Independent News
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Despite the headwinds, Democrats gain some ground
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WaPo:
Biden ticks up, but GOP holds advantage on economy, Post-ABC poll finds
Republicans lose ground when it comes to which party voters see themselves casting ballots for in November and the parties are now at rough parity.
Today, 46 percent of registered voters say they would vote for the Democrat in their congressional district, compared with 45 percent who say they would vote for the Republican. Based on historical patterns, Democrats would likely need a bigger advantage to avoid losing their majority.
Yet last fall, Republicans held a 10-point edge and in February led by seven points on this question, known as the generic ballot. Nearly all of the change since February is the result of a shift toward the Democrats among self-identified independents, a group that can be volatile in public opinion polls.
Evidence mounts of GOP involvement in Trump election schemes
The text exchange, in an April 22 court filing from the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot, is in a batch of startling evidence that shows the deep involvement of some House Republicans in Trump’s desperate attempt to stay in power. A review of the evidence finds new details about how, long before the attack on the Capitol unfolded, several GOP lawmakers were participating directly in Trump’s campaign to reverse the results of a free and fair election.
John Stoehr/Editorial Board:
Raskin boxes in 3 Republicans before stomping the box
A masterclass in defusing fascist rhetoric.
[Jamie] Raskin 1) put the Republicans in a broad context with the highest of stakes, in this case Ukrainian democracy against Russian autocracy; and 2) found a Republican, in this case Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has said things you say only when your love of democracy is subordinate to your lust for power.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
Three steps for Elon Musk if he’s serious about free speech at Twitter
But first, a primer for a somewhat confused billionaire on what the First Amendment actually entails
“It’s not just about turning up the free-speech dial, because there are always trade-offs,”[Jameel] Jaffer said. For example, if there are no limits on harassment and abusive speech, people — particularly women and members of minority groups who tend to be the targets — will leave the platform altogether.
“And that is not a win for free speech,” Jaffer said. “Nobody wants a platform on which anything goes.”
Even if viewed as generously as possible, Musk’s warped logic still falls into a common trap. He’s conflating First Amendment protections — which prohibit the United States government from swooping in to shut down speech via the courts — with the rules that a private company establishes to conduct its business. (Not to mention failing to take into account the laws of other countries where Twitter operates.)
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
Can Democrats knock Republicans off their two-faced midterm strategy?
Republicans are running two very different campaigns for November’s midterms. So far, it’s working.
To their base, they promote an unending culture war around race, education and LGBTQ issues.
But to appeal to independents and more moderate conservatives, Republicans are offering a thoroughly conventional “Had enough?” argument. Voters unhappy with the leadership of President Biden, inflation and the persistence of covid-19, they say, should communicate their discontent by ending Democratic control of the House and Senate….
Polls for congressional contests are closer than the conventional wisdom suggests about impending Democratic catastrophe. Some even give Democrats a slight lead in generic surveys for House races. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday found Democrats with 46 percent among registered voters, Republicans with 45. But the Republicans’ two-step, and enthusiasm in their base, give the GOP confidence about the fall.
David Patrikarakos/Unherd:
Passover in war-torn Odessa
‘I think the Rabbi made a dirty joke,’ Vlad informs meI start talking to the man to my right. He’s called Michael and he’s just been to the nearby town of Mykolaiv where the fighting is fierce. Mykolaiv is what is stopping the Russian army reaching Odessa: if it falls, the Russians will be at the city gates. Michael works with the Jewish ambulance and is taking the wounded to safety. “Aren’t you worried?” I ask him. He looks upwards: “The Rebbe is with me,” he replies.
I tell him I want to go to Mykolaiv to see the front. The fussy man leans across the table. “Don’t do that,” he says. “I know you want a Pulitzer, but there is no guarantee you’ll come back.” He continues. “Look, this is not an army that respects the Geneva Convention. The Russians see the red cross of an ambulance as a target.”
Dan Lamothe/WaPo:
Western artillery surging into Ukraine will reshape war with Russia
The expanded artillery battle follows Russia’s failed effort to rapidly seize Ukraine’s major population centers, including the capital, Kyiv. It comes as the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Western benefactors brace for what is expected to be a grinding campaign in the Donbas region. The conflict there is expected to showcase the long-range cannons that are a centerpiece of Russia’s arsenal, weaponry already used to devastating effect in places such as Mariupol, a southern port city that has been pulverized by unrelenting bombardment.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking alongside his Canadian counterpart at the Pentagon on Thursday, said long-range artillery will prove “decisive” in the next phase of the war. The Biden administration, which along with Canada is training small numbers of Ukrainian troops how to operate the dozens of 155 mm howitzers that both countries have pledged to provide, is expected to approve the transfer of even more artillery to Ukraine in the coming days, Austin said.
Ukraine update: Pelosi visits Kyiv; Putin adds to his war crimes
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a small congressional delegation to Ukraine on Saturday, the details of which were not publicized until she had again left the country. Pelosi, Rep. Adam Schiff and others met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in yet another show of support towards Ukrainians currently fighting for their nation’s continued existence.
The situation on the ground remains as it was; few Russian gains, but continued Russian atrocities. Details of what is happening to the Ukrainians forcibly “relocated” to Russia suggest Putin’s plan is to depopulate Ukraine of its citizens, scattering them throughout Russia, in a move meant to erase Ukraine’s own cultural identity and replace it with a more Russian version.
The eagerness of Putin and his government to engage in such war crimes is a primary reason the United States and NATO allies are now sending weapons and ammunition shipments to Ukraine in ever-increasing numbers. Ukraine has shown it can defend itself, and Putin and his associated oligarchs have shown themselves to be unfit leaders by every possible measure.
Some of this weekend’s news:
- ‘Filtration camp’ may be the most disgusting euphemism
- To mobilize or not—Putin’s lose-lose choice
- Nancy Pelosi led congressional delegation to Kyiv, met with Zelenskyy
- Russia is stuck, and they can’t even blame it on the mud
- since WW II
- Russia using ‘depleted & disparate’ units, still can’t coordinate forces
- Dept. of Defense acknowledges that logistics are limiting Russian advances
- To execute a different strategy, Russia needs a different army
The 'savage' of 'civilized' nations
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The debate over how some refugees are more deserving of aid and assistance than others isn’t new, especially in contrast with narratives of Latin and Caribbean American refugees and refugees from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA); It demonstrates how humanity is not as advanced or progressed as far as it would like to believe itself to be—especially those of European descent. Western Civilization has long held itself above other nations, cultures, and civilizations: it has confused technological advancement with progress; misconstrued high-minded ideas, applied in a limited manner, with evolution; and failed to confront a history driven by military domination and destructive materialism.
How we view and talk about events of the modern world is rooted in its past—this world is a product of a root, trunk, and branches of a seed planted 1,000 years ago. We exist in a world born from those who see themselves as civilized and hold their conceptions of civilization as the epitome of human advancement and evolution.
To begin, we must ask, what is civilization? What does it mean to be “civilized”? Even those who do not consciously subscribe to white supremacist ideology have maintained ideas of a civilized and uncivilized world. Most recently, this has been seen in the coverage of Ukrainian refugees and how it has been noted that there seems to be more sympathy for them because of their “blonde hair and blue eyes.”
Western Civilization has evolved over the past 500 years as it drew (illusionary) lines of divisions between civilizations. These false divisions have given rise to myths of isolated states, pure cultures, pure human genetics (i.e., race), and an illusion of forever borders between nations and civilizations. These so-called hard lines are more than arbitrary; they are intellectual hallucinations.
This specific perception of civilization is rooted in a colonial worldview—colonialism was a project meant to “civilize” the world through some of the most inventive forms of violence in human history and profiting off these “lesser” peoples. The seed and soil of the modern world were founded in the Middle Ages, laying root during the so-called “Renaissance,” sprouting from The Enlightenment, growing during the early imperial and the Age of Reason, and spreading its poisonous fruit across the world from the late 19th century to our present day.
The Roots
While there were Muslim states and Christian kingdoms, the idea of pure civilizations, of hard lines between the two, is a myth. The Crusades planted a seed in bloody soil; this seed created a narrative dividing line between “West” and “East;” It was the birth of a narrative of the “civilized” and the “savage.” This seed would root and eventually thrive as time progressed.
The West vs. East clash of civilizations is more of a modern conceit than the reality lived during the Middle Ages. In The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry write, “holy war was never a permanent state. Christians and Muslims in the eleventh and twelfth century were sometimes enemies, sometimes friends, but in all cases lived together.”
This seed of narrative division, of the “civilized” and “savage,” slowly grew. It wasn’t until the so-called “Renaissance” that ideas of being civilized took root and sprouted. Fourteenth-century intellectuals reached back, past the Middle Ages, into Rome and Greece’s “classical” eras. They believed the knowledge of these civilizations was lost—it wasn’t—and wanted to cleave themselves off from what they saw as an age of darkness by “re-discovering” those eras’ achievements and ideas. This is where we get the term “Dark Ages”—most modern Medievalists (historians that study Medieval Europe) do not refer to this time in such a way.
A modern example of how arbitrary divisions are made is how we draw random lines between generations. Think about how many times authors have written about the death of literature or writing—nostalgia for the way things used to be. Perry and Gabriele elaborate further In The Bright Ages, writing:
“Petrarch and his contemporaries argued that the knowledge of antiquity had been lost for a thousand years but now was recovered, reborn, translated into their fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. This argument was political as well as cultural … (they) may have laid the foundations for seeing the medieval world as backward and dark, but the Enlightenment … built the house in which we still live. … Europe had supposedly crawled out of the darkness and into the light. Those familiar terms—dark and light—mirrored the value judgment behind this investigation of the past, one that selectively privileged white skin.”
As European intellectuals attempted to separate themselves from their past and their connected world, the actions of their ruling elites and justifications that arose became a potent combination in retrospect. Through the Crusades and Reconquista (an idea born in the first millennium of Christian kingdoms reconquering the Iberian peninsula from the Islamic rule of Moorish kingdoms that ended up forcibly converting or expelling Muslims and Jews from the Iberian peninsula), Christian kingdoms created a forced hierarchy, placing European Christians at the top, with Muslims and Jews seen as lesser than. The date the Reconquista came to its completion is notable, sharing a year with another monumental event in world history—1492.
In the ocean blue, Columbus’ so-called discovery of what we now call the Americas upended the world power axis, creating the rainfall needed for these aspiring empires. Trade soon morphed into colonial projects in West Africa, along with the expansion of the slave trade. Until the transatlantic slave trade, much of the world’s slave trade went on throughout SWANA and the Mediterranean world, comprising most of its victims from Eastern Europe (the word slave is derived from “Slav”) and North and East Africa.
This so-called discovery of the Americas by Columbus was transformative because of the lasting connections between the worlds of the Americas and those of the “old world.” The Enlightenment would give birth to the ideas that justified the coming of the New World—which was as much an idea as a geographic location.
The Trunk
The Americas provided the space, resources, and land these small kingdoms needed to feed their lusts. The discovery of Indigenous Americans in these lands served as a theological and intellectual complication. Jennifer Raff wrote in Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas:
“Many Europeans were shocked when they first realized that Native Americans were not Chinese or South Asian Indians but instead a people not described in the Bible. … Europeans fabricated elaborate mythologies to explain their presence. Most of these stories featured some version of a ‘lost race,’ fables of an ‘advanced’ people who were wiped out by contemporary Native Americans.”
We can see the idea of the primitive savage sprout in these early perceptions of Indigenous Americans. And these perceptions continued to evolve as the United States formed and set out to conquer the American West.
These kingdoms quickly abandoned trade with the civilizations they came into contact with. Instead, they brought indentured servants and enslaved people to aid with the manual labor required for resource extraction, which was how most colonialism at this time worked. It was yet to fully develop into settler colonialism—the use of settlers to expand the state, such as the American expansion west or Israeli settlements in Palestine.
As Portugal and Spain expanded their colonies, ideas of race and human hierarchies took shape. Thinkers like Voltaire and Immanuel Kant, who are still uplifted by many now, helped give birth to a parasite still alive today with racial hierarchy. Author Emmanuel C. Eze explores this with his 1997 book, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial Future, and explores Kant, who wrote: “Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have a smaller amount of talent. The Negroes are lower, and the lowest are a part of the American peoples.”
Writer Jamelle Bouie does a great job of laying out the racism of not just Kant but of the Enlightenment itself where he writes:
“It is true that, in his Two Treatises on Government, Locke proclaimed himself an opponent of ‘slavery.’ But this ‘slavery’ refers to the political domination of an absolute monarch. In the second of the treatises, Locke provides a justification for slavery as a result of war, using the same ‘absolute power’ language that grants slave owners the power of life and death over their slaves. While his argument doesn’t fit the hereditary chattel slavery taking shape in the Americans, it was nonetheless used to justify the practice.”
Ideas of race, civilization, the civilized, and the savage began to thrive, becoming intellectualized during The Enlightenment. Adam Smith, in 1776 wrote in The Wealth of Nations that Africa “seem[ed] in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we find them at present.” These ideas during The Enlightenment and then the Age of Reason quickly advanced to what is now called race science.
The “civilized” conductors of the transatlantic slave trade shipped over 12.5 million Africans to the Americas over the slave trade’s history. They committed genocide, before 1492, on between 75-100 million Indigenous people who were living within what is now the Americas. By the 20th century, 4-4.5 million Indigenous people remained in the Americas. The 19th through the mid-20th century would see millions more die or become subjugated across the globe, all in the so-called name of civilization.
Even as these men of “western civilization” believed themselves to “progress,” such as banning the international slave trade, their progress was finding more acceptable ways to commit horrific acts. The interior slave trade of America would prove far more financially rewarding for the growing elites of America. In Stamped from the Beginning, author Ibram Kendi details Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on the “Second middle passage” that moved over one million enslaved people to the interior of the United States after the Slave Trade Act of 1807, banning the international trading of enslaved people from Africa.
The brutality that created this “civilized” land of the United States is seen as justified. The ideas born of The Enlightenment and The Age of Reason were vital to the birth of the United States of America and its domination of the American continents. Race science gave rise to ideas that would evolve into what we now call eugenics. As the Age of Reason grew out of The Enlightenment, European kingdoms, states, and empires began to move past religious doctrine and justification to evolution and biology, yet still “under god.” By 1914, 84% of the world was under European domination.
Branches and Leaves
The late 19th century to the present has been filled with wars, brutal conflicts, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. And at almost every turn, direct involvement, a hand, and connections can be drawn to the so-called civilized nations steering the ship.
As the 19th century progressed, the Scramble for Africa quickly spread its canopy, setting in motion a series of monstrously brutal clashes between European imperial nations and the stripping of a continent continuing to this day. These industrial and “civilized” nations created poverty and destruction, now claiming to lift people they plunged into poverty into the “developed world.”
As humanity’s modern world came into being, the so-called civilized world enacted monumental atrocities across the globe. This period saw the “land of the free” complete its almost total genocide of Native Americans in what is now the continental United States. The U.S. war in the Philippines from 1898-1902 saw 200,000 civilians die. King Leopold II of Belgium and his occupation of the Congo from 1885 to 1908 led to over 10 million Congolese dead through massive brutality. Turkey’s Armenian Genocide led to over 800,000 Armenians being killed. India saw 12-24 million people die of starvation while living under the British Empire. These are just a few of the genocides and atrocities committed by non-Nazi western powers.
The quest for power, rule, and territory led these nations into direct conflict and provided the world with the most cataclysmic wars it has seen: World War I ended the lives of over 15 million people, and World War II with over 60 million dead. World War II also saw the United States become the first and so-far only nation to use nuclear weapons directly upon human populations, dropping two atomic bombs on Japan—the justification of their use is still debated today.
Post-WWII West hands are still bloodied with incursions too numerous to list. But in short, since WWII, the United States has placed over 700 military bases across the globe. Attempting to overturn some 72 governments, some launched decades of violence, such as the 1960 coup in the Congo. And today, with the “War on Terror,” millions have suffered: The Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University Cost of War Project estimates nearly a million people have died as a result, with millions more displaced.
Ideas of civilization, the civilized, uncivilized, and civilizing people undergirded these actions by nations of Western Civilization. Ideas of whiteness evolved and shifted, evolving to protect itself. European “races” or nationalities created their own hierarchies of the European race. Irish, Italians, Polish, Slavic, and Ukrainians were seen as dirty, as lesser than, and less evolved—be it biologically or culturally, depending upon who was writing or lecturing. But as time went on, they became “white.”
Josiah Strong, a leading late 19th-century intellectual, wrote a book, Our Country, in 1885, exemplifying the attitude of intellectuals during the Age of Reason. He talked about the “Anglo-Saxon race” and the rise of America. Richard White, author of The Republic for Which it Stands, wrote about Strong and his view of the rise of the United States: “God was ‘training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future.’ The moment of a final contest between the races was at hand, and God was schooling Anglo-Saxons for victory and conquest.”
Many ethnic European identities would become white, but the sentimental driving force and justification of place in the world continued to be the undercurrent of intellectual thinking. The poor, the native, and the African were to be the underclass; The divine right of kings continued under a new name, using “science” and “reason” to justify it.
Ideas of biological race evolved into eugenics and the building of modern medicine. These “civilized” men experimented on enslaved people as a launching pad to create the modern world. The book Medical Apartheid, by Harriet A. Washington, gruesomely details this history. Enslaved people were put on medical display and experimented on without anesthesia while they were still alive—the entire field of gynecology was built through painful and invasive procedures on enslaved women. In the 20th century, America experimented on Black Americans, such as exposing Black GIs and forced sterilizations (still present today), to persistent medical racism. These are just a taste of monumental medical horrors in America, horrors the American narrative keeps buried.
Ideas of the “civilized” infected every facet of society, including medicine, entertainment, and economics, to name a few. Be it white angelic elves vs. brown men called Easterlings and orcs in Lord of the Rings, or the differences in how we talk about Black vs. white athletes, it’s always about comparing one group against another. In economics, African poverty was created with the paternalistic nature of the “civilized” continuing.
As always, there was “progress,” and the narrative shifted to softer language: the First World, the Second World, and the Third World. Initially, this meant capitalist nations, Soviet allied nations, serving as First and Second world, respectively. The Third World were those who didn’t clearly fall into either camp. Many were former colonial subjects of the First and Second World, but the Third World quickly took on the meaning of “impoverished nations.”
It continued to evolve into “developed,” “developing,” and “undeveloped” nations. It erased the violence that made the wealthy nations “developed.” It ignored the continued robbery of the “Third World,” now referred to more commonly as the “global south,” and the plundering of the African continent continues to this day, much of it under the guise of “economic development.”
Dehumanization of the “uncivilized” continues, as we see with the treatment of the Caribbean and Latin American immigrants and refugees into the U.S. and elsewhere. American policies have created these immigrants and refugees through violence, oppression, and stripping of resources.
Refugees from SWANA, caused by American wars, serve as another example, as they are left to die, drowning in the ocean. No shred of humanity was granted to them, with people on the far-right calling these people invaders and the mainstream press embracing this frame, albeit diluted by using “caravan” as a substitute. And now, people who were once seen as the dirt of Europe are “civilized” because they must be to serve narratives that maintain our world order.
Yet those beaten, bred, mutilated, experimented on, doused with radiation, sterilized, stolen from their land, stolen from their language and history by the self-named civilized people of Western Civilization expose the very idea of “civilized” as a farce. How can one be “civilized,” labeling others as “savage” or “sub-human,” rejecting our common humanity, and participating in brutality that would make Genghis Khan blush?
We must question the very nature of civilization. What we call the very first civilizations in Mesopotamia were just “strongmen,” lording over some and enslaving others. War, slavery, rape, and domination were core components of what we call the first civilizations. If this is civilization, then what is uncivilized?
Should we look at being civilized as “good manners” and being well dressed? The British Empire, in all its brutality, had a wealth of manners.
So what is civilization? In the end, it is whatever we claim it to be. What about being civilized? Civilized, the essence of the very concept is the creation of judgment of others; the very idea places some above and others below.
Let’s reject the very idea of civilized, but in exchange, embrace a revolution of values, one that rejects aggressive competition between civilizations and people, zero-sum social dynamics, and materialism and militarism. While “the West” didn’t invent these things, it has embraced them to the edge of our species’ destruction.
This story was produced through the Daily Kos Emerging Fellows (DKEF) Program. Read more about DKEF (and meet the author, and other Emerging Fellows) here.
Nuts & Bolts—Inside the Democratic party: The decreasing importance of experience
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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.
‘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.
The Downballot: Big, big May primary preview (transcript)
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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.
Judge orders Trump supporter who defaced LGBTQ mural to write 25-page essay on Pulse club massacre
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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.
Trevor Noah is still trending day after White House correspondents' dinner, as he should be
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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.
Florida farmworkers are boycotting Wendy’s over their refusal to join the Fair Food Program
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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.
Ukraine update: Nancy Pelosi led congressional delegation to Kyiv, met with Zelenskyy
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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.
GOP’s cheap and dangerous ‘invasion’ talk on the border is tawdry compared to Ukraine’s reality
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Republicans eager to concoct reasons to attack the Biden administration have spent the past month beating their well-worn drum about a nonexistent “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border by Latino immigrants. But this time around, the effect has been jarring.
That’s because, since late February, the world has been seeing in real time what an actual invasion looks like, thanks to the attack on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin and the Russian Army. We’ve witnessed cities bombed into rubble, tanks rumbling through the countryside, suburbs turned into death camps, women and children murdered while waiting at railway stations.
So when Texas Congressman Michael McCaul goes on Fox News Sunday, as he did this week, and makes the comparison explicit—“Putin invaded Ukraine,” he told host Sandra Smith. “We have an invasion in my home state right on the border, every day”—the contrast between the two situations becomes stark. And the tawdry, wildly inappropriate nature of the analogy couldn’t be clearer.
When ordinary people think of invasions, they usually are referring to what we are seeing in Ukraine: One nation’s government sending its armed forces across borders and attempting to defeat the other nation’s military and ultimately depose its government. You know, what we did in Iraq. Planes, tanks, bombs, the works. Shock and awe.
They don’t think of poor people trekking across the desert, looking to land hard labor in our farm fields and on construction sites, or at least escape persecution and seek political asylum, quite the same way. Unless, of course, they are Republicans.
As James Downie in The Washington Post observed:
Notice that McCaul didn’t limit this comparison to traffickers or criminals trying to cross the border. No, every single person trying to cross—including the tens of thousands seeking asylum and the hundreds of thousands of families and unaccompanied children who are just seeking a better life—is in McCaul’s framing no different from soldiers invading a sovereign nation.
The invasion rhetoric has become thick on the ground as Republicans prepare for the 2020 midterm elections in their usual fashion: ginning up as much fear about nonwhite immigration as humanly possible.
Donald Trump, as usual, has been leading the way. “We are being invaded by millions and millions of people, many of them criminals,” he told the crowd at a rally in Washington Township, Michigan, on April 2, claiming that between 10 and 12 million undocumented people were waiting to cross the border. “We will be inundated by illegal immigration.”
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, the House’s third-ranking Republican, also called it an invasion. “Ending Title 42 will worsen the already catastrophic invasion at our Southern Border,” she tweeted. “Joe Biden and his Far Left policies are destroying our country.”
Steven Miller, Trump’s white nationalist-friendly former senior adviser and the architect of Title 42, was even more dire: “This will mean armageddon on the border. This is how nations end.”
Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, who has become Republicans’ go-to white nationalist in the House, joined in the hysteria on Twitter: “This is full scale invasion. This is 540,000 in one month. Putin sent 150,000 troops into Ukraine and we are ready to set fire to the world. Eliminating Title 42 will only add fuel to the fire. Madness.”
Texas lawmakers have been especially frantic in pushing the “invasion” rhetoric. Some of them are even encouraging Gov. Greg Abbott to declare an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution, and then use state personnel to deport immigrants.
Under the plan, Texas would invoke Article IV, Section 4, and Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution to exercise wartime powers and use state Department of Public Safety officers and state National Guard troops to immediately turn back migrants at the border. The plan is being pushed by a group of former Trump administration officials and the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), the union that represents agents and support staff of the U.S. Border Patrol. Brandon Judd, the head of NBPC, recently said Abbott should “absolutely” declare an invasion.
Judd also echoed white nationalist “replacement theory” rhetoric: “I believe that they’re trying to change the demographics of the electorate; that’s what I believe they’re doing,” he said.
The “invasion” declaration idea is being heavily promoted by the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank led by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Homeland Security official under Trump. Abbott has not committed to the plan, however. Most legal observers note that the term invasion is reserved to mean an “armed hostility from another political entity.”
The most pernicious aspect of the invasion rhetoric, however, is that it is fundamentally eliminationist in nature: It dehumanizes the people it targets. In this case, it serves two specific functions: It justifies state coercion and violence, and it creates permission for nonstate violence.
It’s rhetoric that has been consistently cited as inspiration and motivation by domestic terrorists of recent vintage, ranging from Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik in 2011 to the man who shot up the Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, killing 26 people. That man’s manifesto described the attack as a response to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” and expressed fears that changing demographics would “make us a Democrat stronghold.”
Similarly, the man who walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 believing Jews (and specifically the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) were responsible for the immigrant caravan then arriving at the Mexico border, around which Trump and Fox News had indulged in nonstop fearmongering, used the same rhetoric. He posted on Gab just before he murdered 11 people and wounded six:
HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people.
I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.
Screw your optics, I’m going in.
It’s fascinating how the same cast of characters promoting “invasion” rhetoric has played a role in helping spread the very same far-right violence that such eliminationist speech is intended to fuel. It’s worth remembering that when Cuccinelli was the deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Trump, he and Acting Director Chad Wolf blocked the release of a threat assessment of future dangers to the nation that highlighted white supremacist violence and Russian election interference, saying it was blocked because of the way it might “reflect upon President Trump.”
“Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on white supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups,” a whistleblower later averred. Cuccinelli was also heavily involved in DHS’ project in the summer of 2020 to use an army of federal contractors to collect information on Portland’s antifascist activists, which a subsequent review found had engaged in a long litany of constitutional violations.
Invasion rhetoric has a long and violent history in American politics, dating back to the origins of nativism in the 1830s, when anti-Irish agitators like Samuel Morse (inventor of the telegraph) called the arrival of immigrants a “Papist invasion” and an attack on “the American way of life.” Likewise, a panic about a “Chinese invasion” arriving on the West Coast “900,000 strong” in the 1860s led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1872.
Japanese immigrants began arriving in the 1890s, and with them, fresh resentment:
During the early 1900s, paranoia about an “invasion” from Asia (mostly Japanese immigrants) gave birth to another wave of nativism. In San Francisco, local agitators founded the Asiatic Exclusion League, dedicated to repelling all elements of Japanese society from the city’s midst. Its statement of principles noted that “no large community of foreigners, so cocky, with such racial, social and religious prejudices, can abide long in this country without serious friction.” And the racial animus was plain: “As long as California is white man’s country, it will remain one of the grandest and best states in the union, but the moment the Golden State is subjected to an unlimited Asiatic coolie invasion there will be no more California,” declared a League newsletter. As one speaker at a League meeting put it: “An eternal law of nature has decreed that the white cannot assimilate the blood of another without corrupting the very springs of civilization.”
It became popular among right-wing border extremists in the 1990s, particularly white nationalist ideologues like Glenn Spencer, who concocted the “Reconquista” conspiracy theory claiming that Latino ideologues were secretly conspiring to return the American Southwest to Mexican rule, creating a new Hispanic nation called “Aztlan.”
This conspiracy theory was revived by Patrick Buchanan in his 2001 book The Death of the West, which played a foundational role in spreading the white nationalist conspiracy theory of “cultural Marxism” into the mainstream. Similarly, his 2006 book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America had as its core thesis a revival of the “Reconquista” theory, claiming that Mexico was “slowly but steadily taking back the American Southwest.”
“You’ve got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country,” Buchanan said on Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes in November 2007.
In the context of the Ukrainian war—where Americans can see on a daily basis what an actual invasion looks like—some conservatives at least recognize how wildly out of proportion that kind of rhetoric seems now. And in light of the very real and very lethal consequences for Texans this kind of rhetoric has had in the recent past, its pervasiveness is a real cause for concern. It’s not just “hot talk.”
David J. Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute called invoking an invasion an “overheated political analogy … An ‘invasion’ isn’t just an overstatement,” Bier wrote. “It’s a completely unserious attempt to demand extraordinary, military-style measures to stop completely mundane actions like walking around a closed port of entry to file asylum paperwork or violating international labor market regulations in order to fill one of the 10 million job openings in this country.”
As the Post’s Downie observes:
Abbott, McCaul and McCarthy, whether they admit it or not, recognize that the easiest way to protect their standing in the Republican Party is to embrace the hate and stoke the same bigoted fury that led a man to open fire in a store. Perhaps one day, the GOP’s fever will break. Until it does, this country’s future remains very dark.