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Welcome back! Every week here on Nuts & Bolts I take time to look at issues surrounding big and small campaigns, and with the help of campaign staff, candidates, and organizations nationally I try to come up with a picture of what goes into a successful campaign, what we learn from the most recent elections, and the trends we think are emerging in the way we communicate our message to voters.

This week, we get to cover a topic that should get a lot more attention. Deciding to run for political office comes with a lot of worry for potential candidates. The biggest worry is that they do not have enough political experience, connections, or the right background to run for office. “I’m not a doctor or attorney” is a frequent note at the local and state level. 

‘I’m too young’

Ah, youth is a big detriment to running for office, right? Not necessarily so. Many young people are deciding now is the time to make a run for office. Issues that are being addressed in office impact them directly and their generation, like the environment and proper wages. What they often run into is an aging Democratic infrastructure that isn’t always as supportive as it should be of younger candidates. 

Young candidates, though, should not be deterred. Hard work and determination throughout their campaign and addressing issues that matter can excite voters who otherwise sit at home. Last week in Nuts & Bolts, I covered why we cannot just count on the youth vote being the rescue for the party if we aren’t able to address issues of importance to them. The party can make a good start by offering support and encouragement to young people who decide to run for office.

You don’t have to be an attorney nearing retirement to think you have a unique perspective that can matter inside of any elected office. 

Listen to a breakdown of the May primaries on Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

‘I don’t have political experience’

There are some serious problems with this argument: How can you get any experience if the only way to have that experience is to get elected, and the only way to get elected is if you have experience? Kind of a chicken and the egg argument, right? 

The beauty of political campaigns is that you absolutely do not have to have political experience, and many fantastic elected officials at all levels were never politicians beforehand: mothers and fathers who ran for local school boards to improve their school districts. People who serve on city councils to improve their community. Special district officers who run for office to manage basic city or county services. You do not need political experience to run for office—what you need is the willingness to run, and to talk to people frequently.

If you are willing to put in the work, the fact that you do not have experience in politics can be refreshing for voters. Talk about yourself as a small business owner, a parent who wants something better, a garbage collector who wants the city streets to improve, or a teacher who wants a more environmentally sound community.

Political experience is not the only thing that resonates with voters. Authenticity resonates with voters.

We are going to have to adjust ‘eliminating’ factors

Almost three decades ago, we had candidates who refused to admit they had ever tried marijuana because that was an experience they thought would doom them. Candidates who had experience in some jobs found that their jobs were so demeaned by the public that they took themselves immediately out of contention to run for office. “I can’t run because 20 years ago …”

We are going to have to get used to the reality that more and more members of our young community do not care a whit about any of that. In fact, there are more young people who are pretty understanding of almost any situation. Did you make money to put yourself through college in the sex industry by stripping or using a paid streaming service? Meh.

Silly video of you on TikTok or YouTube drinking or trying some new dance craze? Again: See the 1996 Democratic convention attempt at “Macarena.”

Did you slip up and say “F you” or other choice words in a fight? The people who will care are not the people who would ever vote for you. 

Did your ex try to blackmail you with vengeance pornography? Talk about it. 

Young people can offer new and unique situations that represent a change in how we elect officials. The truth is many of these problems happened long before, it’s just we lacked cell phones with digital cameras. 

From now on, we’re going to have to deal with the reality the world has changed and the expectations of the voters have changed as well. Be honest. Eliminating factors are not what they once were, and they shouldn’t be. 

Trying to violently overthrow the government should eliminate you from running to many people, but paying dues for the rest of your life over a video taken on a high school field trip is the kind of thing people will get over more frequently as the years move forward and people stop remembering life before cell phones and the internet.

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If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The 2022 election cycle really gets going next month with primaries in more than a dozen states, so we invited Daily Kos Elections editor Jeff Singer to join us on this week’s episode of The Downballot to run us through all the key contests. We analyze some sloppy GOP food fights in Senate races in Alabama, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania; a pair of primaries in Oregon and Texas where progressive challengers are seeking to oust irritating Democratic moderates; and the first incumbent-vs.-incumbent matchup of the year, thanks to West Virginia losing a House seat.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also shake their heads in disbelief at a bizarre ruling by New York’s top court striking down the state’s new maps; explain why Utah Democrats chose not to endorse a candidate for Senate at their convention last week; discuss the Michigan GOP’s decision to back Trump-endorsed Big Lie proponents for state attorney general and secretary of state, and breathe a sigh of relief over the results of the French presidential runoff.

David Beard:

Hello, and welcome. I’m David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.

David Nir:

I’m David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. We have a big favor to ask you. If you would please rate us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to us there, that would really help boost our audience. Apple Podcasts is like The New York Times Best Seller List of the podcast world. You can do that very easily. Just go to dailykos.com/thedownballot, click on the Apple Podcasts link, and you’re good to go.

David Beard:

We’ve got a jam-packed episode today. What are we covering, Nir?

David Nir:

We sure do. We are going to be talking about a very bizarre ruling from New York’s top court striking down the state’s congressional and state Senate map. We’re also going to be discussing an unusual decision by the Utah Democrats to not nominate a candidate for U.S. Senate. There was also a GOP convention in Michigan this past weekend, where Republicans nominated two Big Lie extremists for the important post of state attorney general and secretary of state. As well, we are going to catch up on the long-awaited results of the French presidential election. In addition, we have as our guest this week Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer. Singer is going to walk us through the top primaries that will be taking place, both for Democrats and Republicans, in the month of May. We have more than a dozen states with elections on top, tons of interesting, nasty, messy, and even funny contests, so stick with us as we run them all down with Jeff Singer.

David Beard:

This week, we’re starting with late-breaking news in New York, where the state’s highest court recently brought down a ruling on the state’s congressional and state Senate map. What happened there, Nir?

David Nir:

This is a huge surprise and really a strange ruling in so many ways. New York’s top court is called the Court of Appeals. It’s not the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, bizarrely, is actually New York’s lowest-level court. The Court of Appeals struck down both the new map for the U.S. House and for the state Senate by saying that state legislators simply lacked the power to pass these maps in the first place. The way they got there was by saying that an amendment to the state constitution that voters approved in 2014 created a body that’s called the Independent Redistricting Commission. It’s not independent at all. Its members are mostly appointed by politicians in the legislature. It’s still called the IRC.

David Nir:

The IRC failed to produce new maps. The constitution says that new maps have to come from the IRC and those maps have to be passed on a bipartisan basis. This panel was at a total impasse. It could not agree on any maps, so that meant New York had no maps. The legislature said, “Well, okay. There are no maps. New York has to have new maps and so we are going to pass new maps,” and so they did. Those maps unquestionably favored Democrats, but this was the process that lawmakers believe was left to them.

David Nir:

Well, the Court of Appeals said, “No. Just because the IRC failed to come up with maps, that doesn’t mean that you get to draw the maps instead.” This part of the decision was really, really strange, because at no point did a majority explain what the legislature should have done differently. In a very vague footnote, they say that the courses of action that lawmakers could have resorted to include, quote, “political pressure,” and quote, “more meaningful attempts at compromise on the IRC.”

David Nir:

It’s not at all clear to me how on earth lawmakers are supposed to force an evenly-divided partisan body, like the Independent Redistricting Commission, to quote, “make more meaningful attempts at compromise,” but that seems to have been the only recourse that was left to them. A dissenter said that was really nonsense and said that this view would leave the legislature hostage to the IRC. That’s essentially what the court seems to be okay with. The majority, this was a 4-3 opinion. It was really bitterly divided. There was a lot of nasty sniping between the majority and the dissenters in the footnotes.

David Nir:

The majority also did something really strange, which it said, “Okay, the maps for the state Senate and for Congress, they are void from the get-go. They have absolutely no validity whatsoever. Oh, and this map that has no legal authority whatsoever, we’re also going to say that it is a partisan gerrymander that violates the state constitution.” There was no need to do this. When courts do this kind of thing, it’s called issuing an advisory opinion. Courts aren’t supposed to issue advisory opinions. They’re only supposed to litigate actual controversies.

David Nir:

This pissed off yet another dissenter, who called it inappropriate that the court would do this. A third dissenter ripped that analysis to shreds and said that the majority, in fact, was wrong on this score, too, that the map was an illegal gerrymander. The fact is, four judges on the Court of Appeals said that these maps should be tossed out. Their remedy is to have a trial court, working with an independent special master, come up with new maps for Congress and for the state Senate.

David Nir:

They didn’t put a timetable on it. All they said was that the maps should be passed with, quote, “all due haste.” It really throws New York’s politics into turmoil, though, because the filing deadline passed several weeks ago. In New York, filing is not just a mere formality. You don’t just tick a box on a piece of paper and mail it in. You actually have to collect thousands of signatures in order to get on the ballot. All of these candidates for the U.S. House and for state Senate, they’re going to have to start this process all over again. They can’t do it right now, because there are no district lines. They don’t know which voters would actually be eligible to sign their petitions. You can’t just get it from any random person in the state. You have to get it from within the district that you’re seeking to run in. It’s expensive, it’s time-consuming. The only thing these candidates do is cool their heels.

David Nir:

This is a really bizarre outcome and Democrats obviously are extremely unhappy about this. No one has any idea what the next set of maps will look like, but those also will be subject to appeal. It’s certain that New York’s primary will be delayed. The Court of Appeals said it probably has to take place in August, but there’s a whole other round of litigation that’s going to have to be resolved over the maps drawn up by this special master. Right now, New York’s maps are a total black hole and there is just no predicting what’s going to come out the other side.

David Beard:

Yeah. To take it from a New York-focused point of a view to a national point of view just for a minute, the end result will probably be less gerrymandered maps for the State of New York, which in a vacuum, one could think, “Oh, well, that’s a good thing. Gerrymandered maps are bad,” but when you look at it from a national perspective, what you see is that, in New York, a gerrymandered map to favor Democrats was struck down by a Democratic court, but in Ohio, Republican gerrymandered maps were struck down once by a Republican court. They allowed the Ohio legislature to go back and draw another gerrymandered map and now those maps are being litigated. The expectation is that the primary will go ahead and the general will go ahead with these current gerrymandered maps. The Republican Legislature was allowed to do a second round of gerrymandering and just pass it through, at least through 2022.

David Beard:

Even worse, in Florida, where they just passed a significantly gerrymandered Republican map, the broad expectation is that the Florida Supreme Court is going to simply wave it through, despite very clear restrictions against gerrymandering in Florida law that was passed by Florida voters. The expectation is, because it’s a Republican court that has a lot of DeSantis appointments, that they’re just going to wave it through. Maybe they won’t. I very much hope that the Republican Supreme Court in Florida will strike down the DeSantis gerrymander and will force fair maps. I don’t have very high expectations on that. What you see nationally is Democrats in New York being forced to move into a fair map, while similar big key states on the Republican side are being allowed to slide through, despite laws that were passed, despite judgments from the Ohio Supreme Court, and have gerrymandered Republican maps go through that skews the entire House nationwide. It’s just an extremely frustrating result.

David Beard:

Now that we got through that, I’m going to talk a little bit about Utah, which is very different, and the Utah Senate race. Delegates to Utah’s State Democratic Convention voted on Saturday not to run a candidate, which is pretty unusual. That’s not something you would expect a state Democratic convention to do very often. What they decided to do instead is back conservative Independent Evan McMullin’s campaign. What you’ll have as a result is Republican Senator incumbent Mike Lee riding on the Republican ticket and you’ll have Independent Evan McMullin. You’ll have no Democratic candidate, but you’ll have it at least publicly known that the Democratic Party is backing McMullin’s independent run.

David Beard:

Now, this is of course in Utah, which is an extremely red state. The idea is obviously that there was basically next to no chance for any Democrat to have any chance of unseating Mike Lee, but McMullin, if he can pull some moderate Republicans and conservative Independents who would otherwise never consider voting for a Democrat, he might be able to put together a coalition that would allow him to win and defeat Lee. Lee, of course, is extremely conservative. He was anti-Trump, like so many were in the beginning, pre-2016, but has now become a very, very tight ally to Trump. He’s somebody who’s extremely conservative and probably a little bit to the right of the State of Utah, which is much more of a Romney-esque Republican state, but still very hard to beat a Republican incumbent senator in a red state.

David Beard:

Utah Democrats are taking the very narrow path to try to get through with McMullin, so that at least you’ll have somebody a little bit more to the center, a little bit more pro-democracy, if not a Democrat, somebody who doesn’t like Mitch McConnell, who has promised not to vote for Mitch McConnell for majority leader. Now, who that means he would vote for if he theoretically won is not clear. Would he vote for a different Republican? Would he vote for a Democrat? Would he vote for himself?

David Beard:

On the off chance he wins and we end up with some sort 50-49 Senate plus McMullin, it’ll be a really interesting scenario to investigate. Again, that’s not super likely. McMullin ran for president in 2016 as an Independent, largely didn’t do very well, except in Utah, where he got over 20% of the vote. In fact, Clinton and McMullin combined in 2016, got 49% of the vote, which was more than Trump’s 45% of the vote. There is at least a theoretical path there for McMullin, if you could combine his 2016 coalition of McMullin voters and Clinton voters to get to something like 49% that he would need to win the election.

David Beard:

Of course, in 2020, the more recent election, Trump got 58% of the vote, as a lot of those McMullin voters, when they didn’t have somebody like McMullin to vote for, went home to Trump. You’re going to have to pull a lot of those voters back. It’s still a tough thing to accomplish, so we’ll see how well McMullin is able to ride this very narrow path. It’s very easy I think to imagine McMullin giving Lee a real scare, maybe even forcing Lee to spend some real money that he wouldn’t have otherwise needed to spend, but it’s still pretty hard to imagine him winning, but it’s certainly something worth keeping an eye on as we move closer to November.

David Nir:

Michigan Republicans also held a convention over the weekend. This was a convention to choose their nominees for state attorney general and secretary of state. In both cases, two Trump-endorsed candidates who are Big Lie proponents defeated more traditional choices that were backed by the establishment. The GOP went with Matthew DePerno in the race against Attorney General Dana Nessel and Kristina Karamo in the race against Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Both Nessel and Benson won close races in 2018. In their roles as the top elections official in the state and the top law enforcement official in the state, they have played an important role in making sure that elections are run safely and soundly, whereas the candidates preferred by Trump, who just won the GOP convention, obviously believe that the only legitimate elections are ones that Republicans win and would unquestionably use their powers, if elected, to overturn any Democratic wins.

David Nir:

That’s particularly crucial, given that Michigan will, almost certainly once again, be a major swing state in 2014. This is a reflection of a broader pattern we are seeing in other states, where really extremist candidates, Big Lie supporters are running for secretary of state. They want their hands on the election machinery. We’re seeing it in Arizona. We’re seeing it in Georgia, as well. DePerno, who is the candidate for attorney general, he shot on to the scene in 2020 after the elections, when he claimed that there was election fraud in Antrim County, that’s in Northern Michigan, a small conservative community, because the vote totals initially showed Joe Biden leading. It turns out it was just a clerical error. It was quickly fixed. Trump did, in fact, win by a big margin in the county, but of course, none of that ever matters in the MAGA world, so DePerno has continued to press his claims that election fraud, which again didn’t exist, wound up causing Trump to lose the State of Michigan to Joe Biden.

David Nir:

Karamo, the candidate for secretary of state, is a similar figure. She was a poll worker in Detroit and claimed, again without any evidence, that she saw fraud in the 2020 elections while she was working as a poll worker. As is typical with this flotsam and jetsam that Trump has managed to bring into the party, Karamo is also a total nutcase of the more traditional variety. She had a podcast, where she obviously said a whole ton of absolutely nutty things. She claimed that Beyonce was, quote, “Bringing black Americans into Paganism.” She claimed that gay people or anyone who has sex outside of marriage, quote, “violates God’s creative design.” She said that yoga was a satanic ritual, that’s an actual quote. Believe it or not, that makes her not the only Republican candidate running for office this year on an anti-yoga platform.

David Nir:

We laugh about this, but there is a very real chance that these candidates could win and jeopardize, really, the very operations of democracy, and again I say not just in Michigan, but in a whole host of other states. I will say, though, that the story is not completely written here. Michigan Republicans actually have to have another convention in August and so do Democrats to officially designate their nominees. This was a pre-convention to allow their candidates to get an earlier start on the general election, but it isn’t official yet. There is perhaps some small chance of these results getting overturned when the delegates meet again in August.

David Nir:

One other candidate who lost in the race for attorney general says that they might actually have to go this route, because they think that DePerno could lose his law license or even be indicted. Republicans might have found themselves in a total mess. The one good thing, I suppose, is that the Republican establishment is pretty despondent about this. One losing candidate for the secretary of state race said, “I’m disappointed that Jocelyn Benson will be the secretary of state for the next four years.” In other words, he assumes that Republicans have just conceded the race by nominating these lunatic candidates. I’m not so sanguine at all. We have seen the GOP win general elections in swing states, nominating the most unacceptable of candidates. These two, DePerno and Karamo, present a real danger.

David Beard:

Just another example of the importance of these downballot races, obviously we talk a lot about the Senate and the House here, but a lot of these races have really important results and so we’ll be continuing to track these Michigan races and other races that affect elections and election rights moving forward. I’m going to take us now across the pond to follow a couple of election results in Europe that went pretty well, all in all.

David Beard:

In France, as we’ve been covering for the past few weeks, the presidential runoff took place between centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, for Macron’s second term. Macron won with 59% of the vote to Le Pen’s 41% of the vote, which is a pretty large feat, a little bit larger than the polls were showing just before the election, which had been about 10 points, but was a significant narrowing from their 2017 election, which Macron won 66% to 33%. There was a real increase for Le Pen and her vote five years later.

David Beard:

We also saw that turnout was 72% out of registered voters, which was a low for French presidential runoffs dating back to 1969. More than 3 million voters went to the polls that cast a blank ballot in protest of the two candidates who were available. I mean, it’s safe to assume these were primarily left-wing voters who were unhappy with the options of a centrist and a far-right candidate. Now, the interesting thing about French elections is that legislative elections are now coming up on June 12th. It’s a weird quirk of the election calendar in France that legislative elections now take place a couple of months after presidential elections.

David Beard:

It’s like if all of the House and Senate races in the U.S. took place on the same timetable as the Georgia runoffs happened back in the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. It’s very strange. What’s resulted usually is it’s been a big benefit for the winning presidential candidate, because they’re on still a honeymoon period. The voters want to give them the ability to govern, so they tend to support the candidates of the winning presidential candidate’s party, so that’s what you expect. Macron’s party won an absolute majority back in 2017 and it looks like they might do so again.

David Beard:

The difference here, obviously, is that Macron is definitely less popular now than he was in 2017. There was much more of a sense that a lot of people voted for him purely to keep Le Pen out, rather than out of real energy on his behalf. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in the legislative elections. It’s a similar system, where all of the races go to runoffs between the top two candidates a couple of weeks later, just like the presidential system was. What we’ll see is a lot of instances where either a centrist candidate and a far-right candidate or a centrist candidate and a left-wing candidate or maybe a left-wing candidate and a right-wing candidate are the ones to advance to the runoffs. That will cause different alliances and different vote decisions all throughout the country. It’s a very messy legislative election to follow, but we’ll definitely check in and see how that turns out when that happens in June.

David Nir:

You mentioned that Macron’s winning margin fell considerably from 2017. It was about 33 points then, about 18 points now, but you also mentioned that a lot of left-leaning voters, in all likelihood, left their ballots blank or just didn’t participate. If we could imagine perhaps a clearer fight between the right and left in France, do you think that might yield a result that was somewhat less concerning than this sizeable drop in Macron’s winning share?

David Beard:

Honestly, I wish that it would be true, that if we just run a left-wing candidate, that they would have energized the French populace and won by even more, but I do think there’s a not inconsiderable amount of center and center-right voters who were pretty happy with Macron and voted for Macron against Le Pen, who I think would have, from their point of view, faced a very difficult choice if it had been the leading left-wing candidate, Melenchon, and Le Pen.

David Beard:

I think that there are definitely plenty of voters in France who voted for Macron who probably would have voted for Le Pen or stayed home or cast a blank ballot in a Melenchon-Le Pen race. There wasn’t really any polling done for that race in a runoff, because Melenchon was way behind for most of it until really the last couple of weeks, when left-wing voters united around him tactically. It’s hard to know exactly how that race would have turned out, but I don’t think that it would have resulted in a bigger win. I think Melenchon, there was a good chance he would’ve still won. Obviously, those millions of blank voters, who were probably left-wing voters, would’ve voted for him instead, but I think there are plenty of Macron voters who would have not gone with Melenchon.

David Beard:

Turning to the other election that recently took place in Europe, this in the small country in Southeast Europe that was formerly part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia, who had their election, as well. They had a right-wing populist, Prime Minister Janez Jansa. He was defeated by a political newcomer, Robert Golob, and his Freedom Movement. Golob is the former executive of a state-owned energy company who took over, in a friendly way, the country’s very newly constituted Green Party, renamed it the Freedom Movement, and led it to victory all in the course of about a year.

David Beard:

Now, Jansa had styled himself very much in the same vein as Viktor Orban in Hungary, very much this far-right populist, go after the media, go after the courts. In fact, Slovenia had experienced the sharpest decline in Democratic rights in Eastern Europe or Central Asia over the past two years, according to an NGO called Freedom House. Now, Jansa had only been in government for two years. He also importantly didn’t have an absolute majority in parliament. One person observed that Jansa governed like he had Orban’s majority, but he was actually in a minority and was reliant on coalition partners, which may have been a key reason why he was not able to build the dominance and media dominance that Orban has been able to build in Hungary. Golob is going to be governing an alliance with a couple of other left-wing parties that made it into parliament and will hopefully turn Slovenia away from its more populist far-right direction that it had been trending over the past couple of years.

David Nir:

Well, that wraps up our weekly hits. Stay with us. After the break, we will be talking to Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer about the huge slate of primaries coming up in the month of May. We are really excited to welcome back Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer for this week’s episode. Though primaries started back in March with Texas, the 2022 election cycle really gets underway in the month of May. We haven’t had any primaries since then, but coming up next month, there are 13 different states holding primary elections, and that includes Texas, once again, because they’re hosting runoffs.

David Nir:

First up is May 3rd. This coming Tuesday, we have two states on the docket, Indiana and Ohio. They are holding primaries, of course, for a huge range of offices up and down the ballot, but we are going to start with a top tier contest that has attracted a great deal of attention and that is the Republican primary for Ohio’s open Senate seat, which has been one of the nastiest primaries in a year full of many, many nasty primaries. Jeff Singer, welcome back. Why don’t you kick us off talking about what’s going on in the Buckeye State?

Jeff Singer:

Thank you, Nir. It’s great to be back. As you said, the main event on Tuesday will be the Ohio Republic Senate primary. It’s an open seat, because Republican Senator Rob Portman decided to retire. We have no fewer than five major candidates running. It’s been a mess. Donald Trump recently decided to weigh in. He endorsed venture capitalist J.D. Vance, who is best known as the writer of Hillbilly Elegy. Vance, like plenty of Republicans in 2016, was a vociferous Trump critic, who at one point mused he might even vote for Hillary Clinton. He since reinvented himself as a born-again MAGA conservative, but he’s still taking plenty of flack for his past statements.

Jeff Singer:

We have also former state Treasurer Josh Mandel. He was the Republican nominee for the other Ohio Senate seat in 2012. He lost to Sherrod Brown. Mandel has the support of the Club for Growth, a really deep-pocketed conservative organization that’s been particularly aggressive about going after Vance for what he said about Trump. We have Portman’s choice, former state party chair Jane Timken, who is the only woman who’s running a serious campaign here. We also have a wealthy businessman, Mike Gibbons, who unsuccessfully ran in the 2018 primary for the other Senate seat. We have state Senator Matt Dolan, who also is very rich. His family co-owns Cleveland’s baseball team. Trump hates him, because the team is trying to change its name to the Guardians. It’s just been this giant messy race. Trump may have clarified things when he endorsed Vance. There was a recent poll from Fox that gave Vance a 23 to 18 lead over Mandel, but that’s pretty tight. A polarity of respondents were still undecided. Vance might have some momentum going in, but we’ll really see on Tuesday.

David Nir:

Something funny happened just on Wednesday, right? Where the Club for Growth launched an ad attacking Vance and Trump?

Jeff Singer:

Yeah. What the Club did was they ran an ad that not only showed Vance beating on Trump in the past, but it showed various people questioning, “Has Trump seen this?” To add insult to injury, it showed a clip reporting that, back in 2018, Trump endorsed none other than Mitt Romney for the Senate and one of the stars of the ad said, “Well, look how that turned out.” They’re gently, but very much questioning Trump’s judgment here. If we know Trump, that’s not going to go well. There’s already been some fighting between Trump and the Club. Trump sent a profane text message to the Club’s president recently, after they kept airing anti-Vance ads. This is not a small thing. The Club is a major power player in Republican politics. If they’re on Trump’s bad side, it could have a big effect on future races.

David Beard:

One thing I’ll be watching for, and obviously we don’t know who’s going to win, but I think you maybe put the scales a little bit on Vance’s side, now that he has Trump’s endorsement, though other results wouldn’t shock me, is that we’ve clearly seen that Vance is not one committed to a certain ideology. He’s completed reinvented himself to get Trump’s endorsement to win this primary, but once he wins the primary, does he really need Trump anymore? If he doesn’t need Trump, does he reinvent himself into some other direction, either in a Portmanesque way or something?

David Beard:

It’s really an Etch A Sketch. We have no idea who Republican nominee J.D. Vance is going to end up being. If he does win, that’ll at least be interesting to watch. Let’s move on now to the following week in May, May 10th, where we have two more states holding their primary elections, Nebraska and West Virginia. These are both fairly small, very strongly Republican states. We’ve got a couple of interesting primaries on the Republican side, one in each state. Let’s start off with Nebraska’s governor race, which has had some interesting developments.

Jeff Singer:

Yeah. Nebraska, that’s a very Republican state. The winner of the Republican primary is probably going to go on to win the general election. There are three major candidates. This race is open because Governor Pete Ricketts, who hails from one of the most influential donor families in the Republican Party, is termed out. Ricketts is backing Jim Pillen, who is a University of Nebraska regent and a pig farmer. Donald Trump is endorsing wealthy businessman Charles Herbster, who was at the January 6 rally that came right before the attack on the Capitol, although Herbster says he wasn’t there for that.

Jeff Singer:

Then, you have a third major candidate, state Senator Brett Lindstrom, who is more moderate. He’s backed workplace protections for LGBTQ people and he voted to override Ricketts’ veto on a gas tax and death penalty repeal. There was a recent poll that showed a very close three-way race with Lindstrom for the first time with a small lead, but very little polling here. The race took a really unexpected turn two weeks ago when eight women, including a sitting Republican state senator, accused Herbster of groping them and other forms of sexual assault. Unsurprisingly, that’s not shaken Trump’s confidence in him in the least, but we’ll see if that affects things on May 10th.

David Beard:

Yeah. What’s interesting is I think Lindstrom probably wouldn’t have a shot in a straight-up two-way race against either of those other candidates, but in a three-way race, you could imagine him coming out with 35% of the votes, squeaking past the other two. That would be comparatively—obviously nothing’s ideal here when you’re in such a Republican state—but a comparatively more moderate candidate who would probably end up becoming governor there. Let’s move on to West Virginia, where we’ve got another Republican primary, this time between two incumbent congressmen. Due to reapportionment, West Virginia lost one of their congressional districts, which forced two incumbent Republicans to run against each other. What do we have here?

Jeff Singer:

All right. In the second congressional district in the northern part of the state, we have our first incumbent-versus-incumbent primary of the whole cycle between Alex Mooney and David McKinley. This is a very red state. Whoever wins is almost certainly going to prevail in November. There’s a lot to see here. The two congressmen, they voted the same way most the time, but they diverged on two very important issues recently. McKinley supported creating a January 6th commission, Mooney very much didn’t. McKinley was one of the few Republicans who voted for the Biden Administration’s infrastructure bill, Mooney very much did not. McKinley’s backed by Governor Jim Justice; Mooney has Donald Trump and the Club for Growth in his corner.

Jeff Singer:

This is an interesting one. If it comes down to who’s more Trumpy, Mooney easily takes it, really no question. If it comes down to who has more local roots, though, that’s where things get more interesting. McKinley is a longtime West Virginian. His family’s been there for a long time. He’s been very involved in Republican politics. Mooney, by contrast, served in the Maryland state Senate. He moved to West Virginia in 2013 when he launched his campaign for governor. Mooney’s chief of staff is also a current Maryland state senator. The Office of Congressional Ethics is also investigating Mooney for allegedly misusing campaign money, including $2,000 for Chick-fil-A. There’s a lot going on here. McKinley represents about two-thirds of this new seat, Mooney represents the other third. If it comes down to geography or who’s the more West Virginian, it’s McKinley. If people want the more MAGA-approved candidate, Mooney.

David Nir:

We’re going to keep rolling right along here, because like I said earlier, there are so many states coming up in May. On May 17, we have five states, including a couple of very big ones. The one we want to start with is North Carolina. That’s a state that’s seen a lot of political upheaval this year. It has a brand new court-imposed congressional map. It’s also gaining a congressional district, but the marquee contest has been yet another Republican primary. I promise we’ll get to some Democratic contests soon enough, but the GOP primary for North Carolina’s Senate seat, which is another open seat race and another truly nasty affair, Singer, what’s going on there?

Jeff Singer:

North Carolina’s Senate seat is open because Republican Senator Richard Burr is retiring. There are three major Republicans running. There is former Governor Pat McCrory, might remember him from 2016, when he narrowly lost reelection over the backlash over the transphobic bathroom bill. Here’s how far Republican politics has gone to the right. McCrory, if anything, is the less far-right candidate; that’s because Ted Budd, who is Trump and the Club for Growth’s candidate, is also in.

Jeff Singer:

You also have former Congressman Mark Walker, who has some connections with the religious right. Walker has trailed very badly in the polls, but kept running, even though Trump tried to convince him to run for a House seat. There’s some fear that Walker could cost Budd some much-needed votes, but while McCrory went into the year with leads in even a Budd internal poll, the recent numbers we’ve seen have shown Budd well-ahead. Things very much appear to have changed. Maybe it was Trump pushing Budd extra hard. Maybe it was the Club for Growth, which has been spending very heavily here on Budd’s behalf, making the difference. Maybe people are just tired of seeing McCrory’s face. The polls show Budd’s really taking control of the race. McCrory’s fired back. He’s run ads that show Budd saying nice things about Putin and commending him as pretty smart when he invaded Ukraine, but so far that doesn’t seem to be moving the needle the way he needs it to.

David Nir:

Regardless of who wins, the Democrats will be nominating former State Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley, who doesn’t really face any opposition in her primary, but there is yet another primary in North Carolina for a House race in the far western part of the state that we absolutely have to discuss. We have talked about Madison Cawthorn plenty on this show. He also has a primary. This one, the runoff rules could have an effect on the ultimate result.

Jeff Singer:

Yeah. Madison Cawthorn, who needs no introduction, there is really no shortage of scandals attached to him, could do a whole podcast episode just on him, but his greatest liability might be because he essentially tried to switch districts. Last year, the Republican Legislature adopted a congressional map and put most of Cawthorn’s existing seat in a different Western North Carolina district. Cawthorn, he gets a little greedy and says, “I’m going to run for an even more Republican seat that I barely represent in the Charlotte area.”

Jeff Singer:

No one’s quite sure why he did that. Might have just been increase the statewide name recognition, might have been just to show what a big dog he was, but it really backfired, because that map no longer exists. That map got struck down. The map that was adopted by the State Supreme Court no longer gave Cawthorn any real option except to run at home. Most incumbents would be quite okay with that, but Cawthorn’s constituents, they felt that he just tried to straight-up abandon them. That could be an even bigger liability than all the coke and orgy allegations in the world that he lives in.

Jeff Singer:

The good news for Cawthorn is that he has seven opponents. As you said, Nir, North Carolina’s runoff rules are different than many states. Many states, if you take less than a majority of the vote, you’re in a runoff. North Carolina, though, no second round, unless no candidate takes more than 30% of the vote. Even if a large majority of voters want Cawthorn gone, if he clears 30% and gets more votes than anyone else, he’s renominated, which is pretty good, considering how red this district is.

Jeff Singer:

Cawthorn’s main opponent right now looks like state Senator Chuck Edwards, who has the endorsement of Senator Thom Tillis. Edwards has been running ads saying, “I’m not some vapid celebrity, unlike my opponent. I’m just a hardworking, dependable conservative.” If 31% of the voters here want a vapid celebrity, that’s pretty good for Cawthorn. Edwards, himself, even released a poll just last month that gave Cawthorn this huge 32 to 20 advantage. More ads are being run here. A Thom Tillis-aligned super PAC has also been running ads against him. We’ll see if that moves the needle, but even Edwards knows he’s starting well-behind.

David Nir:

One super interesting thing to note is that Edwards got into the race during that brief period of time when Cawthorn said “See you” to western North Carolina and was going to run in Charlotte instead. Cawthorne jumped back into the race in the 11th District and Edwards said, “Well, I’m not going anywhere.” Really, Cawthorn’s attempt to abandon his constituents could be his true undoing.

David Beard:

We promised some Democratic primaries and now we’re going to get to them. We’ve got two really interesting, for different reasons, Democratic primaries over in Oregon, who will also be voting on May 17th. Let’s start with Oregon Five.

Jeff Singer:

This is held by moderate Democratic Congressman Kurt Schrader, who has annoyed progressives for, among many other things, saying last year that the idea of impeaching Donald Trump was like a lynching. Schrader apologized and voted to impeach Trump anyway, but the damage was done. Schrader’s one and only Democratic primary opponent in the seat, which takes up some of the Portland suburbs in Central Oregon, is Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who would be the state’s first LGBTQ member of Congress. She’s run to Schrader’s left. She’s arguing he’s dependent on special interests. One very prominent Democrat doesn’t agree. Joe Biden, just over the weekend, endorsed Schrader. Biden, in many ways, is not like Trump. One of them is he does not really take part in competitive Democratic primaries that often, so it’s pretty notable he’s weighing in here, even for someone who’s tried to obstruct his agenda.

David Beard:

Then, nearby, we’ve got another Democratic primary, where there’s an open seat because the seat is new, but at least one candidate has money like an incumbent. What’s going on there?

Jeff Singer:

Yes. In Oregon’s 6th District, in the Willamette Valley, you have a large field, but only two of the nine Democratic candidates have really gotten a lot of attention. One of those candidates is Economic Development Adviser Carrick Flynn, who has benefited from over $7 million from Protect Our Future PAC, which is a group that’s funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. $7 million in outside spending for a House primary, that’s, if not unheard of, it’s very, very rare. Even more rare is what the Democratic group House majority PAC, which exists to keep Democrats in majority is doing, they don’t intervene in primaries, except this time, they spent $1 million to help Flynn, as well.

Jeff Singer:

That’s caused a lot of consternation here. Why would they get involved in a primary for a seat that, since Biden won at 55 to 42, really shouldn’t be that competitive. It doesn’t look like Flynn is such a great candidate that the group needs to intervene here. It’s caused a lot of angst. The other candidate who’s got plenty of attention here is state Rep. Andrea Salinas, who would be the first Latina to represent Oregon in Congress. She has endorsement from Governor Kate Brown and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has also spent $1 million on her. That’s far less than what Flynn has benefited from, but it’s still quite a lot. It’s still going to help her get her message out. There are seven other candidates here. So far, none of them have benefited from anything like the endorsements the other two have, but we’ll see. It’s a very, very strange race.

David Nir:

We are going to swing back to the eastern portion of the United States and hit the third major state that has a primary on May 17th. That is Pennsylvania, where we have competitive Democratic and Republican primaries in the Senate race. How do you see both of these going, Singer?

Jeff Singer:

On the Democratic side, things are a bit more clear. We have three major candidates, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, who’s the tattooed, six-foot-nine candidate, who has this big fan base. He’s had an advantage in every poll we’ve seen against Congressman Conor Lamb, who won a very closely watched special election in Western Pennsylvania in 2018, and State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, who would be the first Black and gay senator to serve, ever.

Jeff Singer:

To try to break Fetterman’s lead, a pro-Lamb super PAC has spent heavily on ads that, relying on a since-corrected media report, falsely claims that Fetterman was a self-described socialist. He’s not. The group had to pull the ad and edit it. The PAC seems to think that this is a good line of attack to argue Fetterman is unelectable, because they’ve attacked Fetterman for applying for the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America, even though Fetterman explicitly said in their questionnaire he’s not a socialist. We’ll see if that does him any damage, but so far it doesn’t seem to be, at least in the primary.

Jeff Singer:

The GOP race, on the other hand, such an expensive mess. Trump recently decided to endorse TV personality Mehmet Oz, as in Dr. Oz, who has very weak ties to the state. He didn’t even vote there in 2020. Oz has been self-funding much of his bid, but so has former hedge fund manager David McCormick and his allied super PAC. They’d been running ads attacking one another. McCormick is portraying Oz as this vapid celebrity. He’s benefited from recent footage of Oz kissing his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There are other candidates. We don’t have any recent polls, but it’s really been this demolition derby between Oz and McCormick.

David Nir:

There is another demolition derby going on in the governor’s race. There, the current Democratic incumbent is term-limited and Democrats have rallied around state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, but the GOP primary, once again, is a total shit-show.

Jeff Singer:

That, it is. There are nine candidates running. Not all of them have much money or name recognition, but anything can happen here. One of the worst candidates in the nation, and that’s saying a lot, is state Senator Doug Mastriano, who, among many other things, tried to help Trump steal the state after the 2020 election and on January 6th, he was filmed passing breached barricades at the Capitol. Mastriano also recently addressed a QAnon-aligned group, although he claims not to have anything to do with it.

Jeff Singer:

Mastriano has plenty of competition, though, on the far-right. You have former Congressman Lou Barletta, who lost the 2018 Senate race really badly to Democrat Bob Casey. Barletta, back in the early 2000s, was this virulent anti-immigration crusader when he was mayor of the small town of Hazleton. He, himself, has said he was a Trump conservative before there were Trump conservatives. You also have wealthy businessman Dave White, who has used his resources to outspend everyone else. He lost his election in Eastern Pennsylvania to the Delaware County Council back in 2017, but he’s still a big presence, thanks to his wealth.

Jeff Singer:

You have former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain, who was trying to portray himself as the Trump candidate, but he got a huge setback earlier this month when Trump himself denounced him for allegedly not doing enough to uncover voter fraud in 2020, which of course didn’t exist. Then, you have state Senate Leader Jake Corman, who just this month, Corman was running out of money. He was about to drop out, then Trump attacks McSwain, and Corman suddenly gets another idea. The very day he was about to announce he was dropping out of the race, Corman says, “Never mind. I’m going to stick around.” There are four others. In a race this packed, anything could happen, but those seem to be the big five. We have seen really no recent polls to indicate anyone is the frontrunner right now.

David Nir:

Once again, Pennsylvania is a state that does not use runoffs, so whoever wins this primary could do so with a very small share of the vote.

David Beard:

Yeah, this one is a real mess. We’ll have to watch and see how that develops. There are also two other states that have primary elections on the 17th, just to note, Idaho and Kentucky. We’ll definitely cover any notable results from those states as we track these races week by week. Moving on to May 24th, we’ve got three states holding a primary, along with the Texas runoffs. That’s Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia. Let’s start off in Alabama, where the Republican Senate primary is taking place. We’ve talked a little bit about that one. That’s where Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mo Brooks. What’s going on there now?

Jeff Singer:

Brooks is still limping along. The Club for Growth is still on his side. Ohio isn’t the first time the club and Trump have parted ways, it seems. Brooks really is in bad shape. There are two other major candidates to watch. There’s Katie Britt, who ran the state’s Chamber of Commerce. She’s the former chief of staff to retiring Senator Richard Shelby. Shelby’s going all-in for her. He’s using his money to finance super PACs to help her.

Jeff Singer:

Then, there’s Army veteran Mike Durant, who was held prisoner in Somalia for 11 days in 1993 in the incident that was dramatized in the movie Black Hawk Down. He’s been self-funding. He’s all over the air. We’re waiting to see if Trump’s going to take sides now that he’s abandoned Brooks, or if he just lets this one play out. Alabama’s another state where you do need to win a majority to avoid a runoff. With three major candidates, or two and-a-half if you count Brooks, and a bunch of pretty minor contenders on the ballot, it’s very unlikely anyone’s going to win the first round outright. This one will probably go to a second round almost certainly.

David Beard:

That runoff would take place June 21st?

Jeff Singer:

Right.

David Nir:

Well, next door in Georgia, we have another whole host of compelling primaries. At the top of the ticket is the GOP battle in the Georgia governor’s race. This one might’ve gotten more ink than any other, but it seems like it’s possibly about to fizzle?

Jeff Singer:

It very well could. Brian Kemp, the governor, he rode to victory in the 2018 primary after Trump endorsed him. Trump’s not so fond of him anymore, especially after Kemp refused to help him steal the state two years later. Trump’s gone all-in for former Senator David Perdue, who lost last year’s runoff very narrowly. The problem for Perdue, it seems, is that Kemp still is liked by a majority of the base. Kemp is anything but a moderate. He’s fervently conservative on pretty much everything.

Jeff Singer:

Perdue’s trying to still get to his right. He’s been focusing pretty much entirely on how he’s Trump candidate and he’s been proclaiming the Big Lie at every chance he gets. At a recent debate, he began, “The election in 2020 was rigged and stolen,” but that doesn’t seem to be working. Every poll we’ve seen has shown Kemp either at or very close to the majority he’d need to avoid a runoff also on June 21st. Perdue’s sticking with his strategy. Maybe the polls are wrong, but if they’re not, it’s looking like Trump’s going to take a very big black eye here. Whoever wins this one is going to take on Stacey Abrams, who was the 2018 Democratic nominee. She has no primary opposition this time.

David Beard:

If it is a rematch between Kemp and Abrams, that will certainly be a blockbuster in November.

Jeff Singer:

Oh, yeah.

David Beard:

We’re going to wrap up in Texas, where they’re taking some runoffs from their March primary. The highlight, of course, is Texas 28, which we’ve covered extensively here already, but what has been going on since the first round down there in South Texas?

Jeff Singer:

On March 1st, conservative Democratic opponent Henry Cuellar led his progressive Democratic primary opponent, Jessica Cisneros, just 49 to 47%. Very close, just below what Cuellar needed to avert a runoff. Cuellar’s pretty much stuck with his strategy from the first round. He’s argued Cisneros is weak on public safety. Cisneros, this time she’s focused more on abortion rights. She’s attacked Cuellar for siding with Texas Republicans to restrict the right to choose.

Jeff Singer:

There was an interesting turn in this race back in January, when the federal investigators raided Cuellar’s home and campaign office, allegedly over his ties to Azerbaijan. Cuellar’s attorney recently said the congressman is not a target in a federal investigation. No corroboration on this claim from the FBI or Department of Justice, but it hasn’t emerged in campaign ads this time. We’ll see if that changes, but so far Cisneros is focusing on abortion rights.

Jeff Singer:

Cuellar has long had a money advantage. He still does, but it’s narrowed quite a bit. Cisneros is not getting outgunned the way she did back in 2020 when she narrowly lost in the first round. The Republicans also have a race to watch here, but the GOP establishment’s going all-in for a former Ted Cruz staffer named Cassy Garcia. Garcia faces Sandra Whitten, who lost a very little-noticed campaign in 2020 to Cuellar. Whitten doesn’t have any big-name supporters, so it’ll be a surprise if Garcia had any problem with her. The seat in the Laredo area is a longtime Democratic stronghold, but Biden won it only 53 to 46 in 2020, so it could be in play.

David Nir:

Well, it’s obvious there is quite a lot to watch coming up in the month of May and there are many races on the ballot in all of these states, beyond those that we mentioned. We will, of course, be covering many of these contests in the weeks to come. Jeff, we are extremely grateful to have you on, once again, to share all your knowledge of all of these many, many elections with our listeners.

Jeff Singer:

Thank you, Nir. It’s been great.

David Beard:

That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Jeff Singer for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you find podcasts. You can reach us by email at [email protected]. If you haven’t already, please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks also to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor, Tim Einenkel. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.

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Nineteen-year-old Florida resident Alexander Jerich was looking for a way to commemorate the birthday of his hero, Donald Trump. Simply driving around West Palm Beach in his white Chevy pickup truck, with its giant Trump flag flying proudly from its bed, just didn’t seem to make enough of a statement.

Even so, on June 14, 2021, he joined a parade of 30 or so like-minded individuals to pay homage to Trump’s birth date by loudly demonstrating their fealty in a noisy parade of motor vehicles, all organized by the Palm Beach County Republican Party. The idea (apparently) was to rub Trump in the faces of the liberal townfolks: to provoke an outraged response, just like Trump used to do.

As he passed through the intersection of Northeast First Street and Northeast Second Avenue, all newly painted with the bright colors of LGBTQ pride (a memorial to the victims of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando, when a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding 53), Jerich was struck with a moment of inspiration: Why not deface the mural with his truck tires? What better way to show his allegiance to Donald Trump than by “sticking it to the Libs” with such a cruel, “in-your-face” gesture?

The painstakingly crafted rainbow mural adorning the intersection, paid for by the Palm Beach County Human Rights Council and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, had only been there for two days. So this seemed the perfect time to vandalize it, being Pride Month and all. No better way to honor Donald Trump’s birthday and legacy than to publicly mutilate some piece of art celebrating the gay community. Well, no one was in Mr. Jerich’s head at the time, so we’re left to guess at what his motives truly were.

But someone did happen to have a smartphone to record Jerich’s act of senseless vandalism for posterity. That video is below:

As set forth in the police affidavit, summarized by Jaclyn Peiser for The Washington Post:

As he drove over the mural, Jerich “intentionally accelerated the vehicle in an unreasonable unsafe manner in a short amount of time, commonly referred to as a ‘burn out,’ ” the affidavit said. “The Chevy truck continues to recklessly skid sideways.”

The skidmarks extended for about 15 feet, causing damage to the mural that would require over $2,000 to repair. (A witness told police he heard another member of the “parade” egging Jerich on to “tear up that gay intersection,” suggesting that Jerich’s act of vandalism was more spur-of-the-moment than premeditated.)

Either way, what Jerich didn’t count on was the fact that his license plate tags were clearly visible to anyone watching at the time. According to the Palm Beach Post, after the video was provided to police Jerich (now 20) was contacted, turned himself in, and was promptly arrested. He posted bond and last week ended up in front of Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Scott Suskauer.

As Jane Musgrave, reporting for the Palm Beach Post, explains, Jerich has agreed to pay restitution for the damage he’d caused. He also pled guilty to criminal mischief and reckless driving charges, and appeared quite remorseful about his actions, crying during his initial hearing and claiming he’d always had trouble making friends and that his behavior in this Trump rally was an effort to “fit in.”

Last Thursday Judge Suskauer put off Jerich’s sentencing hearing until June 8, but in the interim he ordered Jerich to write a 25-page essay about the Pulse Nightclub shooting, with special emphasis on each of the 49 victims murdered in that mass shooting. As Musgrave reports:

In addition to researching the backgrounds of the 49 people who died and the loved ones they left behind, Suskauer told Jerich to offer his own views about why such tragedies occur.

“I want your own brief summary of why people are so hateful and why people lash out against the gay community,” he said.

Peiser’s report for the Post notes that hate crime charges were not brought against Jerich because “Florida’s [hate crime] statute states there must be a specific victim targeted.” Prosecutors have requested the judge sentence Jerich to 30 days in jail, with five years probation, which the judge agreed to consider. But Palm Beach’s residents—particularly the gay community, understandably livid at what seems undoubtedly a hate-inspired crime—are urging a longer prison sentence.

The judge has indicated, however, that he doesn’t want to assign a felony conviction due in part to Jerich’s age. He has said he wants Jerich to do volunteer work for some community LGBTQ-supportive organizations, although Rand Hoch, the president of the Human Rights Council, reportedly told the judge that “none of the groups he deals with are interested in having Jerich as a volunteer.” 

Further, even though Hoch asked that Jerich be banned for life from the intersection he defaced, Suskauer said it might be good for the young man to be reminded of the damage he caused. He said he may order Jerich to visit the site weekly, accompanied by his father, to keep it clean.

Outside the courtroom, Hoch said he was pleased that Suskauer was taking the case seriously.

As Peiser’s article notes, beyond his excuse of wanting to “fit in” and be “accepted,” Jerich has provided no specific reason for his actions. Interestingly, neither Peiser’s Washington Post article nor Musgrave’s piece for the Palm Beach Post spend any effort connecting the context of Jerich’s behavior to the fact that he was demonstrating his loyalty to Donald Trump at the time. Perhaps they believe that readers will draw their own conclusions.

In the meantime, Jerich’s essay is due in court on June 8.

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President Joe Biden did not disappoint at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday, which was the first time since 2019 officials have been able to host the event after cancellations resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden transitioned from poking fun at former President Donald Trump, calling him “a horrible plague, followed by two years of COVID” to jabs at Fox News and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “I’m not here to roast the GOP,” Biden said. “That’s not my style. Besides, there’s nothing I can say about the GOP that Kevin McCarthy hasn’t already put on tape.” (That was a personal favorite.)

But the true star of the evening was hardly the president. No, that honor belongs to comedian Trevor Noah, who was still trending much of the morning on Sunday. He joked while underscoring real issues the Biden administration should be prioritizing from student loan forgiveness to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ brand of discrimination.

RELATED STORY: Biden Pummels Trump And Fox News With Jokes At White House Correspondents Dinner

Noah started with an acknowledgement that none of the more than 2,500 journalists, commentators, and political officials in attendance really should have been there. Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Tuesday she had tested positive for COVID-19.

“You guys spent the last two years telling everyone about the importance of wearing masks and avoiding large, indoor gatherings,” Noah joked. “Then the second someone offers you a free dinner, you all turn into Joe Rogan, huh?”

Rogan is a podcast host who infamously spread misinformation about the pandemic, and with the mention of his name, “The Daily Show” host was off.

Spoilers of only some of his punchlines that night:

• “I know a lot of you are worried and, yes, it is risky making jokes these days. We all saw what happened at the Oscars. I’ve actually been a bit worried about tonight, I won’t lie. What if I make a really mean joke about Kellyanne Conway and her husband rushes up on the stage and thanks me?”
• “What I like about Ron DeSantis is if Trump was the original Terminator, DeSantis is like the T-1000. You’re smarter than him. You’re slicker than him. You can walk down ramps. Trump said he won the election, but everyone was able to look at the numbers and see that he was wrong. That’s why Ron DeSantis is one step ahead. First you ban the math textbooks, then nobody knows how to count the votes.”
• “Interesting fact: Even as first lady, Dr. Biden continued her teaching career, the first time a presidential spouse has ever done so. Congratulations. You might think it’s because she loves teaching so much, but it’s actually because she’s still paying off her student debt. I’m sorry about that, Jill. Guess you should’ve voted for Bernie.”
• “Think of all the journalists whose careers have been hurt by the Biden presidency. People like Daniel Dale. He used to be CNN’s fact-checker on TV every day but now there’s barely anything to check. Same for Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post. On the way here, I saw him offering four Pinocchios for a dollar. Mr. President, that’s on you. What about Maggie Haberman? For four years, it was exclusives. … Now look at her. She spends all day fighting with random people on Twitter like a common political reporter.”
• “Fox News is sort of like a Waffle House. It’s relatively normal in the afternoon, but as soon as the sun goes down, there’s a drunk lady named Jeanine threatening to fight every Mexican who comes in.”

Watch every bit of Trevor Noah’s remarks. It will be time well spent. 

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This article was originally published at Prism

Farmworkers in Florida are turning up the pressure on Wendy’s. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization, has been calling for a national boycott of the fast food chain since 2016 for their refusal to join the Fair Food Program (FFP), a partnership among farmers, farmworkers, and retail food companies that ensures humane wages and working conditions for farmworkers growing the produce used in retail establishments. Fourteen national buyers, including fast food giants like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell, have all joined the FFP since the program started in 2011. But despite years of protests, Wendy’s continues to evade national pressure. Now, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is partnering with Majority Action to press Wendy’s shareholders to vote against the board and ensure the protection of workers in its food supply chain.

“Not signing with the FFP puts the corporation at risk, [because] there may be complaints of forced labor, sexual harassment, or sexual assault,” said Lupe Gonzalo, a senior staff member with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. “We want investors to know that joining the FFP is an advantage they can have as a corporation.”

This month, over 800 farmworkers and consumers took to the streets in Palm Beach near the home of Nelson Peltz, the majority shareholder and board chairman for Wendy’s. In anticipation of Wendy’s shareholder meeting on May 18, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is hosting a rally and street theater protest May 12 in front of the headquarters for Trian Partners, Wendy’s largest institutional shareholder, in New York City.

Peltz has the power to sign Wendy’s up for FFP but has been making excuses for not joining since 2013. At the time, Peltz claimed all the Florida tomatoes purchased by Wendy’s came from suppliers who already participated in the FFP. But according to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the claim “rings hollow” and is unverifiable and meaningless because in the event that one of the suppliers is suspended from the program for violating worker safety conditions, Wendy’s would be under no obligation to shift its purchases to another supplier, as it would under the FFP rules.

Shareholder rights and worker safety

In 2015, Wendy’s moved its tomato purchases from Florida to Mexico. The following year, Harper’s Magazine reported that Wendy’s purchased tomatoes from a Mexican tomato grower with documented modern-day slavery conditions, where workers were forced to work without pay; trapped in scorpion-infested camps, often without beds; fed scraps; and beaten when they tried to quit. That next year, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers began its boycott of the fast food chain. In 2018, Wendy’s announced they were moving their tomato purchases to greenhouses in the U.S. and Canada. But moving to greenhouses is not enough for Gonzalo, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and shareholders—they want long-term accountability.

“That’s not what workers’ rights protect,” Gonzalo said. “There could still be wage theft, there could still be sexual harassment, and other human rights problems. It’s not just having shade, it’s about protecting the human rights of workers in general.”

In 2021, the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany, New York, filed and passed a shareholder resolution in conjunction with Investor Advocates for Social Justice seeking a report on Wendy’s protections for workers. That same year, the Department of Labor fined a U.S. tomato greenhouse owned by Wendy’s supplier Mastronardi for wage theft and discrimination, which was subject to a U.S. Customs Border and Patrol ban due to forced labor concerns.

“Since that time, even though there was a majority vote on the shareholder proposal, the company has failed to adequately respond to or implement what the proposal directly calls upon them to do,” said Eli Kasargod-Staub, the executive director and co-founder of Majority Action. “This is an issue, not only of farmworkers’ safety, but also of shareholder rights.”

Majority Action and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are encouraging investors to vote against directors on the board of Wendy’s to hold them accountable for their failure to respond adequately to the majority vote shareholder proposal.

“The entire dynamic rests on the decision-making calculus of Nelson Peltz and client partners because, though they only have a minority stake in the company, they have outsized influence over the way this board works,” Kasargod-Staub said. “We’re not witnessing fully rational corporate decision-making here. We believe that Wendy’s requires a shift in thinking by the Trian leadership in order to actually get where we need to go.”

The benefits of the Fair Food Program

The stakes of holding Wendy’s accountable are high for farmworkers. For 12 years, Gonzalo’s average day as a farmworker in Immokalee, Florida, began before the crack of dawn. She would wake up at 4:30 AM, have breakfast, walk to the parking lot, and wait for buses to transport her to the fields where she would spend her day harvesting the nation’s produce for meager pay. At the farm, she and other farmworkers would receive 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they harvested. By the end of the 12-hour day, she would have harvested anywhere between 100-150 buckets, totaling $250-375 a week and less than $15,000 a year.

Gonzalo said everything changed once the FFP began implementation at the farm she was working for.

“They just see us as tomato-producing machines,” Gonzalo said. “They didn’t care so much if we had water or if we were feeling hot or if women were facing sexual harassment situations. To hear about this program and to hear that for the first time women could report harassment and that the consequences were not going to be for us, that was very powerful for me. It felt like a new day.”

Gonzalo began attending Coalition of Immokalee Workers meetings and in 2013 joined the team as a worker educator, teaching farmworkers about their rights.

“We ourselves are going to do the education sessions because we have the confidence to talk to the workers, because we come from that same experience,” Gonzalo said. “That is what has given the program great success, because we know what the conditions are and we know that it can be changed, if the workers report and are encouraged.”

The demands for Wendy’s include paying 1 cent more for each pound of tomatoes, given directly to the workers as a bonus at the end of the week, and commit to sign a code of conduct that was created by the workers themselves, which includes basic rights such as having shade, breaks, clean water to drink, and a process for workers to report sexual harassment and modern slavery conditions.

“The worker’s voice should be heard,” Gonzalo said. “The program only works if they are listening to the voice of the worker because the workers are the experts. They are the ones who know what problems are happening on the ranch, they are the ones who know if the program is working for them, so that is why it is important to always be listening to them.”

According to FFP, since 2011, they have received and resolved 3,110 hotline complaints of worker conditions and addressed 9,357 audit findings. If a rancher is found to be noncompliant with the code of conduct, such as sexually harassing farmworkers, then the FFP speaks with the contractor and instructs them to fire the rancher. If the contractor refuses to fire the rancher, FFP harnesses the power of the market and informs the corporations not to buy from that supplier because they are noncompliant with the code of conduct.

“It is a very effective way to protect workers’ rights,” Gonzalo said. “It’s a big deal to have someone that powerful walk out of a company over a report. It sends a message to all the contractors and supervisors who for years had controlled the power that they can’t do that anymore.”

Gonzalo hopes that Wendy’s will sit down with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and join the FFP, and that consumers think critically about where their food comes from and the conditions the workers may be living in.

“Vegetables do not arrive alone in our refrigerator,” Gonzalo said. “There are hands that harvest it and process it until it reaches our table. Corporations only show the pretty side, but not the side where there is suffering.”

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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In a move we’re only hearing about after the fact for obvious security reasons, it has now been publicly revealed that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine, to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday. Pelosi led a small congressional delegation that included House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff and House Foreign Affairs chair Gregory Meeks.

Zelensky posted footage of the trip early Sunday:

The Pelosi trip is another bold statement of commitment to Ukraine’s cause, and follows the approval of a lend-lease program to Ukraine. That authority allows the federal government to ship as much artillery ammunition, drones, heavy weapons, and whatever else Ukraine is deemed to need without having to ask Congress for further approval, and that equipment is now flooding into Ukraine not just from the United States, but from NATO allies.

Any Russian thoughts of achieving something that can be held up as a modest victory on May 9 are well and truly gone; not only are Russian forces continuing to be depleted in exchange for little to no on-the-ground progress, each passing day brings more NATO-provided weaponry to the Ukrainian frontlines. Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s next major decision is whether to begin a general mobilization, ordering Russia’s vast numbers of inexperienced, poorly-trained reservists over the border.

Such a move would be all but necessary if Russia still hopes for a face-saving partial victory, as the Ukrainian government and public are in no mood to entertain thoughts of ceding towns to Russia after Russian war crimes were discovered in the Ukrainian towns Russia has been forced to retreat from. It will also, however, compound Russian logistical problems that have already proved intractable. There’s little reliable information at this point as to what equipment even exists for the reservists to use, and Russian military troops manning popup security checkpoints in Ukraine have already been videotaped carrying bolt-action rifles and other antique equipment.

NATO nations are now sounding exceedingly confident in Ukraine’s ability to at least fight to a stalemate in coming months, though driving Russian forces back across the borders is still a tall order unless enough casualties can be inflicted to convince Putin and his military to declare victory and leave. Pelosi’s trip is just the latest in a series of trips by top U.S. and European officials showing hand-in-hand partnership with Ukraine’s government and military. It’s a far cry from where we started, with NATO nations quietly bickering among themselves about how much aid to give Ukraine, and how much would unnecessarily “provoke” the invading Putin.

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Reuters has an excellent report on pro-Trump Republicans who have attacked U.S. election systems, stealing voting data or attempting to do so under the supposed justification of searching for “election fraud.” Reuters counts eight known recent attempts, the most infamous being the case of Colorado election clerk Tina Peters, who now faces multiple felony charges after allowing voting data to be breached and stolen. But Peters isn’t the only pro-Trump official accused of attempted or successful thefts of voting data or unauthorized access to sensitive, must-be-secured-at-all-times election machines.

There is a trend of Republican officials and allies looking to breach election systems so that they can comb through voter data looking for “fraud” that they claim to be omnipresent simply because they refuse to believe Americans did not vote overwhelmingly to reelect the incompetent loudmouth Donald Trump. Cases include Adams Township in Michigan, where a QAnon-promoting clerk was found in possession of sensitive election tabulation hardware four days after it went missing; another Michigan episode in which a Republican activist impersonated a government official in an attempt to steal equipment; a Colorado election clerk caught on video making “forensic” copies of “everything on the election server”—the two hard drives the information was copied to have not been recovered. Pillow kingpin Mike Lindell features heavily as a financier of election conspiracy theories that have now morphed into pro-Trump crimes and attempted crimes.

It’s worth reading in full, if only as emphasis on how widespread the attacks on the validity of our elections have become and will become, but there are some key takeaways worth highlighting:

1. It is all based on conspiracy theories. Not sophisticated conspiracy theories, but QAnon or similar-styled ranting at clouds, bizarre claims with no evidence other than being passed around on the internet from crackpot to crackpot. The “evidence” the pro-Trump officials are looking for is not something that they can even describe; the goals are to obtain voting records or the secured software being used on election equipment so that it can be looked through and distributed to others, upon which the presumption is that “something” corrupt will be found. Like what? You know, something. And what are these suspicions based on? What tidbits of information are out there to suggest that stealing this information will result in exposing a conspiracy?

Not a damn thing. Literally nothing. The best the evidence ever gets is the sort of “looking for bamboo fibers in our ballots”-styled nonsense of the Arizona Republican audit; the tabulation machines are being targeted to look for secret “make Joe Biden win this thing” code, the 2020 election records are being targeted in the hopes that a grand conspiracy will be uncovered in which long-dead or nonexistent voters overwhelmed the vote counts through raw force of their nonexistence.

The people doing the crimes are conspiracy cranks who have either risen to positions of minor local party power or want to. They are … not scholarly people, to say the least. They are people who have been incited by the invented propaganda claims put on television by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, House Republicans, Fox News, and Pillow Dude, and believe them simply because one of those aforementioned bozos managed to convince them through the sheer power of their televised hairlines.

2. Each case shows a brazen Republican disregard for the law. The Republican clerks and other local officials behind the data breaches and thefts are unapologetic; since they believe somebody else somewhere might be doing a crime, they assert they are justified in doing real crimes to expose the imagined ones.

Historically, this has tended to be a significant component of conservatism and is a blazingly obvious component of authoritarianism in all its forms. Enemies, named and unnamed, are “oppressing” us by secretly doing crimes. The crimes are so secret that they cannot be found, which only proves that even more crimes are being committed to hide them. Therefore the laws are now invalid and we’re going to break them in order to “level the playing field” between the imaginary crimes and our real ones, rinse, repeat.

So you’ve got things going on like a local Republican official threatening to get an elections official fired if that elections official doesn’t let the Republican have access to secured voting equipment that by law nobody is allowed to have access to because then it wouldn’t be secure. Election integrity can simply be disregarded if it is in service to Republicanism, especially Republicanism that is itself obsessed with proving that our election integrity is faulty.

It turns out that having a “president” willing to break laws regularly, alongside party-devoted lawmakers who are eager to simply scrub out enforcement of whatever rules he breaks, may result in more widespread party beliefs that Criminality Is Good Now. Given the number of Republican lawmakers still willing to spout the same arguments and a justice system that has gone from apathetic pursuit of crimes committed by public officials to near-silence, there is no indication this will not get much, much worse.

3. These criminal efforts are more coordinated than they might look. The tell here is the simple note that Mike Lindell, the aforementioned Pillow Dude, is pouring a lot of money into convincing people like these local Republican conspiracy theorists that Republican election conspiracy theories are so dire that extraordinary action needs to be taken to combat them. In Texas, a big Republican donor is now under indictment for financing a supposed “investigation” into election fraud that saw one of his investigators run a random Texan off the road and hold him at gunpoint on the bizarre belief that the man’s truck was stuffed with fake ballots.

The crimes are all committed due to a belief in a handful of nebulous, nonsensical conspiracy theories that came from top Trump propagandists and which continue to be repeated now as core movement beliefs. The reason those beliefs continue is because there’s a whole lot of Republican money being poured into making them continue.

There are also legislative efforts to make such tampering the new normal, Republican-controlled state legislatures have now passed a bevy of new laws that allow them to simply seize control of whatever local election offices have reported back with vote totals that Republican partisans find suspicious. Here’s a tip: Counties that tend not to vote for Republican candidates are the ones being singled out as “suspicious.” Elections officials who object to partisan party hacks thumbing through secure data are either being voted out of office by the Republican base or are being stripped of their authority, and the lawmakers writing those laws are being quite clear that they’re taking those actions because of party conspiracy theories being propped up by, well, themselves.

Reuters is reporting on a wave of conspiracy-minded Republican cranks now looking to target the nation’s election systems by stealing sensitive data, but the broader context here is that the party is looking to legalize those sorts of breaches, not tamp down on them. The problem they’re trying to solve is that, in states like Georgia, Americans aren’t voting for Republicans in sufficient numbers for Republicans to win. The solution they’ve come up with is to declare that if a Republican candidate doesn’t win, it’s because there was a secret conspiracy to fudge the numbers—thus requiring Republican “investigation” into votes against them.

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What better way to kick off the month of May than with a birthday tribute to Mabel Louise Smith, better known to R&B, blues, gospel, jazz and rock fans as Big Maybelle? Born on May 1, 1924 in Tennessee, Big Maybelle’s musical output was prolific during a career that ended with her death at the age of 47. It’s difficult to place her discography in one single category. And sadly, like far too many Black female artists who were musical groundbreakers, her legacy and impact on multiple genres has been obscured, and virtually forgotten.  

It’s hard to believe, given Maybelle’s drawing power among the Black community during the height of her career, that not one biography has been written about her, and certainly no biopic starring famous musicians of today. But at least we’ve got her extensive catalog of music to listen to.

So for this #BlackMusicSunday, let’s do just that, as we celebrate Ms. Maybelle, the American Queen Mother of Soul.

I was pleased to find this tribute to Big Maybelle from YouTube’s Soul Facts. The web series is a creation of Mike Boone, who bills himself as the “Chancellor of Soul,” and describes himself as “a music historian and storyteller from Harlem.” His work focuses deeply on the work of “unsung or unnoticed” musicians.

As Boone explains, while singing in churches and carnivals as a child, Maybelle was “discovered” by bandleader Dave Clark in the early 1930s.

Boone’s video launched me onto a small detour into the story of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm; historians, including Boone, note Maybelle toured with the group early in her career. Daily Kos Community Contributor Charles Jay showcased the Sweethearts in 2021, and this 30-minute documentary about the Sweethearts from 1986 was produced by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss.

Oddly, Big Maybelle is not mentioned.

Finding mentions of Big Maybelle longer than a paragraph or two is difficult. Harlem World Magazine offers an exception, picking up her career as she reached adulthood.

In the early forties Mabel was part of pianist Christine Chatman’s orchestra (a decade later Chatman was a session pianist on some of Hank Ballard & The Midnighters sides for King) and made her first recording with that group in 1944 for Decca Records. Soon she toured with the Tiny Bradshaw band, and her work with him and Oran “Hot Lips” Page led to a couple of appearances on record for King in the late nineteen forties. By the start of the new decade she was now working as a single, but bookings were sporadic and recording sessions were non-existent. At an appearance with Jimmy Witherspoon at Detroit’s Flame Show Bar in 1952, the struggling performer gained notice, and soon it paid off.

Here’s that first record from 1944—when, just 20 years old, she was still billed as Mabel Smith.

Back to the Harlem World story:

Okeh Records, the newly revived R & B offshoot of Columbia records was developing a roster of recording talent when word was passed about the blues belter based in Cincinnati, Mabel Smith. The people at Okeh liked what they saw and heard, and so the newly renamed Big Maybelle was signed to the label in September of 1952. Her first session for the label produced the song “Rain Down Rain” written by promising composer Lincoln Chase on #6931. The flip side was “The Gabbin’ Blues”. This very first session produced the first success of Maybelle’s career. “Gabbin Blues” along with Chuck Willis “My Story” resulted in the biggest month for the label ever and the first time Okeh had two top ten sellers on the list at the same time. Maybelle was an in person smash in Philadelphia, first for a week at the Earle Theater along with Willie Mabon, and then at a number of nightclubs in that city including Pep’s and Emerson’s cafe.

Gabbin‘ Blues, her 1952 Okeh debut, is a very Black shade-slinging session between Maybelle and Rose Marie McCoy, the tune’s cowriter.

It opens with McCoy saying, “Here come ol’ evil chick, always telling everybody she come from Chicago. Got Mississippi written all over her,” before Maybelle’s powerful vocal comes in. McCoy keeps up a steady stream of trash-talking and cackling in response to each sung stanza.

Dave Penny offers an anecdote about Maybelle’s risque humor, displayed one night at The Apollo.

“She became a super favourite at The Apollo; they loved her not only for her singing – she’d tear the place apart – but also for her comedic work. One joke she used to tell all the time : at that time there was a product on the radio, a detergent called Duz whose slogan was “Duz Does It!”. Maybelle said, ‘I’m gonna go to work and make commercials for a new cleaning detergent. It’s called Fug, and if Duz don’t do it, then Fug it!’”   Fred Mendelsohn (producer and friend) DVD of the Newport Jazz Festival 1958

In 1956, Okeh Records dropped Maybelle due to lagging record sales, but she got picked up immediately by Savoy. There she would record the hit Candy, which would become her signature tune. Maybelle posthumously received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for the song in 1999.

Most fans of early rock and roll are very familiar with Jerry Lee Lewis’ 1957 hit, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, which is lauded as one of the founding classics of the genre. I actually saw him perform the song live as a teenager, at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier. He was a curiosity for me; it was odd to see a white guy playing Black music with a country twist. But few know that the song originated with Big Maybelle.

Here’s Big Maybelle’s rendition, which was recorded two years before Lewis’, in March 1955. The song was produced by a young Quincy Jones.

Thanks to the 1959 documentary Jazz On A Summer’s Day—filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival—we get to see Big Maybelle at her best, and in color!

Here’s the audio of the entire session:

As for Maybelle’s personal life and struggles, they were many. The most dangerous was her ongoing battle with heroin addiction, as well as with her weight—which she was taunted for most of her life—and diabetes. Even as her health declined, Maybelle had one last unlikely hit with a cover of 96 Tears in 1967, made famous by the Mexican American garage rock band, ? and the Mysterians.

In 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Big Maybelle shouted out the pain that people around the globe were feeling. Paul Devlin wrote about her for The Root in 2011, dubbing her tribute “The Best Martin Luther King Jr. Anthem Ever.”

A better candidate for the best-ever MLK tribute title: Big Maybelle’s visceral, angst-ridden dirge, “Heaven Will Welcome You, Dr. King,” a searing shriek from the depths of the soul. Unlike “Abraham, Martin and John,” “Heaven Will Welcome You, Dr. King” was not designed for AM radio. The lyrics (by Jack Taylor) are very simple. They don’t rely on poetic devices. They appear to have been straightforwardly written and recorded while the pain of the moment was still overwhelming.

The song seems to have lain dormant for years. It was released on iTunes and Amazon.com in 2009 on a two-song “album,” along with her cover of “Eleanor Rigby” (which certainly deserves to be known by Beatles fans far and wide). “Heaven Will Welcome You, Dr. King” doesn’t even sound as if it was fully produced, and that feels appropriate; the rawness of the sound mirrors the rawness of the emotion. It is less pristine, clear-sounding, marketable, music-business commodity than intensely and authentically felt horror and anguish. The anger and sadness in her voice is matched by the playing of the musicians. It adds up to a mighty lament, an expression of darkest funerary gloom, unimpeded by any sweetness or light, evoking the emotions of what that April 1968 morning must have been like.

Have a listen for yourself.

Big Maybelle would be welcomed into the heavenly band of angels in January 1972, her life ending in a diabetic coma. She is buried in Evergreen Memorial Park Cemetery, in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Bedford Heights.

In 2019, Maybelle was honored in her Tennessee hometown with a historical marker.

Please join me in the comments for lots more music from Big Maybelle, and to celebrate this first day of May. Be sure to post your favorites!

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We start today with Nicholas Confessore of The New York Times and his three-part profile of Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

…Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history. […]

Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.

One of the more interesting facts in this profile is how Carlson used to to have guests on his show with opposing viewpoints but it was discovered that Fox News viewers did not want to hear opposing viewpoints so the show did away with them.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is back. And we are still in the Age of COVID. I guess…

Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that so much of the student debt burden felt by those seeking loan relief is because of false promises.

How much relief will he offer? I have no idea. How much relief should he offer? I’m for going as big as political realities allow, but I understand that too generous a debt write-off might produce a backlash. And I have no confidence that I know where the line should be drawn.

What I think I do know is that much of the backlash to proposals for student debt relief is based on a false premise: the belief that Americans who have gone to college are, in general, members of the economic elite.

The falsity of this proposition is obvious for those who were exploited by predatory for-profit institutions that encouraged them to go into debt to get more or less worthless credentials. The same applies to those who took on educational debt but never managed to get a degree — not a small group. In fact, around 40 percent of student loan borrowers never finish their education.

But even among those who make it through, a college degree is hardly a guarantee of economic success. And I’m not sure how widely that reality is understood.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe writes in a similar vein to Krugman about student debt but centers Black attendees and graduates.

Stay in school. It’s an American maxim, the path to the so-called American Dream. Or so we’re told.

“What is the master narrative that we tell ourselves over and over again, in policy conversations, in our national conversation? That master narrative is: If you go the college, and borrow student loans, you’re going to get a return on those student loans through your degree and the labor market,” says Jalil Bishop, co-author of the Education Trust’s report “Jim Crow Debt: How Black Borrowers Experience Student Loans” and co-creator of the National Black Student Loan Debt Study. “Well, that’s not happening for a lot of students, and it’s really not happening for Black students.”

We know there’s a gaping wealth chasm between Black and White American households.

We also know a key factor driving the financial gap is the staggeringly high cost of college and post-graduate education. Unequally distributed by race, this cost is often paid through student loans that saddle graduates with crippling debt.

That debt often means Black Americans, who already begin with a fraction of the wealth of White Americans, start their working lives financially underwater. These factors harm their credit; their ability to gain assets, and start and grow businesses; save for retirement; or pass on generational wealth — ensuring that the racial wealth gap persists for generations.

Sigal Samuel of Vox looks at several different Guaranteed Income (GI) programs taking place across the nation.

The point of running pilots is to amass evidence that an intervention works so you can then make a convincing case that it should become policy. In a sense, GI pilots targeting parents are all tryouts for an idea that we’ve already implemented as federal policy: the expanded CTC.

The CTC proved extremely effective. In July 2021, when the first checks went out to parents, the child poverty rate dropped from 15.8 percent to 11.9 percent, the lowest rate on record. And yet, that evidence wasn’t enough to make the CTC permanent. Although polling found a bipartisan majority of voters wanted it to be permanent, Congress let it lapse — with Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition dealing the final blow.

So you might wonder whether there’s much point in continuing to run pilots aimed at amassing more evidence. Maybe a lack of evidence isn’t the constraining factor. Should the movement for GI focus its efforts on something else, like building political will?

Charles P. Pierce of Esquire writes that Republicans throwing around the name of George Orwell in protest of a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security are simply full of it.

Spare a thought for Nina Jankowicz, who has stepped up to lead this effort at the Department of Homeland Security. Volunteering to be a piñata takes a certain amount of gumption. And yes, for the record, I am concerned what this operation would look like under, say, President DeSantis, and there had to be a more deft way to roll it out than having DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just drop it into his testimony before a House committee. (The Senate will have its turn at him next week.) And there had to be a better name for it than the Disinformation Governance Board, a monicker that sounds as though it were made of steel, concrete, and barbed-wire. Why are Democrats so bad at naming stuff? The Republicans are terrific at naming stuff, even though, most of the time, those names are perfect examples of…disinformation. We should all talk about this seriously at a later date.

But I am not going to listen to it at the moment from the party of insurrection, the party of book-banning and library-scouring, the party of dangerous myth-making bullshit about “grooming” and (eek!) “critical race theory,” the party full of people who still bend the knee to the Prince of 30,000 Lies down in Florida. Hell, this is a party that lies to itself. Isn’t that right, Never-To-Be-Speaker Kevin McCarthy? Regain your sanity, folks, before you start throwing around George Orwell’s name in defense of your absolute right to launder and launch all the fantastical tales spun by Macedonian teenagers. Orwell would eat you all on toast and still have room for bangers and mash.

Oliver Milman of the Guardian writes that climate change may become the catalyst of the most extreme extinction event for marine life in 250 million years.

The world’s seawater is steadily climbing in temperature due to the extra heat produced from the burning of fossil fuels, while oxygen levels in the ocean are plunging and the water is acidifying from the soaking up of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This means the oceans are overheated, increasingly gasping for breath – the volume of ocean waters completely depleted of oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s – and becoming more hostile to life. Aquatic creatures such as clams, mussels and shrimp are unable to properly form shells due to the acidification of seawater.

All of this means the planet could slip into a “mass extinction rivaling those in Earth’s past”, states the new research, published in Science. The pressures of rising heat and loss of oxygen are, researchers said, uncomfortably reminiscent of the mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Permian period about 250m years ago. This cataclysm, known as the “great dying”, led to the demise of up to 96% of the planet’s marine animals.

“Even if the magnitude of species loss is not the same level as this, the mechanism of the species loss would be the same,” said Justin Penn, a climate scientist at Princeton University who co-authored the new research.

Dave Zirin of The Nation thinks that in light of the release of Trevor Reed from Russian custody, perhaps now is the time to make some noise about the detainment of WNBA star Brittney Griner.

The Trevor Reed story should focus our attention on another imprisoned US citizen in Russia, WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner, and indeed, judging by trending across social media, it has. Since mid-February, Griner has been detained in Russia awaiting a May 19 trial date where she faces 10 years behind bars—five years at hard labor—for the alleged crime of having hashish vape cartridges in her bag at the airport. With Reed’s release, Griner’s supporters want to know that she is next.

If you’ve been reading this space, you know that I believe we need to understand Griner as a political prisoner, partly because she has been paraded in front of Russian state media like some sort of six-foot-nine prize, partly because 10 years for allegedly having cannabis cartridges is obscene. Factor in that Griner is a Black queer woman in a country where national minorities and LGBTQ people have been victims of targeted harassment, and the urgency to secure her freedom only grows.

The State Department and the WNBA has preached silence in the hope that Griner would not become the kind of high-profile political prisoner Russia could use like a pawn on a chessboard. But that’s wishful thinking. Of course Griner was always going to become a political prisoner. This was easier to predict than the success of an attempted Griner slam dunk. It is past time that supporters shed their silence and spoke out for her return. They only need take a cursory look at Trevor Reed’s case and the activism of Reed’s parents—done with one-millionth of Griner’s cultural capital—to see that this could prove to be a positive approach—or at least more positive than doing nothing. The possibilities could be seen in how the release of Reed spurred a long-overdue public discussion about Griner. The State Department commented on the matter, with spokesperson Ned Price saying to CNN, “When it comes to Brittney Griner, we are working very closely with her team. Her case is a top priority for us. We’re in regular contact with her team.”

Timothy Snyder writes for The New Yorker about the long history of colonialism and Ukraine.

Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way, dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.

The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.

Catherine Belton and Greg Miller of The Washington Post write that a number of Russian oligarchs are getting fed up with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

At least four oligarchs who made it big in the more liberal era of Putin’s predecessor, President Boris Yeltsin, have left Russia. At least four senior officials have resigned their posts and departed the country, the highest ranking among them being Anatoly Chubais, the Kremlin special envoy for sustainable development and Yeltsin-era privatization czar.

But those in top positions vital to the continued running of the country remain — some trapped, unable to leave even if they wanted to. Most notably, Russia’s mild-mannered and highly regarded central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, tendered her resignation after the imposition of Western sanctions, but Putin refused to let her step down, according to five people familiar with the situation.

In interviews, several Russian billionaires, senior bankers, a senior official and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, described how they and others had been blindsided by their increasingly isolated president and feel largely impotent to influence him because his inner circle is dominated by a handful of hard-line security officials.

“…his inner circle…of hard-line security officials,” the siloviki.

Finally today, Bobby Ghosh of Bloomberg writes that the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Africa may not be limited to food shortages.

The war has cut off Africa from two major sources of grain. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 14 African nations depend on Russia and Ukraine for half their wheat, with Eritrea (100%), Somalia (over 90%) and Egypt (nearly 75%) topping the list. Overall, wheat imports make up 90% of Africa’s $4 billion trade with Russia and almost 50% of its $4.5 billion trade with Ukraine, according to the African Development Bank. In an interview with Al Jazeera, the bank’s president, Akinwumi Adesina, warned of a growing food crisis that could “destabilize the continent.”

In addition to crimping wheat supplies, the war has caused a price surge in a wide range of commodities, sending inflation soaring even as nations struggle to recover from two years of economic suffering caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This poses a threat to governments throughout the developing world, but especially in Africa, which is already experiencing a democratic retrenchment and a resurgence of military coups.

Everyone have a great day!