re doing—to create your own magic.”
Reporting for this article was supported by Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a journalism and research initiative based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
I grew up on the high-elevation plains of northwest Montana, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, in a culture in which English did not become the dominant language until the middle part of the 20th century. Leaving to attend the University of Montana in the mid-1990s, after receiving a tuition waiver the summer following my senior year of high school, marked my first time living away from our reservation. My graduating class was one of the first in which many of us left to seek degrees, a development that mirrored a shift taking place nationwide; by 1996, 30 percent of Native American 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college, up from about 16 percent in 1989.
Some of us went to college to escape our treaty-established, semi-sovereign homeland and the social and political problems common in Indian country. Others left because there wasn’t anything else to do. Many of us, though, were driven by an idea about higher education that had recently begun to take hold on reservations—that the purpose of college was to prepare us to help our communities. Not until well into adulthood did I realize that this well-meaning notion reflected not only our communities’ need for help, but also their failure to understand that higher education, in the absence of structural change and economic opportunity on the reservation, was likelier to draw young people away from home than to help them make it better.
The relationship between education and economy is more complicated in Indian country than elsewhere in the United States. While access to higher education is a means to a better life as much for American Indians as for anyone else, connotations specific to reservation people exist that trouble the situation. Going to school means leaving a cultural context—which includes many relatives, sometimes too many—that doesn’t occur anywhere else in the country. Departing for college also means engaging with an educational system that does little to break the myth of how this country came to be, one that elides historical facts about broken treaties, Indian law, and Congress’s plenary power over tribal nations.
At the University of Montana, I found myself having to address American ignorance in an exhausting manner, explaining again and again that no, we do not go to school for free, and yes, we do pay taxes; that “blood quantum”—a measurement of a person’s “Indian blood” that determines membership for most tribes—is a colonial invention.
Prior to colonization—for millennia, in fact—the economy of the Blackfoot people revolved around the iinii, or buffalo, which provided not just food, but tepee covers, clothing, tools, and weapons. The animal’s sudden, severe decline in the mid-to-late 1800s, the result of slaughter on the part of Americans hunting for hides and so-called sport, caused enormous cultural chaos for all plains tribes. Within several years, many indigenous people in the vast region were without sustenance. In 1883, as many as 600 Blackfeet starved to death, an event that came to be known as the Starvation Winter. That time still hangs in the air, one of the few historical events discussed on my reservation.
While the recent return of the buffalo to the Blackfeet Reservation has resulted in positive PR, employment statistics in our homeland make clear that their reappearance is largely symbolic. In 2015, the poverty rate among Blackfeet was higher than 38 percent (compared with a national average of 13.5 percent), unemployment was at almost 19 percent (compared with 5.3 percent nationally), and labor-force participation was at 53 percent (compared with 62.7 percent nationally). Many reservations are in rural areas geographically isolated from stronger urban job markets. Although people sometimes perceive casinos as having brought riches to reservations, that’s true in very few cases. Meanwhile, outsiders who might consider investing on reservations have difficulty assessing the risks because tribes are separate sovereign entities, with distinct and unfamiliar laws and legal structures, so they often avoid investing altogether.
And, for various reasons, the kind of economic opportunities that might produce homegrown entrepreneurship are rare. For one thing, many reservation Indians live on land that is held in “trust” by the federal government and managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs—meaning individual tribal members don’t own the property on which they live. As a result, they lack the collateral needed to acquire business loans, a problem compounded by a lack of financial literacy endemic to Indian country.
What no one ever told me at college, I assume because it seemed self-evident to them, is that higher education is associated with a white-collar economy. When you come from a reservation, where any such economy is unlikely to exist, understanding what a degree is supposed to do is difficult. In my case, I happened upon Jack Kerouac’s work when I was 19, and became a writer. I dropped out of school, not sure how higher education related to writing fiction, unsure if I’d ever reenroll. Thus began a pattern—drop out, reenroll, drop out, reenroll.
Each move home brought an overwhelming sense of relief after the stultifying atmosphere of attending class with non-Indian students I found bafflingly humorless. (In even the darkest of times, Blackfoot prefer to laugh at life and one another.) But returning home also showed me what awaited if I stayed there: substitute-teaching gigs, working at the diner, or managing my family’s convenience store, where I often stood in the parking lot listening to the vast, predawn silence of the northern plains, drinking coffee and waiting for the first customer. Much later in life, I recognized these experiences as my first encounters with the economic hardship that dominates Indian country.
Though the general message for people like me is that the purpose of higher education is to return home to help our community, the reality is that the economy on most reservations cannot support the work that’s needed. The kinds of jobs most Americans might associate with a healthy, middle- or upper-middle-class economy—software development, sales, marketing—are nonexistent. Other occupations so common to healthy economies that we often take them for granted, such as counselorships, managerial positions, and careers with nonprofits and the state and federal government, are rare.
Perhaps it is telling that the most lucrative job available to me, during my stints back home, involved doing controversial work in the oil-and-gas industry, acquiring lease signatures from Blackfeet landowners who lived on our reservation and around the western United States. To outsiders, Indians participating in the extraction of resources from their land by American corporations uninterested in tribal nations’ well-being might appear contradictory. The reality is that, in our devastated economies, many people have little other choice.
None of these were jobs I wanted. I craved to be around writers, and the writers I knew were on campuses and in urban areas. I felt a need to be in a culture where the fine arts were appreciated, where that type of intellectual discussion was commonplace. Each time I left school, these things brought me back. After nine years, at my mom’s urging, I finally graduated. Much later, I learned my long undergrad arc, with its staccato enrollment, is common for a reservation Native.
I often ask myself what our reservation would look like if there had been a healthy economy and a more diverse culture to welcome those from my graduating class who received college degrees. The majority of my high-school classmates who left for school did not come back, opting for stable jobs elsewhere, perhaps returning to the reservation for Christmas or the summer powwow. As for me, I kept drifting. When I was 36, a new job opened up at Blackfeet Community College, one of the few white-collar positions available to someone like me on our reservation. I applied and got the job. Directing the writing center, I hoped, would give me what I needed most: a steady income, time to write, and the opportunity to give back to people in my community. I also intensified my relationship to Blackfoot-language work, helping to start a nonprofit dedicated to the revival of our mother tongue. I went to traditional ceremonies again. I ran into cousins during late-night visits to the convenience store. For the first time since high school, I became a full-time participant in contemporary Blackfeet culture.
At Blackfeet Community College, I found that many of our young people now assume they will go to college. This is the case on reservations across the country, whether that means attending one of the 38 tribal colleges and universities in the United States or another school. In an American sense, reservation people are becoming more educated. But I soon realized that college degrees haven’t translated to Indian graduates regularly securing white-collar jobs in their homelands; years after I graduated college, reservation economies still aren’t substantial enough to provide those careers. When asked what they wanted to do with their future associate’s degrees, my students responded largely with blank looks.
In my students, I saw my 18-year-old self. Many wanted to help our community, and I was at a loss to help them understand how that might happen in a place with such limited opportunities. I didn’t know how to tell them that their basic, human desire for stability and a decent income would contribute to a brain drain that has profoundly affected our economy and politics; that the purported objective of education—that we are to become educated so we can help our communities—is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. Without improved economies, higher education simply contributes further to reservation students’ confusion about where they belong in this world.
Though I was one of the few who found the kind of job an educated reservation Indian is supposed to find, I remained conflicted. Due to my professional duties, along with the stress that comes with teaching students from a community broken by colonial force, I found myself writing less. So I applied for a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University, and was accepted.
This fall, I left the reservation again, departing with some sense of failure—of not having done enough. The Stegner Fellowship will potentially provide opportunities unavailable to me otherwise: time to write and professional advancement. Pursuing those experiences, though, will necessitate being away from my reservation for most of the rest of my life. All too often, success for reservation Indians means leaving your heart in your homeland.
On Tuesday, residents of Washington State will vote on whether to adopt a carbon fee, an ambitious policy that aims to combat climate change by charging oil companies and other polluters for the right to emit greenhouse-gas pollution.
If the measure passes, Washington would immediately have one of the most aggressive climate policies in the country. The proposal—known as Ballot Initiative 1631—takes something of a “Green New Deal” approach, using the money raised by the new fee to build new infrastructure to prepare the state for climate change. It would generate millions to fund new public transit, solar and wind farms, and forest-conservation projects in the state; it would also direct money to a working-class coal community and a coastal indigenous tribe.
Despite its local focus, Initiative 1631 stands to reshape climate politics in places far from Seattle or Spokane. If it passes, Washington would become the first state in the country—and, in fact, the first large government anywhere in the world—to impose a price on carbon by ballot question. Victory might help convince national politicians—both Democrats and Republicans—who systematically underrate enthusiasm for climate policy, that Americans actually are willing to pay to fight climate change.
If Initiative 1631 fails, on the other hand, it would suggest that ambitious climate policy cannot find a winning coalition, even in one of the most outdoorsy states in the union. Its defeat would provide yet another example of how—even as the list of President Donald Trump’s unpopular environmental rollbacks grows by the month—blue states cannot actually convert their confessed concern for the natural world into the muscular work of government.
I first wrote about Initiative 1631 in August. Since then, a few factors have changed in the race. Oil money has swamped Washington: A handful of companies and industry lobbyists have given tens of millions of dollars to the “No on 1631” effort, making it the richest ballot-initiative campaign in state history. Meanwhile, local papers disagree on the referendum’s merits: The Seattle Times and Tri-City Herald have opposed 1631; The Olympian and Tacoma’s News Tribune support it. (A reputable local paper in New York City has also enthusiastically endorsed the referendum.) Public-opinion polls seem to be similarly split.
A few years ago, researchers at Yale and George Mason University surveyed the nation and found that most Americans—almost 60 percent of them, in fact—believed “global warming will harm people in the United States.” A majority said that climate change was already hurting Americans. But when asked if “global warming will harm me, personally,” the numbers plummeted. Sixty percent of Americans swore that climate change would never hurt them.
This more or less mirrors the situation in Washington State, according to the same study. Most Washingtonians say that climate change is already hurting people in the United States. But three out of every five state residents also say that climate change will never affect them.
Washingtonians have many good reasons to conclude they’re safe. Secure in the country’s northwest corner, the Evergreen State seems far from the deadly hurricanes or oppressive humidity that dominate coverage of the crisis. Yet those Washingtonians are, alas, wrong. 2015 was the warmest year ever recorded in Washington; eight of its 10 warmest years on record have come in the past three decades. Wildfires, which do seem to be worsened by climate change, have poisoned Seattle’s air for two summers running. Climate change is even exacerbating declines in the state’s wild salmon population.
And climate change is being felt in smaller ways, too. Sheltered by the Cascades and fanned by sea breezes, the state’s West coast normally enjoys chilly summer nights. Just ask Karin Bumbaco, who moved to Seattle a decade ago and left behind the air conditioner she had owned in New York. “For nine years, I was fine without it,” she told me.
But summertime nightly lows have been soaring in the state, at a rate of half a degree Fahrenheit per decade. This year, she finally gave in and installed a unit in her daughter’s bedroom. “I was more concerned, having a toddler, given the dangers of sleep in really warm temperatures,” she said. “People on the East Coast will laugh—our nightly temperatures are still in the mid-to-upper 60s—but it’s not enough to cool down the inside of houses and apartments.” Bumbaco is the assistant state climatologist.
Initiative 1631’s success will depend in part on whether Washingtonians realize that they are already paying for climate change in small but costly ways—through the increased power bills incurred by an AC window unit, through the hassle of terrible summer-air quality. It will also force voters to decide whether they’re willing to experiment with climate policy for the rest of the country, even if Washington State’s carbon emissions are a drop in the overflowing global bucket.
As I wrote last year, the Democratic Party says that it cares about climate change—but it has no law ready to pass if it wins control of Congress and the White House. While a Democratic president would surely attempt to use the powers of the executive branch to fight climate change, the party cannot agree on a national legislative plan to combat it.
[Read: Democrats are shockingly unprepared to fight climate change]
It’s not hard to explain why. Under the U.S. federalist system, states must function as “laboratories of democracy,” testing policies before their debut on the national stage. But only one state, California, has passed aggressive climate policy and attempted to wean its economy off fossil fuels. Washington is trying a different but similarly ambitious approach—something like a “Green New Deal” approach—with 1631.
This century’s defining progressive legislative victory—the Affordable Care Act—would have been impossible if Massachusetts had not implemented a similar, state-level program first under Governor Mitt Romney. If Initiative 1631 passes, it will provide national politicians with another model policy, another civic experiment, to consult if they wish to pass a national climate law.
On a more local level, I suspect that 1631 will also be the Evergreen State’s last chance to pass an aggressive climate policy. Three strikes and you’re out is not an ironclad rule of politics, but it describes the situation here. In 2016, the state first attempted to pass a carbon tax by ballot question. But that measure—which was more libertarian in approach and which lacked the support of some environmental groups—eventually failed. This year, it tried to pass a carbon-pricing scheme through the state legislature. That tactic faltered as well.
If Initiative 1631 fails now, climate activists may not try their luck again. Jay Inslee, the state’s governor and a possible 2020 presidential contender, may try to pass a few smaller climate bills that work around the edges of the problem. But neither he nor national environmental groups might attempt a climate-change fight for some time.
You can sense that desperation in the sheer financial scale of the fight.
BP, Chevron, and other members of the oil industry have spent more than $31 million to defeat the referendum. Their donations make up nearly the entire budget of the “No on 1631” campaign; the local Republican party has also given $298 in noncash contributions. Some of these oil donations suggest hypocrisy: BP, for instance, has previously endorsed the policy of putting a price on carbon. Yet BP has donated $13 million to defeat the measure in Washington State—because, it says, 1631 fails to suspend other laws that it dislikes.
The “Yes on 1631” campaign has raised about $15 million. Its largest donors are the Nature Conservancy and the League of Conservation Voters. Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg have also donated $1 million each. (Disclosure: The Laurene Powell Jobs Trust donated $400,000 to the “Yes” campaign. Powell Jobs is the founder of the Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic.)
Reading coverage of the referendum, I’m struck by a certain aura of unreality in how seemingly sensible political observers talk about climate change. Climate change, in many pundits’ analysis, looks like a mild policy issue and not a difficult and long-running malady that we are not close to addressing.
Take The Seattle Times’ editorial against the initiative, for instance. It begins by acknowledging that climate change is a problem, calling it “a crisis needing an aggressive, coordinated response.” But then it sighs in resignation at the imperfection of the policy on the table. Initiative 1631 is “larded with special-interest payouts,” it says. It chides environmental groups for not supporting a carbon tax in 2016 because that proposal “didn’t fund their wishlist.” Never once does The Seattle Times mention that it opposed the 2016 carbon tax, too.
Two years ago, at least, The Seattle Times could claim that climate action from an inevitable Hillary Clinton presidency obviated any statewide climate policy. Now it says, more meekly, that Washington should “seek a national carbon tax.” But how is that going to happen, exactly? The editorial board never mentions that 97 percent of House Republicans voted against a national carbon tax this summer.
1631’s supporters have a tendency to use social-justice lingo that may repel moderates; the policy itself will generate millions of dollars in revenue and then hand the purse strings to a board of mostly unelected experts and officials—albeit a board under the control of the state legislature. Even the most vigorous editorials supporting Initiative 1631 say it will need “strong oversight.” Much is misunderstood about the proposal, too: As I wrote in August, 1631 exempts Washington’s last remaining coal-burning power plant only because it is already scheduled to shut down, and any change to the law would allow it to remain open.
On Friday, I happened to talk with Bryce Smith, the chief executive of LevelTen Energy, a renewables-financing company in Seattle.“1631 is not a perfect bill by any measure, and I’m not sure anyone would agree on what a perfect bill is,” he told me. “But from a policy perspective, it is a pretty good bill. It’s putting a price on carbon. There are some economic inefficiencies, but I think they are not as important as actually getting a price on carbon, which this would accomplish. It would be a huge milestone in the country, and the precedent-setting would be incredibly valuable.” On Tuesday, we’ll learn if Washingtonians agree.
On the morning of November 9, 2016, millions of Americans woke up in a fog. In New Holland, Pennsylvania, Annie Weaver stopped at the Wawa on her way to the school where she teaches, and she couldn’t look anybody in the eye. Brandi Calvert, a real estate agent in Wichita, Kansas, only got out of bed because she had to take her 11-year-old boy to school. Before heading out, she told him what had happened, but he refused to believe her.
I walked my daughter to school that morning in Washington, D.C. and went inside for her kindergarten class’s biweekly open house. A third-grader had drawn the assignment of reading the day’s news over the PA system, and he began with a brief history of the expansion of voting rights. He then ventured into more recent events: “In 2008, Barack Obama was the first African-American elected president. This year, in 2016, Hillary Clinton was the first female president — nominee. In a surprising election, she was defeated by Donald Trump,” he said. “Stop by room 308 to see our timeline. Have a great day.”
My daughter — who’d very much been “rooting for the girl to win” and found Trump to be a miscreant and an offensive bully — stood unusually silent, as her teacher, clad in black jeans and an olive green hijab, turned her face to hide her tears.
There was nothing to say — nothing that could be said — to make right the raw fact that, after a hate-filled, vitriolic campaign, enough people in the United States had voted for Donald Trump to make him our 45th president.
Back in Wichita, Calvert drove home and called her mother. “I went through the emotions of crying and being angry and disbelief, and surely it was a mistake and will be corrected,” she recalled.
After processing her grief, a two-week-long endeavor, she said, Calvert, like millions of people across the country, became consumed by the need to “do something.” There was nothing to say, but there was something to do. Still, what was that something?
The last two years of party-building and pushback belong to a multiethnic, multigenerational, and multifaceted collection of movement activists.Most of those people had previously done little in the way of political activism, but many had been deeply involved in community events, the local school, or charities. They didn’t know it yet, but they were already political organizers. Convinced that there was no way that Trump could actually be their president, they took a kitchen-sink approach to dealing with the country’s impending doom. Upward of 160,000 people collectively donated $7 million to Green Party candidate Jill Stein to fund a recount, hoping that Clinton would come out with enough votes to be the actual victor. When that didn’t work, the newly minted activists turned their attention to the members of the Electoral College, lobbying them relentlessly to flip their votes and elect somebody — anybody — other than Trump. If the electors couldn’t do that, the activists urged, they could at least throw the election to the House of Representatives, right? Perhaps House Speaker Paul Ryan would do his statesman duty and save the union. Surely, Democratic leaders in Washington could stop it all from happening.
It soon became apparent that nobody was coming to their rescue, and that the people who wanted it done would have to do it for themselves. It was never guaranteed that there would be widespread, powerful resistance to the Trump administration, or that Democrats would be able to plausibly challenge Republicans for control of the House in less than two years. Indeed, the leadership of the Democratic Party was ripe with talk of compromising, even as Trump’s circle praised former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of internment camps during World War II.
The last two years of party-building and pushback belong to a multiethnic, multigenerational, and multifaceted collection of movement activists, largely led by women in support of women, activated by a catastrophic election that uncorked a latent power that had long been dormant on the political scene. Over and over, candidates and volunteers have said that the last time they saw a mobilization that was anywhere near as passionate and expansive was on behalf of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Unlike in 2008, there is no centralized leadership this year. That means that, even after the votes are tallied on Tuesday, there’s nobody to tell them to go home. The Democratic Party is stuck with them.
Photo: Brad Barket/Getty Images for Ozy Fusion Fest 2017
By the time Thanksgiving came around in 2016, liberals had largely moved on from their election shock to organizing mode. Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, former Hill staffers working for progressive nonprofits, were visiting family over the holiday when they met up with a friend from college at a bar in Austin, Texas.
The friend told them about a Facebook group she was running dedicated to resisting Trump. Dumbledore’s Army had 3,000 fired-up members, but no clear direction, the friend relayed. “They were showing up for protests and they were sending postcards to Paul Ryan and they were calling the electors” — the folks in the Electoral College — “and they kind of all felt like they were throwing stuff at a wall,” Levin told The Intercept.
Levin and Greenberg explained to their friend exactly how tea party protesters had shaken up Congress in 2009 and 2010, spelling out what works to pressure a member of Congress and, importantly, what doesn’t — such as sending postcards to the House speaker. Their friend was transfixed; this was precisely what she and her group needed to know.
At the time, countless guides to resisting fascism were floating around, but none were practically oriented for people looking to do something on a daily or near-daily basis.
Levin and Greenberg, husband and wife, put their thoughts down into a Google Doc and shared it with politically savvy friends back in Washington, refining the guide along the way. But when it came time to publish the document, no one in the group wanted their name on it.
They were, after all, Democratic staffers, and the contents of the guide were unlikely to go over well with their bosses. Half of the problem for activists, the guide advised, was the Democratic Party, which could not be assumed to be part of the resistance to Trump, but needed to be pushed and prodded into action.
The document, which they called the Indivisible Guide, was made public in December 2016. Soon after, Indivisible chapters began popping up around the country. The Democratic Socialists of America, meanwhile, attracted supporters of America’s most prominent self-described democratic socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and saw its rolls exploding. A group called Our Revolution was born from the ashes of the Sanders presidential campaign. In some areas, grassroots activists started their own organizations, like Lancaster Stands Up in Weaver’s home of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Word had been spreading on Facebook and in the national media about a Women’s March on Washington, D.C. the day after Trump’s inauguration. Weaver resolved to make the trip from Pennsylvania, even if she had to go alone. Brandi Calvert, emerging from her post-election funk, also planned to attend, but then had a second thought: Why not organize one in Wichita?
Several thousand people turned out at the Keeper of the Plains on Jan. 21, 2017, to take part in the Women’s March in Wichita, Kan.
Photo: Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle via AP
She had never organized anything beyond a field trip, she said, but she figured she knew enough to put it together. Among the estimated 5 million people who marched in towns and cities across the U.S. on January 21, 2017, some 3,000 marchers were in the streets of Wichita.
James Thompson, a military veteran and civil rights attorney, was among them, and the size of the crowd gave him his own idea: The local congressional representative, Mike Pompeo, had just been named director of the CIA, meaning there would be a special election to replace him. Why not run?
The surge of energy translated into thousands of people looking to run for office, and thousands more looking to join a moribund Democratic Party.The surge of energy translated into thousands of people looking to run for office, and thousands more looking to join a moribund Democratic Party. “I’m as busy this year as I was at any time last year in the heat of a huge election,” Mark Fraley, chair of the Monroe County Democratic Party in Indiana, told me early last year, as local parties across the country began booking larger venues for once-sleepy meetings that were now spilling out the doors. “What’s very different is that it’s made the party younger,” he said. “Young people never really wanted to have as much of a meaningful part in the Democratic Party infrastructure. Now that doesn’t seem true anymore.”
Running for OfficeAs soon as Thompson announced his candidacy for the special election in Kansas’s 4th Congressional District, the local Indivisible chapter, started by Calvert’s friend, jumped into organizing for him. Though Trump had carried the district by nearly 30 points, Thompson’s grassroots army made a race of it, stunning the commentariat by losing by just 7 points. (He immediately announced that he’d be running again for the seat in November 2018.)
The special election season kicked off in December 2017. Delaware Democrats had nominated Stephanie Hansen to run in a February special election for a state Senate seat that would decide control of the chamber. The Republican nominee, a retired cop from New York, had run in 2014 and lost by just 2 points.
As Hansen campaigned door to door, she had a front-row seat to a historic awakening. “What I saw on the ground, beginning in December, was that the Democrats in the community were very depressed, very sad. There was a lot of anguish, from December 21 till right about the inauguration,” she told me at the time.
“As soon as the inauguration and the Women’s Marches [happened], Democrats and those who are likeminded became very angry,” she said, recalling the outrage at the Muslim travel ban and other executive orders flying from then-White House adviser Steve Bannon’s desk. “I watched that whole process happen. That anger turned into something different. It turned into determination.”
Volunteers and small donations flooded in from across the country, and Hansen trounced her opponent by 16 points. When I talked to her nearly two years later, she told me that the energy she feels on the ground has, if anything, only increased since then. She still sees bumps of small dollars come in, she said, and can tell by her ActBlue fundraising page when Trump has done something particularly horrific.
Grassroots donors, driven by the need to “do something,” poured millions into the race, effectively nudging the party in.Naureen Akhter, a young mom in New York City, was shaken into action by Trump’s election, and her first phone-banking ever was for Democrat Jon Ossoff in an April 2017 special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s organ in charge of winning elections, hadn’t wanted to compete there, worried that a Democrat had little chance of winning, even though Trump had won the district by a mere 1.5 points. But grassroots donors, driven by the need to “do something,” poured millions into the race, effectively nudging the party in.
Akhter was disappointed when Ossoff fell just short of 50 percent in the first round of voting and lost in a runoff, but she still wanted to join her local Democratic Party. It proved difficult, as details of the when and where of the party’s meetings were closely guarded, and party officials never let her know when they were happening, despite promising to do so over email. She finally found an event being put together by a local state senator. She went and learned that he had been a member of the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of Democrats who caucused with Republicans. (The IDC was formally dissolved in 2018.) None of it was inspiring.
By chance, she stumbled upon a different candidate’s campaign event. The young woman’s name was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, running a quixotic bid against Rep. Joe Crowley, the member of Congress presumed to be next in line for speaker of the House after a Democratic takeover. Akhter decided that if she couldn’t join the party, she would beat it. She became one of Ocasio-Cortez’s top volunteers and now, as 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez is poised to become the youngest woman elected to Congress, Akhter is her director of organizing.
Thank you! ??
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) March 10, 2018
Organizing Pays OffAll this ground-up energy ran headfirst into an official Democratic Party structure that was unprepared and, in some cases, unwilling to receive it. The party, run from the top down by leaders in Washington, reviewed its performance, and kept all of the same leadership in place, even giving Rep. Ben Ray Luján a second term as chair of the DCCC.
Meanwhile, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a conservative Democrat from New York, was tasked with conducting an autopsy of what went wrong for House Democrats. He produced his report in the spring of 2017 and it was immediately buried, yet to be publicly released.
With a strategy in hand — recruit centrist candidates with an ability to raise money from big donors — national party leaders ignored or rejected advice from anyone whose approach to combating Trump involved embracing a strong progressive alternative, whether it came from Indivisible chapters, Lancaster Stands Up, the local Democratic Party, Swing Left, or DSA.
Having to battle the official Democratic Party was disorienting, but the Indivisible Guide had prepared millions, and the 50,000 (and growing) card-carrying members of DSA were ready from the jump. Through brute force, they broke through in primaries across the country, winning some outright and pulling candidates their way in others.
National party leaders ignored or rejected advice from anyone whose approach to combating Trump involved embracing a strong progressive alternative.The act of organizing, of fighting for something, became therapeutic. Rather than dissipating, the energy fed itself, making and strengthening connections. There has been a fundamental transformation on the left as millions of people have recognized that organizing and activism are not necessarily a burden, that these acts are not strictly selfless, but can have a rejuvenating effect and help one find meaning in a darkening world. This past weekend, volunteers with Swing Left, which was founded after the 2016 election, contacted some 2 million people through door knocks and phone calls in 84 districts. A spokesperson said that roughly 4 in 10 of the most active volunteers had done zero political organizing before the 2018 election. Of those, three-quarters were women.
According to nearly every poll, as well as interviews with voters across the country, whatever Trump’s racist diatribes are doing for his supporters — ratcheting their anger up from 11 to 12, perhaps — they are having the opposite effect on college-educated voters in the suburbs and rural areas, particularly women.
Indivisible chapters that were largely organized by college-educated women now had newly persuadable voters to woo to their side. The conversations taking place on Facebook and during get-togethers have collectively added up to a mass exodus of those women from the GOP. College-educated white women voted comfortably for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, but switched to Clinton by single digits in 2016. In 2018, they are poised to vote Democratic by at least 15 points.
Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
Exit polls found that in 2016, Trump won 52 percent of white women’s votes, a figure that has contributed to an intense demonization of white women across the spectrum. But it ignores a critical distinction — religion — and has been used to produce a narrative that is deeply misleading. White evangelicals made up a fifth of voters in 2016, and Trump won a staggering 80 percent of their votes. According to Pew, some three-quarters of evangelicals do not have a college degree, which means that if you are looking at white women who are not evangelical, they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, whether they have college degrees or not. That group of women is poised to break even harder for Democrats in 2018, though the significance of the realignment has been lost on those who lump all white women together and zero in on the 52 percent stat.
At minimum, this realignment stands to give Democrats control not just of the nation’s growing urban areas, but its tonier suburbs too, leaving Republicans only with rural areas and the exurbs — working-class precincts with long commutes to the city, no organic identity, OK-but-not-great public schools, and growing immigrant populations.
But even that last redoubt is threatened, as Democratic activists and candidates who refused to take the national party’s advice that rural regions were unwinnable will likely make major gains on Tuesday.
The DCCC may have buried Maloney’s autopsy, but he previewed some of it for the Washington Post. His analysis, he said, was that Democrats simply couldn’t win in some rural districts, though some suburban ones were becoming pickup opportunities. That latter point was an extension of the 2016 conventional wisdom and has borne out as accurate this cycle. But the former was a flop. The two rural districts he gave as examples were Minnesota’s 2nd and Iowa’s 1st. In both, the DCCC did end up investing resources and wisely so: Democrats are polling far ahead in both once-unwinnable districts.
Democratic Kansas U.S. congressional candidate James Thompson, left, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic congressional candidate from New York, stand together on stage after a rally in Wichita, Kan., on July 20, 2018.
Photo: Jaime Green/The Wichita Eagle via AP
Thompson, in Kansas’s 4th District, is not favored to win, but his candidacy has had ancillary benefits. A woman who volunteered in his original campaign is making a run for the state House, another is running for county commissioner, and voter registration is surging. Those new people will be a boost to Democrat Laura Kelly, who has a real shot at being elected governor against outgoing Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Democrats are even competitive in the race to replace Kobach, as Google Earth co-founder Brian McClendon runs for secretary of state. He has built a simple voter registration tool designed to expand the franchise, an attempt to undo Kobach’s legacy of voter suppression.
Thompson’s candidacy has had ancillary benefits.Two other House seats, as well as the governor’s mansion, are within Democratic reach in Kansas, and in Oklahoma, Democrats used special elections to flip four state legislative seats in deeply red districts. In the wake of teacher strikes, they’re on the cusp of claiming the governorship.
In rural Iowa, Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, progressive Democrats are making a run in deep-red districts long written off. The entire Rust Belt and Midwest is revolting against Trump, with Democrats threatening to seize every single Iowa House seat, as well as the governorship.
In Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Ohio, Democrats have a chance to retake the governor’s mansion from Republicans.
Grassroots GivingA defining feature of this burgeoning liberal activism is its approach to fundraising. Rather than courting wealthy donors, as the Democratic Party had long done, the candidates seeking to yank their state governments and Congress from GOP hands homed in on small-dollar donors — people who would contribute less than $200 to a single campaign. Donations in $3, $5, and $27 increments have become hallmarks of progressive campaigns across the country.
The party at large has embraced this fundraising strategy only through Washington consultants who bombard inboxes with debt-collection-looking emails. But despite largely turning down corporate PAC donations, Democratic House candidates raised a record $250 million in just the third quarter of 2018 alone. Over 60 candidates raised over $1 million for the quarter. When polling showed that white nationalist Rep. Steve King could go down in Iowa’s 4th District, grassroots activists sent former minor-league baseball pitcher J.D. Scholten $641,000 — in two days — even though he is not listed on the DCCC’s Red to Blue list.
In January, ActBlue, the Boston-based platform that collects and distributes small-dollar donations for Democratic candidates, celebrated hitting the $2 billion mark in total money raised since its founding back in 2004, when Howard Dean’s presidential campaign ushered in the era of small giving.
At the end of October, it hit the $3 billion mark.
Republicans have been baffled by this gold rush, intimating that it must be part of a nefarious plot. “Somehow the other side has arranged for people to send money to this group in Massachusetts, to send it all across the country,” said a confounded Pete Olson, a five-term GOP incumbent who’s struggling to hang on to his gerrymandered House seat in a rapidly changing district in the Houston suburbs.
Olson’s opponent, former foreign service official Sri Preston Kulkarni, is conducting phone banks in at least 13 languages, reaching out to Asian and African communities nestled in the district’s subdivisions. Kulkarni doesn’t have staff airlifted in from Massachusetts for this purpose — his phone bankers are all volunteers who combed through voter lists to categorize residents by ethnic origin and then reached out to them on their own terms, often in their own languages. “We find actual community leaders to be the organizing force for specific communities,” said Ali Hasanali, part of an army of younger organizers who is sharpening this technique in Kulkarni’s campaign. “You can’t have token representation. That never gets you community-based knowledge that someone in the community does.”
Thara Narasimhan, left, the host of a Hindu radio program in Texas, talks with Democrat for Congress candidate Sri Kulkarni during a fundraiser in Houston on July 29, 2018.
Photo: David J. Phillip/AP
If you listen to the gaggle of campaign operatives, media planners, strategists, and policy mandarins that holds down the centrist wing of the party, they’ll explain how they dominated the 2018 cycle, channeling anti-Trump energy into moderate, business-friendly candidates who will return Washington to a bipartisan equilibrium. In September, Third Way, the most vocal defender of the political center, released a primary score card, showing that candidates backed by the DCCC and the NewDemPAC, the political arm of the House centrist New Democrat Coalition, won an extraordinary number of races, while left-wing groups like Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats, and Our Revolution had a much lower win rate. Jim Kessler, Third Way’s co-founder, has brandished these numbers like a weapon. He boasted “20 million Democrats can’t be wrong,” in a recent email sent to Democratic insiders and forwarded to The Intercept.
Delving into the numbers shows that those successes are largely exaggerated.But delving into the numbers, as the Progressive Change Institute has done, shows that those successes are largely exaggerated. For example, Third Way statistics claim that 32 of the 37 NewDemPAC candidates put on the organization’s watch lists before the primaries won their races. But in eight of those races (AZ-09, KS-02, MN-02, NY-22, PA-06, UT-04, WA-05, and WI-06), the NewDem endorsee had no opponent in the primary. In another 17, the disparity in fundraising between the NewDem candidate and the alternative was so stark — $2.4 million to zero in one case — that they can be said to have been virtually uncontested. So in over three-quarters of the wins, the NewDem candidate had no real competition.
Using Third Way’s own list, that leaves 12 competitive primaries left to review.
But the NewDemPAC is also claiming as its own California candidates like Harley Rouda and Katie Hill, both of whom are so strongly in favor of a “Medicare for All” health care system that they have been endorsed by Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All PAC. This does not jibe with the NewDems’s mealy-mouthed call to “promote greater insurance coverage,” and Third Way’s repeated insistence that calling for the policy is a death wish for Democrats.
In Rouda’s case, he had the backing of local grassroots groups, including the district’s Indivisible chapters, who leaned on the DCCC to back him. Hilariously, NewDemPAC put both Rouda and his primary opponent Hans Keirstead on its watch list, guaranteeing success in that race. Two other races (AZ-02 and NJ-11) did not really feature a progressive alternative to the NewDem candidate.
That brings the Third Way list down to eight races.
When you narrow down to those races with an actual ideological battle between credible, well-funded candidates, the NewDemPAC lost five and won only two or three, depending on how you characterize the outcomes. Katie Porter, an Elizabeth Warren-backed foreclosure fraud expert, defeated NewDem-endorsed former Chuck Schumer staffer David Min in CA-45. R.D. Huffstetler, a NewDem endorsee, was so thoroughly beaten in local caucuses by Leslie Cockburn in VA-05 that he dropped out and endorsed her. Josh Butner (CA-50), Jay Hulings (TX-23), and former Rep. Brad Ashford (NE-02) also lost to more progressive opponents. Curiously missing from the NewDem list is the race in New York’s 14th District, where Ocasio-Cortez beat Crowley, the chair of the New Democrat Coalition from 2009 to 2013.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrates with supporters, including Naureen Akhter, at a victory party in the Bronx on June 26, 2018.
Photo: Scott Heins/Getty Images
Outside of the strict NewDem frame, progressives beat centrists in a number of important races in which the NewDemPAC didn’t specifically compete. Progressive Jahana Hayes beat Mary Glassman, who had the backing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the local party machinery, in Connecticut. Jess King in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was on the brink of beating her establishment opponent, Christina Hartman, when Hartman dropped out of the race and moved to a different district. Richard Ojeda’s establishment opponent in West Virginia, the mayor of Huntington, dropped out as Ojeda caught fire. Dana Balter beat the DCCC-backed Juanita Perez Williams in Syracuse. DCCC-backed Colin Allred did indeed win a runoff against progressive Lillian Salerno in Texas, but that was after the party’s original favorite, Hillary Clinton policy adviser Ed Meier, didn’t make it into that runoff.
Lauren Baer (who out-raised her opponent significantly in FL-18), Abigail Spanberger (VA-07), and Lizzie Pannill Fletcher (TX-07) managed to be victorious in a straight-up ideological fight — though Pannill Fletcher only won after the DCCC’s preferred candidate failed to make it into the runoff. Even there, NewDemPAC only endorsed Fletcher after the primary (when she obtained the most votes) and before the runoff in Texas with Laura Moser, who in 2017 became a hero of the Trump resistance movement as the creator of Daily Action, a text-messaging tool that channeled progressive anger into a single piece of activism per day. The DCCC smeared Moser with an opposition research dump before the primary, calling her a “Washington insider” (which is a bit discordant coming from a campaign operation based in Washington). And the centrist wing doesn’t boast about one of its more high-profile wins, when it pushed Donna Shalala through a primary in Miami over progressive opposition. The 77-year-old Clinton administration alum is now on the cusp of losing an extremely winnable race.
The ultimate problem with Third Way promoting its “win ratio” is the concept itself, which encourages fudging the numbers, but also avoiding competition in races where the outcome was less certain. If the group Justice Democrats was primarily concerned with its winning percentage, it would never have gone all in on a millennial candidate who couldn’t campaign full-time because she was still bartending four days a week.
Photo: Michael Nigro/Sipa via AP
Beyond the divisions at the top of the party, however, activists found that on the ground, people who had supported Hillary Clinton and those who’d backed Bernie Sanders largely wanted the same things: “Medicare for All,” a $15 an hour minimum wage, debt-free (or just free) college, a Green New Deal. Even the candidates presenting as moderate or centrist rallied to many of those causes.
The fatalism of the early days of the Trump era, coupled with talk of compromising with the president, was elbowed out last summer by the hope that with enough public pressure, the Affordable Care Act could be salvaged.
Even as liberals suffered blow after blow, their energy remained high because Trump’s assault on the dignity of the public never let up. Each time Trump felt cornered, he found new ways to rally the MAGA crowds. He never let up on his Muslim ban and eventually got a version of it past the Supreme Court. He announced an end to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that offered legal protections to Dreamers (though that termination has been stalled by the courts). He sparked a crisis on the Mexican border, separating parents from their children, and locking them all up.
Trump’s relentless demonizing of his perceived enemies fanned hatred, as emboldened white supremacists marched in Charlottesville and elsewhere, and far-right extremists launched and executed domestic terror plots. Just 10 days ago, 11 worshippers were massacred in a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Right-wing ethno-nationalism with an authoritarian flavor is on the rise across the globe, but an energized left is pushing back, too.The danger for the Republicans of embracing the Southern Strategy (of attracting white voters by appealing to racism against African-Americans) was always that it would constrain them to, well, the South. But their exploitation of racial animus has potency across the country, and it arguably brought them to the national dominance they now enjoy. Right-wing ethno-nationalism with an authoritarian flavor is on the rise across the globe, from Russia to India to Brazil. But an energized left is pushing back, too. Earlier this year. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, running on a populist-progressive platform, swept to power in Mexico; socialists took over in Spain; Jeremy Corbyn remains deeply popular in the United Kingdom.
The 1930s in Europe, and the 2010s in Brazil, showed that center-left movements without a popular base are incapable of meeting the challenge of fascism in times of economic crisis. The Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018 began its transition toward a party of its people, by becoming ever more reliant on grassroots donors and activists. More than 2 million people have gotten involved in Democratic organizing in the past two years.
On the morning of November 7, win or lose, they’ll wake up again.
Reporting for this story is drawn from the forthcoming book by Ryan Grim, “We’ve Got People: Resistance and Rebellion, From Jim Crow to Donald Trump.” Sign up here to get an email when it’s published.
The post How Donald Trump Saved the Democratic Party From Itself appeared first on The Intercept.
Facing his first serious threat to re-election, Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, a close friend and ally of embattled Iowa Rep. Steve King, is attempting to transform himself into the very type of moderate he beat a decade ago on his march to power.
Harris, a Republican who represents Maryland’s Eastern Shore and parts of the Baltimore suburbs, rose to prominence while taking positions so extreme that he managed to make headlines as a state legislator. In the decades since, Harris and King have become partners in the right-wing Freedom Caucus and have mutual adoration for eastern European fascists. Now, as King faces a backlash for his white supremacist ties, Harris has receded into the background, sticking as close as possible to Maryland’s moderate Republican governor, Larry Hogan, for cover.
But with the election fast approaching, local Democrats are drawing attention to Harris’s ties to King. “While Marylanders remain appalled by the hate-filled attacks against Jewish Americans in Pittsburgh last week, Congressman Harris owes it to his constituents to condemn Steve King,” Baltimore County Democratic Central Committee chair Tara Ebersole said in a recent statement.
On Tuesday, Harris is facing Democrat Jesse Colvin, an Army Ranger whose campaign ad, which features Colvin and his Republican wife, a former police officer, at a shooting range, picked up significant media attention in the region.
Having run for Congress as an opponent of the Affordable Care Act, Harris is now a strong defender of making sure that insurance companies don’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. Though his voting record suggests otherwise, Harris said at a debate with Colvin in Easton, Maryland, that he will stand up to President Donald Trump when need be.
Harris’s rhetorical slide to the center in the closing months of his current campaign reflects a nationwide move by House Republicans, who spent every election cycle since 2010 vowing to repeal Obamacare but are now feeling heat from constituents.
Yet Harris, who has served in Congress since 2010, first ran for the state Senate in 1998 in a primary against the GOP’s minority leader, challenging him as too moderate for his lack of a full commitment to a late-term abortion bill.
One of his first high-profile battles was with the University of Maryland over a student group’s plan to screen an explicit film on campus. Harris, then a state senator, called it “poison” and made national headlines by threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from the university if anybody pressed play.
In 2008, Harris made his first run for federal office. He again primaried a Republican, this time taking on moderate GOP Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, challenging the Vietnam War veteran for being insufficiently supportive of the war in Iraq. Harris ran so far to the right during his primary that Gilchrest endorsed the Democrat, and Harris lost in the general election to Frank Kratovil.
The climate was much more favorable for Republicans in 2010, as the tea party wave swept them into power. Harris beat Kratovil easily in a rematch, and hasn’t had a significant challenge since. A physician, Harris centered his 2010 campaign on opposition to the Affordable Care Act, equating a public health insurance option with a government takeover of health care. Kratovil opposed the public option, but Harris still made the issue the centerpiece of his campaign.
Andy Harris, right, participates in a candidate forum with Rep. Frank Kratovil, D-Md., at Centreville High School in Centreville, Md., on Oct. 17, 2010.
Photo: Bill Clark/Roll Call via AP
Harris won handily, but then quickly made a fool of himself post-election. Upon arriving in Washington, Harris was told that he wasn’t eligible for his publicly funded health insurance until he was sworn in. That wouldn’t work, Harris said in front of his colleagues during an orientation — he needed it now. Wasn’t there some type of public option he could buy into?
Harris joined the archconservative Freedom Caucus once in office, and was regularly among the loudest holdouts in support of a government shutdown. He made culture war headlines again by picking a fight with the District of Columbia over its attempts to liberalize its marijuana laws. He also joined King in his alliance with far-right European demagogues. In January 2018, Harris, King, and three other Republicans planned to visit the Czech Republic’s Freedom and Direct Democracy Party, just a few weeks after the party’s secretary declared, “Jews, gays, and Roma should be gassed.” Human Rights Watch dubbed the planned trip a “trans-Atlantic hatemonger hoedown,” and the visit was canceled amid backlash.
“I didn’t make the agenda,” Harris later said, when questioned by local press about the trip. “I mean, you could call it fake news. It never happened,” he said, adding that if the trip had gone forward, he would have skipped that particular meeting.
But Harris has also come to the defense of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has said that “ethnic homogeneity” is key to the country’s development. When a group of U.S. senators wrote to the State Department warning of Orbán’s erosion of the rule of law, Harris shot back with a letter demanding that the senators butt out. (Harris’s father fought in the pro-Hitler Hungarian army, and Harris often refers to him as an anti-communist fighter. The fascist alliance did indeed go to war against the Soviet Union, which captured and imprisoned Harris’s father.)
Moderation has been tricky for Harris, though. When Christine Blasey Ford stepped forward to accuse Brett Kavanaugh, then a Supreme Court nominee, of attempted rape, Harris suggested that the “troubled woman” must have “psychological problems.”
The post Rep. Steve King Takes Heat for White Nationalist Views as His Political Ally Rep. Andy Harris Escapes Scrutiny appeared first on The Intercept.
Police stand between protestors during a White Lives Matter rally on Oct. 28, 2017, in Shelbyville, Tenn.
Photo: Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images
Over the weekend, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy and in-depth piece on how U.S. law enforcement has willfully ignored the threat of white supremacist extremism for decades. The author, Janet Reitman, takes an ostensibly deep dive into how law enforcement — particularly federal agencies — has neglected the growth of the violent far right, in part owing to Republican political agenda setting. For a story framed around a “blind spot,” though, the piece itself is hobbled by an egregious case of sightlessness.
The Times tells a story about law enforcement failing and struggling to deal with white supremacy. The elephant in the room, unmentioned by Reitman or any of the sources she chose to cite, is that U.S. law enforcement doesn’t do enough about violent racists because as an institution, U.S. law enforcement is violently racist and contains explicit white supremacists in its ranks.
The problem is that the framing of the New York Times Magazine piece ignores the deep and historic links between policing and racism.It is not that the Times story doesn’t contain some bits of information that point to this obvious conclusion. Reitman goes as far as to call law enforcement’s indifference to white supremacist extremism “willful”; an entire section of the piece reports on how police regularly permit neo-Nazi violence at rallies, while instead targeting left-wing, anti-racist protesters. She notes how police have been seen posing for photos with the so-called alt-right, and briefly highlights an incident, first reported by Arun Gupta for The Intercept, in which a right-wing militia member aided officers from the Department of Homeland Security in arresting an anti-fascist protester.
Rather, the problem is that the larger framing of the piece ignores the deep and historic links between policing and racism. Throughout the Times Magazine article, a sharp line is drawn between police officers and the white supremacists they interact with — it’s a profound category mistake.
The opening paragraph of Reitman’s piece contains this anecdote about last year’s far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: “A black man held an aerosol can, igniting the spray, and in retaliation, a white man picked up his gun, pointed it toward the black man and fired it at the ground. The Virginia state troopers, inexplicably, stood by and watched.” The main character of the piece, a Florida police officer, is then said to have “fixated on this image, wondering what kind of organizational failure had led to the debacle.” The fact that Reitman opens with a story that frames a black counterprotester as the instigator of violence is questionable enough. The broader problem with the article is that the Virginia state troopers’ inaction was far from inexplicable, and the organizational failures do not merit a sense of bewilderment.
It has been well-reported that not only is racism endemic to American police culture, but that, in the exact decades Reitman looks at, white supremacist groups infiltrated law enforcement agencies around the country. Somehow, in Reitman’s interrogation of the FBI dealing with far-right extremism, she fails to mention that the agency itself was internally investigating white supremacist infiltration in law enforcement.
“Although these right-wing extremists have posed a growing threat for years,” The Intercept’s Alice Speri reported last year, “federal investigators have been reluctant to publicly address that threat or to point out the movement’s longstanding strategy of infiltrating the law enforcement community.” Speri’s story was based, in part, on a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from 2015, which noted that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.” (I reached out to Reitman to see if she was aware of The Intercept story, and if so, why she declined to include the information. This story will be updated if I hear back.)
Former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge leaves the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago on June 29, 2010.
Photo: Jose M. Osorio/TNS/Chicago Tribune/Getty Images
Speri’s report cited numerous examples from the past decade of white supremacist police activity, including the case of a local sheriff’s department in Los Angeles that was found to have formed a neo-Nazi gang in 1991; a Chicago detective and rumored Ku Klux Klan member who was found to have tortured 120 black men while on duty (before eventually being fired and prosecuted); and cops in Cleveland who scrawled neo-Nazi graffiti in their locker rooms.
The Times piece has a passage on a joint 2009 assessment by DHS and the FBI, which warned of the growing white supremacist threat. The assessment caused outrage among adherents of the growing right-wing political movement known as the tea party, as well as conservatives in general; among other complaints, they took umbrage at the report’s claim that veterans were at high risk of right-wing radicalization. Then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano bowed to the pressure, disavowed the document, and apologized to veterans. But as the report’s lead researcher, Daryl Johnson, told Speri last year, “Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups.”
The least we might expect from the New York Times story would be for it to include federal agencies’ own admissions of white supremacist infiltration in policing.The least we might expect from the Times story — which, according to the author, took over a year to report — would be for it to include federal agencies’ own admissions of white supremacist infiltration in policing. A true reckoning with law enforcement’s role in American white supremacy would address the dark and unfinished history of policing as a racist institution, from its birth in the slave patrols of the 18th century, to its historic presence in the KKK, to the innumerable instances of racism by the police and the continued threat policing poses to black life.
As if to provide an example of how to do it, the day before the Times Magazine story went live, the Washington Post published an article that detailed the systemic racism and misconduct of the police department in Little Rock, Arkansas, including the hiring of an officer who had attended a KKK meeting and went on to shoot dead a 15-year-old black child in 2012. The story of this officer, the Post’s Radley Balko wrote, “isn’t one of a rogue, aberrant cop so much as a glimpse into the police culture of Arkansas’s largest city.”
Reitman’s Times piece mentions that police have shown a tendency to target Black Lives Matter protesters above neo-Nazis, but declines to mention that Black Lives Matter — the central anti-racist movement of our time — is a movement against racist police brutality. Reitman’s piece reads as if the message of Black Lives Matter — that white supremacy undergirds U.S. policing — has fallen on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, Reitman did manage to include a comment from Nate Snyder, a counterterrorism adviser to the Obama administration, recalling local police officers asking for help fighting neo-Nazi skinheads. “They’d be like, ‘Thanks for that stuff on Al Qaeda, but what I really need to know is how to handle the Hammerskin population in my jurisdiction,’” Snyder said. This no doubt took place, but to include this information and leave out explicit police involvement with neo-Nazis and their racist fellow travelers paints a misleading picture of generally well-intentioned local cops, stymied by Washington’s priorities.
I’m not suggesting that Reitman or the editors involved with the story intended to give police or white supremacists a free pass. Compared to some of the Times’s more sympathetic coverage of Trump-emboldened white supremacists and the administration’s racism, this article made a point of stressing the contemporary threat of the far right and appeared to aim, in good faith, to point a finger at the government. But for an investigation with the alleged purpose of unveiling the “whys” of law enforcement’s treatment of white supremacy, it is more than an oversight to ignore that the call has been coming from inside the house. It is journalistic malpractice.
The post Even the FBI Thinks Police Have Links to White Supremacists — but Don’t Tell the New York Times appeared first on The Intercept.
There are two Senate seats up for grabs in Mississippi on November 6. But that’s probably news to you.
Mike Espy’s candidacy has gotten some national attention — largely because he’s competing in an exciting three-way “jungle” primary against establishment Republican candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith, who replaced Thad Cochran on an interim basis when he stepped down in April, and Chris McDaniel, a tea party candidate who has benefited from millions of dollars of independent expenditures from right-wing PACs.
If none of the candidates gets 50 percent of the vote, the top two go into a runoff election, in which Hyde-Smith is heavily favored. Polls from early October showed Espy and Hyde-Smith in a dead heat, but she’s been polling about 10 points ahead of Espy since a visit from President Donald Trump, who rallied for her in Mississippi on October 3.
But unlike Espy, who has benefited from high-profile media coverage and visits from national figures like Sen. Corey Booker and former Gov. Deval Patrick, David Baria’s race against 11-year incumbent Roger Wicker is so under-covered, the title of a recent local news article described the race as the state’s “other” Senate campaign.
A double Senate race has only happened 55 times in American history, but the twin Mississippi races still can’t break the news cycle. And no wonder.
With 35 Senate seats and 435 House seats hanging in the balance, national focus has understandably been reserved for those races that seem to be most “winnable.” It’s reasonable to be pessimistic about red states, and given the conservative politics of the deep South, it’s particularly hard to be sanguine about Mississippi.
But Mississippi is not just red. It’s black. At 37 percent, no state has a higher proportion of African-American residents — or black senators over time. Of the 10 black senators ever elected in American history, the first two were elected by the Magnolia State — both in the decade following the Civil War, before senators were directly elected by voter.
Reconstruction-era politics are an unlikely hook for contemporary Senate chances, but there is a more recent reason to be hopeful: Barack Obama won over 43 percent of Mississippi voters in 2008, the best showing for a Democrat in the modern era since Jimmy Carter won 48 percent of the vote in 1980. For all of the demographic prognosticating about the increasing power of the Hispanic vote and glib democratic posturing about how African-Americans are a “firewall,” few seem to have taken notice of the untapped political power that lies in the heavily African-American Democratic base of Mississippi.
Few seem to have taken notice of the untapped political power that lies in the heavily African-American Democratic base of Mississippi.Espy, the first African-American secretary of agriculture and a former representative from Mississippi’s 2nd District, sees a path to victory. He says often that it runs through the black community, but he also understands that attracting black voters alone is not enough. To win, not only would he need 95 percent of African-Americans to vote for him at Obama’s turnout levels, but Espy would also need one 1 of 4 white voters on his side.
In a September MSNBC interview, Espy pointed out that he’s achieved as much in the past. When he first won his congressional seat in 1992, he did it with only 85 percent of the black vote and 11 percent of the white vote. But by 1996, he’d garnered 95 percent of the black vote and 40 percent of the white vote, thus proving that the odds might be long, but they aren’t impossible.
FiveThirtyEight is forecasting Espy’s vote share at only a fraction of a point behind Hyde-Smith — 39.2 percent to her 39.9 percent. But he’s nowhere near the 50 percent needed to secure the election without a runoff, and his odds sour considerably in a runoff, during which Hyde-Smith would no longer be competing with McDaniel for Republican votes.
The time to win is now. Which is why it’s frustrating that the Democratic Party hasn’t taken more interest in the state.
According to Federal Election Commission filings, the Republican Party spent nearly $8 million in the state as of late October, while Democrats have received a little more than $2 million from the Democratic Party.
And conservatives are also overwhelmingly outpacing Democrats with respect to independent expenditures. In particular, right-wing groups like the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, Citizens United, and Remember Mississippi — a pro-McDaniel Super PAC — have poured millions of dollars into the race in support of McDaniel or opposing Hyde-Smith.
Meanwhile, outside help for Baria and Espy has been limited. The American Civil Liberties Union spent $130,000 in radio advertisements for Espy’s campaign, but independent expenditures for the Democratic candidates have been meager. Espy received about $5,000 each from The Collective, a PAC founded to remedy African-American underrepresentation in elected office, and the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. Indivisible kicked $1,497 to Baria in October.
In a rare national media interview, Baria was asked whether he felt he was getting enough support from the Democratic National Committee. He demurred, saying that the DNC has offered support through state parties. But according to FEC disclosures, Baria has received less than $7,000 in party committee contributions. The DNC has given over $300,000 to the Mississippi Democratic Party this cycle, but the state party has made fewer than $6,000 in disbursements outside of operating expenses. Only $1,250 of that meager sum seems to have gone to Baria.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is solely dedicated to electing Democrats to the Senate, has given directly to only four candidates — offering the maximum $47,400 donation to Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. The bulk of its independent expenditures — $28.68 million — has been against Republican candidates, compared to $1.1 million for Democrats. But it doesn’t appear that any of that money has been used against the Republican candidates in Mississippi. Curiously, the DSCC saw fit fund an ad attacking Wicker on health care and wages back in 2008, but not in 2018, when highlighting that the threat Republicans pose to residents of the disproportionately low-income state would benefit two candidates at once.
The failure to invest is particularly troubling given the low cost of advertising in Mississippi. An ad that costs $35 per minute in Los Angeles might cost less than half as much in Jackson. Small, independent ads have proven to be overwhelmingly beneficial to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who saw a huge spike in funding after an advertisement by socialist filmmakers Means of Production went viral.
In May, CBC member Rep. Bennie Thompson D-Miss., articulated his hope that the DSCC would help Espy. “If I get asked, I’ll tell them they should,” Thompson said, according to the Clarion-Ledger, a local newspaper. “If we are the base voters for the Democratic Party, then you need to invest equally in those voters,” — not two weeks before the election, but two years before. A day before the election, that hope has not materialized.
Baria’s campaign is interesting in its own right. He’s running the kind of inclusive, issue-based campaign that’s been shown to have traction in red, rural districts that Democrats gave up on long ago. And with a biracial son, he’s not without a certain amount of identity-based appeal. Certainly it’s a long shot — 43 percent of those polled favored Wicker, giving him a 14-point lead. But Baria is quick to point out that Wicker fails to break the 50 percent mark in polls and that there are more than enough swing voters to tip the balance in his favor — especially since black voters tend to be underrepresented in these polls.
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— David Baria (@dbaria) September 7, 2018
More cynically, however, Baria’s presence on the ticket serves as a natural boost for Espy’s campaign — even more so given that he could turn out white moderate Democrats who might not be inclined to come out for Espy, but may be likely to vote a straight ticket at the polls.
The two candidates have campaigned together around the state, bumping into each other at “beans and greens,” fundraising dinners where the candidates can talk to constituents and give their stump speeches. When their paths overlap, both Baria and Espy will tell audiences that they have a chance to vote two Democrats into the Senate on November 6. The candidates apparently see the opportunity for collaboration, but that hasn’t been taken advantage of on a broader scale.
The candidates apparently see the opportunity for collaboration, but that hasn’t been taken advantage of on a broader scale.When Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., visited Mississippi in April to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, he identified Obama’s success in the state as a point of political opportunity. “If you had a Democratic Party that was a 50-state party, which was paying attention to Mississippi, and South Carolina and Georgia, as well as Kansas and Montana and Idaho, if you had a party that was putting resources and energy into every state in the country, there is no way on earth that you will not get 20 or 30 percent of white Mississippians voting for a candidate like Obama.”
Recent gains in the South have proven as much. In Georgia, another deep South long shot, Stacey Abrams is neck and neck with Brian Kemp in the race to become the first black female governor in the state. Her inclusive messaging strategy and voter registration work have paid clear dividends and provide a blueprint for other states. Espy, it seems, has adopted similarly broad and inclusive messaging. “I don’t look at race so much as I look at economic possibilities, common ground for everyone regardless of race,” he said during a recent MSNBC interview. “I’m talking about not just black, but all Mississippians.”
Sen. Doug Jones’s victory in Alabama over accused child predator Roy Moore is also an instructive lesson in the power of grassroots organizing by the black electorate. Espy’s campaign has hired staff members from Jones’s campaign and is hoping to recreate the levels of turnout that contributed to Jones’s victory.
But the story of that Alabama race is also a story about the power of opposition advertising. Not only did black voters — especially black women — come out in support of Jones, Republican voters stayed home — unenthusiastic about voting for an accused child molester. Negative ads highlighting Republican efforts to cut Medicaid and Social Security could have a suppression effect on Republican voters, who, like the Alabama conservatives turned off by Moore, might decide to sit this one out. After all, Mississippi is the worst state in the country with respect to health outcomes, and both Democratic candidates have been campaigning on health care as a centrally important issue to Mississippi voters.
As Jones’s Alabama win showed, even if winning is a long shot, there’s value in showing up.But despite the political gains to trade here — the historic opportunity presented by two Senate seats up for grabs in Mississippi and the opportunity to maximize the value of ad dollars by supporting two Democratic candidates in one media market — the Democratic Party has largely ignored the election. Given the significant impact even a small spend could have in the state, Mississippi feels like a missed opportunity. As Jones’s Alabama win showed, even if winning is a long shot, there’s value in showing up.
Rather than approaching elections as though outcomes are a fait accompli determined by polling and historical trends, Democrats could try harder to change outcomes by doing the actual work of politics — persuading voters that the Democratic platform would benefit constituents’ lives — no matter where they live. Beto O’Rourke has expanded the left’s political imagination in Texas, where he poses a genuine challenge to Republican incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz despite running an unapologetically liberal campaign, one largely funded by grassroots donations. By running an inspirational campaign, O’Rourke was able to tap into tens of millions of dollars to make the race competitive. Democrats in Washington think too often about the downsides of allocating scarce resources. Instead, they should also look to expand the resources that are available.
The analogy isn’t lost on Baria. Last week, he retweeted a supporter: “Hey Mississippi, did you know we have our own version of @BetoORouke? His name is David Baria, and he is going to Washington to fight for our healthcare, or right to marry who we love, and our education.” If only more people knew.
States where Democrats have lost by greater margins than Obama lost Mississippi are considered to be swing states, hotly scrutinized as sites for political opportunity. In 2016, Hillary Clinton earned only 43 percent of the vote in Ohio and 41 percent in Iowa, compared to Obama’s 43 percent share of Mississippi voters in 2008.
Of course, close elections alone don’t make swing states. Both major political parties needed to have won in recent years for a state to get that designation, and a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t won in Mississippi since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Moreover, a Democratic senator hasn’t sat in the state since John Stennis — a pre-realignment segregationist — retired in 1989. In other words, Mississippi has yet to “swing.” But it might be a loaded ballast just waiting for the right push.
The post Both of Mississippi’s Senate Seats Are Up for Election. National Democrats Barely Paid Attention. appeared first on The Intercept.
Republican operatives and representatives from America’s largest business groups — alarmed at a wave of upset electoral victories by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other avowed democratic socialist candidates — have been plotting to stem the tide of left-wing Democrats sweeping the country.
Andrew Wynne, an official at the Republican State Leadership Committee, spoke to business lobby leaders in July, encouraging them not to ignore the latest trends within the Democratic Party. He called for Republicans’ allies to enact a unified plan to defeat progressives in this week’s midterm elections.
“Recent elections have proven the leftward shift. An anti-free market, anti-business ideology has taken over the Democratic Party, particularly this year during the primaries.”“Recent elections have proven the leftward shift,” said Wynne. “An anti-free market, anti-business ideology has taken over the Democratic Party, particularly this year during the primaries.”
Wynne referred to a series of surprise election upsets over the last year, including the victory by democratic socialist Lee Carter in a competitive Virginia legislative race in November 2017 and primary victories by democratic socialists in several Pennsylvania state Democratic primaries in March of this year.
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez captured the energy of these voters to win a congressional nomination in New York, defeating the incumbent who many thought could be the next Democratic speaker of the House,” Wynne continued.
He noted that the defeated incumbent in the Ocasio-Cortez race, Rep. Joe Crowley, a moderate Democrat and former chair of the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition, “was someone who the business community could have a conversation with on the Democratic side.” On the other hand, Wynne warned, Ocasio-Cortez would not be so receptive to business lobbyists.
The July conference call included business lobbyists from state chambers of commerce in Texas, Kentucky, New York, Georgia, and Maryland.
Officials from the Republican State Leadership Committee, which assists Republicans in capturing power on the state level, explained during the call that they expected to raise $45 million in direct contributions and $5 million to $7 million through an allied dark money group for election campaigns this fall.
The group is organized under the IRS’s 527 rules and operates in a manner similar to Super PACs: It can raise and spend unlimited amounts from individuals and corporations. The latest disclosures suggest the group is well on track to bring in significant corporate support for electing Republican state officials.
Koch Industries, Crown Cork & Seal, Genentech Inc., ExxonMobil, NextEra Energy, Range Resources, Eli Lilly and Co., Marathon Petroleum, Reynolds American, Boeing, General Motors, and Astellas Pharma are among the companies that have already provided at least $100,000 to the committee.
Many of those companies are from industries that have long contributed to GOP causes, including resource extraction, financial services, tobacco, retail, for-profit education firms, and private health care interests. But the list also includes a number of Silicon Valley firms that have stepped up political giving, including Uber and Google.
Several of the largest donors to the Republican State Leadership Committee are themselves dark money groups. The Judicial Crisis Network, a 501(c) nonprofit that does not disclose its donors, has given $1.5 million to the group. The ABC Free Enterprise Fund, a dark money affiliate of a lobbying group that represents non-union construction companies, gave $100,000.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has given $1.7 million to the committee. The chamber, notably, does not disclose its donors but has been financed in the past by Goldman Sachs and Dow Chemical, among other major American and foreign companies.
The money, explained the operatives from the Republican State Leadership Committee on the call, would not only be spent on campaign advertising, but a suite of election resources to identify voters, provide issue polling, and messaging to defeat left-wing candidates.
The Republican State Leadership Committee additionally provides “intelligence sharing” to “disseminate details of partisan political and interest group agendas that are disfavored by the business community,” said Wynne on the call.
One example of such services from earlier this year was help for Republicans to counter the wave of teachers union protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and other states. “We’re able to identify similar slogans, similar organizing principles, and help protect the business community and their allies in the legislature,” Wynne said.
In the New York state Senate, a group of centrist Democrats, known as the Independent Democratic Conference, or IDC, caucus with the GOP to provide the Republicans with an effective majority. During the Republican State Leadership Committee call, Zack Hutchins, the director of communications for the Business Council of New York State — a trade group that represents AT&T, JPMorgan Chase, Corning Intl., and other New York companies — asked committee officials if they would engage to help maintain the IDC-backed GOP majority in the legislature.
Wynne said his organization was planning to engage, despite the significant costs of election campaigns in New York. Former Republican Rep. Tom Reynolds, now a lobbyist and campaign strategist, was heading up an effort to work on the election, Wynne explained.
“They’re going to try to throw a big money smear campaign against all of us in the years going forward to make sure they don’t lose any more ground electorally.”Carter, the Virginia democratic socialist who unseated a senior Virginia Republican in his race last year, said the chamber lobbyists had opposed “pretty much everything I’ve tried to do,” describing the business league as a threat to policies designed to help the working class.
Asked about the coordination between the Republican State Leadership Committee and state business leaders on election efforts, Carter said activists should be on the alert.
“We’ve got to stay focused. They’re going to try to throw a big money smear campaign against all of us in the years going forward to make sure they don’t lose any more ground electorally,” said Carter. “If people stand together, if we come together and demand change, demand a better life for working people in this country, then they won’t be able to buy our elections.”
Top photo: Matt Walter, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, gestures while speaking during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18, 2016.
The post Business Lobbyists, GOP Operatives Plot to Take Down Wave of Ocasio-Cortez-Style Democratic Socialists in Midterms appeared first on The Intercept.
Reyna Gengler, 41, is a lifelong resident of Milwaukee who’s never voted. In 2018, she says, she’ll vote for the first time. But that’s not all: She’s jumped directly from being a non-voter to a committed activist. She’s working as a canvasser for the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization to get out the vote for Tony Evers, the Democratic candidate for governor in Wisconsin. Moreover, she now believes she may want to run for office one day herself.
Precious Crawley, 26, is also a Milwaukeean, and — as is obvious after hearing her speak for just five minutes — a born organizer. But this year is the first time she’s gotten involved in politics beyond voting. She too is canvassing for Evers, even though she has three children and two other jobs at McDonald’s and a Family Dollar store.
Both Gengler and Crawley are part of a push by the organization Fight for $15 to elect Democratic governors in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan — that is, the Upper Midwest, where the modern U.S. labor movement was born but recently has seemed on the verge of dying. Notably, the strategy does not primarily aim at persuading those who vote regularly in every election. Instead, Fight for $15 is attempting to find and mobilize infrequent or non-voters, particularly people of color, by knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors in African-American and Latino communities.
The strategy aims to pull people into the political process by making clear that voting can translate into direct, material benefits. The Democratic candidates in all three states are running on platforms that include support for a $15 minimum wage, opposition to union-killing “right-to-work” laws, and Medicaid expansion.
Gengler and Crawley may be particularly effective at their jobs because they know what they’re talking about from experience. Both have urgent medical needs — Gengler can’t afford medication for several serious conditions, and Crawley says she was caught in the middle of a police car chase and needs a third operation to repair damage to her liver — and neither has health insurance. Both of their lives would be changed by a $15 minimum wage. Crawley currently makes $7.50 an hour at McDonald’s and $7.75 at her Family Dollar job.
Based on the most recent polls, Fight for $15 and newly active constituencies may well succeed on Tuesday in putting Democrats in the governor’s mansion in all three states. If so, it would mark a sharp U-turn for the politics of the Upper Midwest and significantly increase the odds that the Democratic presidential candidate will win in 2020.
• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was first elected in 2010 and is now running for a third term. Walker became a hard-right superstar in 2011 when, defying 100,000 protesters who came to the state capital of Madison, he successfully passed a bill aimed at crushing public-sector unions. This was particularly striking in Wisconsin, given that in 1959, it became the first state where public-sector workers could engage in collective bargaining. Walker went on to sign a right-to-work law in 2015, hamstringing private-sector unions. He’s also refused to take full advantage of the Medicaid expansion available under the Affordable Care Act, costing Wisconsin $1 billion and an unknown number of Cheesehead lives.
October’s three polls show Evers ahead by 5 percent, tied with Walker, and 1 percent behind, respectively. Evers may not have the election in the bag, but he has a clear shot at knocking off one of America’s most effective Gilded Age-style politicians.
A victory would reverberate far beyond Wisconsin. Donald Trump won the state by just 23,000 votes out of 3 million cast. That was the first time Wisconsin went Republican since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide. Both Democrats and Republicans recognize — the former with distress, the later with glee — that this wouldn’t have happened without Walker’s demobilizing attacks on labor.
• Michigan Democrats were surprised when Rick Snyder, who’d served on the board of a computer company when it outsourced thousands of jobs to China, won the governor’s race in 2010. But they were truly poleaxed in 2012 when he managed to pass a right-to-work law for Michigan. This was, in a state that was once America’s central fortress of union power, akin to outlawing show business in California. In 2014, Snyder also headed off attempts to raise the Michigan minimum wage via referendum to $10.10 by signing a bill boosting it to $9.25. He’s also prevented cities from passing their own higher minimum wage.
Snyder did accept the full ACA Medicaid expansion. But Bill Schuette, the state’s attorney general and the 2018 GOP candidate for governor, has attacked the expansion and joined numerous lawsuits trying to bring down the ACA. Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic candidate, promises to protect Medicaid and possibly expand it further. Recent polls have Whitmer way ahead.
Trump won Michigan in an incredible squeaker, by about 10,000 votes out of nearly 5 million. As in Wisconsin, the Republican candidate hadn’t won Michigan for decades, since 1988, and it couldn’t have happened without a GOP governor.
• Bruce Rauner, a Republican first elected governor of Illinois in 2014, has a reported net worth of $500 million from his career as head of a private equity firm. The minimum wage in Illinois has been stuck at $8.25 since 2010, and Rauner vetoed a bill that would have raised it to $15 by 2022. While there was never any chance that the legislature in deep-blue Illinois would pass a right-to-work law, Rauner has done what he could around the edges to undermine unions. Illinois accepted the ACA Medicaid expansion in 2013 before Rauner arrived in office, which has made him quite unhappy.
Rauner is almost certain to lose to the Democratic candidate, J.B. Pritzker, in a landslide. Pritzker is heir to a family fortune that’s made him a billionaire, but is running on a powerfully pro-labor platform.
So if the Democrats sweep these races on Tuesday, it will alter the balance of power in the region and perhaps the 2020 election. But it could do more: It would be a striking demonstration that the Democratic Party should adopt a different model of politics.
The U.S. has one of the lowest voter turnout rates among its peers in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, coming in 26th out of 32 countries. The nations we beat out include such democratic powerhouses as Slovenia and Latvia. Interestingly, the U.S. has a high rate of participation among registered voters. But Americans are registered to vote at an unusually low rate, about 70 percent. It’s much harder to become a registered voter in the U.S. than in comparable countries.
The significance of our voter turnout levels can be seen in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton received 65.9 million votes, while Trump got 63 million. But 98.1 million Americans were eligible to vote — about 40 percent of the total — but didn’t. And of course, voter turnout is far lower during midterm elections, when 60 percent of Americans generally fail to show up at the polls.
Who are the non-voters? Compared to voters, they are, as a careful Pew Research Center study recently found, “more likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent, and nonwhite. And non-voters were much more Democratic.”
It would therefore seem obvious that the Democratic Party’s top priority at all times across all elections should be to find, register, and mobilize intermittent voters and non-voters for the long-term. Yet it has done so only in fits and starts, spending the rest of the time either fixated on winning over voters in the mythical middle of the political spectrum or hectoring third-party voters.
This dynamic can be seen in distilled form in a remarkable story about the aftermath of the 1972 election. Following Hubert Humphrey’s loss to Richard Nixon in 1968, the civil rights and feminist movements forced the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination process to become far more open and small-d democratic. But the party’s conservative, corporate wing loathed the changes, and loathed George McGovern, the man who took advantage of them to seize the nomination for himself in 1972. The AFL-CIO refused to endorse him. One Chicago pol was heard saying that McGovern was “gonna lose because we’re gonna make sure he’s gonna lose.”
McGovern indeed did lose to Nixon in a landslide. Yet Nixon had oddly short coattails, with Republicans picking up just 12 seats in the House and even losing two in the Senate.
Meanwhile, McGovern in defeat had brought enormous energy from social movements into the Democratic Party. This included 600,000 small donors — i.e., precisely the people most likely to vote, volunteer, canvass, and drag friends and family to the polls. After the election, McGovern turned this list over to the Democratic National Committee on old-timey computer tape. By then, the head of the DNC was Bob Strauss, a corporate lawyer and lobbyist so GOP-friendly he’d later become an ambassador during the George H.W. Bush administration. Strauss appears to have simply discarded the list, telling subordinates, “Those are just those issue-oriented people, let those people go.” Strauss died in 2014 and never explained his actions. However, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he and his allies preferred to lose elections without such troublemaking newcomers than to win with them.
In the decades since, various insurgencies within the Democratic Party have tried to reorient it to appeal to disaffected outsiders, sometimes with success. Steve Cobble, the national delegate coordinator for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, explains that the campaign’s key belief was that it was critical to “expand the base electorate with more African-American and Latino and young voters.”
Cobble points to a prophetic speech in which Jackson proclaimed,
We have not proven that we can win and make progress without each other. … The team that got us here must be expanded. …
We cannot be satisfied by just restoring the old coalition. Old wine skins must make room for new wine. We must heal and expand. …
If blacks vote in great numbers, progressive whites win. It’s the only way progressive whites win. If blacks vote in great numbers, Hispanics win. If blacks, Hispanics and progressive whites vote, women win. When women win, children win. When women and children win, workers win. We must all come up together.
These weren’t empty words: Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns registered enormous numbers of new African-American voters. Jackson recently said he believed this “laid the groundwork for Clinton in ’92. We fundamentally changed the registration population, but more importantly, the activist population.” For Cobble’s part, he’s continued working at the left-most edge of the Democratic Party ever since and was part of the backstage effort to draft Bernie Sanders to run for president in 2016.
Here in the present day, Gengler and Crawley report that their clear, simple, positive message is an easy sell with intermittent and new voters.
“I speak to people every day; initially they don’t want to speak,” says Gengler. “They’re running out to work. But [after a conversation, they say,] ‘You can count on me to vote.’ … They respond to $15 and a union, they respond quickly. … They’ll send me to all their neighbors — ‘Talk to this person, talk to this person’ — they’re really, really motivated.’”
Precious Crawley canvassing for Tony Evers, the Democratic candidate for governor in Wisconsin.
Photo: Courtesy of Fight for $15
We don’t know who’ll win on Tuesday. But the strategy being pursued in the Upper Midwest may have both immediate political impact and something more subtle that goes beyond vote counts. “This is a huge life change,” says Gengler about her first political experience. “It’s very personal … a whole new world. I didn’t realize I had a voice. That I could vote, and that it mattered.”
The post Democratic Candidates for Governor Could Turn the Upper Midwest Blue Again by Mobilizing New Voters appeared first on The Intercept.
Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitor a polling place in Washington, D.C., during the presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016.
Photo: Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images
Voter suppression. Disenfranchisement. Gerrymandering. Can Tuesday’s midterms in the United States really be considered free and fair elections?
Perhaps we should consult with the experts. Few Americans have heard of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE; even fewer are aware that OSCE observers have been keeping tabs on U.S. elections since 2002, at the invitation of the U.S. State Department.
On October 26, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Washington, D.C., issued an interim report on the 2018 midterms. It didn’t make for pleasant reading. “The right to vote is subject to many limitations,” warned the report, “with racial minorities disproportionately impacted.”
This isn’t the first time the OSCE has sounded the alarm. In the wake of the 2016 presidential race, OSCE observers praised the U.S. for holding a “highly competitive” election while also criticizing a campaign “characterized by harsh personal attacks, as well as intolerant rhetoric” and changes to election rules that “were often motivated by partisan interests, adding undue obstacles for voters.”
“Suffrage rights,” the 2016 observers concluded, were “not guaranteed for all citizens, leaving sections of the population without the right to vote.”
Is that what a free and fair election is supposed to look like? It should be a source of shame that the United States, once held up as a model to emerging democracies around the globe, now needs outside observers to remind it of its most basic democratic obligations. The OSCE mission to the U.S. began in 2002, in response to the “serious shortcomings” in the 2000 presidential election, which saw tens of thousands of black voters in Florida purged from electoral rolls and prevented from voting.
But have these international observers succeeded in nudging the U.S. in a more democratic direction? Not quite. The OSCE’s final report on the 2016 presidential election issued a series of recommendations to U.S. officials, including:
• “To meet requirements regarding the equality of the vote, states should consider the establishment of independent redistricting commissions to draw district boundaries free from political interference.”
• “Election officials at the state and county level should be released from their duties if they are candidates in elections.”
• “Restrictions on voting rights for persons with criminal convictions should be reviewed to ensure that all limitations are proportionate.”
• “Authorities should review existing measures to further reduce the number of unregistered voters, including addressing undue obstacles and burdensome procedures faced by marginalized sections of the population.
• “States should refrain from introducing voter identification requirements that have or could have a discriminatory impact on voters.”
Two years later, none of these recommendations have been acted on by U.S officials, either at the federal or state levels. On the contrary, since the 2016 election, at least nine states have brazenly enacted further restrictions on voting which have had a clear “discriminatory impact” on voters.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Since 2000, the story of the Republican Party’s approach to elections, in fact, is one of racist voter suppression; of targeting minority voters with “almost surgical precision,” to borrow a line from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. And Republicans are equal opportunity vote suppressors. They have disenfranchised and purged people of color from a wide range of communities, across a wide range of states. “No child left behind” was the name given to Republican education reforms in the era of George W. Bush. “No minority left behind” could be the tagline of Republican voter suppression efforts in the era of Donald Trump.
Native Americans? Check. In North Dakota, where Democrat Heidi Heitkamp won her Senate race in 2012 by a razor-thin margin of less than 3,000 votes, 6 in 10 Native Americans — who tend to lean Democratic — live on reservations and lack street addresses. In 2013, the state’s Republicans passed a law requiring voters to present identification that displays a street address, which was upheld by the Republican-led Supreme Court in October.
African-Americans? Check. In Georgia, where Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams are locked in a tight race for the governor’s mansion, an Associated Press investigation in October found that 53,000 voter registrations were on hold, of which “nearly 70 percent” were black.
Latino Americans? Check. In Dodge City, Kansas, which is 60 percent Latino, Republican officials moved the town’s sole polling station “to a tough-to-access location outside the city limits.” Voters, literally, have to “get out of Dodge” in order to cast their ballots on Tuesday.
Incidentally, to make matters worse, in both Georgia and Kansas, the Republican secretaries of state, who are in charge of the election process, are also running as the Republican candidates for governor. Thus, their Democratic opponents, in the words of Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith, are “competing against a rival who is also the referee.” So much for elected officials being “released from their duties if they are candidates in elections,” as per the OSCE’s 2016 recommendation.
The United States is in dire need of election observers. Such observers, according to Duke University’s Judith Kelley, “can — under some conditions — lead to improvements in conduct and quality of elections.”
Domestic observers, however, are few and far between — especially since a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act and “severely curtailed” the Justice Department’s power to deploy federal election monitors to states with a history of racial discrimination. As a result, the 2016 presidential election saw one of the smallest deployments of domestic observers since 1964.
Meanwhile, international observers — in the form of the OSCE, which has spent the past 20 years observing more than 300 elections in 56 countries — are subject to a host of constraints on U.S. soil.
For a start, as it’s the midterms, the OSCE mission is miniscule. It features a “13-member core team” based in Washington, D.C., and only “36 long-term observers deployed throughout the country.”
Second, contrary to the hysterical claims from some conservatives, they are OSCE observers, not United Nations monitors. As the Atlantic’s Uri Friedman has observed, “The difference is that observers don’t intervene in the political process,” so OSCE observers have to report voter complaints “to U.S. authorities rather than taking action themselves.”
Third, as the OSCEs interim report revealed in October, “several state political and electoral authorities have declined to meet with … observers,” while “explicit restrictions on observation of voting by international observers are in place in 18 states.” And guess what? The majority of those 18 states have introduced “significant voter restrictions” since 2010, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Despite OSCE-participating countries, including the United States, having agreed in 1990 to allow each other to observe elections, on the basis that such observers “can enhance the electoral process,” individual U.S. states do have the power to block international observers from … observing. In 2012, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott even threatened OSCE observers with criminal prosecution for violating state law.
You might think a healthy and vibrant democracy wouldn’t have any qualms about conducting its elections out in the open for all to see. That it wouldn’t have anything to hide or cover up. That it would welcome international observers as a way of setting an example for the rest of the world.
The problem is that the U.S., plagued by rampant voter suppression and partisan election officials, is far from a healthy or vibrant democracy. These days, as the midterms once again remind us, it’s more of a banana republic.
The post U.S. Elections Are Neither Free Nor Fair. States Need to Open Their Doors to More Observers. appeared first on The Intercept.
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