Morning Digest: Court puts Georgia utility board races on hold, finding they harm Black voters

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

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Leading Off

GA Public Service Commission: On Friday, a federal district court ruled that Georgia's system of electing all five members of the Public Service Commission in statewide elections violates the Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters. The court further blocked officials from holding elections for two seats that were supposed to be on the ballot this fall.

Republican state Attorney General Chris Carr has yet to indicate whether he will appeal, but if the ruling stands, the elections will be postponed until the state's GOP-controlled legislature enacts a new district-based system next year so that Black voters have a chance to elect their chosen candidates in at least some seats.

Although members of the commission, which regulates public utilities, must seek one of the body's five districts (and live there), all voters statewide get to vote for every seat. The plaintiffs pointed out that only one Black candidate, Democrat David Burgess in 2000, has ever won an election for the commission in its 143 year history. All five current commissioners are Republicans, none of whom was the favored candidate of Black voters (the commission's sole Black member, Fitz Johnson, was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2021 and wasn't set to face the voters until this November).

While adopting district-based elections could empower Black voters if a map is fairly drawn, a switch could backfire if Republican legislators are still allowed to gerrymander the lines. GOP lawmakers enacted new commission districts earlier this year that packed Black voters into just one of the five districts while every other seat was at least 58% white and no more than 36% Black.

Republicans consequently would have carried four districts in every recent statewide election, even those they've lost. In fact, Donald Trump would have won a majority of the districts in 2020 by at least 15 points despite losing narrowly overall. It's not clear why Republicans aggressively gerrymandered the new map since district-level elections were not in the offing until the court's ruling, but it's possible GOP leaders anticipated they'd lose this suit.

Senate

CT-Sen: Donald Trump on Thursday evening endorsed his former ambassador to Chile, Leora Levy, days ahead of the GOP primary to take on Democratic incumbent Richard Blumenthal. Trump initially made his proclamation by calling Levy's phone while she was attending a party gathering along with her two intra-party rivals, former state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides and Peter Lumaj. (Levy broadcast his voice through the P.A.) He later put out a statement calling Klarides, who has long been a GOP rising star, "Weak on Crime, Weak on our Military and Vets, and will not be protecting our under siege Second Amendment."

PA-Sen: Democrat John Fetterman has announced that he will hold a rally in Erie on Aug. 12, which will be his first since his May stroke.

Governors

FL-Gov: Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried recently aired a spot faulting Rep. Charlie Crist for appointing an "anti-choice extremist" to the state Supreme Court when he was Florida's Republican governor, and Crist has launched a response ad ahead of their Aug. 23 Democratic primary. “The truth: I vetoed anti-abortion legislation to protect your right to choose,” the congressman tells the audience, adding, “Nikki knows I fought for your right to choose.”

In a separate commercial, Crist’s narrator declares that Fried was “close pals with accused sex trafficker [Rep.] Matt Gaetz.” Politico writes that Fried became friends with Gaetz when he was in the state House and she lobbied for the state’s medical marijuana industry, but she says the two are no longer in contact.

KY-Gov: Secretary of State Michael Adams announced Friday that he would run for re-election next year rather than seek the Republican nomination for governor or attorney general.

MI-Gov: NBC reports that the anti-abortion group Right to Life Michigan has reserved $7.8 million in ad time to defeat Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Voters in November will also likely decide on a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right to an abortion.

MS-Gov: State House Speaker Philip Gunn has publicly acknowledged that he's considering waging a 2023 primary bid against Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, saying he is in "constant evaluation" about what to do. Magnolia State politicos have been talking about a potential Gunn campaign for over a year, but Mississippi Today writes, "In recent weeks, though, those rumors have cooled off."

House

FL-04: St. Pete Polls' new survey for Florida Politics gives state Sen. Aaron Bean a hefty 59-16 lead over Erick Aguilar, a Navy veteran who made news last month for getting ejected from the GOP fundraising platform WinRed, in the Aug. 23 primary.

MN-05: Minnesota Public Radio reports that a newly established group called Make A Difference MN 05 has launched a $350,000 TV buy to aid former Minneapolis City Council member Don Samuels in his Tuesday primary battle against Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.

prosecutors

Shelby County, TN District Attorney: Democrats scored a pickup on Thursday in Tennessee's most populous county when former Shelby County Commissioner Steve Mulroy won an eight-year term by unseating Republican incumbent Amy Weirich 56-44.

Shelby County, which is home to Memphis and several of its suburbs, has long been a Democratic bastion in what's become a very red state. However, Weirich, who was appointed by then-Gov. Bill Haslam in 2011, easily won 65-35 in 2014 the last time she was on the ballot. The district attorney, though, made international headlines over the last year by prosecuting a woman with a felony conviction named Pamela Moses for attempting to vote.

As Daniel Nichanian writes in Bolts, Moses, who was also waging a longshot 2019 bid for mayor of Memphis, did not know that the state had permanently banned her from casting a ballot, and her probation officer had mistakenly signed a certificate of restoration to vote. (Moses, who is Black, resides in a state where one in five Black adults cannot vote because of a felony conviction.)

The district attorney's office last year successfully convicted Moses after arguing that she had known she wasn't eligible to vote; Judge Mark Ward sentenced her to six years in prison, declaring, "You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation." However, that wasn't the end of the story.

The Guardian reported earlier this year that the state had learned that Moses had been given wrong instructions about her voting rights days after her certificate was signed. The judge ordered a new trial after this information came to light, but Weirich ultimately decided to dismiss the charges; the district attorney argued that the blame lay with the Tennessee Department of Correction and that her office wasn't at fault. Moses, who still cannot vote, told Bolts afterwards that she believed she'd been prosecuted because of her race and political activism and added, "I think that the goal was to scare people, but it could boomerang."

Mulroy was determined that it would, arguing, "Overcharging and overreach is a theme with this prosecutor and has been for many years." He also faulted Weirich for advocating for a 2014 law that would make it a misdemeanor assault to use drugs while pregnant, saying that it showed how she'd behave once the state banned abortion. (The legislation was not renewed in 2016.)

However, while Shelby County supported Joe Biden 64-30, it was far from certain that enough Democratic voters would show up during the statewide primary to oust their Republican district attorney. In 2014, when Weirich was turning in a landslide victory, approximately 52% of the county's electorate cast a ballot in the GOP primary when Republicans had a competitive Senate primary.

This year, though, neither party had a high-profile statewide primary contest to draw out voters. Ultimately, 63% of Shelby County's voters participated in the Democratic primary for governor, and the bluer electorate helped Mulroy prevail. Ward, the judge who sentenced Moses, also narrowly went down in defeat as well.

Election Result Recaps

AZ-Gov: The Associated Press has called Tuesday's Republican primary for Kari Lake, a former local TV anchor turned far-right conspiracy theorist. The Trump-backed Lake leads Board of Regents member Karrin Taylor Robson, who had the support of termed-out Gov. Doug Ducey, 47-43. Lake, whom Ducey said weeks ago was "misleading voters with no evidence," will go up against Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

 AZ-04: The AP has also projected that self-funding restaurant owner Kelly Cooper has defeated former Arizona Bankers Association president Tanya Wheeless, who had the backing of the Congressional Leadership Fund, for the right to take on Democratic Rep. Greg Stanton. Wheeless benefited from $1.5 million in outside support, but she trails Cooper 28-25​. Biden would have carried the new 4th District 54-44, while he took Stanton’s existing 9th 61-37.

TN-05: Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles won Thursday's Republican primary for this newly-gerrymandered seat by defeating former state House Speaker Beth Harwell 37-26. Ogles, who is a former state director for the Koch network's Americans for Prosperity, benefited from spending from groups affiliated with the Club for Growth; the mayor celebrated his win by declaring, "Liberals, we're coming for you."

Ogles will face Democratic state Sen. Heidi Campbell in the fall in a seat the GOP did everything it could to flip. Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper decided to retire here after the GOP legislature transmuted his seat from a 60-37 Biden district to a 54-43 Trump constituency by cracking the city of Nashville.

 WA-04: The AP has called a general election matchup between incumbent Dan Newhouse and Democrat Doug White, which makes Newhouse the first House Republican to beat a Trump-endorsed intra-party foe after supporting impeachment. (California Rep. David Valadao made it through his own June top-two primary, but Trump did not take sides in that one.) Newhouse is in first with 26%, while White leads 2020 Republican gubernatorial nominee Loren Culp 25-21 for second. Trump would have taken this eastern Washington seat 57-40.

WA-08: Both 2020 nominee Jesse Jensen and King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn conceded Tuesday's top-two primary to their fellow Republican, 2020 attorney general nominee Matt Larkin, shortly before the AP called the race. Democratic Rep. Kim Schrier was at 48% of the vote on Sunday evening while Larkin led Dunn 17-15; Jensen was in fourth with 13%. Biden would have carried this suburban Seattle constituency 52-45.

AZ-SoS: The Associated Press has called the Democratic primary for former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, who leads House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding 53-47. Fontes will go up against Republican state Rep. Mark Finchem, a QAnon supporter who led the failed effort to overturn Biden's victory and attended the Jan. 6 rally just ahead of the attack on the Capitol.

Ad Roundup

The Downballot: The Kansas abortion earthquake, with Quinn Yeargain (transcript)

Kansas rocked the political world on Tuesday night, rejecting an attempt to amend the state constitution to strip away the right to an abortion in a massive landslide. In this week's edition of The Downballot, we pick apart the vote with law professor Quinn Yeargain, an expert on state constitutions. Yeargain explains how the amendment came to be on the ballot, what might've caused the huge spike in voter turnout, and what lessons Democrats should take away from the election (hint: abortion rights are popular, so lean into them).

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap Tuesday's other key races, including Trump picks prevailing in Senate races in Arizona and Missouri (if you allow that "ERIC" nonsense); a pro-impeachment House Republican going down to defeat in a Michigan seat Democrats are now better-positioned to flip in November; and the return of the notorious Kris Kobach, who narrowly won the GOP nod for Kansas attorney general and could once again jeopardize his party's chances in a race Republicans have no business losing.

Please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

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. You can subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts, and we'd be grateful if you would leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple podcasts.

David Beard:

Primary season is back in full force this week and we have a ton to cover. So what are we going through today?

David Nir:

Oh man, do we ever. We are going to be wrapping up results in Kansas, Arizona, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington. And of course, we are going to be spending a lot of time talking about that state constitutional amendment vote that went down in massive flames on Tuesday night. We're going to be talking about that with law professor Quinn Yeargain, a long-time Daily Kos Elections community member and an expert on state constitutions. So, so much to dive into. Let's get started.

David Nir:

We have a ton of elections to catch up on from Tuesday night. Number one, of course, on everyone's lips is the Kansas constitutional amendment that would have stripped the right to an abortion from the state constitution. It went down to defeat in flames by a huge double-digit margin, about 18 points. We are going to get into that one in great depth with our guest on this show coming up in the second part of this program, but there is one other Kansas race, though, that we do want to mention. That's the Republican primary for state attorney general. That position is open this year and the GOP primary was won by Kris Kobach, the former secretary of state, who you'll remember from his disastrous 2018 bid for governor. He was so awful that he played a key role in allowing Democrat Laura Kelly to flip that seat. Kelly is up for reelection this year.

David Nir:

Kobach also ran for Senate in 2020 and Republicans were so worried that he could jeopardize that race, too, that they spent millions of dollars to successfully stop him from getting the nomination. Outside Republican groups really didn't try to stop Kobach this year and there's a chance that his sheer and unique awfulness will put this race into play. He faces Democrat Chris Mann in November.

David Beard:

And Kobach, of course, has near-universal name recognition among Republican primary voters after such contested races over the past four years. So the fact that he only got 42% of the Republican primary vote here shows that there are a ton of Republicans who did not want him to be the nominee and who could potentially vote for the Democrat in November.

David Nir:

Over to Arizona. We also had a bunch of hot races there. In the GOP primary for governor, it still has no call from the Associated Press, but former TV anchor Kari Lake, who is Donald Trump's pick, leads Karrin Taylor Robson by about 2% of the vote. In a great irony, Robson won the vote that was tallied on the earlier side while Lake dominated among the vote that came in on Election Day. Lake is an extreme Big Lie conspiracy theorist who is exactly the sort of Republican who would scream about the results shifting after Election Day, except, of course, they've shifted in her favor this time. She is looking like the likely nominee at this point and she will take on Democrat Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, who won her primary easily. This is for an open seat held by term-limited Republican governor Doug Ducey.

David Nir:

Of course, Arizona also has an extremely high-profile race for Senate where Blake Masters won with 39% of the vote. He is the candidate backed by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and also Donald Trump. He will face Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly, who, of course, won the special election to flip this seat two years ago. Kelly has absolutely dominated in fundraising. Polls show him with small leads. Of course, Republicans are going to do everything they can to try to take this seat back, but right now it looks like Kelly has a small edge.

David Beard:

Then up in Michigan, there were a number of really important races that took place on Tuesday. We'll start at the top with the governor's race, where conservative commentator Tudor Dixon comfortably won the GOP nomination for governor with 41% of the vote and she'll be facing Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer, who will seek a second term. Of course, this race was shaken up after two leading candidates where dropped from the Republican primary ballot after fraud was discovered in their election petitions, which left, really, a total lack of a frontrunner and real lack of clarity. Of course, Tudor Dixon started to come to the front and then Trump endorsed her, which very much solidified her position as the frontrunner and so she'll face Whitmer this November.

David Beard:

Then there were two congressional incumbents who were defeated in Michigan on primary night. We'll start in the 3rd District where John Gibbs defeated GOP incumbent Peter Meijer, who, of course, was one of 10 Republicans to vote for Donald Trump's impeachment, which painted a very large target on his back, of course, by Trump and many others in the Trumpist wing of the party. It ended up being very close. Gibbs won by 52 to 48 margin. I think the expectation was that Gibbs would win a little more comfortably than that, but of course margin doesn't matter when you've advanced to the general election. Gibbs will go on to face Hillary Scholten in November in a seat that Biden won by 9 points, so should be highly competitive.

David Beard:

Then in the 11th District, two democratic incumbents were paired together after redistricting and representative Haley Stevens defeated Andy Levin in this matchup, winning by about 60% to 40%. Stevens and Levin each won their parts of the district fairly comfortably, but Stevens really dominated in the part of the district neither of them had represented before, which led to her comfortable victory.

David Nir:

One really unfortunate thing about this outcome is that Levin was a rather well-liked member of Congress, especially among progressives and labor and a lot of folks, not just commentators like ourselves, but other members of Congress really felt that he should have run in the open 10th District. That is certainly a much more difficult district. It is very narrowly divided, whereas the 11th is comfortably blue-leaning. Of course, Levin, if he had run in the 10th, might nonetheless have lost in November, but he at least would've had a stronger chance of returning to Congress. The fact that he got blown out 60 to 40 is really an unsurprising result that I think a lot of folks had anticipated.

David Nir:

Moving over to Missouri, we had a hotly contested GOP primary for the state's open Senate seat, but it turned into a landslide there. State Attorney General Eric Schmitt won with 46% of the vote. He beat Rep. Vicky Hartzler, who took just 22% and disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens' finish with just 19%. This, of course, is the race where the day before the election, Donald Trump oh so cleverly decided to endorse ERIC in all caps so that way he wouldn't have to decide between Eric Schmitt, who the GOP establishment greatly preferred, and Eric Greitens, who, because he is an alleged abuser, Donald Trump preferred. Trump did totally hate Vicky Hartzler, reportedly, because she refused to back off her criticisms of Trump's behavior around Jan. 6. So Trump gets his Eric, and Schmitt will now face off against Democrat Trudy Busch Valentine. This is a seat that Republicans are overwhelmingly favored to hold.

David Beard:

Lastly, we'll wrap up in Washington state where we have partial results. Of course, Washington state is almost entirely vote by mail and as a result, many of the ballots will come in the days to follow, obviously, as long as they've been postmarked by Election Day, but we do have a significant chunk of results and so we can look at the results in the two Congressional races where GOP representatives who voted to impeach Donald Trump were facing Trumpist challengers who were trying to knock them out of the top two slot. Of course, in Washington state, everyone runs on one primary ballot and the top two finishers in the primary advance to the general election. And it's looking like as of now, with the results that we have, both Jaime Herrera Beutler in the 3rd District and Dan Newhouse in the 4th District will be able to advance to the general election in the top two slot for November.

David Beard:

Right now, in the 3rd District, we've got Marie Perez, who is the main Democrat leading with 32% of the vote. We've got Herrera Beutler in second place with about 25% of the vote and Joe Kent, who is the Trump-endorsed candidate, on 20% of the vote and that's with about 57% estimated in. And then in the 4th District, Dan Newhouse is leading with 27% of the vote. He's the incumbent Republican. Doug White, the main Democrat, has 26% of the vote. He's in the second spot. And Loren Culp, who was the, again, Trumpist-endorsed challenger, has 22%, so in third place. And really, in both of these cases, the Trumpist candidates were hurt strongly by the clown car effect, for lack of a better term. There were four Republicans running against Herrera Beutler and they combined for over 35% of the vote, which would've comfortably led Herrera Beutler's 25%. And over in the 4th District, there were six Republicans challenging Dan Newhouse and the one Democrat and they combined for over 40% of the vote. Had one challenger been able to consolidate the Republican anti-Newhouse and anti-Herrera Beutler vote, there's a good chance they would've been able to advance and certainly, in the 3rd District, they would've advanced against the Democrat.

David Beard:

It's conceivable you would've ended up with Newhouse versus Trumpist candidate in the 4th District because that's much more a Republican district, but either way, it looks like both Newhouse and Herrera Beutler will likely advance and then will likely comfortably win their elections in November.

David Nir:

That means as a result, we might see as few as three of the 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment on the November ballot. The only other one with a guaranteed spot is David Valadao in California's 21st District. Liz Cheney still has her primary coming up, but she is looking very likely to lose. Valadao could also certainly lose the general election as well. So if Newhouse and Herrera Beutler hold on, they might be the only two pro-impeachment Republicans to make it into the 118th Congress.

David Nir:

That does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we are going to be talking with state constitutional expert Quinn Yeargain about the amazing results out of Kansas and also interesting and quirky features of state constitutions nationwide. Please stay with us.

David Nir:

I am extremely excited to introduce our guest on today's show. Quinn Yeargain is an assistant professor of law at the Widener University Commonwealth Law School and they're also an expert on state constitutions and a longtime Daily Kos Elections/Swing State Project community member, so it's amazing to see someone who I originally knew in the comments section truly make good in this field. Quinn, thank you so much for joining us.

Quinn Yeargain:

It's fantastic to be here. And I'll just say I think I've been around since 2009 and a number of comments helped inspire some of my very, very first academic works. It's really been a wonderful community and I'm so glad to come back in this capacity.

David Nir:

That is truly fantastic to hear about that inspiration and what makes it all the more perfect is that the area of expertise that you have developed in state constitutions and state politics is exactly what we have to talk about on this episode. On Tuesday night, we, of course, saw Kansas voters reject an attempt to amend their state constitution by a massive landslide, 59-41 margin. This amendment would have said that the Kansas Constitution does not recognize any right to an abortion. And the most amazing thing about this, to me anyway, is that Republicans did this to themselves. They handed themselves this opportunity for this enormous defeat because they're the ones who put this amendment on the ballot in the first place. So Quinn, why don't you walk us through the background about how exactly we got here?

Quinn Yeargain:

Yeah. Kansas is a place that rather strangely, maybe, has had a pretty good string of Democratic governors in the last 15 years or so. And so as a result, for a while, a majority of the Kansas Supreme Court has been Democratic appointees. And so a few years ago, the Kansas legislature passed a pretty strict abortion ban on some second-trimester abortions, specifically dilation and extraction abortions. And several Kansas doctors challenged that in state court, arguing for the very, very first time to the Kansas Supreme Court that the Kansas Constitution's Bill of Rights actually is more expansive than the U.S. Constitution and contains an explicit and stronger protection of abortion rights than the U.S. Constitution does.

The Kansas Supreme Court was almost entertained by this argument because they pointed out nobody really litigates state constitutional provisions. Anytime that anybody's making an allegation that something violates a right or a liberty or something like that, they rely on the federal constitution, so this was the first time that they'd ever had the opportunity to actually rule on this. And in a 6-1 ruling that Kansas Supreme Court said, "Yes, there is a right to abortion in the Kansas Constitution," they used something akin to strict scrutiny, which is really, really critical of government regulation of particular rights to strike down this particular law.

But the effects of this, actually, weren't really all that clear. Kansas has had a Democratic governor again since 2019 with Laura Kelly and so the legislature hasn't had an opportunity to really try a whole lot to outlaw abortion. They have a veto-proof majority right now. It's not clear if it's actually a veto-proof majority to enact new abortion regulations and so the actual long-term impact of this ruling is not really all that clear. So in 2021, they proposed an amendment to the Kansas Constitution that said that there's no right to an abortion or government-funded abortions in the Kansas Constitution. And then they decided to schedule it in a way that coincided with the Republican primary, or all primaries in Kansas, in the hopes that it would ultimately benefit their side to have that, so they called a special election and happened to have it coincide with the primary election, then obviously, went down in flames and defeat.

David Nir:

You mentioned that Republicans put the amendment on the ballot, but they took that action in 2021. Do you know why it took so long, basically almost a year and a half, before it could actually come up for a vote?

Quinn Yeargain:

So they could schedule a special election for any time that they want, I believe, and so this is more my guess than a statement of fact, but I think that they decided that it would probably be to their advantage to do it when there was a contested Republican primary. At this point in 2021, I think it looked like there was going to be a contested Republican primary for governor. And in that event, high Republican turnout probably would've been really helpful. Obviously, that didn't end up being the case and Derek Schmidt won his nomination pretty much unopposed, seriously unopposed anyway, so it didn't end up panning out for that reason. But even in Kansas, when there's no real big contest, you're still going to get more Republicans turning out, especially in a primary election, than you are Democrats.

David Nir:

And yeah, on that note, it is pretty clear that they were hoping for generally low turnout in a summertime primary, perhaps juiced by this gubernatorial primary that really never came to pass, but we saw that backfire spectacularly. Just to put this in perspective, as of right now, more than 900,000 voters showed up on Tuesday. And many of them, as Beard noted on Twitter, only voted for the amendment. They didn't vote in other races. By comparison, in the 2018 general election, which saw an extremely heated race for governor, you had about 1 million voters, so we're talking turnout of almost 90% for a summertime primary compared to a general election. What do you make of that?

Quinn Yeargain:

I saw somebody on Twitter say that this is what happens when the dog catches the car. For years, Republicans have been pushing to overturn Roe v. Wade, to criminalize abortion and I don't think that they've really grappled with the electoral consequences of actually getting what it is that they've been organizing for the last 50 years. And you have this thing that is not wanted by the vast majority of Americans, the exact percentage, obviously, depending on how you ask the question, but Americans generally supporting Roe v. Wade and a lot of voters haven't really had to grapple with what do their votes mean when it does actually determine whether abortion is legal in their state or not. And that's where I think a lot of this comes from, that voters understood even with the bullshit way in which this amendment was written, which was terribly unclear, I think voters grasp that, "Okay. If this amendment passes, then the legislature is pretty much free to do whatever it wants to regulate or much more likely outlaw abortion altogether."

And I think that in that kind of context, when you don't have to sort through the issues, a candidate's platform, anything like that, you don't have to think really critically. It's really one thing that you care about on the ballot and that's what you have to show up and do. The stakes are really clear. It's really understandable. Voters get that and I think that it made it really easy for people to get involved. I think it also helps that when you're seen as doing this backhanded sneaky move of scheduling the election at a weird time, I think it's really easy for it to backfire and I think that it absolutely did that here. I think it's the exact same dynamic that in South Dakota two months ago, when, again, legislature put an amendment on the ballot in the primary election, voters came out in droves to oppose it. I think it's the exact same dynamic.

David Nir:

I did appreciate when Republicans on Twitter, as soon as it became clear they were going to go down to defeat, started complaining that the badly written ballot language, which was written by Republicans, as the reason that voters voted against the amendment, so that was a nice bit from after the election. But before the election, you actually went and predicted that the amendment would fail on Twitter in part, because, and I quote, "The surprisingly close outcome of similar amendments in more conservative states." And you also predicted it would be a margin of 8 to 10 points, which it, of course, ended up being even larger than that but that was fairly close, considering the close polling that had taken place before. So what led you to make that prediction?

Quinn Yeargain:

Well, what really inspired it was I saw a tweet that summarized a press briefing that the Kansas Secretary of State's Office had with reporters when they said that turnout was exceeding their wildest expectations and they'd previously disclosed a few days ago that they were anticipating high turnout. And so to hear that, that they're anticipating really, really, really high turnout that's higher than what they were anticipating anyway, which is already going to be high, that made me have the realization, that the dynamic that I just talked about. When you are trying to sneak something through and voters get wind of what's going on, I think that dynamic can flip on you where it can supercharge turnout in the exact opposite direction. It makes it easy for voters to turn out because like I said, there's one thing that they really care about on the ballot. It's easy for them to do it.

And if you look at the range with which states have ratified similar amendments, it’s all over the map. You have Alabama and Louisiana ratifying amendments like this with really, really high double-digit margins but then in Tennessee and West Virginia, only by single digits and it's pretty close. And the real difference is that in Tennessee and West Virginia, there were state-supporting court holdings on point that were the law in those states that said that there is an independent state constitutional right to an abortion. So by voting yes in those two states, voters were actually changing the status quo. But in Alabama and Louisiana, those constitutions have never been held to imply any sort of separate right to an abortion.

And Kyle Kondik had shared this really interesting article that came out last year on the status quo bias in ballot initiatives and that when push comes to shove, if an amendment or an initiative is going to change the status quo dramatically, “no” probably has something of a built-in advantage because voters aren't going to do something if they don't fully understand the consequences. All that stuff came together and I think that Kansas is a state that seems uniquely primed to not want something like this, despite its socially conservative reputation, because it's also a heavily suburban state. And if you supercharged suburban turnout, which seems like that's exactly what happened, then that suggested to me that it would lose by a fairly wide margin. I think that pretty much everybody's wrong assumption was that they were too conservative about how supportive of abortion rights they thought Kansans would be, which is a fun sentence that you didn't really think you'd get to say in 2022.

David Nir:

Speaking of that status quo bias, we've talked on this show about two other states where abortion will also be on the ballot this fall: Michigan, where activists are trying to enshrine abortion rights affirmatively into the state constitution, and then Kentucky, where an amendment similar to the one that just went down in flames in Kansas is going to be on the ballot. Now, Kentucky is a much more conservative state even than Kansas is. Trump won it by 26 points; he won Kansas by about 15 points. And also, Kentucky, based on your research as I understand it, does not have a similar State Supreme Court ruling that has said there is a right to an abortion, so you don't have that status quo bias in place. So what, if anything, do you think the Kansas vote says about the chances of defeating the similar amendment in Kentucky?

Quinn Yeargain:

I think it's tough. I mean, obviously, Kentucky is a much more conservative place, I think, maybe not in terms of always how it's voted in the past, obviously, at the state level, but in terms of the values that a lot of its voters have. 

It's a much more socially conservative place. I think that there are also fewer places that you'd logically anticipate might otherwise vote for Republicans, but would vote against something like this. I mean, you're really putting a lot of stock in the three Kentucky counties that are sort of the Cincinnati suburbs, really having sort of a hard left shift that they kind of had in 2019, but not as much and not as dramatically as Kansas. It all comes down to what the Kentucky courts do in the next few months.

As you know, a couple weeks ago, a Kentucky court blocked the state's abortion ban on state constitutional grounds. That ruling was later stayed, but it could well be the case that the Kentucky Supreme Court steps in at some point to issue some ruling. I'm pretty doubtful that they would come in and say, yes, there is a separate constitutional right to abortion in the Kentucky Constitution. It's a pretty conservative court. That would be pretty surprising to me. I guess if I really had to predict an outcome, I would say it probably narrowly passes, but I'm not confident enough in that. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some kind of backlash, but anticipating a double-digit win like in Kansas seems too optimistic.

David Beard:

Now, there're a ton of states that won't allow initiatives on abortion moving forward because of the variety of ways in which states govern and have rules around that. Folks are going to have to look to Democrats to protect abortion rights. Now, Trump, as Nir mentioned, won Kansas by 15 points, but the no vote prevailed by 18 points. So that's a massive, massive 33-point swing and it means that a hugely significant number of Kansas voters voted for Donald Trump and then voted against that amendment.

But of course, as we've seen in a lot of instances, voting on an amendment or an issue does not necessarily translate to voters voting for the party associated with that position on that issue. What can Democrats learn? What can progressives learn thinking through this and how to use this to motivate, to pull votes for Democrats in these states where you're not going to have an amendment to vote on for abortion rights?

Quinn Yeargain:

I think that the message kind of has to be that abortion is on the ballot, even where it isn't explicitly. I think that the idea that the sort of generic congressional ballot would have this kind of vacillation that it's had back to Democrats where I think it's tied in 538's tracker as of today, to me that's not something that really is all that common in midterm elections. Not to mention the fact that Biden's approval is obviously still really bad and Democrats are doing much better than you anticipate given that as well as general pessimism relating to the economy. And that suggests to me that there's some sort of fundamental shift in this country, that voters really do actually care about this in a way that maybe they're not actually showing to pollsters.

And I think that, especially in swing states—it’s probably less likely to be successful in really conservative states—Democrats have to lean into this message. I think at this point it is about base mobilization. It's obviously about persuasion too, but abortion is an issue where you can both motivate and persuade. I think that making the stakes really clear to voters that if you vote for a Republican, for governor, for legislature, they'll ban abortion. There's not a question about that. They'll ban abortion. And to the extent that they're saying, “Oh no, we won't,” a lot of them are on record saying that's exactly what they want to do.

There are these really draconian laws that maybe they never thought would ever come into effect, maybe where they were just test cases to get them the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. It doesn't matter because they can be the law now. So I think that in a way that they've never really had to in the past, Republicans really have to stand on their record on abortion. And it's not a record that I think a lot of voters are going to be sympathetic to once they learn a little bit more about it.

I think that rather than buying into the nonsense advice of just playing to pocketbook issues or something like that, they need to lean into something like this. Abortion is a pocketbook issue. Tell someone who is not of very much money in a very conservative state, that's bordered by other conservative states, who has to either take a flight or drive hundreds of miles to get an abortion, that's a pocketbook issue. And I think they're framing it in sort of that kind of economic justice way, I think that could be successful. I also think that again, this is something that you can both motivate and mobilize on. And so in the end, I think that this is a winning issue for Democrats.

David Beard:

Obviously, abortion is going to be the number one issue for the election going forward, at least for large segments of the population, but there are quite a few other ballot initiatives taking place in other states. And we want to keep an eye on those too. So what are some of the most interesting issues that are going to be going directly before voters this year?

Quinn Yeargain:

Well, in pretty much every state, there's something interesting on the ballot somewhere. Maybe it's interesting to just a really narrow sliver of the population and me on top of that, but it's interesting to someone somewhere. I think that one of the biggest things that is happening this year is Alabama is voting on what you might call a new constitution. Alabama has long had the longest constitution, not just of any state, but of any country or subnational entity anywhere in the world and it's bulky, it's overburdened, and they're voting on a new one this year. Hooray, it's going to be shorter. But even with all of the racist provisions cut out and all of the superseded provisions cut out, it's still going to be the longest constitution anywhere in the world. So maybe not that impactful on practice.

In terms of some attacks on direct democracy, there're two in Arizona that I think are significant to point out. Arizona does not have a single subject requirement for its initiated statutes and constitutional amendments. Single subject requirements are hardly ever applied in any sort of consistent way. And a lot of courts use them to strike down a lot of progressive initiatives. Florida, horrible offender on this. Arizona doesn't have one, but there is one on the ballot this year to add one.

They're also trying to raise the threshold required for initiated amendments in both Arizona and Arkansas to 60%. There hasn't been a huge effort in Arkansas to use the initiative process, but it's been used some in the last few years. There are some changes to the structure of state government. There's an amendment on the ballot in Arizona to create a lieutenant governor. There's also one in West Virginia that would bar any state court from exercising jurisdiction over impeachments. Hypothetically, should that ever be relevant again, definitely not based on the time that the state legislature launched a coup of the state Supreme Court in 2018, and some of the court stepped in to stop some of that.

And there're also some efforts in a couple states that would allow the legislature to call itself into special session. That's a really small, specific thing to point out, but in a lot of states, legislatures actually can't convene themselves unless the governor calls them at a session, and that affects a lot of things, like how long governor's appointments serve or appointees serve, administrative rules and regulations, and really limits the ability to legislature to check the governor. This is happening in a lot of states where there's been pushback to public health measures in particular. And if the legislature's out of session, it can't undo the governor's public health measures. So those are on the ballot in Arkansas, Idaho, and Kentucky.

There could be some election law changes. There's an early voting constitutional amendment in Connecticut finally, and there's going to be a top five primary election amendment on the ballot in Nevada this year. We mentioned some of the other abortion amendments. There's also going to be two, one in California, one in Vermont, that will add abortion protections to the state constitution. Neither of those currently has that. And then there's other various and assorted fun things: an affirmative right to health care in Oregon, something that is relevant given how frequently Senate Republicans have fled the state in Oregon. An amendment that would ban absentee lawmakers from running for reelection. Medicaid expansion in South Dakota and right to work in Tennessee.

David Beard:

So you mentioned the initiative to create a lieutenant governor position in Arizona. Many states now have lieutenant governors, but that wasn't always the case. It's one of the more interesting creations of American politics since the creation of the country, and you've done a lot of research into that. So tell us about sort of the evolution of lieutenant governors, and if you think there's a best way to handle this position out of the many, many ways states do so.

Quinn Yeargain:

Yeah. There're a lot of very specific things that I've chosen to focus on or obsess over in the last few years and lieutenant governors are one of them just because it's kind of a fun role. It's only relevant in a handful of cases, really just for stepping in when the governor vacates for whatever reason. That's just kind of a fun idea to me that there's a position specifically just for that.

In many cases in many states, that's literally all that it does. It doesn't have any other constitutional responsibilities. And most states did not have lieutenant governors. I mean, most states did not even have popularly elected governors in 1776 when a lot of state constitutions were drafted or even in 1789, when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. That happened over time, but they didn't have lieutenant governors either. In most states, the president of the state Senate became governor if there was a vacancy and this triggered a lot of very silly questions like, well, the state Senate president is a temporary job technically. What if somebody else is elected state Senate president? What happens then if they're the acting governor?

Most state courts answering this question said, well, then the position of acting governor switches to the new Senate president, which is really weird and really chaotic. There's also the question, if the state Senate president is acting as governor, do they actually become governor? And the answer is no, they don't. Well, okay. Do they then stay as state Senate president? And in some cases, the answer is yes. And so all sorts of really weird questions resulting in really unsatisfactory succession procedures, ultimately, and they very, very slowly produce this gigantic increase in the number of lieutenant governors.

One of the weirdest things to me is that this was an innovation from the North in Southern constitutions during reconstruction. Southern constitutions were quite anti-democratic, unsurprisingly, before the Civil War. And so they didn't have lieutenant governors in most cases. When northerners came down and a lot of them were at these state constitutional conventions, they created lieutenant governors, sometimes copied and pasted from their home constitutions. The Democrats in these states hated lieutenant governors with a burning passion. They specifically amended their constitutions and got rid of lieutenant governors and unloaded them with a burning weird passion. And it was only when a lot of these states again had problems with succession that they were recreated and they've ultimately been recreated in every state that they've been abolished in.

So it's just one of these weird things that the history of it is extremely specific, has a lot of really weird stories, and it's just one of these facets of modern state government that we don't really think about all that much. In terms of a model procedure, I think that team ticket elections are better than not just because I can't really imagine in most cases that voters are really making a conscious decision of, “Okay, I'm going to elect a Democrat as governor and a Republican as lieutenant governor. So if the Democrat governor vacates, then a Republican becomes governor.” I'm not sure that's a choice that voters are making a lot of the time.

I think they're just—you have somebody like John Bel Edwards in Louisiana that voters really like, and there's nobody comparably like that at the lieutenant governor level running in that race. So I think team ticket elections are better. I think that the idea of having separate primaries is kind of weird. It's been called a shotgun wedding and I prefer to think of it as a double blind experiment where voters are choosing a running mate for a gubernatorial nominee they don't know.

And you can't really do that because if you're trying to balance something out, you can't if you don't know what you're trying to balance. Some of the arguments in opposition to creating team ticket elections when this first happened in the 50s and 60s was, well, it's just going to encourage gubernatorial nominees to pick somebody who's going to balance the ticket. And it's like, yeah, that's the whole point. That's exactly why you do that to ensure some sort of geographic diversity and now some sort of racial diversity or gender diversity or ideological diversity. So I think the idea of separate primaries is not good. Where I don't—and this is I realize far more specific than the question you were asking—where I don't have a clear answer myself is whether there should be a rule that gubernatorial candidates have to pick a running mate before the primary, or if they can do it after the primary.

David Nir:

So Quinn, one other area that your work touches on, particularly with regard to state constitutions, is of course redistricting. And there was an unusual situation that together we explored at Daily Kos Elections and yourself, regarding Montana, which somehow is going to finish out the year 2022 without adopting new legislative maps, even though of course every other state has produced new legislative maps because we got census data last year from the 2020 census. So what did you uncover with Montana? Why are they so weird? Why don't they have new maps?

Quinn Yeargain:

This is the dumbest shit. So when the Montana Constitution was amended in the 1970s, it created a redistricting commission to draw state legislative and congressional maps. This is a bipartisan commission that's selected from the majority and minority parties and the state legislature. And then they picked a theoretically independent fifth member. And so the way that it basically works is different for each of those two responsibilities that it has.

So congressional maps, super easy. It gets the census data. It draws the maps and it files them with the secretary of state, easy. With state legislative maps, there are a couple of things that are intersecting in really weird ways. The kicker is that the legislature has to have the opportunity to provide feedback on the maps. This feedback is totally gratuitous and the commission doesn't have to take it into account, but it still has to provide it. So the basic confines are as follows: The commission gets the data from the Census Bureau. It has to hold at least one public hearing. And then at the next regular session of the legislature, whatever the next regular session is, it gives its map proposal to the legislature, gets its feedback on the proposal, makes any modifications it wants to, and then files them with the secretary of state.

Now at no step in that process did I say anything that explicitly, like to people who are listening really carefully, necessarily requires that this happened on an off cycle. The problem though is that the Montana legislature's regular session is once every two years in odd-numbered years. So if the redistricting commission doesn't get the data from the Census Bureau until the legislature's regular session is over, then it has to wait until the next regular session to give the legislature its proposed map.

To provide a specific example, last year, the states got their data from the Census Bureau in August 2021. The only regular session that the Montana legislature will have from 2021 through the end of 2022 ended in spring of 2021. So it was too late to do anything. So it has to wait until spring of 2023 to give its legislature that proposed map, get any gratuitous feedback that the legislature wants to provide—which it can totally ignore—make any revisions, and then file them with the secretary of state for some sort of election in 2024.

David Nir:

Now, the maps that Montana is going to use this year are badly malapportioned. Some districts have too many people, some districts have too few people. This would seem to violate the well-settled constitutional provision of one person, one vote, particularly because we have new and better census data. Could someone have sued to force Montana to make new maps earlier?

Quinn Yeargain:

They totally could have. It's really kind of astounding that nobody did. This was litigated in Maine, for example, with respect to congressional districts, which Maine was theoretically operating on a similar cycle as Montana until 2011, 2013. And it's astounding that nobody sued because what do you really have to lose? If you're Democrats in Montana, why not do it? You're in a permanent ... Probably a permanent minority for a while, unless the state radically changes. Why not upend everything and force new elections with new maps this year, rather than relying on these malapportioned maps?

I think the real challenge is it's obviously too late to sue now, and it's not necessarily clear if in the aggregate, the map is unconstitutional. The typical standard used by the Supreme Court basically says that if there's 10% population deviation between the largest district and the smallest district, it's probably okay. And if it's greater than 10% deviation, it's probably not. With relevant context, adding color as necessary. But there is at least a plausible case that this was unconstitutional, that it is unconstitutional. That at a bare minimum, the elections taking place this year are unconstitutional, but obviously nothing happened. But I think that's my perpetual frustration. There is a lot of stuff that happens that arguably violates one person, one vote or basic principles of settled election law that just go totally uncontested. Like the fact that the Nebraska special congressional election last month happened under the new district boundaries instead of the old district boundaries. Illegal, clearly illegal, but nobody sued. I don't know why. If I were barred in Montana, I would sue on their behalf, but I'm not.

David Nir:

Now, as we've mentioned, state constitutions can be quite unusual documents. They can vary a lot. So is there any particular provision or amendment that you found in your research that is really, really strange or out there?

Quinn Yeargain:

So there're two that I think are particularly interesting or funny. One of the ones is from 1934, when the state of Louisiana added a map to its constitution. One of the amendments was about highway routes that it was paving. And rather than specify where the highway routes were, they drew a map and added it into the constitution to say this is where the highway routes should go. And it's 1934. So it's not a great map with a lot of detail. And that's how the routes had to be drawn, with this map that was in the constitution.

And I first saw this, not even when I was looking at specific amendments, I was looking at a dated Louisiana Constitution from some year. And I saw a map in there and I thought there's no way. That doesn't make any sense. But indeed, I went back, looked at the specific amendment and indeed it appended a map to the Louisiana Constitution.

David Nir:

I have to ask, why couldn't they just pass a law or regular statute saying build the roads here. Why did they have to amend their constitution to do that?

Quinn Yeargain:

I think asking why didn't the Louisiana legislature simply pass a law instead of a constitutional amendment is a great question that I really wish that they had asked themselves between the years of 1920 and 1970. There was one year, for example, when there were enough amendments added to the Louisiana Constitution that it added a whole 65 pages to its constitution. Longer than most state constitutions anyway, but it added that year alone, 34 amendments added 47,000 words. So it's a great question. A great question.

David Nir:

But one with no answer.

Quinn Yeargain:

One with no answer. The second amendment that I came across that I just ... I really thought I misunderstood it at first as an amendment to the Colorado Constitution in the 1970s that said that before any nuclear device is put into the ground and detonated, it has to have been put to the voters and gotten their approval. And my first gut reaction to that was what are you talking about? Like what on Earth are you talking about? Are you talking about the U.S. government getting permission from voters before it ... Does it test? Are you talking about the Soviets, like petitioning for an initiative measure before they bomb Pueblo? What are you talking about? And it's not about that at all. It's actually about using nuclear devices to shake loose gas that's in mineral formations in the state so that it can extract the gas, which has been done a few times apparently, and was not well received by Colorado voters understandably.

So they pass an amendment barring the detonation of nuclear devices. It's still in the Colorado Constitution. If you live there, I think it's article 25 or 26 of the Colorado Constitution. It's still there. So it's still the case. So I guess any would-be nuclear powers up there—if Kim Jong-un is listening, you have to get the voters’ approval before launching a nuclear attack in Colorado.

David Nir:

I would love to see that litigated in court one day. We have been talking with Quinn Yeargin, who is an assistant professor of law at Widener University Commonwealth Law School, long time DKE and SSP community member. Quinn, it has been fantastic having you on the program and I hope we can have you back to talk about some more of these state elections soon.

Quinn Yeargain:

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

David Nir:

That's all from us this week. Thanks to Quinn Yeargain for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach us by email at thedownballot@dailycoast.com. If you haven't already, 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.

Trump pledges to campaign against Manchin in West Virginia because of spending bill deal

Former President Donald Trump on Friday pledged to campaign in West Virginia against Sen. Joe Manchin because of the Democrat's $739 billion tax hike and climate change deal. 

Trump said that Manchin and Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who are both up for reelection in 2024, would pay a heavy political price for agreeing to back the deal after previously withholding their support.

SCHUMER AND MANCHIN'S $700B SPENDING BILL UNDERCUTS EFFORTS TO WOO BLUE-COLLAR VOTERS

"What the happened to Manchin and Sinema, what the hell happened, where did this new philosophy come from," Trump said during an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas. "I think if this deal passes, they will both lose their next election, I do believe that, West Virginia and Arizona will not stand for what they did to them." 

The former president's remarks came as the Senate was debating the massive spending measure. Written by the Democrats, the legislation raises taxes by $739 billion over the next decade. 

Most of the money, nearly $440 billion, is slated to go towards climate change subsidies in hopes of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030. 

DONALD TRUMP HINTS AT 2024 WHITE HOUSE COMEBACK BID: ‘THE TIME IS COMING’

Given widespread GOP opposition, Manchin and Sinema's support for the bill is key because Democrats plan to push it through the 50-50 Senate using a party-line process known as budget reconciliation. 

"Maybe this speech can stop them, because when Manchin hears me say he's going to lose West Virginia," said Trump. "I'll go down [there] and campaign against him as hard as anybody can." 

Democrats have pitched Manchin-Schumer bill as a salve for inflation. They argue it will lower electricity bills through new climate change subsidies and cap the amount of money that elderly Americans pay out of pocket for some life-saving prescription drugs

"It's a bill for America," said Manchin after agreeing to the deal. "We have an opportunity to lower drug costs for seniors, lower [Obamacare] health care premiums, increase our energy security, and invest in energy technologies — all while reducing our national debt."

Trump, who won West Virginia by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020, contended otherwise, saying the bill's tax provisions were a "rip-off." The former president also questioned Manchin's credibility claiming that the West Virginia Democrat had previously flip-flopped on impeachment. 

"I got along with him fantastically well, he called me all the time," said Trump. "When the impeachment hoax started [Manchin] said: ‘I would never vote against you, you’re a great president.'" 

"Then when we were counting up the numbers … he voted against me," said Trump.

Marjorie Taylor Greene open to White House run ‘down the road’

EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene says she is open to running on a national ticket, either as vice president or as president, at some point in the future. 

"Those are things I'm definitely interested in, as long as I think they're achievable, and I can be effective in those roles," Greene said during an interview with Fox News Digital Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas. "But we'll see what happens down the road." 

The first-term Georgia lawmaker has raised more than $10 million for her reelection campaign since the start of last year. Greene is not just sitting on that money, however. 

Instead, the congresswoman is using it to endorse candidates in line with her and Trump's populist style of politics. In recent months, Greene has backed Ohio's JD Vance and Arizonan Blake Masters in their races for the Senate. 

MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE CONFRONTS DOJ ABOUT ALLEGED 'ENTRAPPING' OF DEFENDANTS IN GOV. WHITMER KIDNAPPING PLOT

"I'd love to see the Republican Party being the party that truly represents the American people," she said. "I think the inner circle inside the GOP is struggling to find that identity, but I hope to play a big role in helping them really realize what their voters want."

A small business owner and mother of three, Greene said she was compelled to seek elective office because Republicans on Capitol Hill were ignoring the conservative base. 

"I'm a regular person, I had no intention of ever becoming a member of Congress, but I can tell you for sure the American people want to see elected leaders in the Republican Party actually doing the job that they campaigned on and say they would do," she said. "I was one of those Americans that felt let down when Republicans didn't get things done like repealing ObamaCare [and] defunding Planned Parenthood."

Trump has recognized Greene as a top ally. 

The Georgia lawmaker vociferously defended Trump during his second impeachment trial last year after the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Dan Newhouse survives Washington primary after vote to impeach Trump

Incumbent GOP Washington Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of two House Republicans in the state who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, has advanced to the general election as he seeks to retain his seat representing Washington's Fourth Congressional District.

Newhouse, a four-term congressman who has served the district since 2015, and Democrat Doug White were essentially tied in the race, with each capturing a little more than 35,000 votes in the crowded race to advance to the fall ballot.

Under Washington’s primary system, all candidates run on the same ballot, and the two candidates who receive the most votes in each race advance to the November election, regardless of party.

Because Washington is a vote-by-mail state and ballots just need to be received by Election Day, it often takes days to learn final results in close races as ballots arrive at county election offices throughout the week.

TRUMP-BACKED WASHINGTON GOP HOUSE CANDIDATES TO TAKE ON PRO-IMPEACHMENT REPUBLICANS

The Trump-endorsed candidate in the race for the Fourth District, Loren Culp, a former Washington police chief, came in third. Following days of vote counts in the state, Culp, who also made a run for governor of the state in 2020, garnered nearly 30,000 votes.

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, another House Republican in the state who voted to impeach Trump, is facing a tough election in the Third Congressional District.

TRUMP'S SWAY OVER GOP STILL STRONG AS HIS ENDORSED CANDIDATES WIN KEY PRIMARIES TUESDAY

In Washington's Third District, Democrat Marie Perez received the highest turnout, with 31% of the vote. Herrera Beutler, who had about 24% on Tuesday night, dropped to 22.6% Thursday night, 257 votes ahead of Joe Kent — a former Green Beret endorsed by Trump — who was at 22.5%.

A mandatory recount would occur if the margin of votes between the No. 2 and No. 3 candidates is less than half of 1% and closer than 2,000 votes, meaning the results for who will advance with Perez to the November election could be delayed if current standings remain.

Of the 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment, four opted not to run for re-election in this year's midterm elections. On Tuesday, incumbent Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer was defeated in a primary by Trump-endorsed John Gibbs and Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina lost to a Trump-endorsed challenger in June. Rep. David Valadao of California — which has an open primary like Washington — survived a primary challenge in June.

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, co-chair of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the capitol, is also preparing for a tough primary election on Aug. 16 against Harriet Hageman, a Trump-backed rival.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Alex Jones has his day in court

John J. Pitney, Jr./Bulwark:

Democrats Are Running as Opposition Party

Usually the out-party runs as the opposition to the White House. This year, the Supreme Court and Trump have made it possible for Democrats to run as a check on Republican extremism.
The in-party has never been able to wear the “check and balance” mantle—until this year. During the 2022 midterm, there are a couple of ways in which the Democratic appeal is essentially that they will act as a counterweight against an out-of-step Republican party.

Put that recession talk away, and change the subject. A vibecession ain't no recession: July payrolls came in at a huge +528k, and unemployment is down to 3.5%. A whap-bop-a-loopa-a-whap-bam-boo!

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) August 5, 2022

Verdict: Alex Jones owes $45.2 million more to Sandy Hook in punitive damages. That's on top of $4.1 million in compensatory. That's $49.3 million to two Sandy Hook families. Two more trials after this. Unanimous verdict (what's required for punitive damages).

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 5, 2022

Bill Scher/Washington Monthly:

The Ads That Won the Kansas Abortion Referendum

Avoiding progressive pieties, the ad makers aimed at the broad, persuadable middle of the electorate.

I reviewed eight ads paid for by Kansans for Constitutional Freedom. One used the word choice. Four used decision. Three, neither. The spots usually included the word abortion, but not always.

To appeal to libertarian sentiments, the spots aggressively attacked the anti-abortion amendment as a “government mandate.” To avoid alienating moderates who support constraints on abortion, one ad embraced the regulations already on the Kansas books.

And they used testimonials to reach the electorate: a male doctor who refused to violate his “oath”; a Catholic grandmother worried about her granddaughter’s freedom; a married mom who had a life-saving abortion; and a male pastor offering a religious argument for women’s rights and, implicitly, abortion.

Let’s dissect some of the ads.

Today’s jobs report ‘defied expectations.’ The Kansas abortion vote shocked and stunned. So I say again: https://t.co/Kv7n7ZvDp3

— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) August 5, 2022

Jack Jenkins/Religion News Service:

In Kansas abortion vote, a blow to Catholic bishops’ political strategy

‘If this is what the bishops are going to do, if this was their plan for a ‘post-Roe’ world, then Catholics are going to be very disappointed,’ said one observer of the Catholic hierarchy.

Analysts were quick to frame the result as a setback for anti-abortion movement, but activists and experts say it also amounts to a rejection of the Catholic Church hierarchy, which had shelled out massive sums of money in support of the amendment’s passage. The vote may hint, too, at mounting backlash against the church’s involvement in the nation’s abortion debate — not least among Catholics themselves.

In the wake of the vote, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, who publicly supported the amendment’s passage, issued a statement Wednesday lamenting its failure.

We can argue the strategic value of Democrats spending money in Republican primaries, something Republicans do in Dem primaries all the time, but the bottom line is these insane Republicans are being elected by an extreme Republican base that is the Republican Party of today

— Adam Blickstein (@AdamBlickstein) August 4, 2022

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

The Trumpists are winning. Here are 3 hidden reasons to fear them.

The Trumpists in question are Republicans who won nominations for positions such as governor and secretary of state in critical swing states. The alarming truth is this: Many of them deny the legitimacy of President Biden’s 2020 victory, even as they are seeking positions of control over the certification of future presidential elections.

But the reality of the threat this poses keeps getting lost in euphemisms. There’s an unwillingness in the media to state the true nature of their project in plain, blunt, clear terms.

Hell of a week for Biden: -528k July jobs added -Unemployment at 3.5% (50-year low) -Zawahiri killed -CHIPS Act passes -PACT Act passes -Inflation Reduction Act deal -Gas hits 50+ day low (median US price below $4/gal) -Kansas protects abortion And he oversaw it all with COVID.

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) August 5, 2022

Paul Waldman/WaPo:

Why criticism of Democrats for boosting radical Trumpists is wrong

[John] Gibbs {MI] is one of a number of such candidates Democrats have tried to help, and the response has been widespread outrage. Outside of the Democratic officials who made the decision to deploy this tactic, there seems to be a nearly universal consensus that what they have done is reckless and hypocritical.

But while I wouldn’t unequivocally endorse parties trying to get their opponents to nominate the looniest candidates possible, there are a number of reasons why the criticism is overblown and even misguided. In fact, we might look back and say that Democrats made a strategic judgment that struck a reasonable balance between risk and reward.

First, note that one of the first things Meijer did after his defeat was to appear at a “unity” event with Gibbs. Whatever Meijer’s distaste for Gibbs’s repugnant views, he’s backing Gibbs in the general election, so spare me the laments for the departure of such a noble public servant.

Second, we can’t escape this fact: Gibbs was exactly what Republican primary voters in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District wanted. This race got plenty of attention, and Gibbs was not hiding who he is. That’s what they chose, just as Republican voters have in state after state. On the same day, Republicans in another swing state, Arizona, nominated an entire slate of election saboteurs; their nominee for secretary of state is an actual member of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing extremist group.

The productivity was hardly sudden. COVID, infrastructure, Juneteenth, postal reform, lend-lease, and more were already law. With CHIPS, guns, IRA, & more, it moves well into a historic Congress and there's still a lame-duck omnibus to pass in December. https://t.co/380gbMxyim

— Josh Huder (@joshHuder) August 5, 2022

Politico:

Trump faces uphill fight on executive privilege in DOJ probe

History and recent battles in civil suits signal he's unlikely to prevail if he seeks to block witnesses' grand jury testimony about Jan. 6.

Short, Jacob and Cipollone testified to the Jan. 6 select committee but negotiated strict terms to avoid discussing their direct interactions with Trump — a nod to the disputed possibility that such communications could be protected by executive privilege. But it’s unlikely that such claims would pass muster in a criminal probe.

“There is no way that any court would say they didn’t have to testify to conversations with President Trump in a grand jury investigation — a criminal investigation arising out of that conduct,” said Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama and represented President Bill Clinton in several executive privilege fights. “There’s no doubt if this got to a court, it would hold that the department is entitled to the information. … I think it’s a no-brainer.”

A lot of the energy behind the "cynical Dems behind MAGA crazies" storyline is driven by pundits who feel very, very off balance needing to say constantly that the GOP is now a sectarian revanchist party thats a threat to democracy over&over because it remains true. Again & gain.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 4, 2022

3/ where Dems were allegedly boosting MAGAs its not even true. PA Gov is a good example of this. Where this has happened is in a number of House contests, run from out of the DCCC. Second, let's be clear what this "boosting" or "running ads for" actually means.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 4, 2022

NY Times:

Is It All About ‘Fealty to Trump’s Delusions’? Three Writers Talk About Where the G.O.P. Is Headed.

[Tim] Miller: I just want to say here that I do get pissed about the notion that it’s us, the Never Trumpers, who are obsessed with litigating Jan. 6. Pennsylvania is a critical state that now has a nominee for governor who won because of his fealty to this lie, could win the general election and could put his finger on the scale in 2024. The same may be true in another key state, Arizona. This is a red-level threat for our democracy.

A lot of Republicans in Washington, D.C., want to sort of brush it away just like they brushed away the threat before Jan. 6, because it’s inconvenient.

[Ross] Douthat: Let me frame that D.C. Republican objection a different way: If this is a red-level threat for our democracy, why aren’t Democrats acting like it? Why did Democratic Party money enter so many of these races on behalf of the more extreme, stop-the-steal Republican? For example, given the closeness of the race, that sort of tactic quite possibly helped defeat Meijer in Michigan.

Miller: Give me a break. The ads from the left trying to tilt the races were stupid and frankly unpatriotic. I have spoken out about this before. But it’s not the Democrats who are electing these insane people. Were the Democrats responsible for Mark Finchem? Mehmet Oz? Herschel Walker? Mastriano won by over 20 points. This is what Republican voters want.

Also, advertising is a two-way street. If all these self-righteous Republicans were so angry about the ads designed to promote John Gibbs, they could’ve run pro-Meijer ads! Where was Kevin McCarthy defending his member? He was in Florida shining Mr. Trump’s shoes.

Thinking back to Trump acquittal in 2nd impeachment, can't help but focus on how McConnell/GOP thought Trump, Big Lie, 1/6 would be ancient history by now -- & were trying to make that happen. But 3 months before mid-terms, they are bigger than ever, wrapped around GOP's neck.

— Michelangelo Signorile (@MSignorile) August 5, 2022

MAGA Victory: Trump-Endorsed Kari Lake Wins Contentious Arizona GOP Gubernatorial Primary

Former President Trump’s track record of endorsing winning candidates kept going this week, as former news anchor and journalist Kari Lake won a close race in Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial primary. The race between Lake and Karrin Taylor Robson remained too close to call until Thursday, two days after election day, when the Associated Press called the race for Lake.

Lake will now go on to face Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in the general election in November. 

RELATED: Whoopi Goldberg Claims God Giving People ‘Freedom Of Choice’ Shows He Supports Abortion

Razor Thin Race

While mail-in ballots coming in prior to election day gave Robson an early lead, election day polling place results and Maricopa County releasing the results of their mail-in ballots gave Lake the win.

The race became a referendum of sorts between Lake, a Trump-endorsed candidate, and Robson, who was endorsed by former Vice President Mike Pence, current Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Trump candidates were victorious in many Arizona races including Senate, Secretary of State, Attorney General, U.S. House seats, and State House seats. Arizona was a crucial spot in the 2020 election, and will certainly be again in 2024.

Lake has been very outspoken on her views of the 2020 election. She has stated that she would decertify Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona, saying, “He lost the election, and he shouldn’t be in the White House.”

Lake has also not been afraid to dish back to left leaning media outlets what they attempt to dish out.

RELATED: After Getting Verbal Lashing From Comedian-Turned-Activist Jon Stewart, Senate Passes Veterans Burn Pit Legislation 86-11

Latest Round Of Primaries Go Well For Trump Candidates

Tuesday night’s latest round of primaries was a good one for Trump endorsed candidates. In addition to Arizona, candidates in Michigan did well.

Rep. Peter Meijer, one of a handful of House Republicans to vote to impeach President Trump, lost his primary race to former Trump administration official John Gibbs. 

Those who voted for impeachment are being picked off one by one with Meijer being the latest. Trump took to his own social media platform Truth Social and wrote, “Not a good time for Impeachers – 7 down, 3 to go!” Tudor Dixon won the GOP gubernatorial primary and will face Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in November.

Nationwide, it was a good night to be a Trump candidate. Of the 42 endorsements Trump gave in this most recent round of primaries, 32 won their respective races, and some may still be pending. 

RELATED: DeSantis Suspends State Attorney For Refusing To Prosecute Violations Of Florida’s 15-Week Abortion Ban

Democrats Bracing Themselves For November

For Democrats, election night this fall could look a lot like Tuesday. Democrats have pinned their hopes on things like the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the Jan. 6 hearings, however those are not priorities for Americans. Soaring inflation and high gas and food prices are.

Joe Biden’s consistently low approval numbers have Democrats saying out loud that they do not want him to run again in 2024, and many shy away from inviting him on the campaign trail with them. 

Another takeaway from Tuesday night’s primaries: while Democrats and the media try to downplay Donald Trump’s influence over the Republican Party, there is no mistaking that it is very much in play. Biden’s unpopularity coupled with Trump’s winning track record could be a lethal combination for Democrats.

Several more states have primaries in the coming weeks, including Wyoming, where Liz Cheney trails her opponent, Harriet Hageman by roughly 20 points. “Number 8” for Trump could be waiting in the wings.

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Morning Digest: Democratic ads hit extreme anti-choice GOP candidates with their own words

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

Subscribe to The Downballot, our weekly podcast

Tennessee held its primary Thursday, and you can find the results here. We’ll have a recap in our next Digest.

Leading Off

Abortion: We wondered shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned in late June if Democratic campaigns would continue to focus hard on abortion rights this cycle, and the answer is a resounding yes. Team Blue is airing new commercials in the races for Arizona's U.S. Senate seat and governor of Michigan that each use footage of the newly minted Republican nominees, Blake Masters and Tudor Dixon, expressing extreme anti-choice views, while Team Blue has also kept up the offensive in other races across the country.

We'll start in Arizona, where Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly quickly opens with clips of Masters proclaiming, "I think Roe v. Wade was wrong. It's always been wrong … It's a religious sacrifice to these people, I think it's demonic." The audience later hears the Republican argue, "The federal government needs to step in and say no state can permit abortion … You make it illegal and you punish the doctors."

Kelly's allies at Senate Majority PAC are also hammering Masters on abortion rights in a new $1.2 million ad campaign, though they're adopting a different messaging strategy. The commercial stars a woman identified as Brianna who explains, "Three years ago, I had an ectopic pregnancy, and if I didn't make it into the OR within a couple minutes, I was going to bleed out and die." She continues, "But according to Blake Masters, that's just too bad. He wants to ban all abortions, even in cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother." Brianna ends by saying that if Masters had his way, her three children would have lost their mother.

Meanwhile in Michigan, a DGA-backed group called Put Michigan First makes use of a debate clip where Dixon answers in the negative when asked, "Are you for the exemptions for rape and incest?" The spot then plays footage of podcaster Charlie LeDuff asking the candidate, "The question would be like, a 14-year-old who, let's say, is a victim of abuse by an uncle, you're saying carry that?" Dixon responds, "Yeah, perfect example." When Dixon is asked in an interview with MIRS if she'd provide an exception for "health of the mother," she replies, "No exceptions."

Over in Virginia's 2nd Congressional District, Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria's commercial takes Republican state Sen. Jen Kiggans to task for celebrating when Roe was overturned. In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams is airing a spot where several women warn that, under a law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, they could be "investigated and imprisoned for a miscarriage."

And back in Arizona, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Katie Hobbs proclaims she'll "protect a woman's right to choose, fix our schools, and lower costs." Other recent Hobbs ads also attack each of the GOP frontrunners, former TV news anchor Kari Lake and Board of Regents member Karrin Taylor Robson, for opposing abortion rights. (Hobbs began airing her ads as Tuesday's GOP primary was still too close to call.)

Republicans, by contrast, have been reluctant to discuss abortion at all in their general election commercials even before this week's big defeat for anti-choice forces in Kansas. One notable exception came last month when Mark Ronchetti, who is Team Red's nominee for governor of New Mexico, argued that his policy to restrict the procedure to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy was reasonable and that Democratic incumbent Michelle Lujan Grisham was "extreme" for supporting "abortion up to birth."

Most Republicans, though, remain content to avoid the topic altogether. Masters, for his part, is spending at least $650,000 on an opening general election ad campaign starring his wife, who says he's running because he loves the country and the state. (Inside Elections' Jacob Rubashkin points out that Masters just days ago was campaigning as a conservative border warrior who warned, "There's a genocide happening in America.") The RGA, meanwhile, is attacking Hobbs on border security―but not abortion.

Senate

AZ-Sen: Republican Blake Masters' allies at Saving Arizona PAC have dusted off a mid-July internal from Fabrizio, Lee & Associates that shows him trailing Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly 49-44, which is identical to what OnMessage Inc. found in a more recent survey for another conservative group. Both firms are releasing these unfavorable numbers to argue that the political climate will be a big asset to Masters.

Governors

FL-Gov: St. Pete Polls' newest survey for Florida Politics finds Rep. Charlie Crist beating Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried in a 56-24 landslide in the first poll we've seen in nearly a month for the Aug. 23 Democratic primary.

Fried's allied PAC, meanwhile, is running the first negative commercial of the race, and it goes after Crist for appointing an "anti-choice extremist" to the state Supreme Court when he was Florida's Republican governor. The spot also features footage from this year of Crist saying, "I'm still pro-life," though it doesn't include him continuing, "meaning I'm for life. I hope most people are." (Crist used that same interview to express his regret over his anti-abortion judicial picks.) Politico says the spot is airing in the Orlando market, which covers about 20% of the state.

RI-Gov: Gov. Dan McKee has secured an endorsement from RI Council 94, which is Rhode Island's largest state employee union, for the Sept. 13 Democratic primary. Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, meanwhile, has earned the backing of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, which is one of the state's two teachers unions: The other, the NEA, is for McKee.

WI-Gov: Wealthy businessman Tim Michels said just one month ago that "[w]hen politicians are shocked to find themselves losing, they go negative out of desperation," but you can probably guess what he's now doing days ahead of Tuesday's Republican primary. Yep, the Trump-endorsed candidate is airing his first attack ad against former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, whom Michels' narrator dubs "the ultimate Madison insider" and a "[p]ro-China, pro-amnesty, anti-Trump politician."

Kleefisch and her allies went on the offensive in early July, with the former lieutenant governor arguing that Michels "pushed for years to raise our gas tax while getting rich from massive government contracts." That prompted Michels to put out a statement bemoaning that "it is sad that the former Lieutenant Governor has decided to go negative by falling in line with politics as usual."

The anti-tax Club for Growth was all too happy to attack Kleefisch last month, but Michels himself insisted as recently as Monday that he was still taking the high road. "I've never had a negative ad run by my campaign in this race," he said, explaining, "And the reason is we've never had a single piece of business by talking bad about the competition." Michels added, "And the reason is, it's just bad policy, and if you get a reputation of doing that in my industry … people immediately disrespect you."

So why did Michels decide to court disrespect and try out some "bad policy" just days later? Kleefisch's team, of course, told the Associated Press' Scott Bauer that this about-face proves their candidate "has all the momentum." Michels' own spokesperson, though, also hinted that they felt the ads were doing them some real damage, arguing, "When your opponent does that for weeks on end, it can't go unanswered forever."

Unfortunately, we have almost no recent polling to indicate if either of the candidates campaigning to take on Democratic Gov. Tony Evers are going "negative out of desperation." The one and only survey we've seen in the last month was a mid-July internal for a pro-Michels group that had him up 43-35, numbers that are quite dusty now.

Whatever the case, things may get a whole lot uglier on Friday when Trump, who has zero qualms about "talking bad about the competition," holds his pre-primary rally in Waukesha County. (You may have heard a few jokes about it if you've ever logged onto Twitter in the last decade.) We got a taste for Trump's dislike of the former lieutenant last month when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel Bice reported that Trump used his April meeting with Michels to bring up a 2019 picture of Kleefisch's daughter going to her high school prom with the son of state Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn.

The elder Hagedorn went straight to the MAGA doghouse the next year when he provided the crucial vote to stop Trump's attempts to steal the election, and Bice reports that he was upset about the photo of the two teenagers. Kleefisch, who has trashed the justice herself, responded by declaring, "I'm outraged my opponent would use a photo of my underage daughter for political ammunition in order to score an endorsement." However, unnamed sources told Bice that Michels didn't actually know about the picture before Trump himself raised the topic ahead of his "little rant" against Brian Hagedorn.  

House

CO-03: Democrat Adam Frisch has released an internal from Keating Research that shows him trailing far-right freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert 49-42 in a western Colorado seat that Trump would have taken by a similar 53-45 spread.

FL-10: Both the state AFL-CIO and the Florida Education Association have endorsed gun safety activist Maxwell Alejandro Frost ahead of the busy Democratic primary on Aug. 23.

FL-13: The Club for Growth is airing what appears to be the first negative TV ad of the Aug. 23 GOP primary, and its piece rips Kevin Hayslett as a "trial lawyer" who was disloyal to Donald Trump in 2016. The broadside comes days after Hayslett released an internal that showed him trailing 2020 nominee Anna Paulina Luna, whom both the Club and Trump are supporting, only 36-34.

The narrator informs the audience, "While Hillary's campaign called Trump a fraud, Hayslett declared it was 'ludicrous' Trump had not released his tax records." The commercial concludes that Hayslett, whose offense doesn't seem to have gone further than Facebook posts, is "guilty of aiding and abetting the Democrats to assault Donald Trump."

Hayslett himself launched his own negative spot around the same time arguing that it's Luna who's the GOP heretic. The audience is treated to footage of Luna saying, "I always agreed with President Obama's immigration policies," and favoring a "pathway to citizenship."

IN-02: A special election will take place this year to succeed Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski, who died in a car crash on Wednesday, though it’s not yet clear when it will be and how the GOP nominee will be chosen. Almost everyone expects the special to coincide with the Nov. 8 general election, but it’s up to Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb to set the date. Trump carried the existing version of this northern Indiana seat 59-39, while he took the redrawn version by a similar 60-37 spread.

It will be up to the local GOP leadership to choose a new nominee for the special and regular two-year term, and Fox’s Chad Pergram explains that state law requires that any vacancy on the ballot “shall be filled by appointment by the district chairman of the political party.” The chair of the 2nd District Republican Party, though, was Zach Potts, a Walorski aide who was also killed in the collision.

MN-03: Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips is out with a poll from GQR giving him a hefty 57-36 edge over Navy veteran Tom Weiler, who has next week's Republican primary to himself. Biden would have carried this suburban Twin Cities constituency 59-39, though Weiler's allies are hoping that a GOP wave could reverse the dramatic Trump-era gains Democrats made in this once-swingy area.

MN-05: Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, whose city makes up about 60% of this constituency, has endorsed former Minneapolis City Council member Don Samuels' bid against Rep. Ilhan Omar in next week's Democratic primary. Omar backed the mayor's two main rivals in last year's instant runoff race, though Frey ended up winning re-election convincingly. Frey and Samuels also defeated a 2021 ballot measure that would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety, while Omar supported the "Yes" side.

NY-10: Impact Research's internal for attorney Dan Goldman shows him leading Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou 18-16 in the packed Aug. 23 Democratic primary, with New York City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera and 17th District Rep. Mondaire Jones at 14% and 10%, respectively. Other polls have found different candidates ahead, but they all agree with Impact that a hefty plurality are undecided. 

NY-16: Former Rep. Eliot Engel has endorsed Westchester County Legislator Vedat Gashi's Democratic primary campaign against the man who unseated him two years ago, freshman Rep. Jamaal Bowman. Gashi also earned the backing of Nita Lowey who, unlike Engel, left the House voluntarily last year after decades of service. About three-quarters of this seat's denizens live in the old 16th District where Bowman upset Engel, while the balance reside in Lowey's old turf.

NY-23: Barry Zeplowitz and Associates has conducted a survey that gives state GOP chair Nick Langworthy a 39-37 edge over 2010 gubernatorial nominee Carl Paladino in this month's primary, which is dramatically different from Paladino's 54-24 lead in his own mid-July internal from WPA Intelligence. Veteran pollster Barry Zeplowitz said he conducted this new poll independently, though Paladino quickly called foul and attacked Zeplowitz for donating $99 to his rival.

"So because I gave $99 to a candidate who asked and gave nothing to a second candidate who did not, the poll is a complete scam?" Zeplowitz asked rhetorically, adding, "Mr. Paladino should be thanking me for giving his campaign a heads-up that he is involved in a toss-up. Let the best man win."

WY-AL: Rep. Liz Cheney's newest commercial for the Aug. 16 GOP primary opens with her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, proclaiming, "In our nation's 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump." Every poll that's been released shows the younger Cheney badly losing to Trump's pick, attorney Harriet Hageman, in what was the Trumpiest state in the nation in both 2016 and 2020.  

Prosecutors

Hennepin County, MN Attorney: Seven candidates are competing in next week's officially nonpartisan primary to replace retiring incumbent Mike Freeman as the top prosecutor in Minnesota's largest county, but campaign finance reports show that only three of them have access to a serious amount of money. The two contenders with the most votes will advance to the November general election.

The top fundraiser through July 25 by far was state House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler, who took in $230,000 and has several unions on his side. Former Hennepin County Chief Public Defender Mary Moriarty raised a smaller $140,000, but she sports high-profile endorsements from local Rep. Ilhan Omar, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the state Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party.

Retired judge Martha Holton Dimick, finally, hauled in a similar $130,000; Dimick, who would be the state's first Black county attorney, has the backing of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as well as the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association.

San Francisco, CA District Attorney: Former District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Thursday that he would not compete in this fall's instant-runoff special election to regain the post he lost in a June recall. His announcement came the same week that attorney Joe Alioto Veronese launched a bid to take on incumbent Brooke Jenkins, a recall leader whom Mayor London Breed appointed to replace Boudin last month.

Alioto Veronese is the grandson of the late Mayor Joseph Alioto, who served from 1968 to 1976; his mother, Angela Alioto Veronese, ran in the 2018 special election for mayor but took a distant fourth against Breed. The younger Alioto Veronese previously served as a California criminal justice commissioner and member of the city's police and fire commissions, but he doesn't appear to have run for office before now.

Under the city's current law, the district attorney's post would be on the ballot again in 2023 for a full four-year term. However, voters this fall will decide on a measure that would move the city's next set of local elections to 2024 and keep them in presidential cycles going forward.

Election Recaps

WA-03: The Associated Press on Wednesday evening called the first spot in the previous day's top-two primary for Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who notched 31%, but it remains unclear which Republican she'll face. With 158,000 votes counted, which the AP estimates is 83% of the total, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler leads Trump-backed Army veteran Joe Kent by a narrow 23-22. The five Republican candidates on the ballot are taking a combined 66% of the vote compared to 33% for Democrats in this 51-46 Trump seat, though Herrera Beutler may have won some support from Democratic voters after voting for impeachment.

Maricopa County, AZ Attorney: Former City of Goodyear Prosecutor Gina Godbehere has conceded Tuesday's Republican primary to appointed incumbent Rachel Mitchell, who leads her 58-42. (The margin may shift as more votes are tabulated.) Both candidates were competing to succeed Allister Adel, a fellow Republican who resigned in March and died the next month.

Mitchell will now go up against Democrat Julie Gunnigle, who lost to Adel 51-49 in 2020, in a special election for the final two years of the term. This post will be up for a regular four-year term in 2024.

Montgomery County, MD Executive: It’s been more than two weeks since the July 19 Democratic primary, but we still don’t know who won the nomination to lead this populous and reliably blue county. With 132,000 ballots counted, incumbent Marc Elrich leads wealthy businessman David Blair 39.3-39.2―a margin of 154 votes.

Election officials say that there are about 4,000 mail-in votes left to tabulate as well as 7,250 provisional ballots to sort through, and that they’re aiming to certify the results by Aug. 12. The second-place candidate would then have three days to request a recount, which is what happened in the 2018 contest between these very two candidates: Elrich ultimately beat Blair by 77 votes four years ago.

P.S. This dragged-out count came about because Republican Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed a measure that would have allowed mail-in ballots to be processed ahead of Election Day. The author of that bill is state Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Democrat who represents part of Montgomery County; Kagan has called for the state to change its policies to prevent another major delay this November.

Grab Bag

Where Are They Now?: Wanda Vázquez, who became governor of Puerto Rico in 2019 after her predecessor resigned in disgrace, was indicted Thursday on bribery charges related to her unsuccessful 2020 campaign for a full term. Vázquez, who is affiliated with both the GOP and the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), responded by proclaiming her innocence.

Federal prosecutors allege that Vázquez fired the head of Puerto Rico’s Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions and appointed a new one loyal to a campaign donor. Vázquez badly lost the PNP primary 58-42 to Pedro Pierluisi, who prevailed in a close general election.

Ad Roundup

Dollar amounts reflect the reported size of ad buys and may be larger.

John Eastman worried he wasn’t going to get paid for his work instigating a seditious coup

The New York Times has another mini-scoop from Trumpland, but the headline news is probably less interesting (and much less funny) than the details. The headline is that coup architect John Eastman, the lawyer who attached himself to an idea that Vice President Mike Pence could simply throw out electors on his personal say-so, was still at it even on Biden's inauguration day two weeks later.

That’s when Eastman sent an email to Trump's personal conspiracy promoter Rudy Giuliani proposing that the Trump team responsible for that violent coup turn their focus to challenging the Georgia runoff elections that had resulted in two new Democratic senators on Jan. 5.

Was it because Eastman had some evidence of supposed "fraud," you might ask? Not even close. Eastman wrote that "a lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud," and after the Trump team got their asses handed to them in every courtroom in the land when they presented their hoaxes about supposed fraud in the presidential election, challenging the Georgia results would give them a new opportunity to hunt for "fraud" in the Senate races.

"If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5," wrote coup plotter Eastman, "it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating [Golfboy's] claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial."

Yet another fishing expedition, then. There was no non-ridiculous evidence that there was anything wrong with the Jan. 5 elections in Georgia, but Eastman and team had just inspired a violent coup, Eastman himself thought he might need to be pardoned for doing it, and since they had come up completely dry on every "fraud" claim in the November elections, this was a last-ditch attempt to hunt for fraud in a different election, which by the mathematical properties of transience would prove they were right all along or, you know, whatever.

But it's that "bulwark against Senate impeachment trial" bit that leads us to the more important motive for Eastman's email to Rudy Giuliani. The guy was still trying to get paid.

You know, for the coup.

The Times reports that the Eastman email also "asked for Mr. Giuliani's help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had sent the Trump campaign the previous day," and that among the invoiced charges was a $10,000-per-day fee for Eastman's work for Trump during eight days in January. Yes, John Eastman billed for each of the days he attempted to goad the vice president and his staff into supporting a seditious act to nullify the U.S. election. It was supposed to cost the Trump campaign $10,000 per day, and even after people died at the U.S. Capitol because an armed and violent crowd actually believed the erase-the-election bullshit Eastman was selling, Eastman was still trying to collect his fee for proposing it.

But Eastman wasn't done yet. He was also trying to get the Trump campaign to pay him similarly steep fees for a barely-related Georgia fishing expedition, and the way Eastman was attempting to sell the new project is to claim that it would be a "bulwark" against Trump's upcoming (second) impeachment trial. Not only was he billing for instigating violence at the Capitol, but he was also still pushing his services as a guy who could help Trump evade responsibility for the violence—and with the exact same invisible "fraud" that caused all of it the first time around!

That is extremely f--king galling, or would be if anyone still thought anyone within a mile of Donald Trump still had a human soul. This guy wanted to get paid for a seditious conspiracy. Here's a guy whose legal advice was so spectacularly terrible that it lead to multiple people's deaths, and he's getting anxious that maybe he's not going to be getting his invoices paid.

He wasn't attempting to overthrow the United States government and install Donald Trump as at least a temporary god-king out of patriotism, you say? He expected to be paid for instigating a violent coup? Oh, and also a pardon, pretty please?

Dude.

The Times indicates that their own sources say Eastman never did get paid, and that John Eastman was looking to Rudy Giuliani, of all people, to pry money out of Trump shows a naivete that seems out of place for the architect of a failed fascist coup. Giuliani, who was charging Trump $20,000 for his own hair-dye melting performances, wasn't any likelier to get paid than Eastman was.

As for the implications of Eastman sending a bill for his attempts to coerce the vice president and his staff into staging a coup, there are probably lots, and I couldn't tell you what they are because, gotta be honest with you here, at the moment I don't even care. Eastman has long claimed he was working as Trump's lawyer, and that's why he doesn't have to testify about anything, But apparently he thought he was working as the Trump campaign's lawyer, not Trump's, and if Eastman ever succeeded in squeezing a dime or two out of the campaign then that would be another direct link between Trump's political team and the plotted coup attempt. The Department of Justice already has Eastman's phone communications, however, so we know whatever thin veneer of "I was just the lawyer" Eastman might be insisting on, it's not working.

For the moment, though, let's just revel in the sheer gall of this blazingly arrogant, irredeemably evil national seditionist being antsy about whether the violent coup's failure means he might not get paid. Just an A+ effort at villainy, Claremont Institute guy. Couldn't do it any better without a costume.

RELATED STORIES:

The net is tightening around John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark as DOJ closes in on heart of Jan. 6 plot

Garland says the DOJ will go after 'everyone, anyone' as new warrant goes out to John Eastman

Trump's direct role in attempted overturn under increasing scrutiny by DOJ prosecutors, sources say

New emails expose Trump advisers planning 'surprise' at Jan. 6 count

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The personal and political

We begin today with Dion Lefler of The Wichita Eagle and his review of the winning campaign in support of abortion rights in Kansas and what it may portend for the future of Kansas politics.

I didn’t cover the Value Them Both election watch. Like almost all serious journalists in the state, I was banned by the campaign from attending.

So all I can tell you about their thinking is that they blamed — you guessed it — the mainstream media.

According to their written statement, the media “propelled the left’s false narrative, contributing to the confusion that misled Kansans about the amendment.”

That’s not what happened at all.

I can only speak for myself, but I never believed their infinitely repeated protestations that they didn’t want to ban abortion, just make reasonable regulations about it.

I didn’t believe it because they didn’t even believe it themselves.

Apparently, about six out of 10 voters didn’t believe them either. 

It was the Value Them Both campaign that attempted to mislead voters and propelled false narratives. One example from Jill Filipovic’s essay for CNN.

The vote was much watched by abortion rights proponents and opponents alike. It also wasn’t exactly a fair fight: One conservative group sent out text messages on Monday, the day of the vote, warning, “Women in KS are losing their choice on reproductive rights. Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect women’s health.”

Voting “yes” on the Amendment was actually a vote against abortion rights. Abortion opponents, though, were clearly worried enough that Kansas voters cared about women’s rights, and so they resorted to playing dirty.

They still lost, which makes this victory even sweeter.

Mitch Smith, Lauren Fox, and Elizabeth Diaz of The New York Times report that the overwhelming victory for abortion rights at the ballot box in Kansas had a very broad coalition which included more rural and, perhaps, even more Republican voters than one would think.

DeAnn Hupe Seib is a fiscally conservative, churchgoing Republican from rural Kansas. When faced with a ballot question about whether abortion rights ought to be removed from her state’s constitution, she voted no. So did her home, Jefferson County, which favored Donald J. Trump by a 32-point margin in 2020.

“I was old enough that I remember stories of women who could not get abortions or had to defy their church in order to get in and get an abortion in order to save their lives,” said Ms. Hupe Seib, 63, a lawyer. “So it’s a very real issue to me, and I know it can be again.”

The sweeping victory for abortion rights in Kansas on Tuesday — the country’s first post-Roe vote on the issue — relied on a broad coalition of voters who turned out in huge numbers and crashed through party and geographic lines to maintain abortion access in the state. The result was an election with a stunning 18-point margin that is shaking up national politics ahead of the midterm elections.

The Dobbs decision engaged women in Kansas to an unprecedented degree. This chart shows the percent of new registrants in the state who were women (as a 7 day average). Note the spike after the Dobbs decision leaked, and huge jump after the Supreme Court handed it down. pic.twitter.com/pvi3WpuR86

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 3, 2022

Amy Davidson Sorkin of The New Yorker wishes that Democratic campaign organizations and consultants would stop interfering in Republican primaries on behalf of election-denying candidates.

But the tactic of manipulating Republicans into nominating proto-authoritarian election deniers is damaging even if it works, in the short term, exactly as intended—that is, even if it helps the Democrats win some seats. For one thing, it habituates Republicans—voters, activists, local officials—in the practice of uniting behind extremists after the primary. It cajoles them into discarding whatever taboos might be left at this point. And making the most conspiratorial voices the loudest changes the tone of the political conversation. Candidates of the sort who might vote to impeach Trump the next time—and it’s all too plausible that there could be a next time—will be driven from politics. (All but four of the ten impeachment-voting Republicans have now either retired or been defeated in primaries, and one of the four, Liz Cheney, is almost certain to lose her primary; notably, the three who survived are in states with nonpartisan “top-two” primaries.) The saddest aspect of Meijer’s comments is how bitter he sounds. “I’m sick and tired of hearing the sanctimonious bullshit about the Democrats being the pro-democracy party,” he told Politico.

Voters may tire of it, too—another risk for Democrats. If, when surveying the strange shape of the G.O.P. field, with its collection of the extreme, the improbable, and the outlandish, Democrats sound gleeful rather than dismayed or alarmed, voters’ faith in their seriousness could be diminished. They could come across as hypocrites and fakes, at a time when voters say they are looking for authenticity. And they could sound like part of a party that doesn’t have faith in its ability to win an election on the strength of its own policies and ideals.[...]

Why have some of the Democratic Party’s most prominent campaign organizations—the D.C.C.C., the D.G.A.—pursued such a terrible approach in these races? The fear for democracy’s future is real. But they or their political consultants may have become too enraptured by the idea of their own cleverness or toughness. Another explanation is that there is just too much money in politics these days chasing too few good ideas. Bad schemes get funded, too. OpenSecrets has documented more than five hundred million dollars in outside spending in the primaries alone, a number that is no doubt incomplete owing to the opacity of many of the organizations that are involved in elections in one way or another (and the primaries aren’t over yet); it doesn’t include spending by the campaigns themselves.

Keep playing with fire like that and you’re liable to get burned.

Heather Cox Richardson writes for her Letters for an American Substack about the significance of Alex Jones emails and texts, especially in light of the Rolling Stone exclusive reporting that those texts and emails will be subpoenaed by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

It has been a source of frustration to those eager to return our public debates to ones rooted in reality that lies that have built a certain right-wing personality cannot be punctured because of the constant sowing of confusion around them. Part of why the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has been so effective is that it has carefully built a story out of verifiable facts. Because House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) withdrew the pro-Trump Republicans from the committee, we have not had to deal with the muddying of the water by people like Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who specializes in bullying and hectoring to get sound bites that later turn up in on right-wing channels in a narrative that mischaracterizes what actually happened.

But today something happened that makes puncturing the bubble of disinformation personal. In the damages trial, the lawyer for the Sandy Hook parents, Mark Bankston, revealed that Jones’s attorney accidentally shared a digital copy of two years’ worth of the texts and emails on Jones’s phone and, when alerted to the error, didn’t declare it privileged. Thus Bankston is reviewing the material and has said that Jones lied under oath. This material includes both texts and financial reports that Jones apparently said didn’t exist.

This is a big deal for the trial, of course—perjury is a crime—and it is a bigger deal for those who have believed InfoWars, since it reveals how profitable the lies have been. Bankston revealed that for all of Jones’s claims of low income, in 2018 InfoWars made between $100,000 and $200,000 a day, and some days they made $800,000. But there is more. People calculating the math will note that if indeed there are two years of records on that phone, the messages will include the weeks around the events of January 6, 2021.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post  writes that even though activists for military families won a victory in getting the PACT Act passed in the Senate, the utter contempt and disrespect for those activists by some of the nation’s lawmakers was on full display.

On Tuesday, the veterans, military family members and their supporters were on their sixth day outside the Capitol. They were clustered under a few trees in the blessed shade just beyond the Capitol’s east plaza on a morning that was already sweltering. They were there to shame the Senate into passing the PACT Act, which extends health-care benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxins from the enormous pits in which the military regularly disposed of waste. Those burning garbage dumps have been linked to cancers, sleep apnea, and other respiratory and neurological ailments. Indeed, President Biden has noted that his son Beau served overseas near such a site and later died of a brain tumor. And so it was not surprising to see an activist holding a cardboard sign shaped like a tombstone that bore the words, “the troops.” Another sign warned: “vets are dying.”

A lot of Americans come to Capitol Hill to make a case for their interests or to raise awareness about looming emergencies. But these activists faced particularly galling circumstances. The Senate had passed the PACT Act back in June with an 84-14 vote, but it had been changed somewhat in the House; so last week the Senate had to vote again, and the second time around the dizzying carousel that is the legislature, the vote was 55-42. This might still seem like a win for veterans, but basic math isn’t so basic in the Senate because of the filibuster, which requires 60 votes before a bill can turn into a law. The legislation stalled and these determined citizens from Virginia and North Carolina and New York were sweating it out on the grass trying to get senators to give veterans something more tangible than a mere “thanks” for their service.[...]

In our democracy, there’s every reason to be proud of the people’s ability to protest and have their demands met. But in the process of making their voices heard on this subject, there have been constant reminders of just how loathe those in power are to listening to voices other than their own. As the bill — and amendments — were considered on the Senate floor, Rand Paul (R-Ky.), explained how he wanted to pay for the veterans’ health care by calling a 10-year moratorium on foreign aid distributed by USAID. Then he rattled off a list of the aid group’s expenditures that, based on the snarling disgust in his tone, he deemed offensively wasteful: encouraging tourism in Tunisia, teaching Korean students about climate change and encouraging millions of Filipinos to go to school. His colleagues did not approve of Paul’s amendment.

Jonathan Capehart, also of The Washington Post, says that for all of Sen. Josh Hawley’s “concern” about masculinity, what he is really selling is more racial resentment.

But as clownish as Hawley comes across, we dismiss him at our own risk. He is selling a vision of masculinity to White America that has much more to do with prejudice than manliness. It’s an old story — but a successful one, and one that’s poised to catch on. Stopping that from happening will require offering an alternative, with better examples of what being a man really means.

During a recent interview, Jason Kander, an Afghanistan War veteran who in 2018 stepped away from rising success in the Democratic Party to tend to his mental health, broke down his fellow Missourian’s plan. Hawley, he said, “is positioning himself, and therefore his movement — his far-right, White-guy movement — as, ‘If you’re a man, then you believe in these things.’” These things, you could probably guess, are archconservative values such as the patriarchy, opposition to women’s bodily autonomy, support exclusively for heterosexual marriage, an aversion to labor organizing. In other words, as Kander told me via email later, Hawley is “making manhood synonymous with conservatism.”

The pitch holds natural appeal for older White men who already hew to traditional morals. But what about the younger White men who, as Kander says, watch Ultimate Fighting but still like their LGBTQ co-workers and have friends who have had abortions? Hawley figures he can woo them too, so long as they share one potent trait with the older group: racial resentment. This vision of masculinity is as much about being White as it is about being a man.

Dave Zirin of The Nation says that Donald Trump is up to his old tired racist tricks again, this time with WNBA star Brittney Griner.

Trump’s one constant has been his racism and bigotry. Even when it seemingly makes no political sense, his unerring instinct moves him toward his happy place: hating others. Never underestimating the racism that lives in this country’s marrow has been his greatest political survival skill, and his survival has never felt more precarious. This is the best way to understand why Trump would look at the political landscape, see Brittney Griner rotting in a Russian prison, and say she should be buried under the cell. Instead of defending a US citizen, an Olympian, and a symbol of wrongful political detentions, Trump piled on. On some godforsaken fascistic podcast that I wouldn’t link to on a dare, Trump called Griner “potentially spoiled” (not sure what that means) and said she deserved to be behind bars.

He described her Kafkaesque situation as follows: “She went in there loaded up with drugs into a hostile territory where they’re very vigilant about drugs. They don’t like drugs. And she got caught. And now we’re supposed to get her out—and she makes, you know, a lot of money, I guess. We’re supposed to get her out for an absolute killer and one of the biggest arms dealers in the world.”[...]

It has largely been a given that everyone wants Griner to come home and be reunited with her family. But Trump doesn’t see the world in terms of easing human suffering. He sees Griner, and you can imagine the neon-blood-red words flashing in his brain—“Black,” “lesbian,” “WNBA”—and Trump immediately deducing that he can use her as a political piñata to bond himself to a frenzied base. It comes from his Colin Kaepernick playbook: demonize a Black athlete, lie about who they are and what they stand for, and reap the benefits.

Charu Sudan Kasturi of the Guardian writes that the spread of polio remains a global threat.

In June, the WHO reported cases of vaccine-derived polio – where a weakened virus in the vaccine itself spreads in the environment and infects people – in Eritrea, Ghana, Togo, Ivory Coast, Israel, Yemen, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And in July, a patient in a New York City suburb was diagnosed with vaccine-derived polio. Over the past six weeks, traces of this form of the virus have also been found in sewage samples in Kolkata and London.

These seemingly unconnected cases highlight a common threat: globally, polio vaccination levels in 2021 dropped to their lowest in 15 years, according to WHO data, with immunisation initiatives disrupted during Covid. India and Indonesia, two of the world’s most populous nations, have witnessed particularly sharp falls in vaccine coverage.

That makes the recent spate of cases a canary in a coalmine, say experts – warning that the paralysing disease eliminated in most of the world could come back, especially in densely populated regions, unless countries redouble their efforts on vaccinations and surveillance.

With such an overwhelming amount of media attention given to the optics of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, Brian Hioe of The Diplomat takes a look at some of the substantive issues.

Pelosi’s motivations for the visit have been speculated to be anything from securing her political legacy to an attempt to tout the Democrats’ record as tough on China before midterm elections. When Pelosi’s plane touched down in Taiwan around 10:43 p.m., the Washington Post released an op-ed by Pelosi arguing for her visit. In that article, she provided her rationale for the trip: “In the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) accelerating aggression, our congressional delegation’s visit should be seen as an unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner, as it defends itself and its freedom.”

As news reports increasingly suggested that Pelosi would, in fact, be visiting Taiwan, speculation revolved around which day she would arrive. Another open question was the length of her visit – whether she would only stay a few hours in Taiwan, as some sources indicated, or whether she would stay overnight – and then whether her visit would only involve meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen or if it would also involve speaking to the Taiwanese legislature.

In the end, Pelosi’s visit involved stops to the legislature and to meet with Tsai. The House speaker’s comments were similar on both occasions, stressing Taiwan-U.S. cooperation in terms of mutual security interests, economic cooperation, and “shared values of self-governance and self-determination,” a phrase she used during verbal comments in her op-ed. With regards to her points on economic cooperation, Pelosi touted the CHIPS Act as an arena for cooperation between the U.S. and Taiwan, a somewhat odd framing considering the CHIPS Act is sometimes understood as aimed at reducing U.S. reliance on Taiwanese semiconductors.

Hannah Roberts of POLITICO Europe writes that with the hard-right Brothers of Italy party poised to win next month’s Italian snap elections, there is a fear that fascism is creeping into Italy. Again.

The public discourse over the murder of Alika Ogorchukwu, beaten to death in front of bystanders in the coastal town of Civitanova Marche, has laid bare the divisions in society as Italians prepare to vote in a snap election next month.

For some, the killing is the fault of years of hate-stoking anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians on the right, with disturbing echoes of fascism. Others accuse the left of trying to make political capital out of a tragedy.

The bitter dispute matters because, according to current polling, it is the anti-immigration parties on the right of Italian politics that stand to win most support at the election and form the next government.

At the head of them all is Giorgia Meloni, leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy, who is on track to become the country’s next prime minister after the September 25 vote. It would mark a radical shift in Italian politics, posing potential risks to the country’s economy after a period of stability under outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s steadying influence. There are also fears a right-wing coalition could weaken European unity at a sensitive time.

The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer on the importance of clear and precise grammar even if it is a bit “clunky.”

But what’s a grammarian to do when precise and concise are at odds with each other?

The ways we talk about abortion and gender — particularly in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s downfall — illustrate the problem.

Take, for example, a recent viral exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley, lately known for running away from the same rioting Jan. 6 mob that he’d raised a fist in solidarity with, and Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Hawley objected to Bridges’ use of the phrase “people with a capacity for pregnancy,” which Hawley — ever the studious grammarian — thought should be shortened to just “women.” Bridges replied that Hawley’s questioning was transphobic, as it excluded trans men and nonbinary people who can become pregnant, as well as cisgender women who are unable to become pregnant. [...]

Put aside (for only the briefest moment) the fact that Hawley’s motivation was likely not syntactic concision but the desire to pick a fight and spark a viral moment and a provocative Twitter post (mission accomplished, Senator). A pressing language question still lingers here.[...]

Where does that leave someone just trying to improve the ways they speak and write?

Finally today, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes a wonderful essay on his Substack about his 60-year relationship with Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell. (Pushing fair use a bit here to tell the story of a young Lew Alcindor meeting Bill Russell.)

As I wandered into the gym, I saw, sitting casually on the bleacher bench reading The New York Times, Bill Russell. The Secretary of Defense himself. My personal hero.

I also saw my coach, Jack Donahue, chatting with the Celtics coach, Red Auerbach. Being naturally shy and unnaturally polite, I decided to head downstairs to the locker room and wait patiently until they were done. Maybe I could find a copy of the Times to read too.

“Lew, c’mere,” Coach Donahue called to me.

I gulped. Me?

I shuffled over to Coach Donahue, who introduced me to Coach Auerbach. Coach Auerbach gestured at Bill Russell. “Hey, Bill, c’mere. I want you to meet this kid.”

Bill Russell dipped down his newspaper and looked me over with a frown. Then he snorted. “I’m not getting up just to meet some kid.”

I shrank to about six inches tall. I just wanted to run straight home.

Auerbach chuckled. “Don’t let him get to you, kid. Sometimes he can be a real sourpuss.” He grabbed my wrist and walked me over to Russell.

“Bill, be nice. This is the kid who just might be the next you.”

Bill looked at me again, this time taking a little longer. I was already 7’, two inches taller than him.

I stuck out my hand. “How do you do, Mr. Russell. Pleasure to meet you.”

He didn’t smile, but his demeanor had softened, just a little. He shook my hand. “Yeah, yeah, kid.”

That’s how I met my childhood hero.

Have a good day, everyone!