There’s probably nothing more predictable in an election loss than this—conservative Democrats with a Politico reporter on speed-dial rushing to kneecap their progressive colleagues:
Dem members are already texting me blaming progressives for “debacle” in Virginia https://t.co/MJnlDzW5WF
Interestingly enough, that’s not the takeaway from Third Way, the longtime policy group friend of the Blue Dog Democrats. “The months of in-fighting and sausage-making must come to an end,” Matt Bennett, executive vice president of the group, said in a statement. “We must pass these two historic bills and then explain what they will do to create jobs, cut taxes, and help working families afford the essentials.”
“Three cheers for Third Way” is a sentiment you might never expect to show up on the front page of Daily Kos, but when they’re right, they’re right. The sabotage of President Joe Biden’s agenda has not been coming from the left of the Democratic congress, but from the right.
“Republicans are intent on using the lessons they learned in Virginia, including the power of cynical distortion and outright lying about cultural and race issues, to try to take back Congress next year,” Bennett continued. “The dangers of the anti-democratic, Trumpified GOP taking control are enormous. Democrats must show that they are the mainstream party of the Joe Biden who won the primary and the general election. That’s the only way back.”
There is no aid and comfort to the Sabotage Squad from there, so they’ll have to keep relying on Politico. Funnily enough, the Democrats willing to go on the record there aren’t falling for the “Dems in disarray” trap. Even California Rep. Scott Peters, who has been fighting on behalf of PhRMA to make sure Medicare can’t negotiate prescription drug prices, wouldn’t play. Not for the record, anyway. “The picture has been of Democrats sparring amongst ourselves. That’s probably not the best face to put out,” he said. “I hope that there’s more of working toward agreement, like we had today, than openly sparring with each other.”
“People in my district don’t care what happens in the Virginia governor’s race,” said Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright, a Democrat, who eked out a win in a Trump-supporting northeast district last fall. “A year from now, what happened in the Virginia governor’s race will be a distant, dim memory.”
That’s not going to keep the conservative Democrats from carping off the record to a Fox News reporter. Chad Pergram tweets that they’re “fired up this morning after the losses in Virginia,” and that one tells him “Hopefully progressives will get the wake-up call.”
They’re still pushing to decouple the hard infrastructure bill from the budget reconciliation that holds all of the things that will actually help people so that they can continue to delay, delay, delay that bill. That’s the tactic we’ve been seeing from the House Sabotage Squad and their Senate cheerleaders, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, for months.
The not-conservative members of the Democratic Congress, however, aren’t falling for it. They’re not fighting the linkage of the bill, and they’re still pressing for action.
KAINE’s take on VA doesn’t mince words: “Congressional Dems hurt Terry McAuliffe. I mean, I’m gonna be blunt, it’s humbling to say it. But if we had been able to deliver infrastructure and reconciliation in mid October, he could have sold” those policies. (via @frankthorp)
There are many reasons for the loss in Virginia. When it comes down to it, most of them are because Republicans once again so skillfully tapped into fear and racism and the ongoing pandemic zeitgeist. It was masks and vaccines in schools and critical race theory and transphobia, not paid family leave and carbon offsets.
No one was voting for Manchin or Sinema in Virginia on Tuesday. Shame on any Democrat who tries to exploit that by further sabotaging not just their colleagues, but their president.
American police forces, while claiming to be neutral protectors of public safety and civil rights, have been green-lighting right-wing attacks on leftist protesters for a long time now, most notably during the anti-police brutality protests of 2020. One of the more insidious ways that this has been occurring has been through vehicle-ramming attacks, in which angry right-wing drivers have plowed through crowds of protesters, maiming dozens.
Even more disturbing is that police, prosecutors, and legislators have been anything but neutral in handling this violence. A Boston Globe investigation published this week found 139 cases of such attacks between late May 2020 and Sept. 30 of this year, injuring at least 100 protesters and killing three of them. But the drivers faced charges in only 65 of those incidents, with only 34 of those being felonies; the others only faced misdemeanors or minor traffic violation charges.
Georgia State University professor Mia Bloom, who specializes in global terrorism studies, told the Globe that convictions for serious crimes in these attacks appear to be occurring at a low rate.
“When we’re looking at a tactic,” Bloom said, “you take your car and you plow it into civilians on purpose, in order to terrify them for a political purpose, what’s the difference between plowing your car and planting a bomb?”
A number of the incidents, the report notes, are not clear-cut cases of intentional assault, such as when drivers have proceeded slowly through the crowds and have been surrounded by protesters, and their vehicles have been attacked. However, in other cases, as domestic terrorism expert Mary McCord of the Georgetown Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection told the Globe, “the driver is intending to intimidate and coerce people from exercising their First Amendment rights. That’s just another way that protests have become more dangerous.”
The survey, moreover, found many drivers who had injured people but never faced a felony charge. On the contrary, police and prosecutors often charged the protester who was hit for disorderly conduct or jaywalking, rather than the driver. Often, a simple claim of self-defense was all that was needed. “In many cases,” the report said, “police and prosecutors simply accepted drivers’ explanations that they were not attempting to instill terror in pedestrian protesters but rather felt terror themselves.”
In Visalia, California, an open-topped Jeep flying an American flag and what appeared to be a Trump flag hit two protesters on May 30, 2020 during an encounter caught on video in which water bottles were thrown at the car. The local prosecutor said the driver was acting out of fear for his safety and did not charge him. In Gainesville, Florida, prosecutors dropped six counts of aggravated assault against a man who drove through a protest on that same day, saying the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows someone in a confrontation to defend themselves in their own residence without any duty to retreat, had come into play.
For researchers such as Roudabeh Kishi—director of research and innovation at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project, from which the Globe study drew its data—the use of vehicles to attack demonstrators rather than terrorism targets is an entirely American development.
“It’s quite unique seeing people using cars as a weapon to suppress demonstrators,” Kishi said. “Most incidents that we’ve seen have all been targeting peaceful protesters … It’s really going against the narrative that these types of incidents are self-defense.”
Many of the confrontations that are occurring at protests, such as this one in Salt Lake City in August 2020, are occurring in both a politicized and racially charged context.
Because they mainly have occurred in the context of protests against racist behavior by police, there is a powerful racial component to these incidents. When the race of the driver is known, they are four times as likely to be white than a person of color. In a number of the incidents, witnesses describe drivers using racial slurs or shouting such phrases as “all lives matter” during the attack. At least one driver in Virginia who drove his truck into a Black Lives Matter protest was a Ku Klux Klan member; he was charged with a hate crime.
“You’re going to have people coming in and expressing themselves with two tons of metal on wheels,” Brian Michael Jenkins, director of the National Transportation Security Center, told the Globe. “That’s part of the landscape now.”
The tactic of attacking protesters with vehicles has enjoyed a great deal of currency on far-right social media, originally in the form of widely shared memes. These memes first gained attention in the darker fringes of the internet—particularly alt-right channels on platforms such as 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit—but have been showing up with increasing frequency on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And they have already played a role in creating fatalities: Charlottesville vehicle killer James Alex Fields shared such a meme shortly before killing protester Heather Heyer with his car in August 2017.
The language is consistently cruel and inhumane: “Run ’em all over” and “Get the protester plow,” are popular lines; one of the favorites is “All Lives Splatter.” Another meme claims to show the “new Dodge Ram Protester Edition” with a custom paint job replicating blood across the truck’s front end.
Popular right-wing figures have gotten into the act. YouTube pundit Steven Crowder recently tweeted: “Charge or block a vehicle and break the windshield with the driver still in it? Congratulations! You are now a speed bump!”
The widespread endorsement of the tactic by conservative Republicans has grown to include passing legislation giving wide legal latitude to anyone using their vehicle to assault protesters when they use public roadways. GOP-controlled legislatures in Florida and Oklahoma each passed legislation that not only outlaws broadly defined “riots,” but provides immunity to people who drive their vehicles into a protest crowd. Other Republican legislatures in a number of states are lining up to do the same.
The Florida bill—signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis—forbids anyone from occupying streets in the course of a protest (which can be any gathering of three or more people), and then gives immunity to drivers who ram their cars into protesting crowds in those streets and injure or kill anyone participating. Anyone who participates in a protest that becomes violent can be charged with a third-degree felony.
In at least one case, the kid-glove treatment by police later led to an escalation of the use of a Trump supporter’s pickup to assault political opponents. In September 2020, Eliazar Cisneros of San Antonio, Texas, drove his large black truck, waving a large Trump flag, into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, but did not injure anyone because he drove slowly. Nonetheless, he cursed at protesters as he drove into their midst, and they responded in kind. He claimed he was driving aimlessly, “waving my flags and showing support for my president.”
“I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Cisneros said. “You know, get off the street, get on the sidewalk and protest whatever you are protesting on the sidewalk. Stay safe.”
Police did not charge Cisneros. One month later, however, he was among the most aggressive drivers in a large “Trump Train” that attacked a Biden/Harris campaign as it drove from San Antonio to Austin. The pickup truck he drove in both incidents was the vehicle that deliberately collided with an SUV driven by a Biden staffer accompanying the bus; as a result, he is one of five people involved in the incident being sued by people who were aboard the bus.
Many of the drivers believe the protesters deserve to be assaulted. When James Hunton, 24, struck a woman with his truck in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on May 29, he told police: “The protesters were in the road … They deserved to be hit, anybody would.” After first being charged with a felony, Hunton pleaded his case down to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to probation.
Police are among the people who often share that belief. In Seattle, at least two officers have come under fire for expressing support for vehicular assaults on protesters. One, a King County detective named Mike Brown, shared an “all lives splatter” meme on his Facebook page, and later posted: “I see a couple of people got infected with Covid-19 from the hood of a car on I-5 last night.” Brown was fired.
An onsite memorial to Summer Diaz in Seattle at the location where a driver ran into protesters during a freeway protest in July 2020, killing them.
A Seattle police officer named Andrei Constantin is currently under investigation after local activists revealed his identity on Twitter, posting as “Bruce Wayne” under the now-deleted @1SteelerFanatic account, which regularly wished violence on local protesters, including his apparent support for Dawit Kelete, the man who drove into protesters on a closed-off freeway in July 2020, killing one person and severely injuring several others.
Constantin frequently promoted the “#FreeDawitKelete” hashtag. Replying to a fundraiser for the person who was killed in the incident, he tweeted: “Do you have the go fund me for #FreeDawitKelete?” Chastised for his tweets, he replied: “Nah, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” Other tweets expressed open hostility to Black victims of police brutality, including one that read: “#GeorgeFloyd got justice regardless of what your definition of ‘justice’ is.”
The end result of the spread of this threatening tactic—and its green-lighting by civic authorities—has been devastating for protesters faced with lethal force for exercising their First Amendment rights. One of the Black Lives Matter activists who endured Cisneros’ assault in September 2020—writing on Twitter as “Nat”—reflected on the trend afterward, noting that he had already endured an earlier vehicle-ramming attack in Rhode Island.
“At the time, the event made national news,” he wrote. “Now, as we’ve seen, this car-ramming tactic has become standard for both the cops and the right. It often doesn’t even make news or it’s only on the local level. I know many others … have talked about this dynamic too.
“It’s scary to see this normalized,” he continued. “Even more scary to me is how blank I feel after again being in a car-rammed protest. I’m sad and scared for my friends and others in the march, but I don’t feel shock. It’s fucked how normal this violence has (had to) become to me and to us all.”
A new report makes a convincing argument for why we need free higher education in this country. It compares the cost of college—which has skyrocketed—with the average wage for graduates since 1980, which has completely flatlined. The most stunning thing is these numbers don’t change according to how smart you are.
“The evidence of our failure to help all youth make the long journey from early childhood to adult economic independence is plain. In the trajectory from kindergarten to a good job, the most talented disadvantaged youth do not fare nearly as well as the least talented advantaged youth,” reads the report. “It is far better to be born rich and white than smart and poor in America.”
The cost of college has increased by 169% in the past 40 years, while wages for young grads have only increased by 19%, according to data from the U.S. Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and National Center for Education Statistics.
“Postsecondary education policy has failed to keep higher education affordable even as formal education beyond high school has become more essential,” reads the report. “Today, two out of three jobs require postsecondary education and training, while three out of four jobs in the 1970s required a high school diploma or less. Yet while young people today need more education than ever to compete in the labor market, a college education is more expensive than in the past.”
Looking at students’ grades in 2019, a Georgetown University report entitled “If Not Now, When? The Urgent Need for an All-One-System Approach to Youth Policy,” found that poor kindergarten students with good test scores were less likely to finish high school, graduate from college, or earn a high salary compared to wealthy peers with lower grades/test scores.
“When we track student test scores beginning in kindergarten, we find that children from families in the top quartile of family socioeconomic status (SES) who have low test scores have a 71% chance of being in the top half of socioeconomic status by their late 20s,” they write in 2021. “However, children from families in the bottom SES quartile but with top test scores have only a 31% chance of being in the top half of SES by their late 20s, and the numbers are even worse for talented children from low-income racial and ethnic minority households.”
The report makes the case that the educational system in the U.S. has failed its students and recommends President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act begin putting the right steps into place to change that by investing in early education, offering a culturally responsive curriculum, work-based learning, free college for those who need it, and employment and career counseling.
“We haven’t connected the dots from early childhood, through K –12 and postsecondary education, to careers,” Anthony P. Carnevale, lead author and director of the Center on Education and the Workforce, said in a statement. “We need an all-one-system approach that facilitates smooth transitions on the pathway from youth dependence to adult independence.”
Should Glenn Youngkin’s margin hold up in Virginia, which at this time on Wednesday morning appears to be a near certainty, it’s completely unclear what he will do as governor other than exercise his fear of children’s books. The shallowness of Youngkin’s campaign seems to be a strong indicator that all those Republican think tanks were right when they seized on the completely fabricated threat of “critical race theory” to lead them into the coming cycle. Certainly there has been frustration over the lingering epidemic, and the “supply chain crisis” that has occasionally deprived a family of their favorite toilet paper. However, Youngkin’s victory can be neatly explained by an enormous shift in a single demographic: According to NBC News, white women without a college degree made a 19% swing to the GOP side when compared to the presidential race a year earlier.
Just as Russia actually devoted far more of its effort to increasing racial tension rather than into directly promoting Trump, Republican leadership understands that race remains an incredibly potent lever for motivating their white base. That’s especially true with the “poorly uneducated” voters for whom Trump declared his love. Looking not just at Virginia but at situations like that in Southlake, Texas, where a school board election positioned Republicans to kill the school’s plans for teaching about racial diversity, it’s hard not to come away with a clear indication that malignant racism and white fear remain a ready source of votes for anyone willing to tap that ugly vein.
And yet … maybe it would be wise not to read Virginia as such a definitive verdict on anything at all. After all, this is the eighth time in a row that an incoming president has been followed with an opposition party win in the Virginia governorship. Those victories have had absolutely no power to predict the outcome of elections that followed.
And there’s an even better reason to keep our chins up when it comes to defeating the electoral power of racism. As USA Today reports, people of color won races across the country, including several historic firsts.
In Boston, Michelle Wu became the first Asian woman elected as mayor. In fact, as the Associated Press reports, Wu is the first woman, the first Asian, and the first person of color elected to that role even though she follows Mayor Kim Janey, who is Black. That’s because Janey was actually appointed mayor after previous office holder Marty Walsh took a slot in the Biden administration. Not only does the AP call this win a marker of how Boston is moving past its history of ethnically segregated neighborhoods, but “a pivotal moment for Boston, which has wrestled with racial strife throughout its history.” To take the position, Wu beat out Essaibi George, whose father was a Muslim immigrant from Tunisia. Both candidates are Democrats.
In New York, not only did Eric Adams decisively stomp Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa to become the city’s second Black mayor, he was joined in that victory by former federal prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who will now be the first Black Manhattan district attorney. According toThe New York Times, sitting Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who has generated some excitement with his investigation of the Trump Organization but failed to lodge any charges directly at Trump or his family, did not seek reelection. In his campaign, Bragg noted that he had sued Trump “over 100 times” while serving in the state attorney general’s office. But what happens with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office investigation at this point is still to be seen.
In Pittsburgh, Ed Gainey says he was inspired to run for that office by the protests following the police murder of George Floyd. As thePittsburgh Post-Gazettereports, Gainey will become that city’s first Black mayor. Gainey won office directly talking about breaking down the racial dividing lines in Pittsburgh, and making the city more accessible and more livable for everyone.
In Cincinnati, Aftab Pureval won another Democrat versus Democrat contest, beating out David Mann to become that city’s first Asian mayor. According to NBC News, Purveal was considered a possible candidate for Rob Portman’s Senate seat, but has promised that he’ll serve a full term as mayor. Still … stay tuned.
In Dearborn, Michigan, state legislator Abdullah Hammoud has become that city’s first Arab mayor. It’s Hammoud who, as reported in The Detroit Free Press, issued a statement that might sum up a string of results that featured the word “first.”
“To the young girls and boys who have ever been ridiculed for their faith or ethnicity, to those of you who were ever made to feel that their names were unwelcome, and to our parents and to our elders and to others who were humiliated for their broken English and yet still persisted, today is proof that you are as American as anyone else.”
A string of mayoral victories might seem like a poor consolation when “the big prize” of the evening was lost. However, these victories show the Democratic Party filling its ranks with a diverse cast who, in the future, will be prime candidates for roles that go beyond a single city.
Last year, minority advocates representing multiple backgrounds called for people to partake in the 2020 census. Many of them feared that if undercounted, minorities would lose or miss out on funding. Lack of representation and participation in the census leads to a lack of funding or programming available for communities for an entire decade. Census totals are used to determine funding amounts for both local and state governments; without accurate numbers, funding cannot be distributed adequately. While not as “dire as some had feared,” that concern is now a reality.
According to a research report by the Urban Institute, the 2020 census—which cost approximately $14.2 billion—likely undercounted people of color at higher rates than previous censuses. The report, released Tuesday, notes that while the Census Bureau may have continued to overcount people who identified as white and not Latino, it likely failed to count nearly 2.5 million people in other racial and ethnic groups.
“Overall, these data show that some communities and their residents will be shortchanged for the next decade due to an incomplete count,” the report’s chief author, Diana Elliott, told reporters Tuesday.
The Urban Institute estimates that nationwide, the net undercount rates by race or ethnicity were highest for Black people, followed by Latino people and Pacific Islanders. The report also found that the 2020 count could be the largest miscount of the true U.S. population in 30 years.
According to NPR, the think tank’s method for calculating population accuracy is different from what the Census Bureau uses. Researchers with the Urban Institute used census participation rates, national survey results, and other data to simulate results of last year’s national head count. The Urban Institute’s figures also come months before the bureau’s estimates of any undercounts from a follow-up survey.
The undercounts were most concentrated in major cities with high minority populations, including Miami, Los Angeles, and Houston.
Arturo Vargas, chief executive of NALEO Educational Fund, told The Washington Post this was not surprising due to the Trump administration’s efforts to silence and erase those communities.
“There was a definite undercount of immigrant cities, and I will argue that that was one of the goals of the Trump administration — to make immigrants invisible or nonexistent, and by not counting them, that was one way to do that,” he said.
Minorities often go undercounted in the U.S. census, but advocates feared a higher undercount because researchers found a multitude of obstacles that could lead to one, Daily Kos reported. In 2019, the Trump administration campaigned to include a controversial citizenship question on the 2020 census, which asked, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
The question raised concerns that undocumented immigrants would not participate in the census should such a question be included. The Supreme Court later ruled against including the question on census forms, yet other misinformation about the census continued to spread during the Trump administration.
Because the census has great implications for community resources, advocates fear the long-term implications of the undercount. Not only is the census used for funding, but for redrawing voting districts and reallocating both the seats in Congress and the Electoral College votes for presidential elections. Researchers believe undercounts can skew congressional representation as well as the distribution of more than $1.5 trillion in federal funds guided by census results annually.
This is a concern because populations who are most vulnerable often are misrepresented in the count and programs to help aid them are often specifically designed based on the census. These households are more likely to be living under the poverty line and often have difficulty accessing child care and job training.
The National Urban League sued to try to stop the Trump administration from ending counting early last year and has recently called for congressional hearings into how the administration’s interference with the 2020 census “could rob” fair political representation from communities where Black people live. According to The Los Angeles Times, in addition to billions of dollars in federal funding, Black residents could lose up to three congressional seats.
In a statement, the Census Bureau acknowledged the importance of reports examining the accuracy of the 2020 census: “The U.S. Census Bureau recognizes the importance of accuracy for the 2020 Census,” the bureau said in a statement. It referenced the release of results from the Post-Enumeration Survey (PES), as well as Demographic Analysis (DA) estimates based on government records. “Once we have these results for DA and the PES, we will be able to better understand the full coverage measurement patterns of the 2020 Census.”
This means the official undercount or overcount of the census won’t be known until next year when the Census Bureau releases a report card on its accuracy. Additionally, the Census Bureau will hold a meeting of its National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations this week. It plans to not only provide updates on the quality of the count and future plans but discuss potential undercounts of vulnerable populations.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released a new report on Tuesday detailing how little Facebook has done to mitigate the spread of climate change disinformation. The report, which you can read here, lists 10 outlets that account for 69% of Facebook users’ activity with climate change denial content, a majority of which Facebook failed to flag with fact-checking labels.
The CCDH looked at a sample of 6,983 articles from all 10 websites published between Oct. 12, 2020, and Oct. 11, 2021. The nonprofit found that just 8% of posts received a fact-checking label that redirects users to Facebook’s “Climate Science Information Center,” which the social media giant rolled out last September. Articles lacking such labels received far more engagement from users, which could explain why Facebook was reticent to use its own fact-checking resources.
According to the CCDH, “posts without information labels received an average of 4,322 interactions, compared to 485 for those with labels.” A majority of those interactions came from users engaging with links shared by Breitbart, the far-right disinformation publication once run by Steve Bannon.
The report calls out Breitbart’s partial owner, Robert Mercer, for having a vested interest in pushing climate change denial, noting that Mercer funds groups like the Heartland Institute and the Media Research Center, the latter of which also appears on the CCDH’s list of outlets pushing climate change disinformation on Facebook.
The CCDH names specific Breitbart writers guilty of pushing some of the most dangerous climate change denial pieces, like editor-in-chief John Nolte, who’s constantly churning out idiotic think pieces like “Scientists Prove Man-Made Global Warming Is a Hoax,” or “Climate Experts are 0-41 With Their Doomsday Predictions.” Nolte may be better known as the guy who thinks the left is forcing his fans to remain unvaccinated in an effort to “own” them by perpetuating a pandemic that’s killed millions.
Breitbart London’s executive editor, James Delingpole is also mentioned for his opinion pieces. Delingpole consistently asserts that there is no “climate emergency” and that climate change itself is a “hoax.” He already wrote a column denouncing COP26 as “stupid,” and claimed, within that piece and a series of tweets, that there is something “quintessentially Satanic” about world leaders fighting climate change in Glasgow. And yet columns like these frequently show up on Breitbart’s Facebook feed looking as legitimate as an op-ed from any established newspaper.
The CCDH calls for both Facebook and Google to “stop promoting and funding climate denial, start labeling it as misinformation, and stop giving the advantages of their enormous platform to lies and misinformation.” Facebook has yet to respond to this ask, though last month Google finally decided to stop serving up climate change denial ads.
How do y’all think social media companies should handle disinformation? Sound off in the comments. And feel free to take our poll on whether you’re choosing to leave Facebook altogether.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●New Jersey & Virginia Recap: Republicans swept Virginia’s statewide races on Tuesday, while the contest for governor New Jersey, unexpectedly, remained uncalled the following morning. It also remains to be seen whether the GOP will have a narrow majority in the Virginia House of Delegates, or if there are enough uncounted votes to force a 50-50 tie that would require a power-sharing agreement.
With 2.36 million votes counted in New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli held a 49.65-49.6 edge over Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy―a margin of 1,193 votes. NJ.com writes that “thousands of votes — especially from Democratic-leaning areas — have yet to be counted,” and that “it remains unclear how many vote-by-mail or provisional ballots still must be tallied.” Neither Murphy, who went into Election Day as the heavy favorite, or Ciattarelli have declared victory or conceded.
Over in Virginia, private equity executive Glenn Youngkin thwarted former Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s bid to return to the governor’s mansion on Tuesday in a close 51-49 race, becoming the first Republican to win statewide in the Old Dominion since 2009. Republicans also won the races for attorney general and lieutenant governor, both of which were held by Democrats, 50.5-49.5 and 50.7-49.3, respectively.
Where things remain up in the air is the battle to control the state House, where Democrats were defending a 55-45 majority. Republicans led in 51 of the 100 seats on Wednesday morning, which would be enough to put them back in the speaker’s chair, but the AP had yet to call 10 races: four where Democratic candidates led (HDs 10, 21, 85, and 93), and six where Republicans were ahead (HDs 27, 28, 63, 66, 83, and 91).
The tightest two contests were HD-85, where Democratic incumbent Alex Askew held a 50.15-49.95 edge over Republican Karen Greenhalgh (a margin of 94 votes), and HD-91, where Republican A.C. Cordoza was edging out Democratic Del. Martha Mugler 50-49 (272 votes.)
Youngkin, a first-time candidate estimated to be worth $440 million, put at least $20 million of his own money into his own campaign, though both sides were well-financed. In a barrage of ads, McAuliffe sought to tie Youngkin to Donald Trump and attacked him for his opposition to abortion rights and vaccine mandates. Youngkin, by contrast, carefully stoked the moral panic over critical race theory by inflaming white fears about what kids are being taught in school while simultaneously presenting himself as a economy-focused moderate to suburban voters.
The results further down the ballot closely mirrored those at the top of the ticket: Former Del. Winsome Sears beat Del. Hala Ayala to become Virginia’s next lieutenant governor (and the first woman of color to hold the post), while Del. Jason Miyares ousted Attorney General Mark Herring, who was seeking his third term in office—both in tight races.
The only solace for Democrats is that the state Senate was not up for election, meaning they’ll retain a check on Republicans, though they hold the chamber by a slim 21-19 margin. We’ll bring you a full recap of all of Tuesday’s action in the next Digest.
Redistricting
●AL Redistricting: Alabama’s Republican-run state House passed the GOP’s new congressional redistricting plan on Monday, with all Democrats and a few Republicans voting against, as well as a redrawn map for the chamber’s own districts. The state Senate, which Republicans also control, likewise passed a new map for itself and will now take up the congressional proposal.
●AR Redistricting: A group called Arkansans for a Unified Natural State says it plans to gather signatures for a veto referendum to overturn the state’s new Republican-drawn congressional map, an undertaking that would also have the effect of suspending the map if the referendum qualifies for next year’s ballot. Organizers would need to collect 53,491 signatures from registered voters in at least 15 counties by Jan. 13. The group previously announced plans to qualify veto referendums for three other laws the legislature passed earlier this year but abandoned those efforts after failing to obtain enough signatures.
●DE Redistricting: Both chambers in Delaware’s Democratic-run state legislature have passed new legislative maps, sending them to Democratic Gov. John Carney.
●MA Redistricting: Lawmakers in Massachusetts’ Democratic-run legislature have released a draft congressional map that doesn’t deviate much from the current lines. The state currently sends nine Democrats and zero Republicans to Congress, and that would be unlikely to change under this new proposal.
Senate
●PA-Sen: In a custody hearing Monday, Laurie Snell testified under oath that her estranged husband, Republican Senate candidate Sean Parnell, had choked her and hit their children. Parnell responded in a statement, “Let me emphatically state: I have never raised a hand in anger towards my wife or any of our three children.” He also called the allegations “complete fabrications; not distortions or misrepresentations — just flat-out lies.”
The Philadelphia Inquirerfirst reported in September that Snell had received two temporary protection-from-abuse orders against Parnell in 2017 and 2018, both of which were later expunged, but it was unclear on what grounds she’d sought those orders. This week, though, Snell said that Parnell had abused her since before they were married in 2010. The paper writes that Snell “testified that after a Thanksgiving trip in 2008, [Parnell] briefly forced her out of their vehicle alongside a highway after raging at her, telling her to ‘go get an abortion.'”
Snell said in court that Parnell’s behavior grew worse in 2018, which she described as the year he “started hitting the kids.” In one incident, she charged, Parnell hit one of the couple’s children so hard that it left welts on the child’s back. Snell also accused Parnell of attacking her, alleging that he once “tried to choke me out on a couch and I literally had to bite him” to escape.
●UT-Sen: Dan Jones & Associates, polling on behalf of the Deseret News and University of Utah, shows Sen. Mike Lee taking 53% in next year’s Republican primary, with former state Rep. Becky Edwards a distant second with 7%.
Governors
●RI-Gov: Campaign finance reports are out for the third quarter of 2021, and we’ve collected the numbers for the Democratic contenders below:
Former Secretary of State Matt Brown: $77,000 raised, $60,000 cash-on-hand
Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea: $153,000 raised, $749,000 cash-on-hand
State Treasurer Seth Magaziner: $253,000 raised, $1.58 million cash-on-hand
Gov. Dan McKee: $154,000 raised, $800,001 cash-on-hand
Physician Luis Daniel Muñoz: $5,000 raised, $6,000 cash-on-hand
Another Democrat, former CVS executive Helena Foulkes, entered the race in October after the start of the new quarter.
House
●CA-37: State Sen. Sydney Kamlager told the Los Angeles Times she was interested in running to succeed Rep. Karen Bass, a fellow Democrat who is leaving Congress to campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, but it remains to be seen if she’d have an open seat to run for. Last week, the state’s independent redistricting commission released a draft set of maps that would essentially eliminate Bass’ district by giving Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters much of her constituency.
●IA-01: Democrat Rita Hart said this week that she would not run for the new 1st District, which contains most of the current 2nd District she unsuccessfully sought last year. She instead endorsed state Rep. Christina Bohannan’s campaign against freshman Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, the Republican who beat Hart by six votes.
●TX-15: Attorney Roberto Haddad, who works as a lobbyist for DHR Health, has filed FEC paperwork for a potential Democratic primary campaign for this open seat.
Obituaries
● Former Kansas Rep. Dennis Moore, who was elected in 1998 and spent most of his 12 years in office as the delegation’s only Democratic member, died Tuesday at the age of 75. Moore first won office in 1976 by winning the district attorney’s post in Johnson County in the Kansas City suburbs. He sought a promotion in 1986 when he ran to unseat Republican Attorney General Bob Stephan, but he lost 53-47. The Democrat left the D.A. post two years later and became a defense attorney in some prominent local cases.
Moore reemerged on the political scene in 1998 when national Democrats successfully recruited him to challenge freshman Rep. Vince Snowbarger, a Republican who had just won the 3rd Congressional District in a close race. Democrats hadn’t represented this constituency in 37 years, but Team Blue bet that the incumbent’s anti-abortion stances and alignment with Speaker Newt Gingrich would be a liability against the moderate Moore in a suburban electorate used to electing pro-choice Republicans.
Snowbarger, meanwhile, focused on his support for low taxes and predicted that voters wouldn’t dump him at a time when “you have a strong economy.” This was one of the most closely-watched House races in the country, and Moore brought in plenty of cash against Snowbarger, who CNN wrote “hates to raise money.” The congressman’s attempts to paint the Democrat as too liberal for the district weren’t enough, and Moore ended up prevailing 52-48 at a time when Democrats were defying the usual midterm trends and netting House seats nationwide.
A few Republicans planned to take on Moore the following cycle, but he announced in 2009 that he would retire. Democrats ended up fielding his wife, nurse Stephene Moore, against state Rep. Kevin Yoder, a Republican who formed an exploratory committee hours after the incumbent retired; the GOP wave ultimately propelled Yoder to a 58-39 victory. Dennis Moore revealed two years after leaving Congress that he had Alzheimer’s, and he spent his final years advocating for others with the disease.
With a likely legal challenges yet to come, the final makeup of the Virginia House could yet change. But if the current situation holds, Democrats and Republicans will be at parity—with no one empowered to break ties.
So … what now?
Glad you asked!
This situation is not entirely without precedent, so while there are few hard and fast rules governing the situation, we have a pretty good idea of what will happen when the Virginia House of Delegates is evenly split between the parties.
After the 1997 elections and a few specials (the result of Republican Gov.-elect Jim Gilmore appointing Democrats to positions in his administration), Republicans held 49 seats to Democrats’ 50, with one independent member caucusing with Republicans. The State Board of Elections, despite having a 2-1 Republican majority, resisted pressure from the governor and GOP lawmakers to expedite the certification of the results of the three special elections that boosted the Republican caucus to 50, so on the first day of the legislative session in 1998, Democrats still had a majority in the chamber. That majority’s last gasp was to elect Democratic speaker, allowing the party to control committee assignments and the chamber’s agenda—despite the even split.
Republicans cried foul and engaged in some theatrics (turning their backs on the speaker’s dais, pounding their desks and shouting “shame,” that sort of thing), but there was nothing they could do. The very next day, the special election results were certified, and the Republican caucus ranks swelled to 50. Democrats and Republicans negotiated a power-sharing agreement, under which 19 House standing committees had Democratic and Republican co-chairs and equal party representation. However, if the co-chairs of any standing committee could not agree on how to conduct committee business, a special rule kicked in: one party’s chair would preside the first year of the biennium, and the other party’s the second. (That agreement was later obviated when Republicans won outright control of the House the following year.)
This history indicates that one of the following scenarios will come to pass:
Democrats try every tactic and trick in the book to delay seating one of the new Republican members until they can elect a Dems as speaker. Republicans will howl in righteous outrage, and both parties will enter a power-sharing agreement similar to the 1998 template.
Democrats and Republicans somehow agree to elect a compromise House speaker, whose power will likely be constrained by specific rules, and they’ll then enter into a power-sharing agreement.
ANARCHY
Okay, scenario 3 isn’t really in the cards, but the point remains that there’s no way to know with any certainty how this situation is going to shake out.
Watching Democrats lose majority control of the Virginia House just two years after winning it is disappointing, but it’s worth noting that some of these contests came down to just a couple hundred votes—underscoring the importance of turning out every possible vote in any election year, no matter what.
Like so many cinematic labors of love, Robert Weide’s Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time took forever to make. Nearly 40 years to be exact. (So it goes.) Thankfully, the lights will dim and the projector will roll this month, and I for one can’t wait. A preview:
More about the movie, and the friendship that developed between Weide and Vonnegut here. Opens November 19th. And now, our feature presentation…
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, November 3, 2021
Note: A quick reminder that I don’t know what I’m doing with all this new technology. If whatever device you’re reading this on blows up while you’re reading it, call Obamacare and put it on my tab.
Factor by which voters polled by NBC News believe Democrats are better on the issue of preventing catastrophic climate change than The Cult: 3:1
Percent of U.S. adults, as of Monday, who now have at least one shot from President Biden’s vaccination campaign: 80%
Number of adults who are fully vaccinated, up from 2 million when Joe took office: 190 million
Number of drivers or passengers not wielding a weapon, and who weren’t under pursuit for a violent crime, who were killed by police officers over the last 5 years: 400
Letters in “nurdle,” the name of the blob of toothpaste that sits on your brush:6
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Mid-weekRapture Index: 186 (including 4 shenanigans in “Persia” and 1…um…Pimp Francis?). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
CHEERS and JEERS to a mixed bag of results. Time to pick over the post-election carcass and see how things shook out hither and yon. 2021 had its share of hits and misses, so let’s start with the wins:
Maine In a closely-watched citizens referendum, Mainers voted against clear-cutting a path through the North Woods to install an electric transmission line from Canada to Massachusetts. And I didn’t check the exact number, but I believe we also passed a bond for $3.5 trillion to give ourselves all the shit that we ain’t ever gettin’ from Build Back Better.
New Jersey An unexpected nail-biter, but Phil Murphy is on track to be the first Democratic governor reelected in over 4 decades, giving him another four years as governor to continue de-Christie’fying the state.
KansasTossing this in from our own Chris Reeves via Twitter: “Democratic local candidates overperformed my expectation, with pro-mask, pro-vaccine candidates winning by big margins.”
Boston Michelle Wu becomes the first elected woman mayor in the city’s history, and Asian-American to boot.
New York CityFormer cop and Brooklyn borough presidentEric Adams becomes only the second Black mayor of the Big Apple. And Alvin Bragg will be Manhattan’s first Black district attorney (succeeding Cy Vance, Jr.), and he’ll inherit a case against former president The Thing.
Oh, I almost forgot: In my city council district the liberal defeated the other liberal and the other other liberal. It’s good to have choices.
JEERS to the results we did not want but still have to live with. For all the elections that didn’t swing your/our way—like Terry McAuliffe losing to a Trump clone, which disappoints me because even The Cult said McAuliffe had stolen the election days ago—follow the same drill as last year. Step 1: Spend the day with one of these…
Step 2: See Step 1. I hear it’s clinically proven.
CHEERS to a pleasant evening at the ballpark. My choice was scientific—I was rooting for the state with two Democratic senators over the state with two Republican senators. There’s nothing in the Book of Life that says I gotta be rational about it or even know anything about—[checks notes]—baseball. And as it turns out, my logic was flawless and airtight because ATLANTA WINS THE WORLD SERIES!!! ATLANTA WINS THE WORLD SERIES!!! ATLANTA WINS THE WORLD SERIES!!! Four games to two. Which, coincidentally, is what the margin of victory will be for Boston next year over Atlanta. Ain’t life freaky sometimes.
CHEERS to cleaning up the gas. President Biden stopped short of forcing the underwear industry to install fart filters—for now. But it may be necessary if his latest move to rein in the fossil fuel industry’s gaseous emissions isn’t enough to prevent us from cooking to death here on Planet EZ-Bake. Yesterday he grabbed a hot mic at the climate summit in Scotland and said dammit, methane, your days are numbered…eventually:
The new rules, proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, aim to curb methane emissions for new and existing oil and gas infrastructure, thereby reducing a significant source of pollution from fossil fuel companies. The regulations target methane leaks and instances when methane gas is purposefully vented, or flared, during the production process. […]
An estimated 75 percent of the country’s methane emissions will be covered by the new EPA rules, according to senior administration officials. … The EPA rules will be stricter than regulations on methane emissions that were set in 2016 during the Obama administration. Those rules were relaxed by former President Donald Trump, but methane standards were reinstated shortly after Biden took office.
[M]ethane has 86 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
When informed that he had no power to throw a wrench into Biden’s executive action, Senator Joe Manchin quickly retreated to his luxury sea palace…er, “houseboat.” He hates to be seen sobbing in public.
CHEERS to a very bad day for the GOP. Eighty-five years ago today, on November 3rd, 1936, FDR was re-elected in a landslide over Alf Landon by—get this—523 electoral votes to 8.
What a headline to wake up to.
On this date twenty-eight years later, the papers trumpeted Lyndon Johnson’s victory over Barry Goldwater 486-52. Twenty-eight years after that Bill Clinton dispatched George H.W. Bush by a less-substantial but still impressive 370-168 margin. Sixteen years after that, Barack Obama disposed of John McCain 365-173. And 12 years after that, Joe Biden cleaned The Thing’s clock by an embarrassing 306-232. Grand total: 2,060 to 535. Takeaway message: revenge is a dish best served lopsided.
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Ten years ago in C&J: November 3, 2011
CHEERS to dispatches from the divine mailbag. Sent via Clarence the Angel:
Dear Speaker of the House John Boehner,
I saw that you voted to reaffirm the state motto of the United States—”In God We Trust”—this week. This is good.
But then I read that it was a ”non-binding” resolution. Really? My all-encompassing power and indisputable wisdom aren’t worth a binding resolution? Non-binding means “does not stick.” That’s great for frying pans, but a real cop-out when it comes to acknowledging my omnipotence.
Best regards,
God
P.S. You’ve been sucking wind lately fighting the War on Christmas. Step it up, Corporal.
But at least he hasn’t been wasting his time on things like jobs. That’d be silly.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to blowing this popsicle stand. Whenever the shit gets too deep here on the bluish-brown marble, I head over to NASA’s site to see if our new Space Force is conquering every ball of gas and rock in the known galaxy. Sorry to say the answer is no, so we’ll just have to spend our days and nights gazing yonward and dreaming. This month’s major celestial events are a partial lunar eclipse, and the return of the winter star clusters to keep us company for the next few months. Here’s NASA’s Preston Dyches with a preview of what you’ll be seeing in November:
