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The same conservative evangelical “churches” that decided habitual liar and lifelong sex predator Donald Trump was, at long last, the American savior they were looking for have not—and this should come as no surprise—dulled in their fascist support for ending democracy rather than abide Trump’s very real election shellacking. That’s the news from a New York Times piece checking in with the Colorado Springs crowd, where hard-right pastors are inviting in hard-right election conspiracy theorists who continue to declare that “fraud” cheated Trump out of a win because … well, because nothing, that’s why.

It’s the same nonsensical claims and the same known-crooked actors. Still, Republicans eat this stuff up because Republican media has been “grooming” the base to accept ridiculous lies about whatever needs to be lied about. Evangelical conservatism has more than flirted with fascism as a counter to American democracy, which hasn’t been going their way for a lot longer than that.

When you’ve got a movement already wedded to the notion that Americans should abide by hard-right evangelical beliefs by force of law, it’s not hard to sell them on theories that voting itself has become illegitimate. They don’t want to know the facts. They just want someone to tell them “facts” sufficient for smashing the place up and rebuilding America as a palace of their own personal prejudices.

The quote around which the Times builds up the rest of its story is from a “one-time Republican congressional candidate” presenting his PowerPoint slides about “Socialism.” William Federer announces that it’s the failure of the January coup to overturn the election that means “lo and behold, an anti-Christian spirit’s been released across the country and the world.”

Showing people a slide deck to explain why historic “socialism” means you need to erase our nation’s democracy is a niche approach. Most of the street thugs who want to end democracy, like the Proud Boys, aren’t about to sit through a slide show. Most of the rich financiers of such schemes have no interest in hearing somebody else’s opinions on why democracy should end—if you were rich enough to have opinions that matter, they already would have heard them.

Slap some references to an Antichrist in there, however, and the Colorado Springs church circuit will eat that up. These are people who already believe the devil controls animals they don’t like, weather patterns, and certain traffic lights—tell them that all of the Americans voting against them are merely demon-possessed puppets whose votes shouldn’t be counted to begin with, and you will get a lot of gray heads nodding along and posting your thoughts to their Facebook feeds.

Now comes the part where I’m supposed to come up with some pithy observation about this, and to be honest? I’m at a loss. You’ve got a whole movement here that would not exist if any of its participants could tell hucksters from huckleberries. Once you have decided to hoist the banner of a bunch of criminal weirdos (Michael Flynn; Tina Peters) because you are so convinced that a reality television host infamous for dishonesty, cruelty, perversions, and general maliciousness is your path to Jesus—and that all of this necessitates nullifying democracy and arresting all the “libs” who oppose you—then, at some point, the rest of the nation is allowed to give up on trying to understand you.

The televangelists who flocked to Trump early in his term were all of the most maudlin grifters, the gilded weirdos with private jets who never did a speck of genuine good for anyone in their whole damn sorry lives, and it made perfect sense because any American gullible enough to be drawn to one of them would be gullible enough to laud the other.

You want pithy? Yeah, you and me both.

I will continue to maintain, however, that humanity has long obsessed over its most brilliant members, devoting books to every physicist or mathematician or artist or researcher whose contributions upend the world and make it a better place. Still, hardly anyone is willing to point out that those people are such outliers because the majority of our species has always been sluggish, prone to delusions, and prone to worse than delusions. At least 80% of us are teetering on the edge of our evolutionary limits in learning how to use a toaster oven. Our technology has evolved around us, but we ourselves, as creatures of meat, are still wired with the same brains that see the outlines of human faces in tree bark and get frightened from it.

Fascism is an irrational movement that has contempt for reality, substituting whatever outlandish fictions are necessary in order for the paranoid to justify oppression or the outright murder of whoever is not them, and nobody involved here gives the slightest damn about whether there is evidence of election fraud. The “evidence” of the Republican conspiracy theorist is that they lost when they wanted to win, which means their enemies did something, which means it’s time for erasing everything and starting over with new rules to make sure such insults no longer happen.

Oh, and also, these assholes are almost certainly complete racists, just to throw that out there. As our Times kicker, we get the casual aside that one of the Colorado Springs pastors hosting these delusion-hoisting frauds is also anti-COVID-safety and anti-“gender identity,” but that “critical race theory” is “a hill for me to die on.”

Of all the paranoias that walk into these people’s heads, it’s the new far-right hoax supposing that “critical race theory” is now an omnipresent force working to oppress The White Folk that hits home the hardest, eh? How very intriguing.

There does seem to be quite the overlap between Americans who believe democracy needs to be overthrown so that conservatives can properly lead and Americans who believe that books by Black authors need to be removed from public schools and libraries, but the Times does not dwell on that. As is usual with these stories from middle America, someone being interviewed invariably pipes up with a clue that it is white nationalism that animates them, not the nuances of zoning laws or a genuine belief in election fraud by space laser, and as proper zoologists studying this ecosystem, we’re just going to write that down in the margins somewhere. Just a little tidbit, apropos of nothing else.

And yet it seems to come up every damn time.

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In a bold move, Washington state legislators passed a law to remove all references to the word “marijuana” in a favor of “cannabis.” Lawmakers say “marijuana” has left a trail of Black and brown bodies incarcerated across the nation with its storied racist history.

HB 1210 was signed into law by Gov. Jay Inslee on March 11, 2022. In June, the word “marijuana” will be gone from every aspect of the Revised Code of Washington, and “cannabis” will replace it.

“This House Bill 1210 to change terminology from using the word ‘marijuana’ to the scientific name ‘cannabis’ is extremely important … even though it seems simple because it’s just one word,” state Rep. Melanie Morgan said in a virtual meeting in January. “But the reality is we are healing the wrongs that were committed against black and brown people around cannabis, as it was used as a racist terminology to lock up black and brown people.” 

RELATED STORY: Report: 2020 marks first time guns were the leading cause of death for kids and teens

According to a 2020 report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Black Americans are “3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession despite comparable marijuana usage rates.” The report adds that even though arrest rates for cannabis are down, police “still made 6.1 million such arrests” from 2010 to 2018, and “the racial disparities in arrest rates remain in every state.”

Folks who work in the cannabis industry say the word “marijuana” comes with weighted significance.

“It had been talked about for a long time in our community about how that word demonizes the cannabis plant,” Joy Hollingsworth, owner of Hollingsworth Cannabis Company, tells KIRO-7.

Morgan, who sponsored the bill, said, “The term ‘marijuana’ itself is pejorative and racist.” She added, “As recreational marijuana use became more popular, it was negatively associated with Mexican immigrants.”

The word marijuana has its roots in xenophobia.

It began being used in the early 20th century as tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants began moving to the southwest region of the U.S. to escape the Mexican Civil War. The word was used to frighten white Americans—the “marijuana menace”—and paint a racist narrative of the new immigrants. But not just immigrants, as NPR reports.

“Sailors and West Indian immigrants brought the practice of smoking marijuana to port cities along the Gulf of Mexico,” according to Eric Schlosser’s 1994 Atlantic article, titled “Reefer Madness.” 

“In New Orleans newspaper articles associated the drug with African-Americans, jazz musicians, prostitutes, and underworld whites. ‘The Marijuana Menace,’ as sketched by anti-drug campaigners, was personified by inferior races and social deviants,” Schlosser’s article adds.

But it was the first U.S. Narcotics Commissioner, Harry Anslinger, who was behind criminalizing the drug. He was able to convince Congress to pass the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, banning the sale and possession of cannabis.

In his testimony to Congress, Anslinger included statements of support for his argument against cannabis.

One statement at the time came from Dr. Frank R. Gomila, commissioner of public safety, and Miss Madeline C. Gomila, assistant city chemist, who offered a “paper” they had assembled chronicling claims about the “effects, physical and mental, of the marihuana weed.”

An example in Gomila’s “report” was the case of a high school student “now confined to an institution for the mentally diseased.” Gomila added that the student’s “experience is entirely the result of acquiring the habit of smoking marihuana cigarettes.”

The letter goes on to lay out the dangers of cannabis by citing a murder in New Orleans, blamed on the cannabis used by the assailant.

“In a downtown section a man under the influence of the weed became so frenzied and angered at his wife as to kill her out on the street in front of many witnesses.”

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A Michigan Republican Party endorsement convention at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan—complete with voting irregularities—ultimately yielded two of Donald Trump’s top 2020 election deniers as party nominees for two top statewide offices.

After thousands of votes were tabulated and a “partial human audit” ensued, Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo emerged as the GOP endorsees for attorney general and secretary of state, respectively, according to Bridge Michigan. The GOP gubernatorial nominee will be determined in August after 10 candidates compete to take on Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in November.

But DePerno and Karamo will ensure the Michigan Republican Party is consumed with relitigating the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden statewide by more than 150,000 votes, or roughly 3 points. Their candidacies might juice turnout among Trumpers but they could just as easily backfire in the suburbs. Either way, it’s a gamble.

Trump celebrated the elevation of his conspiracy-laden candidates, saying that Karamo and DePerno will “get to the bottom of the 2020 Election Fraud.”

That seems unlikely, since there was no fraud—except perhaps for that which may have been perpetrated by DePerno himself.

DePerno’s claim to fame is floating a bunch of unfounded conspiracy theories about voting machine data from Antrim County that became the epicenter of the state’s election fraud lies. DePerno filed a lawsuit challenging the results that was summarily dismissed last year by a GOP-appointed judge; a three-judge panel unanimously reaffirmed that decision last week on appeal.

An investigation conducted last year by the GOP-led state Senate concluded there was no evidence of widespread fraud and called such claims in Antrim County “indefensible.”

The Senate Oversight Committee’s final report on the matter also urged Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel to investigate “those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

DePerno reportedly raised some $400,000 through crowdfunding for an “Election Fraud Defense Fund.” The missing funds are now under investigation by the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission. It’s not DePerno’s first brush with corruption claims; he was fired from a law firm in 2005 after colleagues said he had “padded” client billings.

Still, DePerno is now the pick of both Trump and the Republican Party to be the top law enforcement officer in Michigan. He had initially struggled to win a three-way race, but an election-night endorsement from Karamo, who handily won her own race, helped pull DePerno across the finish line.

They are two peas in a pod. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Karamo—now the GOP nominee to run statewide elections—has repeatedly insisted without evidence that Trump won the 2020 election. Karamo gained notoriety as a supposed “whistleblower” after she claimed on Fox News to have personally witnessed a ballot in Detroit be fraudulently counted for Biden. That didn’t happen, and the fine print in the “incident report” Karamo filled out after Biden had been declared the winner read: “Paid for by Donald J Trump for President, Inc.”

In any case, the public speaking professor-turned-election denier is now the GOP nominee for secretary of state.

Perhaps that isn’t a surprise given that both candidates had Trump’s seal of approval, but it certainly divided the room last weekend at DeVos Place, where the nominating convention was held.

One of DePerno’s opponents, state House Speaker Ryan Berman, didn’t concede, predicting there was “a good chance” the nominee would lose his law license over twin investigations being conducted by the Grievance Commission and the Michigan State Police.  

“In that case, I’m going to be ready to step up and be the nominee,” Berman told Bridge Michigan.

But he wasn’t the only attendee who was disappointed by the outcome.

“The Michigan Republican Party used to be a model for how a state party should be run, but the process today is evidence that is no longer the case,” said former political director Jonathan Duke, who supported a DePerno rival. Duke added that Republicans had now elevated “the most unelectable candidate in the best political environment for Republicans in a generation.”

Similarly, a Karamo opponent, state Rep. Beau LaFave, said he was “disappointed that [Democratic Secretary of State] Jocelyn Benson will be the Secretary of State for the next four years.”

Aaron Miller, a former state representative and chair of the House Elections Committee, flat-out said he personally would not vote for either DePerno or Karamo.

“The theories on elections that have entered the mainstream are downright scary — in this room,” Miller said.

Just one more state where Trump has exquisitely threaded the needle of dividing the state Republican Party against itself while backing candidates with dubious election credentials.

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There’s a new book from New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns set to come out soon that will shed light on the nasty battle over the 2020 presidential election results. This means that serious information that probably should have been reported by the Times many months ago is now beginning to leak out in order to promote the book. The Washington Post has an early copy of the book for review and on Monday released an explosive tidbit concerning Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s conversations with Martin in the hours after Donald Trump and his MAGA friends tried to overthrow the government.

It has been no secret that McConnell has long been angling, the way many do in the delusional GOP, back toward a clearly defunct status quo in his party. That status quo was long ago abandoned when he and others became entirely complicit in the corruptions of the Donald Trump administration. Since then, McConnell—who had originally described the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “thugs” and “mobs”—has retreated as far out of the public eye as possible while also trying to retain neoconservative control over the GOP.

According to the Post, the new Times reporters’ book details a conversation between McConnell and Martin that tells a story of a man who thinks he’s gotten everything he wants and is ready to dance on Donald Trump’s self-dug grave.

“I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell reportedly said after the events of Jan. 6, 2021 had unfolded. McConnell shared a macabre analogy with Martin: “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

Listen to Jennifer Fernandez Ancona from Way to Win explain how Democrats must message to win on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast with Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld

Martin writes that McConnell fished for rumors about whether or not Vice President Mike Pence or Trump’s Cabinet of con artists were making any moves to try and get Trump pushed out of office early under the 25th Amendment, and even said he had spoken with Democratic leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi about releasing a joint statement together urging Trump not to be anywhere near the inauguration.

Clearly none of those things happened, and now McConnell, like the turtle he resembles, has spent the past year and few months using his shell to keep from having any direct confrontations with The Donald, while also seeing if the constitutional provisions for enacting law against corrupt officials can function to keep him in control of his warring fascist political party. Sadly, these are the same provisions that he has personally worked to erode and defang.

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It might be wishful thinking and Sen. Joe Manchin attention-mongering all over again, but there is increasing noise that Democrats are looking again at trying revives the parts of President Joe Biden’s agenda for climate change and social investment (formerly known as Build Back Better). “We want to get it. Look, there are lots of talks going on right now. They’re not in a great degree of granularity,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters before the Senate took off for Easter recess earlier this month. “We’d like to move a reconciliation bill and go as far as you can, get as much done as we can, with 50 votes.”

Reconciliation is how it has to be done, the only way to avoid a Republican filibuster, because two Democrats—Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema—refuse to consider saving everything that’s good in this country with filibuster reform. Reconciliation, which requires 50 Senate votes, is also hampered by the hostage-taking of one or both of those senators, who can derail anything on a whim by withholding their votes. So when Manchin says he would agree to three things from the Build Back Better framework—tax reform, prescription drug cost cuts, and climate efforts—he does so knowing that Sinema won’t agree on any of those things. In fact, just this month she promised the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry that she’ll protect their low tax rates.

“What I can’t tell you is if negotiations will start again or what they’ll look like,” she said. “But what I can promise you is that I’ll be the same person in negotiations if they start again that I was in negotiations last year.”

But Biden can act without them on some of this stuff, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reminded the administration of yet again on Monday. She wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to outline the executive actions Biden can take on prescription drugs—actions that can be done without Congress—to lower to their cost to consumers. Which would be a really popular thing to do ahead of an election.

Warren worked with a group of more than 25 experts in law and public health from Yale Law School, Harvard Medical School, and Columbia Law School to explain the three options the administration has at its disposal, and urged Becerra to to “move swiftly to use your existing authorities to give sorely needed relief to the millions of Americans paying far too much for their prescription drugs.”

“Existing law gives the executive branch several tools to intervene when patients and public health are harmed by excessive drug prices,” the experts explained in their own letter to Warren last week. “These tools can help the Administration break patent barriers, foster competition where currently there is none, and drive down prices. Critically, using them requires no additional congressional action.”

Listen to Jennifer Fernandez Ancona from Way to Win explain how Democrats must message to win on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast with Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld

One of the three tools they discuss is the “government patent use power,” which has been used by the government “to procure important patented technologies from manufacturers other than the patent holders, who may charge very high prices.” They provide the example of the Pentagon using it to purchase technology like night-vision goggles. The other two options for executive action are provided under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, “intended to ensure that the public would not be deprived the benefits of inventions that it had effectively sponsored through government-funded research.” Through both “royalty-free license” and “march-in rights” established in that act, the government can break patent barriers for drugs developed with federal research money—and many, many pharmaceuticals fall into that category.

“In our view, § 1498 [the ‘government patent use power’] is a powerful general-purpose tool to target excessive pricing, while the Bayh-Dole Act is particularly helpful for patents that received government research support,” the experts write. “We believe that the two can and should be used together as part of a cohesive strategy when drugs of high public health importance are sold to US patients at excessive prices.”

Democrats and advocacy groups have been ramping up the pressure on Biden to take all the executive actions available, from immigration to canceling student debt, combatting the climate crisis, reducing fossil fuel dependence, investing in care economy jobs and standards, and regulating for economic and tax fairness. Biden has acted on Affordable Care Act premium costs, on ghost guns, and on environmental issues, but not on some of the really big stuff—the really big stuff he was imagining in Build Back Better.

Here’s one option for him from Warren, at least one item from Biden’s big agenda that can be salvaged immediately—Manchin and Sinema be damned.

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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Daniel Donner, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

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Leading Off

● MI-AG, MI-SoS: Two election conspiracy theorists with Donald Trump’s backing, Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo, defeated more traditional choices at the Michigan GOP’s endorsement convention on Saturday, setting them up for general election battles against Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, respectively.

The results, though, left some vocal Republicans fuming that their party had just thrown away the chance to take down two vulnerable Democrats in this important swing state. State Rep. Beau LaFave, who badly lost his bid for the nomination for secretary of state, spoke for many when he said, “I’m disappointed that Jocelyn Benson will be the secretary of state for the next four years.”

Dissenters may get another shot, though: Under state law, both Democrats and Republicans are actually required to pick nominees for these two offices (plus lieutenant governor) at their August conventions; these April gatherings are a recent innovation to allow candidates to get an earlier start on their campaigns, but they don’t have any official imprimatur.

To that end, state Rep. Ryan Berman, who took third place in the race for attorney general, said he’ll continue his campaign in the hopes of achieving a different result at the end of the summer. It would, however, take an affirmative vote of three-fourths of delegates to overturn Saturday’s vote, something one consultant characterized as a “smash-glass-in-case-of-emergency” option.

But Berman argued that Republicans might have to avail themselves of this option: He predicted that “[t]here’s a good chance” that DePerno could lose his law license or be indicted, which Bridge Michigan explains is a reference to a pair of investigations—one by the state’s Attorney Grievance Commission, the other by the state police—into DePerno’s lawsuits aimed at overturning Trump’s loss in Michigan.

DePerno, who recently called for the arrest of Nessel, Benson, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, was a minor figure in Michigan politics until just after the 2020 election. But he attracted Trump’s attention when he filed a lawsuit arguing that election fraud had taken place in Antrim County after vote totals initially showed Joe Biden leading Trump in this small conservative community. Those numbers, though, were the result of a clerical error that was quickly corrected to reflect Trump’s actual 61-37 win in the county, and a hand-count audit confirmed that voting machines provided by Dominion Voting Systems had correctly tabulated the results.

None of that, however, stopped the Antrim County results from becoming a prominent feature in the false Trumpian narrative claiming that Dominion had stolen the election, and DePerno has been all too happy to keep the story in the limelight. In the real world, his crusade has been an utter failure: Last week, a state appeals court issued the latest verdict against his evidence-free lawsuit, which DePerno vowed to appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court. But that setback did not bother his allies in the least, nor did a recent revelation that his former law firm fired him in 2005 after alleging he’d “padded” client bills.

Karamo likewise emerged from obscurity after she insisted she’d seen fraud in 2020 while working as a poll worker in Detroit. She’s since used her newfound far-right fame to appear at a QAnon event in August with extremist secretary of state candidates running in other states, taking the opportunity to call Benson “evil.” She later said (baselessly, of course) that Benson and other Democratic election officials had been “placed in those battleground states strategically to ensure that there was massive cheating and fraud in the election.”

Karamo also previously hosted a podcast, so you know the archives are replete with crazy. On her now-defunct show, among many other things, she announced that Beyoncé was bringing “Black Americans into paganism,” declared that LGBTQ people and anyone who has sex outside of marriage “violate God’s creative design,” called herself an “anti-vaxxer,” and labeled yoga “a satanic ritual.” (Believe it or not, she’s not even the only anti-yoga Republican on the ballot this year.)

On Saturday, she easily won the GOP endorsement outright with 67% of the vote, while DePerno was forced into a runoff after leading 2018 nominee Tom Leonard 49-40. Berman, who took third with 10%, backed Leonard in the second round, where voting was delayed for half an hour because, according to party officials, runoff ballots left out the candidates’ names and video graphics listed them in the wrong order. A party official called the issues the result of “human error,” which Bridge notes “echoed official explanations about 2020 irregularities in Antrim County that have spawned Trump’s false claims of fraud.”

But unlike in 2020, Trump’s people didn’t complain because the convention results went their way, with DePerno beating Leonard 55-45. Trump even celebrated both results before voting had even begun in either race, proclaiming that DePerno and Karamo would “get to the bottom of the 2020 Election Fraud.”

Redistricting

● KS Redistricting: A state court struck down the new congressional map drawn by Kansas Republicans as an illegal partisan and racial gerrymander in a 207-page decision issued Monday.

Republicans had sought to make the 3rd District, held by Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids, more favorable for Republicans by splitting up the Kansas City area and placing portions of it in the 2nd District. In so doing, the revamped district would have voted for Joe Biden by a 51-47 margin—considerably redder than Biden’s 54-44 win under the old lines.

And to avoid making the neighboring 2nd any bluer, Republicans extricated the liberal college town of Lawrence and grafted it onto the sprawling 1st District, deep-red rural turf that stretches all the way to the Colorado border. Had they not included that second step, Donald Trump’s margin in the 2nd would have shrunk to about 51-46 and made the seat vulnerable; instead, it stays at 57-41 Trump, similar to the old district’s 56-41 margin for Trump.

Judge Bill Klapper, however, ruled that these maneuvers violated the state constitution’s guarantee of the right to vote by diluting “the power of votes on the basis of party affiliation.” At the same time, he held that the map also ran afoul of the constitution’s equal protection provisions by diminishing the ability of Black and Latino voters in and around Kansas City to elect their candidates of choice by moving a disproportionate number from the 3rd District to the 2nd. Klapper did not specify a timetable for lawmakers to draw a new map but said they must do so “as expeditiously as possible.”

Republicans, who passed their map over a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, reacted with predictable anger to the ruling and pledged to appeal to the state Supreme Court. Separately, Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt asked the Supreme Court to review the state’s new legislative maps on Monday, triggering a process that gives the justices 30 days to decide on their validity.

Senate

● UT-Sen: In a surprising move, delegates to Utah’s state Democratic convention voted on Saturday to back conservative independent Evan McMullin’s campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Mike Lee rather than put forward their own nominee. The decision, which ended the campaign of Democrat Kael Weston, gives McMullin a better chance to put together a winning general election coalition in this very red state, though he’ll still be in for a very tough contest.

Prominent Democrats, including former Rep. Ben McAdams and Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson, had previously endorsed McMullin, with Wilson explicitly urging Team Blue against fielding a candidate of its own in order to avoid splitting the anti-Lee vote. But Weston, who was the 2020 nominee against 2nd District Rep. Chris Stewart last cycle, still went forward with his bid, and because he was the only Democratic candidate to file, it looked like he’d be on the November ballot.

However, the Beehive State’s unusual ballot access laws gave McMullin’s Democratic allies a chance to block Weston on Saturday. In Utah, as we’ve previously explained, candidates either needed to have turned in the requisite number of signatures or win enough support at their state party convention, and while contenders can simultaneously try both options, Weston only went with the convention route. That meant that, when delegates voted 57-43 not to nominate anyone, he had no fallback option. Weston, whose supporters booed McMullin when he addressed the gathering, did not explicitly endorse him afterwards, though he put a statement declaring, “Let’s all help defeat Mike Lee — the sooner the better.”

McMullin, who took 21% in the state in the 2016 presidential race as an anti-Trump conservative, has used his new campaign to argue that Utah needs to replace the extremist Lee. The independent also focused on recent revelations that Lee worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat in his brief speech to convention delegates Saturday, saying, “We will show the rest of the country how we beat people like Mike Lee who try to overturn our democracy in the shadows.” McMullin, unlike most nonaligned candidates, will have the money to make his case, though Lee still ended March with a wide $2.4 million to $847,000 cash-on-hand lead.

● VT-Sen: University of New Hampshire: Peter Welch (D): 62, Christina Nolan (R): 27

Governors

● GA-Gov: The NRA has endorsed Gov. Brian Kemp ahead of the May 24 Republican primary.

● NV-Gov: Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo uses his very first ad for the June Republican primary to go negative on his intra-party foes, North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee and former Sen. Dean Heller, as well as Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, by labeling them “a bunch of keyboard cowboys” who “talk tough about immigration.” Lombardo continues by saying that unlike his rivals, “I’ve deported thousands.”

● WI-Gov: Wealthy businessman Tim Michels has announced he is joining the Republican primary for governor this August, and the Wisconsin State Journal reports that he’s poised to go up with a “high-dollar” TV ad buy soon. Michels co-owns a construction company and previously ran for office a couple of times in previous decades, but his last attempt way back in 2004 saw him decisively lose that year’s Senate contest as the GOP nominee against former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, who prevailed 55-44.

Following the news of Michels’ entry into the race, GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany has reiterated his support for former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who has held large leads in the few polls taken to date, though with many voters still undecided. Also in the running for Republicans are 2018 Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson and state Rep. Timothy Ramthun.

House

● FL-02, FL-05: Democratic Rep. Al Lawson told Politico on Sunday that if he decides to run again, he would do so in the Tallahassee-based 2nd District against Republican Rep. Neal Dunn rather than in the new 5th, which is contained to the Jacksonville area. Lawson for three terms has represented a plurality-Black 5th District spanning from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, and Republicans targeted him with their recently enacted congressional map by breaking up the 5th District to ensure that both cities were drawn into majority-white districts that favored Republicans, leaving Lawson with no great options.

In a sign of which way he might be leaning, Lawson also recently told a local TV reporter that his “plan right now is to be on the ballot,” though that isn’t quite a firm commitment to running again. If Lawson does choose to run in the 2nd, he would face sizable headwinds in a seat that Donald Trump would have carried by 55-44 in an area that has been trending to the right over the last decade. Furthermore, Lawson currently represents only 31% of the redrawn 2nd’s population compared to 64% for Dunn.

However Lawson argued that his ties to the area are much deeper and broader than a quick glance at the toplines might suggest: Lawson represented much of this area, including several conservative counties outside of Tallahassee, when he was in the state Senate from 2000 to 2010. Additionally, prior to his initial 2016 victory in the current 5th following court-ordered redistricting, Lawson made two runs for Congress in older versions of the 2nd District that contained a large majority of the new 2nd’s territory, coming up short by close margins in the 2010 primary and 2012 general election.

Still, with Joe Biden sporting a low approval rating and the midterms shaping up to favor Republicans this fall, Lawson would have his work cut out for him if he chooses to run here. One reason he may be holding off on making a decision, though, is that several advocacy groups and Florida voters filed a lawsuit in state court last week alleging that the new map violates the state constitution’s prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering and diluting minority representation, which could result in something close to the existing 5th District getting revived if the plaintiffs prevail.

● MA-04: Former Brookline Selectwoman Jesse Mermell, who just barely came up short by 22-21 in the crowded Democratic primary against freshman Rep. Jake Auchincloss when the current version of this seat was open in 2020, has announced that she won’t seek a rematch this cycle. Auchincloss, a relative moderate who benefitted last time from multiple more progressive opponents splitting the vote, faces no notable opponent in the September primary this cycle, and time is quickly running out for one to materialize before the May 10 filing deadline.

● MN-01: Republicans in the new 1st Congressional District held their convention over the weekend, but while a majority of delegates backed state Rep. Jeremy Munson, he was unable to take the requisite 60% needed to secure the party endorsement for the full two-year term. The GOP did not do a convention for the special election because redistricting was completed just before Republican Rep. Jim Hagedorn died, though an endorsement for the regularly scheduled race still could have given one of the contenders a lift in the May 24 primary.

Ultimately, however, Munson fell just short. He led former Department of Agriculture official Brad Finstad 55-35 in the seventh round, but attendees voted on Sunday at 1 AM local time to disperse after concluding that no one would outright win. “By one o’clock, everybody was getting kind of grumpy,” explained one delegate.

● MN-03: Navy veteran Tom Weiler defeated businessman Mark Blaxill on Saturday to win the Republican Party endorsement to take on Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips; Blaxill does not appear to have said if he’ll file to compete in the August primary for a seat Biden would have carried 59-38.

● NC-01: Retiring Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield has endorsed state Sen. Don Davis in the May 17 primary to succeed him.

● NC-11: State Sen. Chuck Edwards’ latest ad for next month’s Republican primary cuts right to the chase and calls far-right Rep. Madison Cawthorn an Instagramer who posts all day but doesn’t actually do anything to solve the country’s ongoing problems. Edwards draws a contrast by claiming he “fought the liberals [in state government] and won,” pointing to how he advanced conservative positions on taxes, guns, and immigration.

Cawthorn is also facing further opposition from a super PAC with ties to GOP Sen. Thom Tillis called Results for NC, which has allocated an additional $126,000 to bring its total ad spending here up to just over half a million in only the last few days. The group recently went up with a spot calling out Cawthorn as a serial liar.

● OR-05: President Biden has endorsed Rep. Kurt Schrader ahead of the May 17 Democratic primary, where the moderate incumbent faces a progressive primary challenge by attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner. In addition to Biden’s support, Schrader headed into the primary’s final stretch with a large financial advantage: Schrader outraised McLeod-Skinner in the first quarter by $714,000 to $314,000 and started April with a $2.7 million to $310,000 edge in cash-on-hand.

● OR-06: CHC BOLD PAC, which is the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ campaign arm, says it is spending $1 million on an ad backing state Rep. Andrea Salinas in next month’s Democratic primary. Their spot notes Salinas’ background as the daughter of an immigrant father and praises her state legislative record on issues including abortion rights, healthcare, the minimum wage, and climate change.

● UT-01: Retired intelligence officer Andrew Badger outpaced freshman Rep. Blake Moore 59-41 at Saturday’s Republican convention, which secured the challenger a spot on the June primary ballot. Former Morgan County Councilmember Tina Cannon, who has the support of former Rep. Rob Bishop, will also be competing in the primary because, like Moore, she collected enough signatures to advance no matter how the weekend gathering went. But it’s the end of the line for both Vineland Mayor Julie Fullmer and businessman William Campbell, who were only pursuing the convention route.

Cannon has faulted Moore with not living in this safely red northern Utah seat, while Badger’s objections are more ideological. Badger, whom Cachevalleydaily.com says delivered “brief speeches that sounded more like revival meetings,” has pledged to join the far-right House Freedom Caucus. The story says that Moore, by contrast, has a “carefully cultivated reputation for bipartisanship,” but he tried out more conservative rhetoric on Saturday. Neither Cannon nor Badger has much money available to make their case against Moore to primary voters, however.

● UT-03: Former state Rep. Chris Herrod led Rep. John Curtis 55-45 at the weekend’s GOP convention, but Herrod heads into their June primary showdown with less than $3,000 to spend. This will be the third face-off between Curtis and Herrod for a safely red seat in the Provo area and southeastern Utah: Curtis won the 2017 special primary 43-33, and he prevailed 73-27 in their rematch the following year.

Obituaries

● Former Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, whose tenure from 1977 to 2019 makes him the longest serving Republican senator in American history, died Saturday at the age of 88. Hatch, who worked as an attorney, was a first-time candidate and political unknown when he joined the 1976 GOP race to take on Democratic incumbent Frank Moss, a decision his family and friends tried to talk him out of in order to spare him what they saw as an all-but-certain defeat. Hatch went ahead and filed a mere five minutes before the deadline, and the Salt Lake Tribune story about his nascent candidacy marked the first time he’d even been mentioned in the paper.

But Hatch gained traction thanks to two influential allies: Brigham Young University President Ernest Wilkinson, who was the 1964 nominee against Moss, and former Salt Lake City police chief Cleon Skousen, who was a powerful member of the far-right John Birch Society. (The Tribune wrote in a detailed 2012 look at this race that Hatch “tried to keep [Skousen] at a distance” while still benefiting from his financial help and volunteers.)

Hatch needed to perform well at the party convention in order to even make the primary ballot, and he reached out to delegates by mailing them cassettes he’d created through one of his side-businesses; he ended up taking a surprisingly strong second-place against former Interior Department official Jack Carlson. Hatch gained ground by capitalizing on post-Watergate distrust of the establishment, and a poll taken just before the primary showed Carlson only narrowly ahead.

Hatch then decided to take a chance and ask Ronald Reagan, who had just lost the presidential nod to incumbent Gerald Ford, for an endorsement; Reagan delivered, though Hatch’s team had to alter Reagan’s telegram backing “Warren Hatch.” After winning the nomination in a 65-35 landslide, Hatch spent the general election saying of Moss, “What do you call an 18-year incumbent? You call him home.” He went on to unseat Moss, who is Utah’s most recent Democratic senator, 56-43 as Ford was carrying the state 62-34 against Jimmy Carter.

Hatch six years later turned back Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson 58-41, and he never again faced a serious Democratic opponent. He sought a promotion in 2000 when he ran for the White House himself, but he won another term in the Senate that year after his longshot presidential bid went nowhere. In 2012, though, he had a potentially serious intra-party challenge from state Sen. Dan Liljenquist, who was hoping to ride the same tea party wave that had cost Hatch’s longtime colleague, Bob Bennett, renomination two years before. The incumbent, however, insulated himself by courting conservatives and won his primary 67-33.

Hatch, who served more than twice as long as Moss had when the Republican implored voters to “call him home,” mulled running for an eighth term in 2018, but he ultimately retired.

Ad Roundup

• AL-Sen: Katie Britt (R)
• AR-Sen: Arkansas Patriots Fund (R) – anti-John Boozman (R-inc)
• AZ-Sen: NRSC (R) (in Spanish) – anti-Mark Kelly (D-inc)
• NC-Sen: Cheri Beasley (D)
• OH-Sen: Josh Mandel (R)
• OH-Sen: Mike Gibbons (R) – anti-Mandel (R)
• PA-Sen: Dave McCormick (R) – anti-Mehmet Oz (R)
• PA-Sen: Carla Sands (R)
• NM-Gov: Mark Ronchetti (R)
• NM-Gov: Rebecca Dow (R)
• OR-04: Doyle Canning (D)

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A right-wing racist doubling as a Michigan radio host decided last week to throw his hat in the ring for a state Senate seat—and get this: He’s running as a Democrat. Mind you, just last month he was trying to make a case that TV commercials should only feature white families. According to The Detroit News, Randy Bishop, who also goes by “Trucker Randy,” said during his podcast episode on March 31 that the media was trying to destroy the “nuclear family,” with every commercial showing a “biracial mom and dad.”

“Can’t even watch a college basketball tournament without commercials telling me I have to feel guilty because I think a family should be a White mom, a White dad and White kids,” Bishop said. “They want us to die and go away. And they’re going to try to do it through politics this year. Well, we have got to be just as smart.”

RELATED STORY: Watch what happens when you pick the wrong Democrat to lie about

He went on to claim that Black people wield too much power in American society. “Why are we allowing such a small percentage of our population to control our society,” he asked. “Because they own the media. Because they own the politicians. Because they own the public schools.”

It’s a claim so ridiculous it’s not even worth dignifying with a rebuttal, and the Michigan Democratic Party made no such attempt. Instead, it distanced itself from Bishop with a statement posted on Facebook:

Views such as the ones Trucker Randy Bishop espouses have no place in the Democratic Party. Candidates who say or believe these things are not welcome. Randy Bishop is not a Democrat, he is a dishonest minor social media personality that enjoys getting attention from making outrageous statements.  He shows nothing but disrespect to our system of government by using a run for elected office to promote his personal agenda, entirely based on lies, hate and fear.

Disgusting racist belief systems are not welcome in the Democratic Party and frankly should not be welcome in any political party or community. We will not support his efforts to run for Senate and find it deeply insulting that he would dare to put a D next to his name.