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Welcome back to the weekly Nuts & Bolts Guide to small campaigns! Midterm elections are stressful. Democratic Party candidates and infrastructure feel the stress of holding on to majorities in the U.S. Senate and House in order to keep Joe Biden’s agenda moving forward and especially to make sure that President Biden’s court and administration nominations are successfully approved. While the pressure may be on for campaigns, there are some basic guidelines that are true for campaigns in every cycle: Do not campaign on religious high holidays, as you will turn off more potential voters while burning out your volunteers.

With Easter occurring this weekend and Passover spanning from April 15 to April 23, campaigns get to sit back and look at how they utilize their resources. Significant Jewish, Islamic, and Christian holidays deserve respect and an acknowledgement that many will not want to be bothered during this time period. Your campaign has numerous functions you can undertake without putting pressure on volunteers to take time away from important events in their family, and without annoying voters.

You earn respect by giving respect

In order to get voters to decide you are worthy of their vote, they have to decide if you are someone they respect enough to believe that you will make good decisions when elected. If you are actively campaigning during holidays, it leads to some people questioning your ability to show respect for their traditions and beliefs. Many holidays are opportunities for campaigns to walk in a parade or make an appearance. The fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Labor Day as good examples. Actively campaigning, or asking for volunteers during religious holidays? Prepare for the pushback to be real.

This doesn’t just mean no door-knocking.

The respect provided to religious events or social events isn’t just limited to going up and knocking on someone’s door. While many think that is the most invasive way of interrupting family events that can occur around the holidays, phone calls and texts from a campaign are just not helpful. People are hoping to spend their time with their families and friends.

Phone calls, texts, and, in my opinion, emails can come across as unwanted interruptions or disrespect to important, well-known dates. People are okay with receiving information on their birthdays, anniversaries, or other internal family events because they know that information isn’t something that a campaign can plan their strategy around. Major holidays? That’s a no.

Acknowledge the importance of the holidays

You do not have to be a practitioner of any particular faith to make it known that you respect the followers of that religion in your district. When you acknowledge the social importance of these events, it shows that you understand your district and that you show respect to the voters and their beliefs. For Democratic campaigns it is especially important, because the Republican rhetoric is to paint Democratic candidates as the representatives of a political party that disrespects their beliefs. Last week and this week, I wanted to cover how we better integrate our party with one that can overcome these kind of attacks:

Take time off. Show respect for your district and be careful with how you operate on high religious holidays. Your campaign may not be 100% shut down, and there may be commitments to fulfill and work you can do. Your campaign can still accomplish a lot of important work during these time periods without causing negatives within your district.

The news never stops

While your campaign may not be out knocking doors or making phone calls, it does not mean that your candidate stops discussing issues or responding to important social events as they happen. That may include events in Ukraine, any major happening inside of your own district that requires a response, or any matter that is a news-related response. Your campaign communication team does not go dormant at any point. You can never be assured that nothing negative will happen, and that could mean anything from a mass shooting to the passing of a beloved community member. 

Understand what respect looks like to your district and your voters. If you keep that in mind, you have the opportunity to build a strong relationship with your volunteers, interns, and voters.

This post was originally published on this site

This week on The Downballot, we nerd out with Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight, whose path from hobbyist to full-time election analyst closely mirrors the Daily Kos Elections story. Rakich discusses how gerrymandering might have made for a more equal congressional playing field but not necessarily a fair one; what kind of redistricting commissions have actually worked best; and some of the key bellwether districts he’ll be looking at to judge what sort of night Democrats can expect in November.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also dig into a hard-to-explain decision by a major Democratic super PAC to take sides in an Oregon House primary; what the 2022 version of a well-established prediction model says about the midterms; New York’s truly screwed-up system for electing and replacing lieutenant governors; and the results of the first round of France’s presidential election.

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

David Beard:

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

David Nir:

And I’m David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency from Senate to city council. If you are listening to The Downballot on the Daily Kos website, we would be grateful if you would subscribe as well—that way you’ll get new episodes of our show on your mobile device whenever they drop each Thursday morning. We would be especially appreciative if you would subscribe on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else that you listen to podcasts.

David Beard:

So let’s dive into today’s episode. What are we going to be covering this week?

David Nir:

So first up, we’re going to be talking about a very unusual involvement by a major Democratic group in a Democratic primary out in Oregon. We’re also going to be discussing a model of this year’s elections that has often been very successful in predicting elections in previous cycles. There’s also the fallout from the resignation of New York’s lieutenant governor following an arrest on corruption charges.

David Nir:

And finally, we’re going to recap the first round of the French presidential election. This week, we have as our guest, Nathaniel Rakich, who is a senior elections analyst at the website FiveThirtyEight. We’re going to be talking about redistricting and several other topics with Nathaniel. So stay tuned.

David Beard:

Great, that’s a lot to cover. So let’s start.

David Beard:

So Nir, I think you’re going to kick us off this week for the weekly hits with a pretty controversial story about some advertising out in Oregon. What’s going on there?

David Nir:

Last week, we interviewed Ali Lapp, who’s the founder of the House Majority PAC (HMP), which is the largest group that spends on House races on the Democratic side. And several days later, HMP took action in a race out in Oregon, like you were saying, in the 6th Congressional District that really has everyone scratching their heads and has also left a lot of people extremely angry.

David Nir:

So this is a brand-new district that the state won thanks to population growth in reapportionment; it’s in the Portland suburbs. Joe Biden would’ve carried it by about a 55-42 margin. So it’s a blue-leaning district, not a safe blue district. There are a number of Democrats—seven of them in total–who are seeking the nomination for this new seat in Oregon 6.

David Nir:

One of them is economic development adviser Carrick Flynn, who hasn’t run for office before. And HMP this week started spending at least $1 million on ads boosting [Flynn’s] campaign. And this came as a total shock for a whole lot of reasons. One of which is the fact that HMP has never gotten involved in a partisan primary in this way before. So why is it picking sides? Another huge factor that’s really generated a lot of anger here is that many of the other candidates running are women. Several are women of color.

David Nir:

The candidate who’s probably the leading candidate, state Rep. Andrea Salinas, who has received endorsements from the governor. And most of the major progressive groups and unions are women of color. She’s a Latina. She would be the first Hispanic person to represent the state in Congress. Carrick Flynn is a white man, and no one really understands what on Earth HMP is doing.

David Nir:

They put out a statement that really just was impossible to believe. They said that they’re “Dedicated to doing whatever it takes to secure a Democratic House majority in 2022. And we believe supporting Carrick Flynn is a step toward accomplishing that goal.” That really doesn’t pass the smell test because there’s nothing so special about Flynn that he simply has to be the Democratic nominee in order for Democrats to win this seat.

David Nir:

And like I said earlier, HMP has never gotten involved in a primary in this way. They spend almost all of their money on general elections, running negative ads to beat Republicans. They have helped in a couple of open seat races in California. They have helped a couple of Democrats, but in those cases, the party was worried about getting locked out of the general election because of California’s special top two primary rules. That simply doesn’t apply here.

David Nir:

Whoever wins the Democratic primary will be the Democratic nominee in November. No one really understands what HMP is doing. But there is a lot of speculation and none of it is really helping HMP. Carrick Flynn prior to this had received almost 6 million in outside support from a super PAC called Protect Our Future that’s run by a 30-year-old billionaire named Sam Bankman-Fried who made his fortune creating a cryptocurrency exchange, and has this year started spending heavily on a number of Democratic races apparently to influence policy in D.C.

David Nir:

He’s supposedly worth $24 billion according to Forbes. There have been a number of arguments made about why Bankman-Fried has been helping Carrick Flynn. Supposedly it’s because the two of them care a great deal about pandemic preparedness. It’s really hard to understand why that alone would be enough of a reason for a billionaire to spend $6 million on an untested candidate who at best will be a very junior member of a caucus that’s likely to be in the minority next year.

David Nir:

But what a number of folks have hinted at, including the campaign manager for one of the other candidates, [and] including Andrea Salinas herself, is people are wondering whether Sam Bankman-Fried offered to give a huge donation to House Majority PAC, which can accept unlimited donations in exchange for HMP deciding to boost Carrick Flynn. Even that feels very strange because Bankman-Fried can obviously dump as much money as he wants into his own super PAC. So why would he need to sort of get involved with HMP here, unless he’s really looking to exert even broader influence over a major arm of the Democratic Party?

David Nir:

Again, this is all speculation. But the problem is we aren’t getting any clear answers. I read HMP’s statement earlier. It really doesn’t make any sense. But what’s more, the super PAC doesn’t have to report its financial transactions for the month of April until May 20. And that’s three days after the Oregon primary. So we’re probably not going to get a straight answer on this any time soon, perhaps not until it matters.

David Nir:

HMP could of course provide records of its donations right now, if it wanted to, of course. That’s not going to happen, but like I said, Democrats, both in the district and in D.C., are pretty furious about this. Senator Jeff Merkley called HMP’s actions, “Flat out wrong.” The congressional Hispanic caucus, which is backing Andrea Salinas, is really hopping mad about this. And they have donated $6 million to HMP in the decades since it was first formed.

David Nir:

So really House Majority PAC is potentially burning relationships with a number of partners. And there’s also still a really good chance that Carrick Flynn, despite all this money, is going to lose this primary. And really what is HMP going to say if they have to support a different nominee in November in our district that Democrats really do need to win to have any shot at holding on to the House?

David Beard:

Yeah. And I think the biggest thing to me from all of this is the reputational risk that HMP has taken on by doing this because obviously these things can always be mended and we’ve seen sort of people get mad at each other and that get fixed before. But independent expenditure PACs like HMP is, it’s very much the wild west. HMP has built itself on its reputation as the super PAC that fights for Democrats in general elections where everyone can go where they can direct traffic, where they can coordinate with everyone because their focus is on electing Democrats for the general election and their influence in primaries have been these very rare exceptions, like you mentioned the top two issue in California that was directly related to needing to get a Democrat into the top two so they could get them elected in the general election.

David Beard:

And to then sort of toss that aside to a degree, to invest in this race and choose the not-establishment candidate, when it’s despite being a super PAC—very much of the establishment, super PAC to pick Carrick Flynn to spend this money on behalf of him when all of the other establishment is on this other side is just seemingly reckless. Obviously, we don’t know all the situation that’s going on here and we maybe never will, but it seems like a very strange decision all around.

David Beard:

So with that, I’m going to take us to another topic where political scientist Alan Abramowitz has released a model of this year’s midterm over at our friends at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. He released a new article. This is something that he’s done in past cycles as well, and it’s always an interesting thing to look at and see how it matches sort of growing expectations for how the cycle is going to turn out.

David Beard:

So this model uses the generic congressional ballot as sort of its baseline, which is historically, as the article says, more accurate for midterm elections and presidential approval. And it also factors in the size of the congressional majorities and which Senate seats are up for that cycle. Because obviously that’s a big influence in how Senate elections go is which seats are up in each cycle. So congressional generic ballot polling is when a pollster asks their respondents, “If you were to vote for a Democrat or Republican for Congress this year, who would you vote for?”

David Beard:

It doesn’t include any names. So obviously, sometimes someone might say, “Oh, I would vote for the Democrat.” But when they actually go and vote, they know their Republican congressman. He’s an incumbent. They like him for whatever reason. So they might vote for him. But on average it usually averages out pretty well. If you take the generic ballot of, “Would you vote for a Democrat for Congress or would you vote for a Republican for Congress?” And translates usually particularly for the House result—translates pretty well into the result.

David Beard:

Based on the current generic ballot polling, Republicans are leading by about two points right now. And when you factor that into the model that Abramowitz developed, it’s actually for me surprisingly good. I would’ve expected worse news than it put out. It predicts a 19-seat loss in the House. So that would take from a plus five Democratic majority currently to a plus 14 Republican majority, which is not good. Obviously we don’t want that, but it’s relatively narrow and something you can look towards 2024 to winning back.

David Beard:

And in the Senate, it’s even better due to sort of the makeup of the Senate elections that are up in 2022. It would predict no change in the Senate for an R plus two generic congressional ballot. So for me, I think no change in the Senate would be great news given the cycle that we’re facing.

David Beard:

Now a big caveat here is that generic ballot polling can change, and it often does from, say, April of 2022 to November of 2022 when the election actually takes place. It can very often move against the party in power. We’ve definitely seen that happen before over the course of the election. So we can’t sit here and be like, “Oh, great. It’s R plus two. So maybe it’ll even be better.” And maybe it will be. That’s not impossible. But we also have to prepare for the idea that maybe it’s R plus four. Maybe it’s R plus six.

David Beard:

But even in those scenarios, the model is not that bad, largely due to the fact that the majority is already so narrow in the House. And because of the Senate seats that are up there, only a few really great targets for Republicans to try to pick up in the Senate. And there are some surprisingly good targets for Democrats to go after, states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

David Beard:

That’s some surprisingly good news in my view. Obviously, and we don’t want to lose the House, but if the model ends up being correct and the generic ballot, say, it’s not that bad, I would take what they’re giving out at R plus two right now in a heartbeat.

David Nir:

So shifting gears once more, let’s talk about what just went down in New York this week. Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin, a Democrat, just resigned his post. He was arrested on charges of corruption that he had supposedly steered state money while he was state senator to a real estate investor in exchange for political contributions. And those contributions also appear to have been straw donations, which themselves are illegal.

David Nir:

It’s a total mess. Brian Benjamin does not have a happy future. But what I want to talk about is Kathy Hochul’s future and New York state’s future. Kathy Hochul is the governor who originally picked Benjamin. So of course she was elevated to the top job when Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace and she had the opportunity to tap her own replacement. And so she picked Benjamin who had earlier last year badly lost a race for city comptroller in New York City.

David Nir:

The difficulty here is that New York’s primary is a couple of months away, but the filing deadline has already passed. New York uses a totally bizarre and completely stupid system for electing lieutenant governors. People have referred to it as a “shotgun marriage.” What happens is that candidates for governor and candidates for lieutenant governor run in separate primaries, but the winners of each primary get stuck together on the same ticket in November.

David Nir:

What happens is that you have candidates who try to run as informal tickets before the primary, but you could still get stuck with someone. You could win the nomination for governor and get stuck with someone who you don’t like, or you’re totally at odds with. This has happened in New York. It happens a lot in Pennsylvania, which is one of only a half a dozen other states that uses this system.

David Nir:

Now there are a couple of other candidates running for lieutenant governor, but they are linked to the two other candidates who are challenging Hochul for the gubernatorial nomination. And Hochul is almost certainly likely to win renomination. The polls show her far ahead. But she could wind up getting saddled with someone who really doesn’t like her very much.

David Nir:

In fact, one of the other candidates for LG, Ana Maria Archila, said that, “The governor announced she would bring a new day and I’m not sure that’s the case.” This is someone who could wind up on the same ticket as Kathy Hochul. So that system totally needs to be changed. In fact, Alaska was one of the states that used to do this, but they just changed their whole system. So New York ought to follow suit. But there’s another bigger issue for the state as a whole, which is the way that New York handles the succession when there is a vacancy in the lieutenant governorship.

David Nir:

Under the state constitution, there’s actually no provision dealing with vacancies in the LG slot. And what happened was that over a decade ago, when David Patterson was governor, he became governor after Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace. The LG slot was open. And so he just said, “You know what, I’m going to cite this other provision of state law that’s sort of a catchall for vacancies and I’m going to unilaterally name my own LG to fill my own vacancy in that position.”

David Nir:

He named Richard Ravitch to that spot and it was challenged in court. And rather surprisingly, the state’s highest court upheld that decision on a very narrow four-three ruling. So if the state’s top court hadn’t issued this decision or had gone the other way, then New York would have a permanent vacancy every time the LG slot became open. And what’s even more absurd is that like I said, under this provision of state law that Patterson used and that Hochul used when she tapped Benjamin, the state legislature doesn’t get a confirmation vote.

David Nir:

It’s a totally unilateral decision by the governor. So let’s say that Hochul were to leave office early, or, had Patterson left office early, which he very well could have. He was mired in scandal himself. Then an LG who was picked unilaterally without any vote by the public, without any confirmation vote by the legislature could then pick their own LG who would be elevated to the post in the same way. You could have the top two officials in New York state chosen by one person, both of them.

David Nir:

The only way to fix this is with an amendment to the state constitution. It’s one of those things that absolutely should be fixed and that state lawmakers probably just don’t care enough about because they’re the ones who would have to put a new amendment on the ballot, but it’s really bad for democracy to put yourself in a situation where the governor of New York could literally be handpicked and neither elected nor confirmed by anyone in the state.

David Beard:

Yeah. It’s one of those quirks of the law that I think clearly wasn’t thought out when it was originally enacted. And now that’s the situation. And as you said, the constitutional amendment is really the only way to get it fixed in New York. So I’m going to wrap us up with weekly hits with another trip across the Atlantic, over to France, where, as we talked about a little bit last week, the first round of their presidential election occurred this past Sunday, April 10.

David Beard:

So the top two candidates from the first round will advance to the runoff, which takes place two weeks later. So it’s going to be taking on April 24. So very soon, they do not have a long period here where they campaign and runoff. It’s pretty much as soon as you could get the next round ready, they go ahead and do it. So incumbent president centrist Emmanuel Macron took first place with 28% of the vote, and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen took second place with 23% of the vote.

David Beard:

And that was pretty much expected. The real surprise of the first round was left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon took a surprisingly close third place with 22% of the vote. And when you really break it down and see sort of all the candidates who got a few percent here or there, it’s really possible that Mélenchon could have advanced over particularly Le Pen depending on how the different candidacies would’ve worked out.

David Beard:

There were a number of left-wing candidates that took anywhere from 2 to 4% who were really never viable when most of the left of France ended up trending towards Mélenchon. So as a result, there were a number of left-wing votes that ended up essentially not getting counted when the third-place candidate could have used those votes, obviously to advance into the top two runoff.

David Beard:

Now, of course there was also another far-right candidate that took 7% away from potentially Le Pen. So you can’t exactly one-to-one this, but it does show that I think for a long time it was basically taking for granted that Macron and Le Pen would advance to the second round as they did five years ago. And what we’ve seen is as with these sort of situations where there’s a top two, voters can vote tactically, and we saw a lot of voters move towards these three candidates, but in Mélenchon’s case, not quite enough to make it into the top two runoff.

David Beard:

So we’re left with a Macron versus Le Pen battle, which is really the center versus the far-right. A number of other candidates have already endorsed Macron, or as Mélenchon did, he didn’t endorse Macron, but he said, “Don’t vote for Le Pen, whatever you do.” So basically saying you could vote for Macron or you could stay home, but don’t vote for Le Pen, which is not an endorsement, but is I guess better than nothing, or obviously better than endorsing Le Pen.

David Beard:

One of the big issues here is that Macron proposed raising the retirement age a few weeks ago from 62, what it currently is in France, to 65 over the next 10 years. And that is obviously something—particularly in the current stage where there’s a cost of living crisis—that a lot of voters we’re not happy with. And you see this a lot in continental Europe where the centrists are the ones who are sort of most economically conservative the way we think about it in America, whereas both Le Pen and Mélenchon opposed raising the retirement age. And the far-right in Europe—there are many, many very bad things about the far-right, but they’re usually not into taking away money from old people in Europe or doing things like raising their retirement age.

David Beard:

So there is some risk that you could see some disaffected left-wing voters who voted from Mélenchon going to Le Pen in the runoff. And that’s why we’ve seen the polls really narrow. Macron currently has sort of a mid-single-digits lead somewhere between sort of 3 to 8%, which I think there’s a good chance he wins. I think he’s definitely still the favorite. But we’re definitely in a scenario where you can’t totally rule out Le Pen winning. And that’s a very scary thing, because she is very much in the far-right despite her attempts to [be] moderate.

David Beard:

She has very extreme views. She’s been friendly with Putin. She’s been very anti-European Union. There’s all sorts of concerns with her. And so it’s very important that Macron wins and you don’t let a far-right candidate lead one of the most important countries in Europe. But we’ll see how it goes. Again, that election is in a little under two weeks from now and we’ll definitely be covering the results as they come in when that happens.

David Nir:

Five years ago when Macron and Le Pen faced off for the first time, Macron wound up winning that in a massive two-to-one landslide. So the fact that he’s only pulling in the single digits in terms of his lead—that feels scary in and of itself, even if he wins.

David Beard:

Yeah. It’s definitely a big shift. He had a bigger lead earlier. I think this retirement age issue is a big deal. We’ve seen it in the past. We’ve seen it here in America when Republicans have from proposed cutting Medicare, cutting Social Security; we saw it in 2017 in the U.K. when Theresa May proposed some taxes that would hit older homeowners [with] raising costs, either by raising their retirement age or raising taxes or cutting benefits on older voters before an election is a really, really terrible idea. They will punish you for it.

David Beard:

So we’ve seen Macron’s poll numbers go down. We’ve seen the race narrow. Hopefully, by all accounts, he will still pull it out. And I think what happened was is that Macron had a big lead a month or two ago and felt like he could propose this, win anyway, and then have sort of a mandate to then roll out this retirement age expansion. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Hopefully he’ll still win because again, you don’t want Le Pen to be president of France, but it’s a risky situation.

David Nir:

Well, that’ll wrap us up for our weekly hits. But please stay with us. We are going to be talking with someone that we have been a great fan of for many years, Nathaniel Rakich, a senior elections analyst for FiveThirtyEight. So please come back and join us after the break.

David Beard:

Joining us this week is Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst for FiveThirtyEight. Welcome, Nathaniel.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Hey, guys. It’s great to be here. Congratulations on launching a podcast.

David Beard:

Thank you. Yeah, I’ve been a long time fan of the FiveThirtyEight podcast. So it’s great to have you on,

Nathaniel Rakich:

Well, I’ve been a long time fan of the Daily Kos Elections newsletter and other offerings. So it’s very appropriate.

David Beard:

Great. Well, before it becomes too much of a love-fest, let’s get started. So tell us a little bit about how you came to your current position. I know you originally started blogging about baseball, so how did you grow from sort of that point a number of years ago to where you are now?

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah. So my kind of origin story is not all that different from you guys. I came on to the blogosphere—I would say maybe the tail end of when the blogosphere was still a thing. Now it’s Substack and all that stuff. So I graduated from college in 2010 and I was always a politics nerd. I was also a sports nerd, but I majored in government and thought that meant I had to work in government itself. So I had several odd jobs including working for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, my home state. I worked on a campaign. I worked for a think tank or two and really was kind of dissatisfied with those jobs.

So in the evenings, I would go home and I would blog. I started this blog, Baseballot, in 2011. And as you can tell from the name, it was a combination baseball and politics blog, baseball plus ballot, and would just kind of write about whatever struck my fancy and I would read other blogs as well. And this was around the time that I discovered you guys at Daily Kos Elections. I’ve been a reader, not since The Swing State Project days, but basically since you guys started having Daily Kos Elections in 2011 and kind of emulated, kind of focused in on local races, the way that you did guys did.

I found that stuff fascinating, much more interesting than the presidential. Started tracking special elections, getting on Twitter and doing following election results live. That was and remains my jam. And from there, my blog started to snowball. It started to accumulate a bit of a readership, including Micah Cohen at FiveThirtyEight at the time. And kind of one thing led to another. I eventually quit my day job and became a full-time freelancer through the Micah connection. I started freelancing for FiveThirtyEight in 2017 and then they hired me full time in 2018.

David Nir:

That is a fantastic path, and is indeed so similar to the one we’ve tried here at Daily Kos Elections. But why don’t we get down into talking about some actual elections that are going to be taking place. You have covered redistricting in depth this cycle as have we, and you have some fantastic tools on FiveThirtyEight that show all of the various maps and the ramifications of those maps and the districts that are going to be used this year.

David Nir:

So what are your broad takeaways at this point in the redistricting cycle now that we’re basically complete? We still have a few maps left, but what are some of the things that maybe we didn’t know going into this redistricting cycle?

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah. So as you mentioned, we’re almost done with redistricting. Only three states have yet to pass new maps, although there are court challenges pending in other states like Kansas and New York. And what I would say, my overall takeaway, even at this point, I think we can … Even no matter how Florida, and New Hampshire, and Missouri go, I think we can say that the overall congressional map is going to be pretty evenly divided between the two parties in a way that it really hasn’t been in recent decades.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the map is fair, right? So we did this calculation over at FiveThirtyEight. We have our metric FiveThirtyEight partisan lean, which basically says whether it’s kind of similar to Cook PVI, which says whether a district leans 5 points toward Republicans relative to the nation or 10 points for Democrats or something like that.

And we estimate that there will be about 220 to 223 districts to the right of the nation as a whole and 212 to 215 districts to the left of the nation as a whole. So that’s pretty evenly split, especially when you consider this enduring Republican bias that’s been in the House lately. So for instance, we also calculated that the median seat of the House for the last several elections has been about 5 or 6 points to the right of the nation, which means in practical terms that in theory, and kind of throwing out candidate quality things, that Democrats need to win the House popular vote by 5 or 6 percentage points in order to take control of the chamber.

Obviously, that’s a strong Republican bias that’s due in no small part due to gerrymandering after the 2010 elections. This year, that bias, it still exists. There’s still slightly more Republican seats probably than Democratic seats, but it’s down to maybe 1 or 2 points depending on kind of how things break, especially in Florida. And so that is definitely historic and it means that the House will be fought on this kind of balanced playing field for the first time in a long time.

But the reason that those districts or that the map is relatively balanced is that Democrats really stepped up their gerrymandering game this year in states like New York, as you guys have covered on the newsletter and on the podcast. And they’ve really kind of matched Republicans’ fire on that front. So if you look at some of the individual maps, you see a lot of really high efficiency gaps, which is this metric that you can use to measure gerrymandering, which is kind of a notoriously difficult thing to pin down.

You know it when you see it, kind of like pornography. Efficiency gap can hint at it. Other things, median seat bias, lots of other things. But a lot of these maps, I think you can point at as being quite gerrymandered. So New York is a good example on the Democratic side. Texas on the Republican side, even though they didn’t necessarily gain a lot of seats from that, it’s a very defensive gerrymander where they had a lot of competitive Republican-held seats that they really locked down for Republicans.

Other states like Ohio, even with its new map, after it was overturned in court is still a pretty gerrymandered map. Georgia, et cetera. So nobody should be looking at the House map and saying, “Oh, that’s super fair.” It’s just kind of the fact that these two parties have been kind of at loggerheads. And I don’t know what the right metaphor is. They’re at a stalemate, stand down, stare off type of thing. Another thing I want to mention too that often I think does not get covered as much in the preoccupation with the horse race and partisan gerrymandering is also the racial gerrymandering that we see.

Things have not necessarily gotten better for people of color and their representation in Congress. So a lot of Southern states—for example, Alabama. There was a court case about whether they could draw a second Black majority seat, which just geographically, cartographically is very possible. But the Supreme Court basically said no. And if that case is still open, but I think the writing is on the wall there. That has implications for other states too, like Louisiana.

A state like Texas is a state that has ballooned in population in recent years. They gain two congressional seats this cycle, the only state to gain more than one. That growth was due almost entirely to people of color, and yet no new predominantly nonwhite districts were created in that redistricting process.

So basically, there is a lot of work to be done on getting kind of fair and representative maps nationwide, even if for the next decade … Or actually, I shouldn’t even say decade, but maybe next year, because there’s a good chance I think of some mid-decade redistricting could change this calculation. But at least in 2022, I think that there’s a good chance that the party that wins the national House popular vote will win the House majority, which is a small victory, but still a lot of work to be done.

David Nir:

I think it’s maybe fair to say we’re in this sort of perverse situation where more gerrymandering on both sides has kind of balanced out on the national map when you look at things holistically. But when you look at things on a district-by-district basis, all we’re really doing is creating a lot of slanted districts on one side or the other for the most part.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah, exactly. So, for instance, we also estimated the number of safely red and safely blue seats that we would end up with. So again, kind of, this is like the median projection for us. So we estimated that there would be 143 safely blue seats, which we define as having a partisan lean of D plus 15 or bluer. And then 170 safely Republican seats, which is R plus 15 or redder. And those are both higher than at any point over the last several decades. As a point of comparison, if you go back to 1996, there were only 89 solidly blue seats and 100 solidly red seats.

David Nir:

And just one clarification, when you talk about compared to the national, and I know that your partisan index is a little bit more complicated than this, but for instance, since Joe Biden won by four points, if you had a seat in the House that Joe Biden would’ve carried by two points, you’re actually saying that even though that’s a Biden plus two seat, it’s actually R plus two, because it’s two points to the right of the nation as a whole?

Nathaniel Rakich:

Exactly. So our partisan lean metric is not super popular on Twitter. I think for that reason, it tends to kind of show Democrats in a bit worse position than when you just use, for example, Biden versus Trump numbers, which I think is more commonly used on election Twitter. But we think that that is a better kind of metric. Not necessarily because we think that this is a 50-50 country. I think the fact that Democrats have won the national popular vote for president, for example, in seven out of last eight elections shows that maybe we’re a point or two Democratic leaning.

Nathaniel Rakich:

I think that’s a valid criticism, but I think we also calculate it this way just for ease of kind of calculating it with the generic ballot for each sample. So in a D plus eight year, you would expect an R plus eight seat to be basically perfectly competitive. In a year right now, so according to our average, the generic congressional ballot shows Republicans with the lead of about two points.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So you can kind of adjust your expectations. Basically the idea is that there isn’t necessarily such a thing as absolute partisanship. These things bounce around and it’s just better to fix it to this hypothetical nationwide 50-50 point.

David Beard:

Yeah. We’ve definitely seen those changes cycle to cycle happen pretty consistently over the years. There’s always an evolution to the next cycle.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah.

David Beard:

So let’s talk more specifically about something that’s really evolved over the past few redistricting cycles, which is the creation of redistricting commissions. They’ve become a bigger and bigger part of things. Michigan, Colorado, and Virginia, all were states that had redistricting commissions for the first time this past year. And they were very much of varying success levels. Pretty widely, I think people thought Michigan went pretty well in terms of what it set out to do, though that wasn’t universal. There were definitely some lawsuits. There were some criticisms over the African American seats in Detroit and that area.

David Beard:

While Virginia, from a process standpoint, sort of the commission basically collapsed and sent everything to the Virginia Supreme Court and had that organization or that group been the ones who actually put in the seats. So from your observations going through this, what worked well in these commissions and what didn’t? What are the keys to making these things function and work?

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah, definitely. I think a huge takeaway from this redistricting cycle has been that not all redistricting commissions are created equal. There have been a lot of different types of reforms proposed and even implemented. And the specific rules about who draws the maps and who are serving on these commissions, whether those commissions have kind of final authority or whether they can be ultimately undermined by the legislature.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Those are really important considerations. So I would say that there are four different types of redistricting commissions: independent commissions, bipartisan commissions, politician commissions, and advisory commissions. Now, these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but just for simplicity’s sake, I’ll leave it at that. I would say that the most successful commissions were the truly independent commissions.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So these are places like Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan. So they drew some of the fairest maps of the cycle by various metrics. So I would say that Michigan’s, for example, was probably the fairest map in the country. It had a literally no efficiency gap, which is very, very hard to do. And they also, processwise, had minimal acrimony.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So these independent commissions are kind of the ones where the members of the commission are really removed from politics to the extent that’s possible. Right? So they’re not chosen by people in the legislature who have partisan interests, for example. So in Arizona you have like a tie-breaking member and stuff like this. So those commissions have been, I would say the most successful.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Arizona, you did see a little bit of acrimony at the end of the process, but they passed the map just fine. And it was a relatively fair map. So I would count that as a win. Certainly compared to some of these other commissions. So when you move on to some of the bipartisan commissions, these are a bit of a more of a mixed bag, I would say. So you had some success stories in states like Idaho and Montana. And so these by of partisan commissions, I should say are places where the politicians have input in who serves on the commissions, but the politicians themselves aren’t serving on the commissions, but they appoint them, for example.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Idaho and Montana have these bipartisan commissions. Those went well. It’s also really easy, I would say to draw a single line in the middle of a state with two congressional districts. So maybe those that wasn’t the most robust test for this kind of commission.

David Nir:

Try telling that to New Hampshire though.

Nathaniel Rakich:

That’s fair, actually. New Hampshire being one of the only states that is not done.

David Beard:

They had a line that they used for like a hundred years that they could have just kept going with, but clearly the Republicans didn’t like that.

Nathaniel Rakich:

That was an avoidable stalemate, I would say. So maybe a better example of kind of the touch and go nature of one of these bipartisan commissions is in Washington state. So this is a commission where Democrats and Republicans get together and they have to agree on a map. They went right down to the wire and in fact, the deadline, the midnight deadline passed, and they technically hadn’t agreed on a map yet, or they had agreed on a map, but they hadn’t voted on it.

Nathaniel Rakich:

It was this kind of fiasco where they went dark for a day, basically. And then finally said, “We picked a map. We voted on it.” But it was after the deadline and so technically we didn’t pass a map. Sorry, guys. It actually took the state Supreme Court bailing them out. The Supreme court said, “Yeah, it was close enough, so we’ll just go with the map that they chose.”

Nathaniel Rakich:

So this is an example of eventually it kind of worked, but it very all nearly didn’t. So these bipartisan commissions a little bit worse than the independent commissions. Maybe still good in a pinch. Almost certainly better than kind of a partisan process in the legislature. Right? Then you have the third type of commission, which is a politician commission, which is what it sounds like, which is literally when politicians themselves serve on the commission.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So we have some pretty high profile examples of them failing this year. So Virginia is a good example. Connecticut is a good example. These are commissions that literally could not come to an agreement between the Democrats and Republicans on them, and it kicked the process to the state Supreme Court.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Ohio is another example. Ohio is a redistricting process you could probably do a whole podcast episode on, but basically the redistricting commission there, which is made up of politicians is one of three stages of the rejection process basically. And that’s, if the map doesn’t get overturned in court, which it did, and it ended up being like five stages.

Nathaniel Rakich:

But Ohio’s commission the first time the map drawing process came to them, failed to pass anything because they couldn’t agree. And then the second time, after the map got overturned in court, they did agree that only the Republicans on the commission kind of railroaded the Democrats on the commission and passed a map that wasn’t very fair to put it mildly. And then finally the fourth type of commission, and I know that I’m rambling, sorry, is an advisory commission.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So these commissions are basically when you set up a group of people and you say, “Come up with a fair map,” and they come up with a nice looking map and then the legislature says, “Okay, thanks. We’re going to ignore that.” These advisory commissions basically don’t have kind of the final authority. They just propose a map to the legislature, but the legislature can change it perhaps after… Sometimes there’s a built in process for they have to at least consider it and vote down a couple of times before they pass their own gerrymandering.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So New York is a prominent example of this as well. Other states have this system like Iowa, New Mexico. The commissions themselves work fine, but the issue is that it really relies on politicians themselves putting aside their kind of self-interest and their politics to do the good government thing which especially in this political environment almost never happens.

David Beard:

Yeah. And I think the Iowa example is really interesting in sort of the subtleties of this where they traditionally have this sort of very fair process where nonpartisan staff draw the lines based on some criteria. And then the legislature comes in. It comes to the legislature and they either have to pass it or reject it. And if they do that twice, then the third time the legislature can amend it. And what happened this time was an opportunity where the Republicans had complete control of the legislature.

David Beard:

So could have gone to the third time and could have made amendments to the maps and passed their own. But instead what they did, they rejected the first round of maps. A second round of maps came along and there was a lot of sort of like rumor that sort of the staff who were drawing it, were incorporating criticisms or concerns from the Republican majority.

David Beard:

And of course that’s all sort of like not done out in the open or publicly. So then the Republicans did go along with a second version of the map. So it’s one of these interesting push and pulls where the map was not sort of a clean map where the staff would be like, “This is what we would want to draw.” But it also wasn’t exactly what the Republicans would’ve drawn from the start. So these things can get very sort of in between messiness.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Right. Iowa’s process is something that they’ve had in place for decades. And this was, I believe the first time that one party or at least Republicans had full control over the legislature and the governorship under this system. So it was kind of the first time that they could have overridden this kind of nonpartisan group, that group that drew the maps.

Nathaniel Rakich:

But I think because Iowa’s had this process and also maybe you can throw in a couple of just salt-shakers of Midwestern niceness, they agreed on a map and they didn’t kind of go for like a maximalist gerrymandering. Although the map is somewhat favorable to Republicans. Although it still has a lot of competitive seats, which I think is good. But you compare this to a situation like New York or like Utah, for example, which both those states newly implemented this kind of advisory commission and in those states which are more used to the legislature getting their way, they were like, “That was cute. No, we’re not even going to listen to you.”

Nathaniel Rakich:

And in fact, Utah’s legislature actively dismantled this ballot measure that Utah has passed to implement this redistricting commission in order to water it down and make it so that they could effectively ignore it.

David Nir:

So I want to switch gears just a little bit. Up until now, we’ve been talking exclusively about congressional redistricting, but of course, states right now are also engaged in the process of legislative redistricting. FiveThirtyEight has also devoted a lot of resources to this topic. And this is really an area that gets undercover even compared to congressional redistricting, which probably doesn’t get as much coverage as it ought to.

David Nir:

So since you’re following this under the radar area, and now of course we’re talking about all 50 states, 99 different legislative chambers, what are some of the major themes that you’ve seen or any surprises, anything that you’d want to share with someone who hasn’t necessarily been following the process in all 50 states?

Nathaniel Rakich:

State legislative, districting, obviously super important as you guys know, state legislatures, as we have seen time and time again, past some of the most consequential, most controversial legislation in the country especially as Washington is gridlocked. I would say that the big trend in state legislative registering has been similar to congressional redistricting which is the decline of competitive seats and competition in general.

Nathaniel Rakich:

This is both because of gerrymandering, but also just kind of, because of natural polarization like there are fewer swing states than ever. I don’t think it’s reasonable to consider the Alabama legislature or the Massachusetts legislature to ask that to be competitive. So you already have this kind of small window of potentially competitive state legislatures. But gerrymandering has taken a lot of those off the table.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So places like Georgia, Texas, where Republicans had full control of redistricting this year, those legislatures are not going to be competitive this district or this decade, I would say unless things really shift drastically.

Nathaniel Rakich:

But I would say that some of the most notable things were the maps getting fairer in a couple of states. So Pennsylvania and especially Michigan. So these are states that have been gerrymandered for Republicans, especially Michigan for decades. I believe in Michigan, the state Senate has been Republicans since 1984 and the State House since 2010.

Nathaniel Rakich:

In Michigan in particular, they have this new independent researching commission that also applies to state legislative districts and they just drastically made a fair map. It’s just kind of mind boggling to me as someone who has followed politics for over 10 years and downballot politics, and then in Michigan where a legislature has always been kind of foregone conclusion to go for Republicans is now genuinely on the table.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So some of the statistics that we have here are the old Michigan Senate map used to have the median seat in the Michigan Senate, used to be 11 points redder than the state as a whole. It’s now just one point redder. In the Michigan House, the median seat used to be eight points redder, and it’s now just three points redder. So it’s very much on the table for Democrats. And obviously as mentioned before, if they were to take control, that would be historic.

Nathaniel Rakich:

It’s a similar situation in Pennsylvania where you actually have a commission that’s been around for a while, but the state Supreme Court this year has been controlled by Democrats. And so they chose the tie-breaking member of that commission, which was kind of a Democratic-leaning academic, but it ended up being producing pretty fair maps. So you had a similar situation.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So for example, in the Pennsylvania House, the median seat used to have a six-point Republican bias, and now it’s just a one point Republican bias. So I think that obviously states like Michigan and Pennsylvania in a year like 2022, which is likely to be a good year for Republicans may go red anyway. But I think it’s really striking that you have a fair fight on your hands for the first time in a long time.

David Nir:

Can you clarify for our are listeners who may not be familiar with the term, what you mean by the median seat because you were using that with the congressional discussion as well?

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I can definitely get over my skis with the terminology. So basically, the idea behind the median seat is if you took every district in a state legislative chamber or in Congress and you sorted it from most Democratic to most Republican. And you looked at the seat that’s right in the middle. So the median seat, and you look at kind of the partisanship of that district.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So theoretically in order to have a fair map, you would have in a state legislature, for example, that median seat should match the partisanship of the state so that if you take a hypothetical state that is exactly 50-50, if that district is also 50-50, then if a Democrat win the popular vote in the state then they would theoretically also win that median seat which means they would win a majority of the seats in the chamber and therefore win control of the chamber.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So it’s basically an idea. So to take another example, one of the more egregious examples is Georgia. So for example in Georgia, in the Georgia House, the median seat is 10 points to the right of the state. So if you assume that Georgia is 50-50 state, I’m not sure that’s correct given that 2020 was a good year for Democrats and they just barely won it, but let’s assume for the safe argument that it’s 50-50.

Nathaniel Rakich:

That would mean that Democrats would have to win the statewide popular vote by 10 points in order to win that kind of decisive seat in the middle of the chamber and therefore take control. And of course, while it’s already hard enough for Democrats to win Georgia by a single percentage point, it’s at least at this point where kind of the demographics and the trends lie. It’s very difficult, if not a impossible to imagine them winning it by 10 points. And that’s kind of why the Georgia State House is out of Democrats’ reach right now.

David Nir:

And so that hypothetical seat, or actually not hypothetical seat, because you said it’s the actual median seat is 10 points to the right of where Georgia is. So we’re saying in essence, maybe it’s a seat that Trump won 55-45, and Democrats would have to exactly capture not only this seat, but every seat bluer than that, which includes a lot of red seats just to have a shot at winning the majority there.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Right.

David Beard:

So let’s turn to one of the topics that we talk about almost every week, because it’s really the story of 2022, which is the Democrats’ attempt to hold onto the House and hold onto the Senate, sort of despite the odds given the historical problems that incumbent parties have with midterm elections and particularly again with Biden’s currently low approval rating in the low 40s.

David Beard:

So as we’re looking towards that, what are some races you’re keeping an eye on as potential bellwethers as to how the cycle might develop both in terms of, is there any chance the Democrats hold on to these chambers and then, B, sort of if that doesn’t look like it’s going to be the case, what are some of the races to look towards to? Is this going to be a bad night or an okay night or really bad night for Democrats?

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah. Well, I’d be curious to hear your guys’ thoughts. I’m someone who thinks that just statistically based on the midterm curse, based on the fact that Democrats have such a narrow majority in the House that Republicans are very likely to win control of the House next year. I’m kind of more focused on whether they’re going to win it by a small enough margin that it’s tight and maybe that makes governing hard for them with the freedom caucus and whether Democrats can take back control of the chamber in 2024 or whether it’s going to be a 2010 or 2018 type of wave environment where they really win dozens of seats.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Some of the districts that I’m watching are some of these districts that haven’t been competitive in kind of recent elections, but if you go back to the old heads no, back in 2014 and 2010, when some of these districts were competitive, if we’re looking at a situation parallel to those years, which of course were very good for Republicans.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So I’m thinking of seats like the Connecticut 5th District, Jahana Hayes’ seat, Colorado 7th at Perlmutter’s old district he’s retiring from. Even like the Indiana 1st, Frank Mrvan’s seat. These are seats that you really wouldn’t expect Democrats to have too much trouble in unless a real red wave was developing. So I think if you see in October, those members are, they’re I guess in Colorado.

Nathaniel Rakich:

In Colorado, you have state Senator Brittany Pettersen running instead of Perlmutter. But if those Democrats are having trouble and they’re in real tough races, I think that you can say that the House is pretty much gone for Democrats and a real red wave is on the table. Another thing I wanted to mention because I wanted to have a creative answer to this one is that not necessarily bellwethers for the general election, but I’m looking at some bellwethers for Republican primaries.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So specifically on May 10th, which I think is not getting a lot of attention when kind of a lot of the focus is on Madison Cawthorn’s primary and the bonkers Ohio Senate primary. On May 10th, you have primaries in West Virginia and in Nebraska. And there are some interesting kind of tests of Trumpism versus a more kind of moderate or at least not particularly Trumpy strain of the GOP. So in West Virginia, you have a congressional primary between two incumbents who are thrown together in redistricting.

Nathaniel Rakich:

You have Alex Mooney who was endorsed by Trump and voted to throw out the 2020 election results and has gone all in on Trumpism. And then you have David McKinley who voted for the infrastructure package and is a little bit more of an older school, pragmatic Republican. And then in Nebraska for the gubernatorial race, you have Chuck Herbster who is a businessman who Trump has endorsed based on their kind of personal relationship. And then you have the outgoing governor’s preferred candidate, Jim Pillen.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So there’s kind of this proxy war there between Trump and specifically the Nebraska Republican establishment. That race is getting no coverage. I think it’ll be interesting because it’s one of the first tests of Trump’s endorsement power, which of course will be a theme throughout most of the primaries this year.

David Nir:

Of course, that race is not getting no coverage because if you read the Daily Kos Elections morning guide, which I know you do.

Nathaniel Rakich:

I do.

David Nir:

We have talked about that one. I think that’s a really interesting call to cite that as a bellwether. So, Nathaniel, we have one last thing that we love to talk about with you, which is that, of course at FiveThirtyEight, you guys are extremely data driven as are we at Daily Kos Elections, and we, over the years at DKE have put out tons of data sets that we have made public, and you have been a big booster of ours, especially on Twitter.

David Nir:

So we’re curious to know which of our data sets have you gotten the most mileage out of, and which have enjoyed making usage of in your own work at FiveThirtyEight?

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah. I use your guys’ data all the time. I just want to formally thank you again for putting it out into the world, having a clearinghouse of election data, especially in our very fragmented system where there are 50 states and therefore 50 state election authorities. It’s very hard and very rare to have all that stuff in one place. It’s really valuable. So what don’t I use from you guys? Let’s see. There’s of course the stuff you guys are primarily known for, which is the presidential results by congressional district and legislative district.

Nathaniel Rakich:

I think most people know about that at this point, so I won’t belabor that, but I certainly use it. I would say some of the things that I really like are, for instance, you guys have this comparison of how much of a state Senate district is in a congressional district and vice versa. So that can be helpful for when a member of Congress retires and you’re like, “Okay. Which state senators in this area might run for that seat?”

Nathaniel Rakich:

Oh, this state senator’s district is 70% in this congressional district. So this person seems like a good candidate. That’s been a resource that I have returned to several times.

David Nir:

I love those tables.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Yeah, for sure. You guys have something similar with media markets, which is also useful from when you’re analyzing TV ads. Another really fun thing. I’m a history nerd. I love your research into when the last time a Democrat or Republican won a given state. So you can whip out a statistic like Republicans are hoping to win the Senate seats for the first time since 1930, when Tungsten Arm O’Doyle was pitching for the Brooklyn Robins.

Nathaniel Rakich:

I mean, let’s see, I could go on. Oh, I guess I should also give a shout out to Stephen Wolf, your colleague who has done a lot of work on voting rights. I wrote an article with Laura Bronner, was it last year? Two years ago? It was a while ago, about kind of the enduring Republican bias in our institutions. So from the Senate to the House, the state legislatures and Stephen has done a lot of work on this and specifically his work calculating the popular vote for the Michigan State House over the last decade, which I think Democrats won the popular vote for the Michigan State House in, I think, 2012, 2016, 2018 and 2020, but they lost the chamber every single time.

Nathaniel Rakich:

And that’s just a statistic when I first learned it that I was completely blown away by, and really I think goes to show the power of gerrymandering and other institutional biases in predetermining elections. So yeah, those are just a few. Your open seat tracker is great, of course.

Nathaniel Rakich:

Filing deadlines. That’s another great one. Just can pull up that and know very quickly, rather than having to hunt on a secretary of state website when we’re going to have a final candidate list in a given state. It’s all been very helpful.

David Nir:

Well, this is truly delightful to hear because we create these data sets and we use them ourselves and then we put them out into the world. So we don’t always know how they get used or whether they’re appreciated. So I love hearing that you found such great use for them. So Nathaniel, before we let you go, can you tell folks how they can find your work, where they can find you on Twitter and what they can do to keep tabs on what you’re doing?

Nathaniel Rakich:

No, I appreciate that. Well, I write for FiveThirtyEight, so you can go to fivethirtyeight.com and check out my work there. Our redistricting checker, which we talked a lot about is available at fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting. That’s been basically the last six months of my life. So that would be good if people can check it out. And then people can follow me on Twitter @baseballot. So that’s baseball, plus the letters O-T.

David Beard:

Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst for FiveThirtyEight, thank you for joining us. And we look forward to many primary election nights on Twitter.

Nathaniel Rakich:

So do I. Let’s get it on.

David Beard:

That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Nathaniel Rakich for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach us by email at [email protected]. Please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya and editor, Tim Einenkel. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.

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This story was originally published at Prism.

Workers across the country are successfully unionizing for better wages and sustainable working conditions after COVID-19 upended the workforce. Two years into the pandemic, the workforce and the workplace have undeniably changed, and after workers across industries lost or left their jobs, many began to reconsider their needs in the workplace.

The reevaluation of workplace standards in 2021 gave rise to what has been called the Great Resignation: workers resigning in the search of better working conditions, benefits, more respect, and better pay. As a result, the labor market tightened, a labor shortage grew, and workers who remained in their jobs or found new jobs recognized their bargaining power. Many workers have organized and contributed to a historic moment in labor history. The unionizing wave reached a peak in the fourth quarter of 2021 with the most picket lines in over a decade. Bloomberg Law named it “Strikeober,” with 58 nonmanufacturing, government, and manufacturing work stoppages in just the last quarter of 2021. While it may seem that unions are on the rise, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 15.8 million workers were represented by a union in 2021, a decline of 581,000 since 2019, and 137,000 since 2020. The decline is due to massive job loss in hospitality and leisure industries during the pandemic. According to the Economic Policy Institute, jobs in less unionized industries, such as hospitality and leisure, were lost at a higher rate, leaving behind unionized workers, causing unionization rates to go up. Now, workers from coffee shops to insurance are making sure their voices are heard.

The modern-day labor movement reached new heights on April 1, when Amazon workers won one of the most significant labor victories: the first successful unionization effort at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York. With 1.1 million workers in the U.S., Amazon is the country’s second-largest private employer and is notorious for its inhumane work conditions. The union win is due in part to the efforts of Christian Smalls, who was fired by Amazon in 2020 for “violating quarantine protocol” while organizing and spent two years organizing the workers at his warehouse and fighting against union busting efforts, which included secret surveillance, police harassment, and disinformation. Despite aggressive union-busting efforts by Amazon, the warehouse voted in favor of the union, with 2,654 workers voting yes and 2,131 workers voting no. Now, staff at more than 50 different Amazon warehouses are contacting Smalls to set up their own organizing efforts.

“We’re very proud of our independence and worker leadership, and we’re committed to this direct democratic model of organizing as a strategy that we’re encouraging and training other workers to employ,” Amazon Labor Union wrote in a statement. “This is just the beginning, and there is so much more work to be done, but never again can anyone plausibly suggest that there is a workplace that cannot be unionized, or that workers cannot win it for ourselves without the resources and experience of formal affiliation with an established union. We are the proof.”

Workers across other industries have also organized while facing union-busting efforts by their employer. Helene Tracey has worked as a barista at a Coffee Tree in Pennsylvania since May 2021. As soon as she heard that her colleagues were forming a union in August, she joined their efforts. She said she and her coworkers felt voiceless on the job—they were working eight hours straight without any breaks, and when they expressed concerns about pay discrepancies, management did not do anything to address it. According to Tracey, she was first hired making $8.50 an hour, while her colleagues made $9 an hour.

“That really motivated me to seek another opportunity to feel seen on the job,” Tracey said.

In February 2022, The Coffee Tree Union voted in favor of the union. They spent six months organizing and dodging union-busting firms and demoralizing meetings. At one point, Tracey said her hours were cut by her employer in retaliation. She filed an unfair labor practice complaint to the National Labor Relations Board and is waiting for the results of the investigation.

“It’s difficult being at odds with a company, especially when I worked with managers almost every shift,” Tracey said. “It definitely transformed the work environment after we went public. It was more uncomfortable.”

While the union-busting was challenging, Tracey said it is necessary to have their voices heard on the job, and it eventually creates a more cooperative work environment. Tracey now makes $12 an hour.

“It’s important to understand that the community is always going to be behind you,” Tracey said.

David Gutsche, who has worked at Half Price Books in Roseville, Minnesota, for almost 10 years, started organizing his bookstore location in May 2021, a year after the pandemic started. Gutsche said workers were overwhelmed by inadequate staffing levels and an outsized amount of work. Around the same time, Minnesota had dropped their mask mandate. The employers at Half Price Books decided that no one in the store had to wear masks anymore either, but workers asked for time to allow for employees to at least get vaccinated. When the employers said that would not be possible, Gutsche said that was the last straw. They signed a petition saying they no longer felt safe and presented it to the company.

“They’re not going to listen to us if we’re just polite and ask them nicely,” Gutsche said. “We realized that the proper channels were set up to serve the company and not the workers, and we decided to make different channels.”

Gutsche’s store voted in favor of the union in November 2021, despite union-busting efforts from outside consultants Ogletree Deakin. His advice to other workers who may be hoping to unionize is to listen to each other and continue to communicate throughout the entire process.

Mike, who works at a Half Price Books in Indiana that just voted in favor of the union on April 1, agreed and said the community fostered by the union has been incredibly valuable.

“There is no better time than the present,” Mike said. “I learned that I can have an impact in my own life rather than have people run my life for me.”

In 2020, California AAA insurance workers started unionizing the Central Valley AAA offices. During the pandemic, Angie Matthews, who has been a AAA insurance salesperson for 13 years in Stockton, California, said the agents had an awakening. Instead of releasing pressure like other insurance companies did on their sales staff, AAA increased the sales goals and quotas and unveiled aggressive plans to “migrate” the insurance salespeople out in favor of the remote call center.

“They wanted to obliterate our team,” Matthews said. “They wanted to get rid of as many as they could so they could profit more. But that’s not what the customers want. Customers want to come in and be advised by an educated insurance adviser.”

More than 460 AAA salespeople in Northern California voted in favor of the union in June 2021 despite union-busting tactics like one-on-one interrogations. Matthews says workers need to “stay vigilant.”

“They are going to use every tactic possible to crush your spirits and the spirits of others, but there always needs to be one person that’s willing to stand out and be brave for the group, to stand out against the oppressors, and people will follow,” Matthews said. “We are in a battle against corporations. We are all labor against these big conglomerates that are trying to rule our country in our roles. If we don’t stand together for the greater fight and respect everyone’s positions, and everyone’s right to organize, and be free from these oppressive workplaces, then we’re not going to overcome it.”

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

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Over the course of the 21st century, it’s a safe bet that the most impactful relationship between any two countries will be that of the U.S. and China. To describe that relationship as ”complicated” is an understatement so vast, one might just be able to see it from space. The complexity goes beyond geopolitics, the contrast between democracy and autocracy, and economic competition.

A recent incident at George Washington University (GWU) is just one example of how complex the relationship between the countries is. Combining freedom of speech issues; a desire to avoid inflaming the rampant, increased hate and violence Asian Americans have faced since the outbreak of COVID-19; protests against state-sponsored oppression; and the Chinese government’s efforts to influence discourse on American college campuses, this incident is unfortunately far from an isolated one, and it’s deeply indicative of a larger problem.

On or just before Feb. 3, posters went up in buildings on the GWU campus that used Olympic themes to criticize a number of Chinese government policies: the horrific treatment of Uyghurs, the occupation and control of Tibet, Beijing’s handling of COVID-19, the mass surveillance of those living in China, and the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong. The posters utilized designs made by a Chinese dissident activist named Badiucao. 

It’s worth clicking through to see them all.

The anonymous-ish artist’s personal journey is a remarkable one. According to a 2019 interview with AFP, Badiucao, thought to be in his mid-30s, was living in Shanghai and attending law school when he and some buddies downloaded a “Taiwanese drama” and settled in for some entertainment. But the file included 1995’s The Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Peabody Award-winning documentary that explores in depth the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, as well as the Chinese government’s massacre of protesters.

These events were completely unknown to Badiucao—barely out of diapers in 1989—and his friends, all of whom had lived and studied in China their entire lives. In a state-sanctioned scrubbing of history that would make today’s GOP proud, not one educator—or anyone, actually—had ever mentioned Tiananmen Square to any of them.

Badiucao described the experience of watching the film as follows: “It was three hours, everybody just sat there and the room was completely dark, nobody even got up to turn on a light.” He left for Australia shortly thereafter, where he’s lived since 2009, producing political cartoons and becoming one of the foremost activists protesting the Chinese communist regime.

Back on the GWU campus, Badiucao’s cartoons provoked an immediate response. The Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) was one of the first groups to condemn the posters. Many U.S. colleges are home to chapters of the CSSA, an organization brought into being by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the 1970s. According to the U.S. State Department, the CSSA serves to “monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that dissent.”

Those opposed to the posters contacted the GWU president and called for their removal, arguing they were racist, discriminatory, and sparked anti-Asian sentiment at a time when members of the Asian diaspora in the U.S. are facing rising levels of hate. Another student group, the GWU Chinese Cultural Association, declared that Badiucao’s posters “pose a potential risk to the personal safety of all [GWU] Chinese and Asian students, including verbal and physical violence.”

A message sent to Mark Wrighton, GWU’s president, characterized the posters as “vicious personal attacks on all international students from China and Asian groups.” They demanded “severe punishment for [whoever put up the] posters, and a public apology to all Chinese and Asian students.” Badiucao disagreed with this assessment, noting in an interview with Axios that “my art is always targeting the Chinese Communist Party, never the Chinese suffering from this regime.”

The GWU president immediately responded. Wrighton emailed the CSSA to report that he was “personally offended” by the posters, had ordered them taken down, and would “undertake an effort to find out who is responsible.” Why in the world would an American university president even consider taking such a step, let alone promise to do so? Those “responsible” could have family in China, or be Chinese citizens, and such an “effort” could put those people in real danger.

Criticizing a government—which couldn’t be more in the wheelhouse of the sort of speech a college should protect—was suddenly speech now being suppressed. Once the word got out, Wrighton was hammered by free speech advocates.

The GWU president quickly backtracked and apologized, admitting that he “should have taken more time to understand the entire situation.” But that doesn’t change what happened—and what could’ve happened had he exposed those involved as planned. A college president, but especially one at a major international institution, should have been more aware of and sensitive to any attacks on efforts to protest Chinese policies.

Christopher Walker, vice president for studies and analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy, expressed his disbelief over the events at GWU in an interview with The Washington Post: “Given the extent to which these problematic intrusions already have come into view, there’s a persistent lack of preparation among universities and the knowledge sector more broadly to ensure that essential standards of academic freedom are upheld.”

An apology after the fact doesn’t resolve the issue: We must ask what ideas are in the air and what pressures are being felt by administrators on college campuses that would lead Wrighton to make such an error.

An Axios report by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian laid out some important takeaways from what happened at GWU.

• Chinese international student groups sometimes use the language of social justice to silence criticism of the Chinese government’s human rights record.

• The incident also highlights fears among Uyghur, Tibetan, Hong Kong and pro-democracy Chinese students in the U.S. that they can’t exercise their right to free speech.

• “Some Chinese students in the U.S. often don’t realize that it’s possible to be both victim and oppressor at the same time,” Maya Wang, senior China analyst at Human Rights Watch, told Axios.

One publication that came out harshly against the final result at GWU was the Global Times, which published an opinion piece with a headline steeped in anger: “Freedom of speech as the last refuge of racist hater: GWU asylum for racism reflects double standard of U.S. society.” The piece condemned Wrighton for “suddenly turn[ing] his back on the Chinese students who pleaded with him for protection from racism.” The Global Times is owned, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the Chinese Communist Party.

The Washington Post notes that “there has been extensive reporting in recent years documenting how the Chinese government’s diplomatic outposts often work directly with CSSA chapters and other Chinese student groups on campuses to spy on Chinese students, to enforce censorship, and to target critics such as the Dalai Lama or Hong Kong democracy student activist Nathan Law. These incidents have been covered on campuses in the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.”

You can hear straight from the source what Law—an activist and former Hong Kong lawmaker targeted by Beijing and exiled in London since 2020—faced when trying to use his platform to speak out for freedom and political rights.

The Dalai Lama’s planned appearance at UC San Diego in 2017 prompted swift condemnation from the campus CSSA—vitriol that was also blasted across various social media platforms. Additionally, they coordinated their efforts with other Chinese student groups at the university, clearly promoting the Chinese government’s official position.

Translated from the original, CSSA posted that the group “strongly objects any behavior of spreading inflammatory, politically offensive speech which slanders and belittles Chinese history, [and] proceed[s] to influence China’s international image with unknown motivation.” It asserted that “all behaviors which disgrace politics and history under the flag of spreading religious freedom are carried with intricate motivation and cannot be tolerated, no matter what background they are put into.”

The power of the Chinese government, through the CSSA, to mobilize large numbers of people in the U.S. to show visible support for the regime—and thus shape public perception here and worldwide—is quite impressive.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Washington on Sept. 24, 2015 on a state visit, hundreds of Chinese students lined the streets for hours, carrying banners and flags to welcome him. It was a remarkable display of seemingly spontaneous patriotism.

Except it wasn’t entirely spontaneous. The Chinese Embassy paid students to attend and helped organize the event. Working with Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) at local universities — a Chinese student organization with branches at dozens of schools around the country — government officials from the office of educational affairs at the Chinese Embassy in Washington collected the contact information of about 700 students who had signed up to attend. Embassy officials communicated with students via WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, during the event and into the night, responding to messages as late as 3 a.m.

According to a Chinese student at George Washington University who attended the event, participants each received about $20 for their effort, distributed through the CSSA a few months later.

The havoc that the government of China and groups like the CSSA, along with the Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes, have been wreaking extends far beyond GWU—and far beyond college campuses in general, as demonstrated by the March arrest of five individuals charged with “acting on behalf of the Chinese secret police to spy on and harass U.S. residents critical of Beijing.”

At college after college, Beijing and its educational proxies have been leveraging the exploding levels of anti-Asian hate fueled by Donald Trump during the pandemic and beyond to suppress anything and anyone critical of Chinese policy … and it’s been going on for years. ProPublica documented a staggering array of examples in a painstakingly researched piece published last November, noting that “pro-China forces on campuses have assaulted, stalked, threatened and doxxed dissidents and scholars.”

While one activist, Sulaiman Gu, pointed out that “repression is worse in Australia and Canada,” the sheer number of U.S. campuses mentioned in the piece is staggering.

When compared to what happened at GWU, virtually all of these schools were home to incidents that involved far worse damage to protestors, or their families back in China: Purdue University, Brandeis University, University of Georgia, Harvard University, St. John’s University (NY), University of California San Diego, University of Chicago, and Florida State University. And in Gu’s case, the Chinese government not only went after him, they took control of his family’s property—valued at north of $300,000—back in China.

Here’s what happened at Brandeis:

Chinese students mobilized [in 2020] to sabotage an online panel about atrocities against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer [Rayhan Asat] as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling “bullshit” and “fake news” over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem. To the dismay of participants, the university’s leaders failed to condemn the incident.

…

Apologetic Chinese students told Asat and other panelists privately that members of the CSSA mobilized to sabotage the event. “They planned the whole thing,” Asat said. “They created a WeChat group for it. Everything was planned on WeChat.”

Perhaps one reason Brandeis and other colleges are so reluctant to act? The financial implications. As ProPublica noted, over $1 billion dollars in donations flowed to U.S. institutions of higher learning from the People’s Republic of China between 2013 and 2020. That’s on top of the 370,000 tuition-paying students hailing from China as of 2019. Though these schools are nonprofit institutions, it would be naive to think that money—big money—doesn’t impact a college administration’s actions.

“It is easier to take a stance against the United States than against China,” Asat told ProPublica. “That is what is happening at U.S. universities. They are self-censoring themselves in order to recruit Chinese students for economic benefit.” She added that she believes the students did not act on their own: “I can see the Chinese government’s hand behind it.”

The Chinese government regularly and without hesitation uses its power and resources to stifle scholarly debate, as well as to punish both Chinese students on campus who speak out against its policies and their families back home.

But what can higher education institutions do about it? First, they must make sure to avoid the trap GWU’s uninformed Wrighton face-planted into. One hopes that more information about the role Beijing plays in attacking speech critical of its policies will encourage universities to recognize those efforts for what they are: government propaganda. Second, colleges can take countermeasures, as Princeton professor of politics and international affairs (and expert on Chinese politics) Rory Truex argued in The Atlantic back in 2019. In response to what he characterized as the CCP’s “encroachment” on “our own social and political discourse,” Truex recommends that American universities and other institutions conduct what he calls “freedom-of-speech operations” (FOSOPS).

American universities can take the lead. They should routinely hold events on the fate of Taiwan, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, and other topics known to be sensitive to the Chinese government. These events can be organized by students, faculty, or research centers. They need not originate from a university’s administration. If anything, the message that FOSOPs send—that everything in the United States is subject to open debate, especially on college campuses—is even stronger if the pressure comes from the grassroots.

…

The goal of freedom-of-speech operations is safety in numbers. Other universities remained largely mum after the Chinese government moved to punish UCSD [where the Dalai Lama gave a commencement address in 2017], effectively inviting Beijing to deploy similar tactics against other schools in the future. But imagine if instead there had been an outpouring of events on Tibet or invitations for the Dalai Lama. Coordination is key. An affront to one American university should be taken as an affront to all.

…

Firms, local governments, civic associations, and individuals can create their own freedom-of-speech operations. Imagine if every NBA player signed a pledge to mention China’s mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang at press conferences, just for one day. Or if American churches reached out to Chinese pastors to give sermons about the repression of China’s Christian community.

That. Would. Be. Awesome.

It’s still very important to draw a clear line between calling out the government of China for its actions and demonizing Chinese people and those of the diaspora. The latter was a particular specialty of The Man Who Lost An Election and Tried To Steal It, who was even caught adding extra Sinophobic hate when remarks prepared for him in 2020 didn’t sink to an appropriately low level.

President Joe Biden, thankfully, has largely struck a far better balance when criticizing Beijing’s policies.

As Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang explained in February, “racism and discrimination against people of Chinese origin is definitely real. But some are exploiting this legitimate grievance and twisting it to say that any criticism of China is racism against Chinese people and should not be raised in any form.” Likewise, all criticism of Israel ought not be considered out of bounds, or responsible for antisemitic violence, just as valid criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East ought not be blamed for terrorist acts such 9/11. To do so is wholly disingenuous and silences the voices of marginalized groups.

In February, California Rep. Judy Chu, head of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, drew the clear distinction between “being specific about challenges and opportunities with China,” and instances where “the rhetoric is vague and xenophobic, simply reduced to ‘tough on China,’ which is the kind of rhetoric we know has led to anti-Asian violence here at home.” Such violence is something everyone should oppose; it’s despicable for people to cynically exploit such concerns to gain support for suppressing legitimate criticism of an oppressive authoritarian regime such as China.

Freedom of speech is one of our democracy’s core values, something virtually all Americans revere. Most Americans also say they reject race-baiting rhetoric—even as the twice-impeached former president, Fox News’ favorite white nationalist Tucker Carlson, and so many others on the right spew hate on a regular basis, never acknowledging that’s what they’re doing. As we’ve seen with Fuck a l’Orange, condemnation of a government’s policies can swiftly cross a line into fomenting ethnic hatred. Pushback against such bigoted condemnation reflects democracy itself.

But what doesn’t reflect democracy is an institution of higher learning shutting down political speech, particularly speech advocating for human rights amid an oppressive government. It’s even worse when such extreme actions are taken without a full awareness of the influence that particular government has on college campuses—an influence that harms students of every background, including the ones it claims to represent.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of  The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

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Shortly before Friday’s deadline to run passed, former Trump administration Environmental Agency director Scott Pruitt, who previously served as Oklahoma state attorney general from 2011 until he joined Trump’s cabinet in 2017, filed and indicated he would run in the upcoming special election to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe. Pruitt gained national notoriety for leading the EPA on a crusade to undermine its very mission by aggressively rolling back regulations against pollution in favor of the fossil fuel industry and denying human-made climate change, but it was his cartoonish level of corruption scandals that led to him resigning just over a year into his tenure.

Indeed, by the time Pruitt stepped down in July 2018, he was the subject of at least 15 federal investigations into his conduct as a Trump official. Among Pruitt’s many dubious activities were his penchant for living high on the taxpayers’ dime, including first-class airfare, luxury hotels, and other exorbitant travel spending; a pattern of financially benefiting from lobbyists such as renting a Capitol Hill condo from one for only $50 a night; $4.6 million in security spending that included a $42,000 soundproof phone booth in his office, his own 24-hour security detail, and $3,000 on “tactical pants;” and also using his office and aides to run personal errands and help advance his wife’s business interests.

While Pruitt won plaudits from conservatives for rolling back Obama administration environmental protections, it remains to be seen just how willing voters will be to overlook his laundry list of corruption scandals. He joins a crowded June GOP primary that includes Rep. Markwayne Mullin, former state House Speaker T.W. Shannon, state Sen. Nathan Dahm, former Inhofe chief of staff Luke Holland, and former white house staffer Alex Gray.

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Conventional fighting in the destroyed city that was once Mariupol may soon be over, as Ukrainian and Russian officials both announce that only a small pocket of Ukrainian opposition forces there. Russian defense officials demanded the surrender of all remaining troops inside the massive Azovstal steel plant; that deadline has now passed.

That does not mean that Russia will gain more than tenuous control of the city. As has been seen elsewhere, Ukrainian defense forces have been astoundingly effective in picking off whatever targets of opportunity arise on the outskirts of Russian-defended territories, and the now heavily damaged Mariupol consists of uncountably many spots for such ambushes. The fighting will now move to guerrilla-styled tactics by what Ukrainian defenders still exist, but it’s likely that Ukrainian forces will not attempt to contest the city’s capture anytime soon. Ukraine has opportunities to push Russian forces back at other points, such as in Kherson, where Russian gains are far more tenuous.

For the remaining civilian residents of Mariupol, the situation remains as bleak as ever. Russia continues to block humanitarian aid to the city, and is now issuing “passes” to residents that will be required for any Ukrainian leaving their own homes.

Pointless Russian cruelties continued elsewhere this weekend, with a rocket attack on a Kharkiv neighborhood killing at least five. There have been no further updates on the fate of the crew of the sunken Moskva, with only a tenth or so of the ship’s 510-person crew appearing in footage of the assembled survivors.

NATO deliveries, both of new weapons and the staggering tonnage of ammunition required for Ukraine’s defense, are continuing aggressively.

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For this week’s #BlackMusicSunday, during Jazz Appreciation Month and on Easter Sunday, it’s only fitting that we celebrate with Duke Ellington. Towards the end of his life, Ellington composed what he called “Sacred Concerts,” which he performed in cathedrals in San Francisco, New York, and London. Ellington has been quoted saying that the Sacred compositions were “the most important music he’d ever written.” Though the Duke has passed on, the songs of those spiritual concerts continue to be faithfully performed (and enthusiastically received) to this day around the world.

I’m also having a joyous celebration of my own: It’s the second anniversary of “Black Music Sunday,” which I started here at Daily Kos on April 19, 2020. I first pitched it to Community Contributors editor Jessica Sutherland as a space of musical respite as we faced “stress, fear, tension, grief, boredom, and frustration in the time of COVID-19 quarantines and lockdowns.”

Two years later, the pandemic hasn’t ended and our stress, fear, and frustration persist. Today, we are also surrounded by ugly scenes of war as we continue to face gun violence and vile and open bigotry, as well as attacks on voting rights and reproductive rights. And so we will continue to offer a musical balm each week to help get through our days—one song at a time, one album at a time, and today, one concert at a time. 

I want to thank everyone who gathers here each Sunday to share the music we love. You make this series possible.

Gabe Meline, senior editor of KQED Arts & Culture, wrote an in-depth piece in 2015 for the 50th anniversary of Ellington’s first Sacred Concert, staged and performed in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral on Sept. 16, 1965.

The concert can be attributed to Grace Cathedral’s dean at the time, C. Julian Bartlett, a white reverend who brought with him from his native New Orleans a love of jazz and who approached Ellington with the commission — not for a jazz mass per se, but for an extended liturgical work. After their meeting in North Beach, Ellington enthusiastically got to work.

“I recognized this as an exceptional opportunity,” Ellington wrote, recalling the event in his 1973 autobiography Music Is My Mistress. “’Now I can say openly,’ I said, ‘what I have been saying to myself on my knees.’”

Ellington padded the program with music from his previous piece Black, Brown & Beige (what he described as “a tone parallel to the history of the Negro in America”), and battling what he admitted was “a certain amount of trepidation,” composed new material for Grace Cathedral drawing on the Bible, starting with its first four words. The six-syllable phrase “In the Beginning God” was woven throughout the concert, either sung by the Herman McCoy choir or played; Bunny Briggs tap-danced to a composition titled “David Danced Before the Lord With All His Might;” Jon Hendricks delivered hip spoken word; Ellington sidemen Paul Gonsalves, “Cat” Anderson and Johnny Hodges shined; and a young singer named Esther Marrow sang the Ellington composition “Come Sunday.”

As the San Francisco Chronicle noted at the time, Ellington shared the stage with some 75 other performers.

Enjoy the full KQED broadcast of the San Francisco Sacred Concert below.

For the 50th anniversary, the young woman discovered by Ellington, Queen Esther Marrow, would perform again. The Duke first escorts Marrow to the microphone at the 12:40-minute mark above.

Queen Esther Marrow was born in Newport News, Virginia. She began her career at the age of 22, when her talent and vocal gifts were discovered by Duke Ellington and made her debut as a featured artist in his “Sacred Concert” world tour. Marrow and Ellington formed a long-life friendship during the next four years while touring together. Queen has since performed with such musical greats as Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, B.B. King, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea and Bob Dylan.

In 1965, Marrow became active in the civil rights movement when she performed in Dr. Martin Luther King’s World Crusade. There she met her lifetime idol Mahalia Jackson, with whom she would later share the stage. Other political activists on the crusade were Jesse Jackson, Sidney Poitier and Dr. Ralph Abernathy.

In this PBS profile, Marrow tells the story of how she met the man who launched her career.

In the wake of the anniversary celebration, Marrow also shared potent images contrasting both performances.

As a major fan of vocalese master Jon Hendricks, I have listened to his interpretation of “In the Beginning God”—found at 15:30 in the KQED broadcast—too many times to count. 

In the beginning God
In the beginning God
In the beginning God
No Heaven, no Earth
No nothing
In the beginning
In the beginning
In the beginning God […]

No mountains, no valleys
No main streets and no back alleys
No night, no day, no bills to pay
No glory and no gloom
No poverty, no Cadillacs
No sand traps and no mud packs
No pedestrians, no carriage trade
No body guards, no credit cards
No conference calls, no TV commercials
No headaches and no aspirins
No heroes, no zeros
No naughty, no nice
No limit, no budget
No bottom, no topless
No cows, no bulls
No Barracuda, no buffalo
No birds, no bees, no beetles
No symphony, no jive, no Gemini five
No ten, nine, six or eight
No men trying to fill an inside straight
No applause, no critique
No amateur, no professional
No questions, no answers
No singers and no dancers
No varied and sundry, ranting and raging
Hither and yon from pillar to pot

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The second Sacred Concert was held over two years after the first in New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Jan. 19, 1968.

The second concert was broadcast as well—in color!

One of the most memorable moments in the New York performance was a solo by trumpeter Charles Melvin “Cootie” Williams.

James Nadal profiled Williams for All About Jazz in 2013.

Throughout his years with Ellington, and on many occasions under his own name, Cootie consistently displayed a vigorous command of his instrument. Whether playing the muted colourful compositions of Ellington, or playing in the full-throated manner that reflected his admiration for Louis Armstrong, the distinctive trumpet playing of Cootie Williams remains one of the lasting joys of jazz.

He was born Charles Melvin Williams, in Mobile, Alabama, on 10 July 1911. As a small child, he played various instruments in school bands but then took up the trumpet on which he was largely self-taught. He was barely into his teens when he began playing professionally. Among the bands with which he played in these years, the mid 1920s, was the band run by the family of Lester Young. He continued to play in territory bands, mainly in the south, including that led by Alonzo Ross. It was with this band that he played in New York in early 1928, choosing almost at once to quit the band and move on to higher profile engagements. In that same summer, he recorded with James P. Johnson, then with Chick Webb and Fletcher Henderson, and early the following year he was hired by Ellington to replace Bubber Miley. This, Cootie’s first spell in Ellington’s orchestra, was to last for 11 years.

As hinted above, Williams would leave Ellington to form his own band but return to Ellington in 1962 after a 22-year absence, continuing to play with the orchestra even after Ellington’s 1974 death. 

Thomas Cunniffe, the founder, editor, and principal writer of Jazz History Online, provides some additional background on the second concert, including the death of Ellington’s composer, pianist, lyricist, arranger, and collaborator Billy Strayhorn.

RELATED: Resurrection from the ashes

This concert also brought the introduction of Ellington’s new Swedish vocalist, Alice Babs.

Billy Strayhorn was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in early 1964. Even under the supervision of Ellington’s personal physician, Arthur Logan, his health went on a downward spiral. His appearance with Lena Horne at the First Sacred Concert in December 1965 was the last time he played in public. Ellington couldn’t stand to see Strayhorn in the hospital, but called him on the phone every day. Moreover, he encouraged Strayhorn to continue writing for the band. Strayhorn’s emotionally wrenching “Blood Count” was sent to the band from the hospital. It would be his final composition. When Strayhorn died on May 31, 1967, Ellington was on the road in Reno. He rushed back to New York for Strayhorn’s funeral, and wrote an eloquent tribute to his friend which included Strayhorn’s Four Freedoms, a set of moral codes which found a place in Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert. Strayhorn’s passing was an obvious sign to Ellington about his own mortality, and without anyone to take Strayhorn’s place, Ellington knew that he was the only one to write new music for the band. Ellington recorded a tribute album to Strayhorn in September 1967—the extraordinary “…And His Mother Called Him Bill”—and then he set to work writing an entirely original set of new sacred music.

No one could replace Strayhorn, of course, but Ellington built his Second Sacred Concert around the talents of a superb musician who would give new voice to his music. That musician was the vocalist Alice Babs. For those who may be unaware of her, Babs could be considered the Swedish version of Julie Andrews. Like Andrews, Babs first caught the public’s attention as a teenager, she was blessed with an astounding voice and a wide vocal range, and she promoted her sunny and optimistic demeanor through a series of film, radio and television appearances. She performed and recorded classical works, folk songs and pop music, but Babs’ greatest talent was as a jazz singer. She had unerring pitch, perfect English diction, and was an outstanding scat singer. Ellington could put any music in front of her, and she would sight-read it without error.

The two first met in February 1963, when Ellington was booked to film a television show in Sweden. The producers wanted to have a local singer perform with the Ellington band, so they handed Ellington a pile of records by leading Swedish artists for him to audition. All it took was a quick listen to Babs’ 1959 LP “Alice and Wonderband” for Ellington to make his decision. Once the special was completed, Ellington told Babs, “We should make a record together”. Babs was flattered at the offer—she had been an Ellington fan since she was 12 years old—but was completely surprised when Ellington called three weeks later, asking her to fly to Paris in the coming days to record. The resulting album, “Serenade to Sweden” was a rewarding collaboration highlighted by Babs’ exquisite version of “Come Sunday”. Perhaps the memory of that rendition convinced Ellington to hire her to sing his new sacred music. While Babs performed the Second and Third Sacred Concerts many times, she was unable to tour extensively with the band, owing to her own career and family commitments. When she wasn’t available, Ellington said he had to hire three vocalists to take her place.

Watch Babs sing the wordless “T.G.T.T (Too Good To Title).”

Babs would join Ellington for the third Sacred Concert, which was held at London’s Westminster Abbey on Oct. 24, 1973. It was United Nations Day, and so U.N. Chairman Sir Colin Crowe introduced the show, held just seven months before Ellington joined the ancestors. This show opened with “The Lords Prayer, My Love” sung by Babs, and closed with “The Majesty of God.” The concert featured notable performances from the John Alldis Choir, conducted by Roscoe Gill Jr.

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The United Kingdom’s National Jazz Archive has a wonderful 1974 interview Ellington did with Les Tomkin for Crescendo, all about his sacred music. The Duke made it clear that writing these concerts did not in any way conflict with his jazz work, discussed his conversations with theologians, and signed off with an entreaty for Tomkin to “tell all your lovely readers that we do love them madly, please. God bless.”

Enjoy the audio of the third Sacred Concert below.

While this weekend brings holidays for many people of multiple faiths, I don’t think you have to be religious to be uplifted by this “sacred” music; as Ellington noted in the opening of the third concert, the theme of the music was “love.”

Join me in the comments for even more Ellington, and orchestras and soloists who are performing his sacred works today. Additionally, to celebrate the second anniversary of “​​​​​​​Black Music Sunday,” I’ll also be posting links to previous stories in the series that readers may have missed in the last two years.

As always, please feel free to post music that lifts you up in these trying times. Thanks again for being part of the Black Music Sunday family of listeners.