The Downballot: HAIL MOLECH! Massive Dem win in New Hampshire + redistricting (transcript)

We did it! And it's all thanks to Molech! We're devoting this week's episode of "The Downballot" to giving praise to the dark god himself after New Hampshire Democrat Hal Rafter won a critical special election over Republican Jim Guzofski, the loony toons pastor who once ranted that liberals make "blood sacrifices to their god Molech." Democrats are now just one seat away from erasing the GOP's majority in the state House and should feel good about their chances in the Granite State next year. Republicans, meanwhile, can only stew bitterly that they lack the grassroots fundraising energy provided by Daily Kos, which endorsed Rafter and raised the bulk of his campaign funds via small donations.

We're also joined by Daily Kos Elections' own Stephen Wolf to update us on the ongoing litigation over Alabama's congressional map. In an unusual move, the court's appointed expert invited the public to submit their own proposals as he prepares replacement maps, so Wolf took him up on the offer and drew two plans of his own. Wolf describes those plans in detail and sings the praises of Dave's Redistricting App, the invaluable free tool that has allowed ordinary citizens to participate in the redistricting process in ways never before possible.

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. Please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.

Just a quick note to “Downballot” listeners that I'll be off for the next three weeks, but I know that I'm leaving you in very good hands with David Beard and our frequent guest host, Joe Sudbay.

Beard: We will persevere as best we can while you're gone, and I'll try not to get too comfortable with Joe as my co-host over the next few weeks.

Let's dive into today's episode and what we're going to be covering.

Nir: Well, I think I'm going out with a banger here because we are starting off with a massive, massive win in New Hampshire. Super excited about it. In less exciting news, we're going to be talking about the Texas Senate acquitting the extremely corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton, and then some developments on the abortion rights ballot measure front in both Nevada and Ohio.

Our guest this week is Daily Kos Elections' own Stephen Wolf, who is joining us to talk about the redistricting case that is pending in Alabama and the maps that he submitted to the court-appointed expert who is currently drawing new districts for the state. It is a very fascinating discussion and an unusual opportunity. We have a terrific episode. Let's get rolling.

Beard, hail Molech, baby.

Beard: Oh, yes. I'm on board. Let's do it.

Nir: Democrat Hal Rafter, our buddy in New Hampshire, won a huge victory on Tuesday night, really huge in every sense of the word. He flipped a very swingy Republican-held seat in the New Hampshire State House by a dominant, dominant 56 to 44 margin. Rafter, of course, is the computer programmer and former official in his town who had run for this seat last year and lost by a very narrow margin.

He defeated Republican Jim Guzofski, who is the absolutely batshit pastor we have very much enjoyed talking about on “The Downballot” previously. He's the one who said COVID vaccines cause COVID. But most importantly, he's the dude who also said that abortion-rights supporters, like myself, like yourself, Mr. Beard, are motivated by blood sacrifices to Molech.

Beard: Who let them know? Who let the secret slip? We need an investigation.

Nir: Well, you know what, though? We still won. Even armed with that secret knowledge, there was nothing they could do about it. And now they're in really bad shape. As a result of this pickup, Republicans now have just a 198 to 197 margin in this chamber. And on November 7, mark your calendars, November 7, there will be a special election for a safely blue vacant seat. If Democrats win that one, then boom, the House is tied.

Beard: Yes. Well, looking forward to it.

Nir: Well, it's really hard to overstate how much I'm looking forward to this one as well, and just how remarkable this term of events is. Republicans had complete control over New Hampshire state government following the 2020 census, and we know what that means. It means that they were able to gerrymander the maps however they liked, and that's exactly what they did. They passed some pretty extreme gerrymanders in both the state House and the state Senate that they were obviously certain would lock in majorities for them for probably years to come.

But funny how 2022 really did not go the GOP's way in so, so many ways. And obviously, everyone knows about Democrats gaining seats in the Senate, about Republicans only barely winning back the House despite predictions they would flip 40 seats. But there are all these under-the-radar things that went really poorly for Republicans, including losing 12 seats in the New Hampshire House despite their gerrymandered map. It went a little bit under the radar in part because New Hampshire is a small state, and also because they didn't actually lose control of the House but they came really, really close, and now Democrats are just one seat away from tying the chamber. This is not a chamber that Democrats were supposed to be competitive in.

Beard: Yeah, it's just another sign that... Particularly what we saw in these northern states. I think New Hampshire can in some ways be compared to what we saw in Michigan and Minnesota and Wisconsin, where these areas are really not as friendly as much as they were to Trumpism and what the Republican Party has increasingly become. So we saw that in 2022, even despite… we saw in other states was more of a not-as-good reaction, but in these competitive states, there really was a backlash to Trumpism.

Nir: Yeah, absolutely. And it goes well beyond just this one race. New Hampshire Democrats genuinely have good reason to be feeling really good right now. Rafter, like I said, he won by 12 points, but this is a district that Donald Trump actually carried by a fraction of a point. So that was another big overperformance of the presidential baseline, something we like to talk about a lot at Daily Kos Elections and on “The Downballot.” And it's actually the fourth such showing by Democrats in the Granite State this year in four races. And it's not just the special elections for the state House; there were really strong results for Democrats in the city of Manchester on Tuesday night as well.

Manchester is the largest city in the state and it's having a race for mayor this year. And there was an all-party primary with four candidates on the ballot: three Democrats, one Republican. And Democrat Kevin Cavanaugh and Republican Jay Ruais advanced to the November general election. But I think the news for Republicans was pretty grim there as well because the three Democrats combined for 58% of the vote, and Ruais, the Republican, got just 42%. And that's the biggest spread we've seen in a Manchester primary in quite some time. And the primary results — I was just looking back at this, this week — tend to very closely resemble the general election results. So what Republicans would have to do, they would have to somehow turn around a 16-point deficit by November. And usually, the results have only moved maybe a point or two at the most from the primary to the general election.

The other thing I want to add is that New Hampshire doesn't really have any statewide elected posts, aside from governor. And because Manchester is the biggest city, winning the mayoralty there is often a stepping stone to higher office. And in fact, the current incumbent, Joyce Craig, is one of two prominent Democrats who is running for the open governorship next year that I think that Democrats have a really good chance at flipping.

So it would be awesome to see Democrats with the governorship, and then continue their hold on the city of Manchester, and install Cavanaugh and have him become the next possible Democrat to run for a higher office. I don't know. I really like the way things are shaping up for our friends to the north.

Beard: Yeah. And as part of a pattern we've seen of Democratic overperformances, both in New Hampshire and across the country, I think there's been some increasing chatter about the consistency of these special election results. And I think you can't take them as like, "This number equals Democrats will do exactly X well next year," or anything like that, but it's certainly an indicator of Democratic enthusiasm of the fact that Democrats have not fallen off the way that we saw Democrats fall off in the wake of Obama's two elections, where the special election turnouts really dipped in the Obama years when Democrats were not motivated outside of his elections. So it's certainly good news. It has been so far. And we'll keep looking at special-election results as they come and hope that this good news continues.

Nir: I think your point, Beard, about enthusiasm is really well taken because there's one final thing that I absolutely have to note about this race, which is the role that the Daily Kos community played in Hal Rafter's win. We endorsed Rafter early on in his campaign, and his last fundraising report prior to the election showed that he raised $47,000, which is actually quite a ton for a state House race in New Hampshire. The Daily Kos community was responsible for $34,000 of that total. Well, that's almost three-quarters of his total. And we're talking small donations. The average was less than $14 apiece. That is kind of mind-blowing to me. And this was such a good race for grassroots donors to get involved in.

The total voter turnout was about 2,800, and that is actually quite high for a special election like this, but obviously, 2,800 people in raw numbers, that's really, really small. And that just means that if you're a grassroots donor giving 10, 15, 20 dollars, you are getting tremendous bang for your buck. Your money is going a really long way in a race like this. That's why I love getting involved in state legislative races. To me, the smaller, the better.

And the cherry on top, Beard, is that Republicans were really angry about this. They had so little to attack Rafter over, that they actually sent out a mailer instead attacking us, attacking Daily Kos. They did a mailer complaining about the post that I wrote announcing Daily Kos's endorsement of Hal Rafter. And the headline of the post was something about we could nuke the GOP majority in the New Hampshire House. And they did this mailer where they had a picture of a mushroom cloud calling out the fact that we said we want to nuke the GOP majority.

It was like something from the cutting room floor from “Oppenheimer.” And they called Daily Kos a, quote, unquote, "national hate site" and linked to the post with the—they had a little URL on the bottom as tinyurl.com/gopnuke. I'm like, "You're actually making us look kind of awesome here."

But really, they have nothing like our energy and enthusiasm. They just don't have this small-dollar grassroots machine that we do. And we know that for an absolute fact because Guzofski, his total fundraising was $450, not leaving off any zeros. Less than 1% of Hal Rafter, and Daily Kos was responsible for the vast majority of Rafter's fundraising. It was freaking awesome.

Beard: Yeah. Well, there is one Republican that has a small-dollar base. It's Donald Trump, but it all goes to his legal expenses. So that's where all the Republican money enthusiasm is currently heading towards. But yeah, I mean, I think there's nothing more than grasping at straws when you see the Republican side sending out a mailer attacking Daily Kos's headline writing, really, really unrelated to the daily cares of people in the state of New Hampshire. But I think it's just more evidence that Daily Kos is a site that really looks to make a difference in these races. I think we did here. And I think it's great that we find places where the community can give and really make an impact.

Now, in much less exciting news, we've got to go to the state of Texas, where the Texas Senate acquitted scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton on all of the charges that the Texas House had impeached him over. There were 16 articles in total, largely centered around Paxton abusing his office and unethically helping a key political donor, real estate developer Nate Paul. Of the votes on these 16 articles, the highest vote-getter in terms of conviction was 14 votes. A number of the articles got 14 votes, which included all 12 Democrats and 2 Republicans. The other 16 Republicans voted to acquit on all of the charges. That's 30 members. There's actually 31 members of the Texas Senate. The 31st is actually Ken Paxton's wife, Angela Paxton, who was actually barred from voting, but she made it clear that she would've voted to acquit had she been able to vote on this issue.

Nir: And they needed two-thirds to convict and remove from office, right?

Beard: Yes. It wasn't just a case where they needed one or two more Republicans to get to 16 votes. They needed to get to 21 votes because even though Angela Paxton wasn't voting, the number 31 was still the number that was determining the two-thirds, so they needed 21 out of 31 members to vote to convict. It wasn't particularly close. You needed half of the Republican caucus and you got two out of 16.

Nir: I’ve got to admit, at first, I was really shocked to read that Paxton had been acquitted because so many Republicans in the state House had voted to impeach him. But I guess the actual shocking thing was not the acquittal, but the impeachment in the first place.

Beard: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things going on here more than just the fact that Ken Paxton is super corrupt. We'll talk about the other charges that he's facing outside of the impeachment process in a second. But I think really the Texas House and the Texas Senate are on two different sides of the Republican Party in Texas. The Texas House still has a lot of the more old-school traditional establishment Republicanism, maybe the Bush-ism of the '90s and 2000s — where, led by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, the Texas Senate is very much of the new Trumpist Paxton branch. Very extreme, not really concerned with things like corruption, and a lot of the senators in the Texas Senate have followed that lead.

Now, we did get a little bit of insight into the deliberations that took place there, and it really didn't surprise me. Democratic senator Nathan Johnson described the eight hours of deliberations among the 30 senators as a seemingly sincere process. And then he said, quote, "And then it collapsed," end quote. Johnson said that it became clear that there wasn't going to be the 21 votes to convict. And after that became clear, Republican senators who seemingly were more open and considering to the idea of conviction, largely peeled away not wanting to take a difficult vote if the outcome was going to be acquittal either way, which ultimately, as we saw, led to only two Republicans standing up, taking the hard vote to actually convict him on certain articles.

Nir: And I think it's even worse than that because Axios reported that Paxton allies were threatening primary challenges to any Republicans who voted to cross him, who voted to convict him in the Senate. And maybe for all we know, Republicans who previously voted to impeach him in the House. I mean, that just feels like straight-up jury tampering. And of course, there's nothing illegal about it because impeachment is a political process. It's not a legal process. But man, I mean, how are you going to be able to have a fair and impartial trial if the jurors are being threatened with the end of their political careers?

Beard: And it reminded me so much of the article I recently read in The Atlantic, which had an excerpt from a book being written about Mitt Romney, where he talks about his discussions with GOP senators who agreed with him on a lot of his criticisms about Trump, but A) refused to say any of it publicly. And then B) when impeachment came around, particularly the second impeachment around January 6th, were scared to actually stand up and take a hard vote.

They wanted to protect their political careers. And on one human level, it's understandable, it's their career, but ultimately you're elected to represent your constituents to do the right thing to try to govern the country. And that's taking the hard votes. And we've seen the GOP both in the U.S. Senate and now in the Texas Senate largely refuse to do that.

Nir: I guess what blows me away is that just like with Trump, they could have gotten rid of Paxton. Imagine if Mitch McConnell had provided just enough votes to tank Trump and prevent him from ever running from office again. He still would've been a very annoying problem for them and would've commanded a lot of media attention. But he would've been, in a lot of ways, a spent force. A lot of Trump's power derives from the fact that he's still running for president and never stopped running for president.

And same with Paxton. I understand those threats, and I understand he's well-connected and he has powerful allies, but surely if he's out of office and also, as I know we need to discuss, facing criminal charges like actual go-to jail criminal charges, then he couldn't possibly be as big of a threat then, could he?

Beard: Yeah, that's what I don't understand about this process is there seems to be terrible fear of the power that these people hold right now without a consideration that if you convict them, they no longer hold that power. I'm sure the Republican Party in Texas could do just fine without Ken Paxton. Even the Trumpist wing of the party could do just fine without Ken Paxton. They don't need him, but there's a sense that you can't cross somebody who's been a team player or who is on the Trumpist side. There's a loyalty test there that's more important than almost anything else, seemingly.

Again, there's a little bit of a cultish aspect to it where how could you cross either the leader Trump or somebody Trump tells you should stay in office, how could you possibly vote against that? But I do want to mention that Paxton still faces charges outside the impeachment process, including a long-running securities fraud case. He was indicted earlier this year for making false statements to banks, and there's an ongoing FBI investigation into his relationship with the aforementioned real estate developer, Paul.

So, all of those things are continuing. Who knows, the securities fraud case has gone on for years. It's not clear when exactly that might get resolved, but these things are almost certainly going to drag out for the rest of Paxton's current term, which runs into 2026. If he runs for reelection in 2026, they will probably be a problem for him. I obviously don't know what the 2026 outlook will be like so many years from now, how Democrats will be doing in Texas at that point. But I think Paxton, if he runs for reelection, will almost certainly be the most vulnerable statewide Republican out of the broader group of statewide Republicans.

Nir: Well, Beard, now it's time for us as usual on “The Downballot” to talk about abortion. Activists in Nevada just launched a campaign to enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution, including the right to an abortion. And as we have mentioned before, a number of states are also putting similar ballot measures before voters next year. But it's especially good to see it happening in Nevada, which of course is always a super-tight swing state. This measure could wind up helping boost Democratic fortunes, of course, in addition to being the right thing to do. But I don't want to just talk about the political implications because there's a really interesting backstory in Nevada regarding reproductive rights.

You'll often hear folks say that last time was the first time ever that voters got to vote in favor of abortion rights at the ballot box. And I've even made that mistake myself. But Nevada voters actually did so all the way back in 1990, and here's how that came about. Following Roe v. Wade, which of course was decided in 1973, the state passed a law codifying abortion protections. But as the years went by, the anti-abortion movement gained steam and supporters of reproductive freedom began to grow, concerned that abortion could be under threat in the state of Nevada.

At the time, Operation Rescue was blockading abortion clinics. The Supreme Court was upholding various restrictions on abortion at the state level. This is in the late '80s, and so the future of abortion rights was really looking like it could be threatened. And so these activists wondered, how best can we protect abortion in Nevada? And it turns out the state has this unique type of referendum that doesn't exist anywhere else in the country that is available to voters, and it's called an affirmation referendum.

Now, normally a referendum in the states that allow them involves asking voters if they want to repeal a law that the legislature has passed. But in Nevada, you can ask voters if they want to uphold a law that the legislature has already passed. And here's the key thing. If voters agree, then that law cannot be changed again except by another statewide vote. So, what these organizers did is they put a measure on the ballot — and there's a really great article in the Nevada Independent by Noelle Sims from just last month; we'll link you to it in the show notes that talks about the entire campaign, but right now got to skip ahead to the end. It was a really big gamble by supporters, though, I should say, because a loss would've opened the door to repealing Nevada's abortion rights laws and made the movement look weak. But the affirmation referendum actually won by a huge margin.

It was 63 to 37, in part because supporters appealed to voters in a very smart way, given Nevada's libertarian streak. They focused on the right to privacy as opposed to specifically a right to an abortion. It wound up being a huge win, but of course, it wasn't replicated anywhere else because no other state has this type of referendum. Now activists want to go a step further, and their amendment is actually quite a lot broader. It would protect a number of other freedoms in addition to the right to an abortion such as contraception, which of course has been a target of Republicans in a lot of ways, including all kinds of lies told about birth control pills. And there are also attacks on in vitro fertilization. So, the amendment would also protect infertility care.

One thing to note is that to amend the Nevada Constitution, voters have to approve the same amendment twice, even if it's on the ballot in 2024. The measure would also have to pass again in 2026 in order to become law. But what that also means is that it would make it incredibly hard to ever undo that amendment because opponents would also have to pass any repeal twice. This is a great move all around, and I'm of course really rooting for it to be successful.

Beard: And Nevada is not a state where reproductive rights is under immediate threat like we've seen in other places. But it's still great to do everything possible, particularly when there's all this momentum right now and energy around it to make reproductive rights as protected as possible, make those rights as expansive as possible because we don't know what Nevada is going to look like 10, 20 years down the road.

We don't know what the laws are going to look like. We don't know where the momentum is going to be, so the stronger that these protections can be made now with this vote and with an additional vote, then the better off everyone will be, and the more certain people can be that those rights are going to stick around.

Nir: Exactly. And hell, last year, one of the few notable pickups anywhere in the country — I mean, maybe really the only notable pickup anywhere in the country — was the Nevada Governorship for Republicans. Democrats right now still have pretty sizable majorities in the state legislature, but like you said, we just can't take that for granted. We're not talking about New York or California here, and hell, even in those states, I mean, California passed an abortion amendment last year. New York has language on the ballot that's supposed to protect abortion next year. You never want to take anything for granted. A lot of people took Roe v. Wade for granted, and look where we are now. So, this is smart politics and also just the right thing to do.

Beard: Absolutely. And speaking of reproductive rights initiatives, we do have one last issue, one we want to cover, and that's in Ohio where the upcoming initiative on November would protect abortion rights. And the ballot language has recently been under controversy after the GOP-controlled ballot board inserted some very pernicious language into the text of what voters see on the ballot itself to try to skew how they're going to vote, try to confuse them.

Of course, the GOP-controlled Ohio Supreme Court largely allowed that misleading language to stay in the text. Specifically, they allowed the ballot board to use "unborn child," quote unquote, instead of “fetus” in the language of the actual ballot while “fetus” is the word that's used throughout the actual text of the amendment. It's completely misleading. We've seen this for years, obviously, from the folks opposed to reproductive rights to use this phrase, "unborn child," so it's going to appear on the ballot.

Hopefully, folks are now sort of inured to this. They understand that this kind of language is just being used by opponents to try to cause conflict. And this won't change anybody's vote, but it's going to be there on the ballot. The Supreme Court did stop the board from using this very strange phrasing, quote, "citizens of the state," in the ballot language when it was about what the ballot amendment was prohibiting the state from doing.

The amendment, of course, prohibits the state of Ohio from restricting abortion rights. But the way that the ballot board phrased it, that was worded that citizens of the state were prohibited from restricting abortion rights, which was just an extremely confusing sentence. They did say that they just needed to clarify and make it clear that it was the state that was prohibited from restricting abortion rights. But they otherwise left a lot of the misleading language. Hopefully, that won't make a big difference when Ohio voters go to the polls in November.

Nir: I just want to note, it was only one Republican justice on that court who agreed that that citizens of the state language was nonsense. The other Republicans would've left it all intact. But I am hoping that this kind of thing sparks a bit of a backlash. We saw it with Issue 1 in August, just last month, the attempt to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives in Ohio in the first place. Voters seem to react really strongly to Republicans trying to rig things, and this just smells the same way. It stinks of rigging.

I'm sure that conservatives will take advantage of this, but they were going to scream about unborn children anyway. God, I really hope that voters don't go into the ballot box and see this language and there's some mushy middle out there that can be convinced by this totally false language instead. We'll see if people make an issue of it, but really, the bottom line here is that this is all nonsense. If this doesn't become law, then Ohio could wind up right back with a near-total ban on abortion. That's the stakes here, not the language that's on the ballot.

Beard: Yeah, and I suspect that this isn't going to make a big difference. As we've talked about, the salience of abortion rights is very high. People know what they believe about it. So, the specific text of the ballot amendment is probably not going to change very many minds. That said, it's still shitty that the Ohio Supreme Court allowed this to happen.

Nir: Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we are going to be joined by Daily Kos Elections' own Stephen Wolf to talk about one of our favorite recent topics, the ongoing redistricting litigation in Alabama. Stephen, it turned out, made a contribution of his own to that case, and we are going to talk all about it after the break.

Joining us today on “The Downballot” is Daily Kos Elections' own Stephen Wolf here to talk about the Alabama redistricting case. Stephen, welcome back on the show.

Stephen Wolf: Thanks for having me back, guys.

Nir: Absolutely. We have talked about the Alabama redistricting litigation a lot on “The Downballot,” but I think that sometimes we can almost get a little bit too into the weeds without giving proper background first. So, I would like for us to take a step back and to ask you, Stephen, since redistricting is really your specialty, to explain what was the issue in this case here? Why did these plaintiffs bring a lawsuit in the first place, and what did the court say?

Wolf: Alabama for the last few decades has drawn a congressional map, where only one of its seven districts has a majority Black population and because of very racially polarized voting, white voters in all the other districts will defeat any candidate preferred by Black voters. In other words, it's one district that is heavily Black and heavily Democratic out of seven. The plaintiffs in this case, after Republicans passed a new congressional map with that same setup, in 2021, they brought this case, and a federal lower court in 2022 said that the map likely violated the Voting Rights Act and that it was going to block it and require a different one.

Nir: What was the plaintiff's theory of the case here? Why did they go to court? Why did they think that a court might actually intervene and step in and say, "No, this map is not kosher."

Wolf: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been interpreted by the federal courts for the last roughly four decades or so to require that districts be drawn in certain instances where a minority group or coalition of groups can elect their preferred candidates. In here, in Alabama, that means Black voters. In most of the state, if you draw a district that does not have a Black majority, white voters are going to vote en masse against the Black voters' candidate and elect a white Republican most likely.

When Alabama Republicans drew this congressional map with only one majority Black district, the plaintiffs went to the court and said, "Look, Alabama's population is about 28% Black, which is about two-sevenths. If you look at the population, how it's distributed throughout the state, a reasonably configured map could have two districts out of seven, where Black voters could either be a majority or quite close to it, and then thus be able to elect their preferred candidate." This case went to trial and the plaintiffs presented a mountain of evidence, and you ended up having a district court panel, where all three judges had originally been appointed by Republican presidents, nevertheless, unanimously ruled that this map did indeed violate the Voting Rights Act and that Alabama needed to try again.

Nir: In other words, what the Voting Rights Act says, to put it in an inverse way, is that if you have, say in this case, a group of Black voters who could constitute their own district, you can't just chop them up willy-nilly and spread them apart among multiple other districts to basically dilute the power of Black votes. That is what the plaintiffs accused the state of doing here, and the courts have agreed.

Wolf: Yeah, that's exactly right. What Republicans did was they took three different regions with large Black populations, that is the city of Birmingham, the city of Montgomery, and the rural Black belt region, which is in between the two. They linked them all together, packed Black voters and Democrats into one heavily Democratic district, and then dispersed Black voters throughout the rest of the state to make sure that none of the other districts was anywhere close to majority Black.

What the plaintiffs did here was they devised a bunch of maps to present to the court and say, "Look, it's possible to draw two districts that are reasonably configured, that are sufficiently compact, and that are both majority Black and would let Black voters elect their preferred candidates." The way that they did this instead was they separated Birmingham and Montgomery and they kept part of the Black Belt with Birmingham in the 7th District and then in the second district, they drew Montgomery with much of the rest of the Black Belt and the city of Mobile, which is along the Gulf Coast and also has a large Black population. Once they did this, they were able to draw both these districts that were just over 50% Black and substantially Democratic enough that Black voters could reliably elect their preferred candidates.

Nir: Of course, as we've discussed on this show in the past, Republicans succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to block this order from taking effect in time for the 2022 elections. But then, we had that huge surprise ruling from the Supreme Court this year, where in a 5-4 decision, the court said, "Actually, no, the Alabama court got it right," sent the case back down to the lower court, and said, "Yeah, the state is going to need a new map."

Wolf: Yeah. Like you said, and like we've mentioned before, that ruling was very surprising because not only did they rule against Alabama, they completely upheld the lower court's ruling, which had directed the state to draw two districts that were majority Black or, quote, "something quite close to it," unquote. That's a very unambiguous order of what the court wanted the state to do.

But when Republicans went back to draw a new map this summer, they only drew one majority Black district and a second district that was just shy of 40% Black. Not 50%, but just shy of 40%. That second district, because of those demographics, it also had a white majority, was safely Republican in pretty much every election that you could look at over the last several years.

Nir: The defiance was just absolutely extraordinary. The thing that got me by far the most was when the Republican governor, Kay Ivey, put out this statement flat out saying that the legislature knows better than the federal courts, as though it's a knowledge competition, "Oh okay, you know better. Therefore, our order no longer applies to you." It was just straight-up defiance. Of course, the plaintiffs went back to the court and said, "Nuh-uh, this map is no good." The court agreed with them.

Wolf: Oftentimes, when we have Voting Rights Act litigation over redistricting like this, where Republicans are accused of violating the rights of Black or Latino voters in particular, what they'll try to do is draw a district that it might look on paper like it can elect that group's preferred candidate, but in practice it really doesn't. But here, that wasn't even at all the case.

The court said in its ruling blocking the new map that the state of Alabama ignored its directive. It was just clear that they had not even attempted to comply with the order. Because of that, it said it was not going to give them a third bite at the apple, and it was just going to appoint its own court expert who would solicit input from the parties and non-parties and draw its own map without giving the legislature another shot.

Beard: We're going to talk about the special master that was appointed in just a second, but tell us about what Republicans are doing in response going back to the Supreme Court.

Wolf: Republicans have appealed the court's order again to the Supreme Court hoping for a different outcome this time, but they're really trying to do two things. One, they're trying to just delay the process as long as they can to try to kick a new map to 2026, even if they lose. That's probably their most likely victory scenario, but even that is hardly guaranteed.

The second thing they're trying to do is raise a different argument to the Supreme Court on the merits to say that, "Oh, our map is still constitutional. The Voting Rights Act itself is the problem." What they're doing here is they're relying on part of conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh's opinion, where he said, "The state didn't raise this argument at the time, but it's possible that the Voting Rights Act's use of race and redistricting might not be constitutional forever, even if it was constitutional at the time the act was preauthorized in 1982."

Nir: There was a really good piece this week from Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern in Slate talking about what Alabama's strategy, if you can even call it that, seems to be. What they pointed out was that what are the odds that Kavanaugh is going to say three months after ruling in favor of the Voting Rights Act in really strong terms, "Oh, no, it's just a few months later and the whole thing is unconstitutional"? Maybe down the line, he's ready to do that, but it can't be the case that he's ready to do that right now. If it is, I think all hell will break loose. But Republicans just seem to expect that the Supreme Court will do their bidding and it seems like they didn't have a plan B for when it decided not to.

Wolf: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. There was a writer who I thought put it very aptly, where they said that John Roberts will essentially tell Republicans, "You have to lie to me better." For instance, with the Census case where Trump tried to add a citizenship question, there was very clear damning evidence that it was done with discriminatory intent toward Latinos and helping Republicans politically, and they had clearly violated the law to try to do this.

The court ruled against the Trump administration, gave them a second chance, and the Trump administration couldn't even put together a coherent case. So, they lost at the Supreme Court. In this Alabama case, the facts are very clear. You had two Trump-appointed judges in the majority in this lower court ruling, and they're now asking Kavanaugh to essentially reverse himself just three months later. It just does not seem like that's a very likely outcome.

Nir: I think it was Dahlia Lithwick, at least who I've seen popularize that phrase about Roberts, the "lie better to me." I think it's spot on.

Beard: Let's set aside the Supreme Court and whatever it may do with these appeals for the moment and go back to the court-appointed expert, which is often called a “special master” by the court. The special master has to create three maps to offer to the three judges by September 25th and as part of that process, they allowed for outside submissions from interested parties who wanted to propose a potential redistricted map. Stephen, you, as part of a group working with Daily Kos, submitted a pair of maps to the court. So, walk us through.

Beard: Submitted a pair of maps to the court, so walk us through the process of actually creating these maps and then getting them officially legally submitting them to the court.

Wolf: We partnered with longtime pollsters at McCreary, who's an Alabama resident and is very familiar with the state's politics and geography. To draw the maps, we use the free online tool called Dave's Redistricting App, which can allow anyone essentially to draw a map and potentially to the standards that would need to be able to submit it in court. One thing I really like about Dave's Redistricting App is that it is free to the public, and so you don't need to pay thousands of dollars for the professional software that lawmakers will tend to use to be able to analyze or even propose your own map. That's something that was a real innovation for this decade's redistricting cycle.

Nir: Yeah, I think DRA is just an incredible tool and really I think we have to give a shout-out to Dave Bradlee and his team for developing it and putting it out there and putting work into it constantly because it is just a very sophisticated tool, so much so that almost everyone who submitted maps used DRA to do so in this case, including one of the other groups of plaintiffs in the case, the so-called Singleton plaintiffs. They're not the lead plaintiffs, but it's kind of funny. I was looking at their submission, I'm like, "That color scheme looks really familiar," and I said to you, Stephen, "I think this is from DRA," and you're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. That's totally a DRA map."

Beard: As you were going through and making this map, what were some of the tough choices that you had to make? What were some of the differences between the maps that you submitted and the other groups that submitted maps and the different reasonings behind those choices?

Wolf: The main problem that our maps had to address was how to create a second district, which happened to, of course, be numbered the 2nd district, where Black voters could elect their preferred candidate. To address that, let me start off with what Republicans did that was invalid. Republicans had separated Birmingham and Montgomery in their latest map, but what they did was they connected Montgomery with a lot of very white rural and exurban areas that would drown out the Black voters in that district, so we needed to find some alternative that didn't do that. What we ended up doing, and what many of the other parties did was we used the city of Mobile on the Gulf Coast and connected that with Montgomery and the rest of the Black Belt region to create a fairly reasonably-shaped district where Black voters could indeed elect their preferred candidates.

Once we decided to use Mobile in this manner, the other question that ended up making the difference between the two of our maps was just how much of the Black Belt to put in one of the districts versus the other, and just how much of Birmingham to put in one of the districts versus a neighboring district. Our first map, which we called Plan A, attempted to put as much of the Black Belt region as possible in just the two heavily Black districts. But in our plan B, we wanted to put as much of the region as possible in just the 2nd district. The reason for that was because doing so let us confine the 7th district to just the Birmingham and Tuscaloosa areas, which also have sizable Black populations and in doing that, we could put almost the entirety of the city of Birmingham in just the 7th district, which most other plans would split to a much larger degree.

Nir: I found it so interesting, Stephen, that the Special Master decided to open the floor, really, to the public in this way because in a lot of redistricting cases, the courts don't necessarily express an interest in wanting to hear from the public. But you did have some experience in the past with a court that was quite open-minded about hearing from ordinary Americans talking about the case in Pennsylvania from several years ago, where the Supreme Court struck down the state's GOP gerrymandered congressional map and drew a new much fairer map that really changed political outcomes in Pennsylvania, and you submitted some proposals in that case that actually in a lot of ways wound up resembling the final map that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court adopted.

Wolf: Yeah. That's right. That case was a partisan gerrymandering lawsuit, which meant it had some pretty key differences with this Voting Rights Act lawsuit. One of those is that the court in Pennsylvania ended up redrawing the entire map and not taking any of it as a starting point. Whereas in Alabama, the court directed map makers to only make modifications necessary to remedy the Voting Rights Act violation and not redraw the entire state. In some ways, in Pennsylvania, that process was closer to, if you had an independent redistricting commission drawing the maps, and when states have commissions like that, they almost always will solicit input from the public, but there was also no requirement that the special master pay particular attention to any one proposal like ours. But when we looked at the map, he drew and analyzed all the various plans that people had submitted. One of the two that I had submitted came closest in terms of population to what the special master actually drew.

Nir: Beard, like you mentioned, the special master in this case, the Alabama case, has to come up with three different plans to propose to the court, and the court will presumably pick one of them, though it, I guess conceivably could make modifications or go back to the special master, and so there's a chance that the special master could choose from some of the plans that are before him and offer those to the court. We just don't know.

Beard: Yeah, we'll have to wait and see what the special master comes up with and then what the court decides based on their recommendations.

Now, before we let you go, Stephen, we want to discuss a couple of ongoing fights in states around their redistricting process, starting with Wisconsin. Their Republicans and the legislature are looking for any avenue to prevent the newly progressive Supreme Court from striking down the gerrymandered maps and requiring fair un-gerrymandered maps. So tell us what they've been doing as they search desperately for a way to stop this.

Wolf: Yeah. In Wisconsin, progressives took a majority on the state Supreme Court back in August, and this is the first time they've had one in 15 years. Almost immediately after, a pair of lawsuits were filed challenging the state's legislative maps as illegal partisan gerrymanders. There's a pretty broad consensus in the state that the court is most likely going to strike those down and draw fairer maps, if it can.

What Republicans are trying to do is twofold. One, they're threatening to impeach the new progressive justice who gave progressives the majority before she's even heard a single case. The second thing Wisconsin Republicans are doing is they just introduced and advanced a bill in the legislature that they claim would establish a nonpartisan redistricting process, but it's really just a charade intended to prevent the court from ruling on the maps.

What this bill does is it claims that it would set up a process like the state of Iowa has that is a somewhat nonpartisan process, but the biggest flaw with this system is that it's only statutory and that a single party, legislature and governor could repeal it anytime they wanted and pass their own maps.

Even if the process stays in place, there are still ways for a Republican legislature to get their preferred maps out of this setup, and the criteria it has for drawing maps are the ones that are tilted toward Republicans to begin with. Even if it worked as it claims it would, it still is not guaranteed to draw fair maps. What we've seen in response is Democrats have almost all opposed this and the governor is likely to veto it, and Republicans might try to override the veto, but they would need a few Democrats to cross over to do that.

Nir: Lastly, Stephen, we want to ask you about what's going on in Ohio where activists, as we've talked about before, are preparing to put a measure on the ballot next year that would establish bonafide independent redistricting in the state, not the sham nonpartisan B.S. that Wisconsin Republicans are trying to put forward right now. But of course, of course, Republicans are once again, doing their utmost to stop it, and the whole thing is being held up by the Attorney General there who is a Republican, so what is the status there?

Wolf: In Ohio to put a measure on the ballot, voters have to gather a few signatures at first, and then they'll submit a proposal to the Attorney General for them to look at, and the Attorney General is supposed to assess whether the proposed ballot summary that supporters have written accurately and fairly reflects the actual amendment that they've proposed. Once he's done that, a separate body of state officials will look at whether the proposal itself is constitutional, and if the proposal passes through both of those stages, it's only then that supporters can go about gathering the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to actually qualify for the ballot.

Earlier this summer, when activists came out with his proposal, they gathered enough signatures to get the Attorney General to have to consider it. And what did he do? He turned right around and rejected it saying that several parts of it did not accurately and fairly reflect the underlying amendment. The supporters went back to the drawing board; they revised the text and submitted it back to the Attorney General. And he just again said that there are still problems with it and he rejected it.

It's not uncommon for the Attorney General to reject a proposed summary at least once, but usually it's something that proponents will go back and fix and then they'll get approval. But what Republicans have been doing in Ohio lately leads me to wonder whether the Attorney General is just trying to string things along and drag things out and cut into the time that would otherwise be allotted for them to gather voter signatures. Like you guys were talking about earlier in the show, Republicans in Ohio just gave an abortion rights measure a very misleading ballot summary, and there should be no expectation here that Republicans will try to act in good faith and ensure that this proposal gets on the ballot with fair language. They're just trying to string things along and undermine supporters of redistricting reform.

Nir: Stephen, do you think that we will see litigation one way or the other over the constitutionality of the proposed amendment? Because, as you said first, the ballot language has to pass muster; then another board has to determine whether the amendment itself is constitutional. Let's say they give it a thumbs up. Do you think that we'll see a lawsuit challenging it that would probably ultimately go before the Ohio Supreme Court?

Wolf: Yeah, I think that's all but guaranteed at this point. If we look at the abortion measure, again, there were multiple lawsuits trying to keep it off the ballot saying that it violated particular constitutional provisions. And, fortunately, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected that, but that's hardly guaranteed with redistricting. One reason for that I think, is because it's much more of a partisan issue where it directly threatens Republican power in the state, and Republicans in November's elections, gained a four-to-three majority of very hard-line Republicans after replacing a moderate former Republican justice who had sided with Democrats to strike down the previous Republican gerrymanders.

Nir: Well, obviously we are going to be following that set of developments very, very closely. Stephen Wolf, it has been fantastic having you back on the show. It's been a little bit too long. Before we let you go, please let The Downballot listeners know where they can find your work and where to find you on social media.

Wolf: Yeah, so I write on Daily Kos Elections, which I'm sure you all are familiar with, and on social media, you can find me on the site formerly known as Twitter @PoliticsWolf, and on Bluesky, you can find me at just Stephen Wolf, and my name has a P-H, no V.

Nir: Stephen, thank you so much.

Wolf: Thanks.

Beard: That's all from us this week. Thanks to Stephen Wolf for joining us. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor Trever Jones, and we'll be back next week with a new episode.

The Downballot: Monster flip in Virginia + reredistricting preview (transcript)

Hell yeah! Election season is here, and it's already off to an amazing start with Democrats' huge flip of a critical seat in the Virginia state Senate, which kicks off this week's episode of The Downballot. Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard dissect what Aaron Rouse's victory means for November (abortion is still issue number one!) when every seat in the legislature will be on the ballot. They also discuss big goings-on in two U.S. Senate races: California, where Rep. Katie Porter just became the first Democrat to kick off a bid despite Sen. Dianne Feinstein's lack of a decision about her own future, and Michigan, which just saw veteran Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow announce her retirement.

The Davids also delve back into a topic that frequently came up last year: redistricting. “Didn't every state just draw new maps?” you might ask. Yes! But many have to do so again thanks to court rulings. Unfortunately, this gives Republicans in North Carolina and Ohio the opportunity to gerrymander once more, though there's an outside chance some Southern states could be required to draw new congressional districts where Black voters can elect their candidates of choice.

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. Please subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave us a five-star rating and review.

David Beard:

What are we going to be talking about this week, Nir?

David Nir:

Well, we kicked off the brand-new year with a freaking awesome special election flip in the Virginia state Senate. We are going to dive deep into that. We also want to talk about the United States Senate. We have some action in two key states, California and Michigan. We also need to talk about what's going on at the legislative level in Michigan; of course, we flipped both chambers of the legislature last year and Democrats are now moving forward with a fantastic progressive agenda, so we're going to talk about the implications of that. Then finally, we are going to discuss an old favorite topic: redistricting. Redistricting isn't done. Even though every state drew new maps in 2022, many have to do so again thanks to court orders in 2023. So we are going to preview what we can expect as new lines are drawn once more in the reredistricting process. Please stay with us.

David Beard:

Even though it's not even halfway through January, we already have an election for 2023 to talk about. Down in Virginia, we had a state Senate special that was pretty competitive, so tell us about that one.

David Nir:

Beard, man, I am so stoked. This was such a great way to kick off 2023. It was already a great year with all the Kevin McCarthy nonsense, but we flipped a state Senate seat in Virginia in a Republican-held district. Democrat Aaron Rouse, who's a Virginia Beach city councilman, beat Republican Kevin Adams by just about 1 point. And this was a district held by Republican state Sen. Jen Kiggans. Unfortunately, in November, she beat Congresswoman Elaine Luria in the 2nd District, but it also meant she had to give up her state Senate seat. And this was very competitive turf. This was a district that Joe Biden won by 10 points in 2020, but the following year, Republican Glenn Youngkin in the race for governor carried this district in the Virginia Beach area by 4 points.

And in 2019, this was an open seat. Jen Kiggans, the new congresswoman, she won this district by 1 point in the regular November general election, a time when Democrats were quite pumped up. Trump was in the White House, and in fact on that night, Democrats actually flipped the Virginia state Senate in 2019, but they didn't take this seat. So Democrats did better in a special election in the middle of January coming straight off the holidays than they did at a normal election when everyone is accustomed to voting.

Aaron Rouse—he is a former NFL player, also perhaps more importantly, a former Virginia Tech football star, and he is also adamantly pro-choice, and this is really the crux of the election. Going into this race, Democrats had just a 21-19 advantage in the state Senate, and the problem is that one of those 21 Democrats is someone we've mentioned before on this show, Joe Morrissey, who is a total scumbag. He has been just scandal-ridden his entire career, but on top of all that, he calls himself "pro-life" and there's always a possibility that he would screw over his party and decide to join with Republicans to pass some sort of abortion ban, which Republicans, including Gov. Youngkin, have been really eager to pass.

And if Morrissey were to do that, well then that 21-19 majority turns to 20-20, it's a tie, and then the far-right lieutenant governor Republican Winsome Sears would be able to break a tie in favor of an abortion ban. That can't happen now. Now the Democratic majority is 22-18, and no matter what Joe Morrissey tries to do, no matter what stunts he tries to pull, it doesn't matter: Democrats have a solid 21 vote pro-choice majority, and that includes Aaron Rouse.

I should also add this district actually is going to be much bluer come November when every member of the legislature is up for reelection, both in the House and the state Senate. This district was held under the old lines, like I said, Biden plus 10. The new lines are more like Biden plus 20, so Rouse definitely should be the favorite for reelection. He is going to almost certainly be facing Adams in a rematch. We will be talking about the overall picture for both the state House where Republicans have a narrow advantage; Democrats are going to be trying to undo that. And the state Senate where, of course Democrats have this four-seat advantage and they will be trying to defend that in an upcoming episode. But man, I love starting a new year with a flip of a major, major seat.

David Beard:

Yeah, it's great to kick off 2023 like this and continue the relative success of 2022. I think a couple of points that we can take away from this special: one, I think we've seen continually now that as coalitions have changed and the Democratic Party has become more and more the home of more educated voters who tend to vote in these specials, the drop off that we used to see ... particularly when there was a Democrat in the White House. Obviously when we had Trump or later in the Bush years, there was always great Dem enthusiasm. But what we're seeing is even with a Democratic president, Democratic turnout is holding up reasonably well in special elections. In large part, I think because we have a lot more better-educated voters who make an effort to make sure that they go and vote in these special elections. So that's good news for us. As these special elections go along, we don't have as much to fear from them as we once did under a Democratic president.

I also think this is obviously a big swing area of Virginia as a whole, particularly as we've seen northern Virginia get bluer and bluer. The swing area of the state has really become the Richmond suburbs and the southeast Virginia/Virginia Beach area. So the fact that we are able to take this seat, put up a good margin compared to what it could've been had we had a bad result, I think that portends well for the fall 2023 elections. Like you said, we're going to talk about that a lot between now and then, but the Senate and the House are both up and so I think this is a good starting point to kick off victories in hopefully both those chambers.

David Nir:

I also want to circle back to the number one topic of 2022, which is also going to be the number one topic of 2023, and that is abortion. I talked about Joe Morrissey, but I want to make it clear, Aaron Rouse campaigned heavily on abortion rights. He ran ads about it, and Adams, the Republican, he tried to sidestep the issue, as Republicans did throughout 2022. So I think it still bears repeating: We are in a post-Dobbs world, and we talked about this after the midterms; the pundit conventional wisdom was, "Oh, well it'll fade." I'm certain that it hasn't, and it certainly didn't fade in November and I don't think it's faded now, come January. I think this is going to remain potent for a long time to come.

David Beard:

2024 has already started when it comes to Senate races, we had a couple of big developments in the past week and we're going to hit both of those. I'm going to start us off with California Senate where incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein has not officially said that she's not going to seek reelection in 2024. But due to her advanced age—she's 89 now and somewhat declining health—that's led many to anticipate that she's not going to run again, that that decision is essentially inevitable. So there are many Democrats that are making moves toward running in 2024.

One of the big names that went ahead and made that move, and officially announced that she was running for Senate, is Rep. Katie Porter. She announced her Senate bid on Tuesday and she also said later in the day that she was in, whether or not Sen. Feinstein ran again. Which again is not expected to be the case, but is one of those brash moves where I think others are waiting for Feinstein to say that she won't seek reelection before announcing and giving that sense of respect and deferral. Katie Porter is saying, "I'm in, I'm running for Senate, whether or not the senator decides to run for reelection or not, that doesn't matter. I'm in."

What that does do, that gives her a little bit of a head start. She gets to go, she gets to start campaigning and raising money. She doesn't have to wait on the senator to make an official announcement, but it's also possible that some people may see that as somewhat of a sign of disrespect. Now, I mentioned that there are a lot of people looking at this race. Another prominent candidate is Rep. Barbara Lee, a longtime, very progressive member of Congress from the Bay Area. She reportedly told the Congressional Black Caucus that she was going to run, but to a reporter, she later said that she'd make an official announcement "when it's appropriate." So she's clearly somebody who is likely going to wait until Feinstein officially announces that she's retiring before making any sort of public announcement or campaign launch.

Rep. Adam Schiff is another person who's widely expected to run. And some of his folks criticized Rep. Porter for her announcement because of the floods that are currently taking place in California, saying that it wasn't an appropriate time to make this sort of announcement and start raising money when many people in California are being affected by this natural disaster. This is just the start of what's probably going to be a very long, very messy campaign once all these candidates get in. But we'll just have to wait and see how it develops as we head towards the 2024 California primary, which will give us two candidates of course, because of their top two system. And then likely even more mess if those top two candidates are Democrats and we'll have that very strange idea of two Democrats competing in a general election with no Republican candidate.

David Nir:

That's exactly what happened the last time California had an open Senate seat, back in 2016 when Kamala Harris beat Loretta Sanchez, and those Dem-on-Dem statewide races in California can be weird and difficult to handicap. Porter released a poll of her own, showing that she would be leading in a hypothetical primary and also leading Adam Schiff in a one-on-one general election. But the reason why she's leading Adam Schiff is, believe it or not, because she's doing much better with Republicans.

Now, many Republicans would probably undervote; they would skip the race if it were between two Democrats, we've seen that before. But Katie Porter is this huge liberal icon, but so is Adam Schiff, perhaps even more so thanks to all of Trump's attacks during the impeachment. So again, it's going to be pretty tricky to figure out who might actually pick up those independent or Republican votes if we do have a Dem-on-Dem race. But there is so much game left to be played until we get to that point, so I don't even want to begin to guess how this one is going to unfold.

David Beard:

Yeah, this definitely feels like the first mile of a marathon. It's going to be a very long, very complicated race.

David Nir:

Well, we have another Senate seat that definitely is going to be open in 2024 that we need to talk about, and that is in Michigan where veteran Democrat Debbie Stabenow announced her retirement after four terms. And as you would expect in a swing state like this, there are tons of candidates on both sides who are reportedly considering, who actually have said they're considering, who have been mentioned by the proverbial Great Mentioner, just names that get floated in newspaper articles without any quote attached to them whatsoever. Some of the best known Democrats whose names have come up so far are Congresswomen Elissa Slotkin, Debbie Dingell, and Haley Stevens; Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist also hasn't ruled out a campaign. He would be Michigan's first Black senator if he were to prevail.

For Republicans, they also have a bunch of names. Maybe the most prominent is actually freshman Congressman John James, who like Garlin Gilchrist, would also be the state's first Black senator. However, James, who ran twice for this seat unsuccessfully before, only just barely squeaked into the House in November after being expected by just about everyone, including the party organizations, to absolutely dominate. I think he won by maybe just like 1% or so. So he might prefer to actually spend some time getting familiar with his district and trying to secure reelection as opposed to immediately seeking a promotion when he kind of entered office in a pretty shaky way. Again, this is one where there is so much left to unfold, but unlike in California, we have traditional primaries in Michigan. Those typically take place in August of the election year, which is very, very late. So it could be quite a long time before we have nominees in that race too.

It's so hard to know what Michigan is going to do in a general election. Trump obviously won it in 2016. It was absolutely heartbreaking. More than heartbreaking. It was devastating. But Biden came back and won it by 3 points in 2020. And then Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic incumbent, she won reelection last fall by an 11-point margin. So is Michigan really a solidly blue-leaning state or is it a swing state? Does it matter if it's a state-level election or a federal election? I guess we'll really have to see, but I am sure that Republicans will try really, really hard to win this seat, especially since they have a very favorable map overall where Democrats are in defense throughout most of the country. And of course we will be talking about the 2024 Senate playing field extensively in upcoming episodes.

David Beard:

And of course, we all know that the top of the ticket affects the Senate races when it's a presidential year. So that's obviously going to be a factor, particularly now that this is going to be an open seat. How Michigan goes at the presidential level will definitely have an effect on this Senate race. Though we've certainly also seen circumstances where really strong or really weak candidates can change that dynamic and you could have a Republican win, even if Biden is reelected or vice versa if there's some other scenario. So that's a big factor that we're going to have to watch as we go on. But candidate quality as we saw in 2022, even in a presidential year that's coming in 2024, candidate quality really matters. So we're going to have to see who comes out of these primaries.

David Nir:

It absolutely does. And I was thinking as you were saying that, Beard, Democrats don't really have any weak candidates. I mean, yeah, sure, I suppose someone could emerge and sneak through that we're not expecting, but all the names that have surfaced so far and beyond just those that I rattled off earlier, they would all be good in one way or another. Republicans have so many disaster candidates, any one of whom could win a primary. I mean, what if Tudor Dixon, the candidate who lost to Whitmer by double-digits in November, decides to run again? Anything is possible with them.

David Beard:

Yeah. And we've seen as the Republican Party continues to fail in these races that they think they should be doing better in, it largely chalks up to the fact that they nominate bad candidates. Democrats have nominated really strong candidates in recent years, and as a result, Democrats do better than you would expect on a race-by-race basis because of our good candidates. So we can only hope that continues. As long as the Republican Party is like this, we have to take advantage of the fact that we have such better candidates than they do.

David Nir:

I'm totally loving it. And speaking of better candidates leading to great success, there is a great success that is on the way in Michigan—still talking about Michigan—that we just have to talk about because it directly stems from one of the best Democratic victories of 2022.

David Beard:

Yes. In case you somehow weren't with us in 2022 and missed this, Democrats took control of both the Michigan state House and state Senate last year, giving them the first trifecta in the state along with Gov. Whitmer for the first time in decades. Which means that they're going to be able to pass legislation without any support of Republican members in either chamber, which is great news because they're going to be able to do some really, really good things for Michigan.

Now, obviously, we don't usually get a lot into the weeds of various state-level legislation here, but it's good to see the positive actual outcomes that result when we elect Democrats in a state like Michigan, then they're actually able to take power. So Michigan Democratic legislative leaders released a list of bills that they're going to take up first and hopefully pass quickly, and that includes some really great legislation including LGBT anti-discrimination protections, and restoring the prevailing wage, which is something that ensures that state workers on construction projects are paid a good wage.

And then ending right to work. Right to work is something that we've talked about a little bit. When a state is "right to work," it allows someone who's in a job that would be unionized to not pay anything to the union that represents them on legal issues and on collective bargaining and all of this stuff. And conservatives like to frame it as this freedom idea. But what it really does is weaken the unions because unions are forced to represent all of the workers whether they pay anything or not. And so in states that don't have “right to work,” all workers represented by the union have to pay a fair share fee, specifically just on that legal and bargaining representation. And so when right to work is in effect, the union has to pay to represent all these workers who aren't a part of it without any compensation.

And so getting rid of right to work is both fair in terms of what people are getting for this fair share fee that they pay. It gives the unions a stronger footing in terms of bargaining, and then also in terms of fighting for workers' rights at the political level. And that's why Republicans always go after it. They want to weaken the unions because the unions fight back against the Republicans’ attacks on workers. And so we've seen Republicans go after and pass right to work whenever they take over a state. And now that Democrats have taken over Michigan, one of the strongest union states in the country, they're going to be able to end right to work, strengthen unions, strengthen workers' rights, and make a level playing field once again.

We're also seeing that the Democrats are going to repeal the abortion criminalization statute, even though it's not in effect. Obviously, it's good to officially repeal it and make sure no changes in the judicial system or anything in Michigan or the Constitution would result in somehow that ever coming into effect. And they're also going to enact some progressive tax changes. So just good policy after good policy that we're hopefully going to see passed really soon here in Michigan.

David Nir:

Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we are going to be discussing redistricting. I know you're thinking, "Didn't we just finish up with redistricting last year?" Absolutely not. A whole bunch of states have to draw maps once more, and we are going to be taking a deep dive to find out what we can expect in the new reredistricting process this year. Stay with us.

So Beard, we got to talk about redistricting. Even though every single state in the nation redrew its congressional map and almost every single state in the nation redrew their legislative maps, a whole bunch have to do it all over again in almost every case because of some sort of court ruling saying that, "You did something wrong. You passed an illegal map. You didn't follow proper procedures. There is something that you have to do over." And we are therefore going to see a whole bunch of new maps across the country, both at the congressional level and at the legislative level. And some we know for certain are coming; others, we are still waiting on the outcome of various lawsuits. But at the top of the list is a state that we definitely know will be drawing a new congressional map and also one new legislative map. And that is your home state, David Beard.

David Beard:

Yes. Redistricting is really a never-ending process for some states, and North Carolina has definitely been one of those over the years. Though as we'll talk about, once this final process happens, they may stick with those maps for the rest of the decade. The North Carolina Supreme Court struck down both the congressional map and the state Senate map, and for the congressional map, they used a court ordered map in 2022 that was only in effect for 2022. So the state legislature will have to draw a new map for 2024.

Unfortunately, the Republican state legislature in North Carolina is who draws the map. The governor, who is a Democrat, doesn't have any role in redistricting in North Carolina. And so the only check on the legislature is the court system and the court that struck down that gerrymandered map was a Democratic-majority North Carolina Supreme Court. And due to the 2022 elections, it's now a Republican-majority state Supreme Court. So it's very unlikely that that court will strike down a gerrymandered map from the state legislature. So they will largely have carte blanche to draw whatever they want and be as aggressive as they want.

The results from 2022 ended up electing seven Democrats and seven Republicans from a 14-district map. That could easily be 9-5, 10-4. Obviously there are some Voting Rights Act considerations around African American districts in North Carolina, but beyond that, the state legislature can be as aggressive as they would like, which is really not good news for Democratic incumbents in North Carolina.

David Nir:

I think in a worst-case scenario, there are really four Democrats who could be targeted, and that includes three freshmen—Don Davis, Jeff Jackson, Wiley Nickel—and also Kathy Manning. So you could potentially see all four of those districts become unwinnable red. That alone would really add to the hurdle that Democrats face in taking back the House in 2024. That said, no matter what North Carolina Republicans do, I still feel very optimistic about our chances of flipping the House in two years’ time, but this could really suck.

David Beard:

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to write off anybody particularly, because, as we've seen, there are situations where Republicans put up a terrible candidate. You've got a strong incumbent, and I think a lot of these incumbents, even though they're freshmen, are pretty strong, and they can really outperform the district by quite a lot. We saw, of course, in Ohio, which we're going to talk about in a minute, Marcy Kaptur way outperform the partisanship of her district against a terrible Republican candidate. And so it's totally possible something like that would happen, but you have to admit it's more the exception than the rule. If they go after all four of these seats really aggressively, it would be great if we could hold one or two, but it would be almost impossible to hold all four if they go all out to go after these seats.

David Nir:

So yeah, let's talk about Ohio. That state was an absolute shit show. Republican maps, both for Congress and the legislature, were repeatedly struck down by the state Supreme Court for violating the state constitution's ban on partisan gerrymandering. But once again, just like in North Carolina, that court had a 4-3 anti-gerrymandering majority. It was three Democrats plus one moderate Republican who was the chief justice. She stepped down, and Republicans now have an outright majority on that court. And so, even though Republican legislators managed to run out the clock and use unconstitutional maps in 2022, now they get a chance to draw maps again, just like in North Carolina, and the only possible check on them is the Supreme Court, and it's very unlikely that these very partisan Republican justices will do anything to stop a more aggressive gerrymander. And, what, Beard, would you say there are probably three Democrats who could be targeted by Republicans if they go hog wild once again? You have two freshmen, Emilia Sykes and Greg Landsman, and plus also Marcy Kaptur, who you were mentioning. It's certainly possible that Republicans could try to strike at all three.

David Beard:

I do think there is slightly more of a question in Ohio about how aggressive Republicans will be at the congressional level, whereas we've seen North Carolina Republicans repeatedly go all out in terms of this sort of gerrymandered aggressiveness. We do have the recent thing that we talked about last week where a slightly more moderate Republican speaker of the House was elected on the backs of Democratic votes. And so there may be a situation where maybe they don't go to the absolute partisan wall to try to pass a new map, given the uncertain situation in the House. But we'll have to see. There are absolutely three seats that were very competitive in 2022. If this same map were somehow used again, it would absolutely be competitive again.

I think the person with the best chance to either have a seat they could win or maybe be left alone is Greg Landsman in Ohio's first district. It's based in Cincinnati. There are some rules in the Ohio Constitution that are pretty straightforward about how many times you can split a county, and so they can't split the county that holds Cincinnati more than once. And so you do have to put all those Democratic voters somewhere.

I think in some ways it would be easier just to give him Cincinnati in the way that there's a big Columbus district where they make a huge Democratic vote sink, and the same with Cleveland, where they make a huge Democratic vote sink, and just put the Democrats into that district rather than try to split it up. But we'll see. I do think Kaptur held a very Republican seat this past cycle. It wouldn't surprise me if hers got maybe slightly even worse. And then, Sykes in northeast Ohio, it's obviously difficult to tell because there's a lot of voters moving in different directions there. So it's hard to know exactly how they might want to change it, but they could absolutely go after her if they really want to.

David Nir:

Regarding that 1st District, the one in Cincinnati now held by Greg Landsman, one point that's worth making is that most incumbent lawmakers don't want to take on new territory. Not just because it might put them at risk in a general election, but also because it might put them at risk in a primary. You could always get a challenge from someone who represents the new turf that you haven't previously represented, and we saw this in particular play out in Missouri, where the far-right faction of the Republican Party there really, really, really wanted a congressional map that created seven Republican districts and just one Democratic district. But they wound up passing a 6-2 map, just as they had before, because in large part, a lot of these Republican incumbent congressmen simply didn't want their districts to change all that much.

So that is something we actually have seen in Ohio as well in the previous decade. When Ohio was dropping a district due to reapportionment, they actually carved up a district that belonged to a Republican congressman, a guy named Steve Austria, simply because they wanted to make sure that they could elect all the other Republicans safely. So that might be the one saving grace. Basically, the desire to protect incumbents could outweigh the desire to screw over Democrats. North Carolina. Man, those Republicans just don't seem to care. They will go absolutely balls to the wall no matter what, and incumbent protection, just, I don't know, either it doesn't matter to them or they've just figured it out so brilliantly with these perfect 55% Republican districts. But they never really seem to have any of those fears.

David Beard:

I do think because there are, on the whole, probably fewer swing voters in North Carolina than there are in Ohio, it is easier for them to be more aggressive because the numbers won't change that much. So if you think of the band of the range of outcomes in a lot of those North Carolina districts, they're a lot narrower than you were in some of these Ohio places, where we see a lot of swing voters. Obviously we've seen Republicans rack up some massive victories. We saw a relatively close Senate race. We saw Sherrod Brown win in 2018. So there is somewhat more swing voters, I think, in Ohio, than North Carolina, which is a factor.

And to go back to your point about how much does a Republican want to take on Democrats, in Hamilton County, which is the county that Cincinnati is in: the district that shares it with CD 1, where Landsman is the Democrat, is congressional district 8, held by Republican Warren Davidson. Now, he won comfortably, of course, in 2022. He won by about 19 points. Sure, he could take on a few Democrats, but the question is, how many Democrats does he really want to take on to try to make that seat a few points more Republican to potentially give himself a competitive race? Because right now it's a nothing race, and if it gets a few more points more Democrat, even if he'd still be favored, he might have to start raising a lot of money, doing a lot more campaigning, and he may not want to do that, which may mean that Landsman may have a slightly easier time, because they have to give any precincts in Hamilton County that go away from Landsman to CD 8, because they can only split it once.

David Nir:

Now, we should also talk about several legal challenges that are still underway, attacking Republican-drawn maps for violating the rights of Black voters. We talked about a couple of these cases last year. I want to highlight two in particular because they are very, very similar, from Alabama and Louisiana. In both of these cases, federal courts ruled that under the Voting Rights Act, the state was obligated to draw a second district where Black voters would be likely to elect their candidate of choice, who would almost certainly be a Black Democrat. In both Alabama and in Louisiana, there is a single Black district, and in both of these cases, plaintiffs sued and said there should be a second such district. And applying a set of criteria required by the Voting Rights Act, both courts held that, in both cases, the plaintiffs were right.

And I read both of these decisions. They were amazing decisions. Incredibly thoughtful. Very, very lengthy, dealing with absolutely every aspect of these cases with incredible thoroughness and seriousness. In some cases, these decisions were written by Trump-appointed judges, and in both of those two cases, the Supreme Court said, "It's a little too close to the election, so, we got to go with the existing GOP maps that only have one Black district apiece." And those rulings from the Supreme Court were just absolute garbage. There was plenty of time to draw new maps in both of those states. That's absolutely what should have happened. But these cases are still pending. So, what that means is that once there is a full trial on the merits, the case is adjudicated fully as opposed to in a preliminary fashion, then hopefully these courts will both rule the same way and, again, say, "Yes, like we said before, you need to draw a second Black district in both of these states." Of course, even if they do come to those conclusions, the Supreme Court could still overrule them on the merits.

Previously, they said, "No, we're putting this ruling on pause because there isn't enough time." But now, going forward, they could say, "We are simply overturning this ruling because you got it wrong." They absolutely didn't get it wrong. These judges wrote really tremendous rulings, as I said, but there is no way to know for sure. I'm not that optimistic about these cases standing up, but if they do, that would mean two more districts almost certain to elect Democrats in two otherwise dark red Southern states. And that would be a huge bonus for Democrats, but not just that, it would be a huge bonus for the cause of Black representation.

I mean, that's why the Voting Rights Act exists. It exists to further the cause of minority representation in this country. And the Voting Rights Act says you cannot try to dilute the strength of Black voters, of Latino voters, of other minority groups, language minority, other groups of voters of color. You cannot try to deprive them of the kind of representation they ought to have if you drew normal, sane, sensible maps, is more or less my layman's interpretation of what the VRA requires here, and I think that's basically right. So, we'll see what the Supreme Court does. Again, don't keep your fingers crossed on these, but that could be plus two to the upside for Democrats if those go the right way.

David Beard:

Yeah, and the Supreme Court heard this case. They specifically heard the Alabama case, which is Merrill v. Milligan. It will almost certainly control the Louisiana case that comes after it. That happened in October, so we could get a ruling anytime in the next few months. Obviously, people often take tea leaves from the oral arguments. It was largely not great for the side arguing for the additional Black districts in Alabama. It seemed like, unsurprisingly, the court really wanted an outcome that resulted in not an extra district. They sort of went around a lot of different ways to get there, whether to just make the requirements more difficult so that the plaintiffs wouldn't meet it, or to just strike down this whole aspect of the voting rights altogether. But either way, I think we would be really surprised if these Republican justices came and were like, "Actually, yes. There should be a second Black Democratic district," despite that being the obvious intent of the Voting Rights Act. And so, we're likely going to have to continue on with the districts as they are, is what I would expect.

David Nir:

There was also a similar ruling, actually, just in the past week, out of South Carolina, that held that the 1st Congressional District, this is a Republican seat along the coast, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymandered, meaning that Republican lawmakers overly relied on race when they drew that district. And what in fact they did was this was a seat that Democrats actually flipped in 2018. Republicans narrowly flipped it back in 2020 and after that, Republican lawmakers wanted to make it redder in order to protect the new incumbent, Nancy Mace. And they did just that, except they did so by deliberately moving Black voters from the 1st District to the neighboring 6th District where Black voters predominate. That is the state's one Democratic district. We'll see whether this ruling survives on appeal.

I honestly don't really expect too much change. Even if it does, because if Republicans have to draw a new map, they'll probably just be smarter the next time. We've seen that happen a number of cases where Republicans simply get busted for being just kind of stupid or overly aggressive or cocky about the way they drew maps in South Carolina.

They were really explicit about their target in terms of the percentage of Black voters they wanted in each district, and that just sets off alarm bells of overly relying on race in doing redistricting. And if you do something that's stupid then even a really hardcore Republican judge is kind of like, "Ugh, God, why did you give me this mess? I have to rule against you. You were just too dumb." And probably the next time they'll be a little bit smarter about this. But we'll see how aggressive they try to be. It'll still be a red-leaning district no matter what happens with this case, no matter what kind of new map we wind up seeing, if any.

But this is also an area, one of these better-educated suburban areas that seems to be trending Democrats’ way. So maybe further down the road, this is an opportunity for a pickup once again.

David Beard:

And of course, what they often do in cases like this is they pretend that they made these moves for partisan gain. The Republicans will say, "Oh, we were just doing this for partisan reasons and they just happened to all be Black people that we moved out of the district." What are the odds? When obviously there's also a very obvious clear racial element to this districting? One of the judges that ruled and wrote on this case said, and I quote, "If you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know someone put it there." And I'm like, "That's pretty good because you can claim all sorts of things. But of course, ultimately someone put the turtle on the fence post. Somebody moved all these Black voters to the other district and you can claim it for all sorts of other things that were going on.”

David Nir:

The turtle got on top of the fence post for purely partisan reasons.

David Beard:

Of course. He was too partisan to not be on the fence post.

David Nir:

So there's one more state in this bucket that we need to talk about, and that's Florida. But the litigation that is ongoing there is in state court, and it relies on amendments to the state constitution that voters passed quite some time ago. These amendments try to crack down on partisan gerrymandering and they also prohibit undermining minority representation. And in fact, in 2016, litigants successfully used these amendments to get the state to draw a new congressional map.

In fact, one that was more favorable for Democrats because of course the map had been drawn by Republicans. The problem is that since that time, Florida's Supreme Court has undergone dramatic changes. Former Gov. Rick Scott appointed several members and the current Gov. Ron DeSantis has also appointed more justices to the court. The majority that wrote that previous decision that cracked down on partisan gerrymandering and also supported Black representation no longer exists.

And the map that Republicans passed last year which was drawn by DeSantis himself. He just told the legislature, "My way or the highway. You better pass this map." It was a really stunning self-aggrandization of power on the part of the governor and state lawmakers simply handed it over to DeSantis. They have just no self-respect. That map was an extreme partisan gerrymanderer, shredded a number of Democratic districts and also completely shattered a predominantly Black district in northern Florida that seemingly is protected by the state constitution, and in fact, a lower court originally ruled that it was, but that ruling was overturned on appeal, and I would expect the Florida Supreme Court to really basically ignore these amendments and say that they don't matter. They don't apply for whatever reason.

They'll wave their hands at it. The judicial reasoning doesn't really matter to them. So even though we had success a decade ago in overturning Florida's map, I'm not optimistic this time.

David Beard:

Yeah. I think outside of FL-05, which is the Black opportunity district that was dismantled, I would be shocked if any of the other districts got ruled against by the conservative Florida Supreme Court. And I also honestly don't expect the Florida Supreme Court to do anything about FL-05 either. There has been a case filed in federal court under the Voting Rights Act about the dismantling of Florida's 5th District, and it sort of remains to be seen. No ruling has taken place yet in that case. The 5th District was a Black opportunity district where African American voters could elect a representative of their choice, and then it was just ultimately destroyed and turned into a couple of districts where Republican-leaning white voters could elect congressmen of their choice.

So we haven't seen that really just brazenly taken place in other states, so we don't know how the conservative-leaning court federal courts will respond to that. It may be a case where they see this as a good opportunity to prove their supposed neutral bonafides and be like, "Oh yeah, we didn't let Alabama and Louisiana create second Black districts and all these other cases we ruled for the conservatives, but we will reinstate this one district in Florida to prove that we're fair."

So it wouldn't shock me if that sort of outcome resulted, but that's probably quite a ways away. I don't even know if we'll have that in time for 2024 because that case seems to be going much slower than the other cases and the rest of the districts in Florida, I don't think anybody should count on.

David Nir:

So we mentioned at the top of this segment, a number of state legislative maps also have to be redrawn, and we've alluded to a couple of them, the North Carolina Senate, both chambers in the Ohio legislature. The South Carolina State House already redrew its map, so they are definitely going to have a new map for 2024. The most interesting one though is Montana. I said at the start that almost every state redrew its legislative maps in 2022. The one exception was the state of Montana. This one is completely, completely bizarre. The issue in Montana is a totally nonsensical state law.

The state has an evenly divided bipartisan redistricting commission that has the authority to draw maps. That commission has to submit those maps to state lawmakers at the first regular session of the legislature after census figures are available. The problem is that that session of the legislature always ends in April, which means that there was absolutely no chance of the commission finishing a map in time before the end of the session.

In fact, it's almost always impossible for that to happen, but it was definitely impossible in 2021 because census data was so heavily delayed, particularly because of COVID. So that means that because the legislature only has a regular session every other year in odd-numbered years, that the next session of the legislature that the commission can submit maps to state lawmakers for the review is not until 2023, and that means that elections with the new maps couldn't possibly be held until 2024.

The reason why this is also completely cockamamie and stupid is that the same law doesn't actually give state lawmakers the power to make changes to these maps. All they get to do is review them and submit comments to the commission, and the commission can take them into account, or it cannot take them into account. The commission gets the final say on this.

The legislature doesn't have any power over the maps. So basically there is this two-year delay for a purely ministerial process that very likely won't affect the final maps. And this isn't just some sort of ticky-tack complaint. The districts that Montana has that were used in 2022 are completely out of whack. The population is totally imbalanced. Some districts have way too many people. Some districts have way too few people. So it was very probably unconstitutional, this law in Montana to wait a whole extra two years.

The thing is, no one sued about it. No one has ever sued, and I think that a lawsuit would very likely succeed if someone actually ever brought one. Maybe in the next decade someone will, but it's too late now. The commission's work is underway. They'll probably have maps finished soon, and we'll have new maps, but they're going to be two years late.

David Beard:

Yeah. It's a reminder that there's a ton of things out there that are probably illegal or unconstitutional, but due to the way that our justice system works, they only actually get stopped or changed if somebody files a lawsuit, shows harm, gets a ruling, that actually changes the issue. Otherwise, these things just sort of continue on weird relics of badly written constitutions.

David Nir:

It really is a case of justice deferred as justice denied, because even if someone sues as we have seen in so many of these cases, like the ones we were just talking about in Louisiana and Alabama, these cases can take forever to play out in the courts. And Republicans know this. They know that delay benefits them, so they have no problem passing totally illegal maps because they'll benefit from them for at least one election. Maybe two, maybe three, maybe even more, maybe almost the whole decade. And if it eventually gets overturned, so what? You at least got three good elections out of it from the perspective of the GOP. Our approach to dealing with unconstitutional election maps is deeply flawed, as badly flawed as many of the maps themselves.

David Beard:

And as this may be the last full redistricting episode we have for a while, let me just put in one last call for a fair redistricting process nationwide, which Democrats do want to enact so that all states have fair redistricting maps and fair policies, but Republicans steadfastly oppose that. So we just need to take back the House, have a Senate that will get rid of the filibuster, and make fair redistricting happen.

David Nir:

And keep the White House.

David Beard:

Well, yes. Obviously, we need to keep the White House as well. That's all from us this week. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcast and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya, editor Trever Jones. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

The Downballot: The last results of 2022 and looking toward 2024 (transcript)

Election season overtime is finally winding down, so Democratic operative Joe Sudbay joins David Nir on The Downballot as a guest-host this week to recap some of the last results that have just trickled in. At the top of the list is the race for Arizona Attorney General, where Democrat Kris Mayes has a 510-vote lead with all ballots counted (a mandatory recount is unlikely to change the outcome). Also on the agenda is Arizona's successful Proposition 308, which will allow students to receive financial aid regardless of immigration status.

Over in California, Democrats just took control of the Boards of Supervisors in two huge counties, Riverside and Orange—in the case of the latter, for the first time since 1976. Joe and David also discuss which Democratic candidates who fell just short this year they'd like to see try again in 2024, and what the GOP's very skinny House majority means for Kevin McCarthy's prospects as speaker.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

David Nir:

Hello and welcome. I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from senate to city council. We wanted to thank you because The Downballot just crossed the 1,000 subscriber mark on Apple podcasts. We are really grateful to all of our listeners for helping us hit this big milestone. My co-host David Beard is off this week, but joining me on the program today as guest host is Democratic operative Joe Sudbay, who you may remember because he subbed in for me on a previous episode. We'll be talking about the Attorney General's race in Arizona, which just got called for the Democrat as well as Proposition 308, which allows students to receive financial aid regardless of immigration status. Then we'll head over to California to discuss two huge counties that both saw their Boards of Supervisors flip to Democratic control this year.

And with the battle for the House winding down, we want to mention a couple of Democrats who fell just short this year, but that we'd love to see try again in 2024. And finally, we will discuss what the GOP's very small margin in the house means for Kevin McCarthy's prospects of becoming Speaker. We have a supremely fun show for you ahead, so please stay with us.

Well, I am so excited for today's show because I get to invite on to guest host with me, Joe Sudbay, democratic operative, a very, very astute political observer, and also a frequent host on Sirius XM. He has had me on various shows on the radio before, so now finally getting to turn the tables. Joe, it is so great to have you back here on The Downballot.

Joe Sudbay:

It is very exciting to be back. And David, I was thinking the last time we spoke was about 4:00 AM Eastern time on November 9th when I was doing the overnight coverage on Sirius XM Progress. And you texted that you were still up and I said, "Let's talk." We had so much fun that that morning it was terrific.

David Nir:

Joe, I was so tired and also so pumped in a way that I just never expected because I think we all pretty much thought election night was kind of going to suck, if not worse, and then it turned out to be awesome.

Joe Sudbay:

It was so awesome and it just kept getting better too. I mean, we thought we wouldn't have a call in the Pennsylvania race for days in the Senate race and there it was at one o'clock Eastern. It was terrific, and the House races, there were so many house races that I was keeping an eye on that the kind of the DC pundits and prognosticators were predicting were going to go Republican. Starting in Rhode Island's 2nd congressional district, they were convinced, the New York Times was convinced, Allan Fung was going to win the Republican. He didn't; Seth Magaziner pulled it out. The races in New Hampshire, those really set the tone for the rest of the evening. Both the Senate and the two House races in New Hampshire, big wins up there and it just really set the tone. It really was a fun night. I feel like we're still riding the wave.

David Nir:

We still are. Overtime is now entering its third week, but we just finally wrapped up the vote counting in a huge, huge race that would be a flip for Democrats if it stands up. So we obviously have to talk about what just happened in Arizona in the Attorney General's race.

Joe Sudbay:

Yes. On Monday the final votes came in the Attorney General's race and Kris Mayes, the Democrat is ahead by 510 votes over Republican Abraham Hamadeh. Now this was ... remember Democrats won the governor's race, they won the Senate race, they won the Secretary of State's race. This one was closer than all of them, but it's a really important win. It's a flip if it holds up. You mentioned there will be a recount, a mandatory recount because it is so close, but there are a lot of experts, including Nathaniel Rakich who was on the show, The Downballot, the last time I was hosting. He noted that the median shift in statewide recounts since 2000 is about 267 votes.

So it does look good, but I just was very excited about this one. Hamadeh is really, he's an extremist. He would've fit right in with the Ken Paxtons and now Kris Kobach, who's the AG up in Kansas. That kind of extremist ran really ugly ads, ran using the invasion rhetoric about immigrants on the border. And defeating him, it's just so sweet and let's just hope it holds. As the recount goes through, we'll know that after December 5th.

David Nir:

What makes this even more amazing as Axios reporter Jeremy Duda pointed out, this is the first time since 1978 that Democrats in Arizona will have won the governorship, the Secretary of State's office, and the Attorney General's post. It is remarkable that the top offices, both Senate seats as well, in this state that was a red state for such a long time, the home of Barry Goldwater and one of the cradles of modern day conservatism, is now blue. And of course, it's only really, really light blue. A lot of these races were really, really close. But now that Democrats hold all these posts, we can be pretty darn sure that Republicans, no matter how hard they try, are not going to be able to steal Arizona for Donald Trump '24.

Joe Sudbay:

That's really important. And the other thing is, I know we always say this, we always say every vote counts, but in a state where two and a half million people voted, over two and a half million people voted, the race for Attorney General is 510 votes. Every vote does matter. Republicans have done so much over the years and around the country to prevent people from participating in the electoral process. They don't want you to vote, but voting really matters. And we will now have a Secretary of State and an Attorney General in Arizona who believe in voting, who believe in the integrity of the electoral process. That is really, really super important.

David Nir:

Well, maybe the most amazing thing that Republicans have done to suppress the vote is to literally kill their own voters by promoting vaccine skepticism, hostility, and refusal. Now, I think it got really overblown by a lot of folks the extent to which the COVID death gap might have played a role in the 2022 midterms. But healthcare writer Charles Gaba has tracked this sort of thing very, very closely and has come up with estimates of the excess number of deaths of Republican voters compared to Democratic voters across the country and state by state that have found support in other studies by other organizations.

And so he specifically took a look at Arizona and according to his conclusions, which seemed quite strong to me, there were probably about 4,000 excess Republican deaths compared to Democrats in Arizona as a result of COVID vaccine refusal, or at least in large part because of that. And like you just said, Joe, 510 votes, well that's smaller than 4,000. What a bitter and sad way to lose. But we warned about this. We told them not to do this. You're killing off your own voters if for no other reason than that you should encourage them to get vaccinated. Well, they didn't and here we are.

Joe Sudbay:

Absolutely right. It's not surprising, but it is surprising and it's still stunning. It brings you back to those days and we're still in a lot of COVID denial, but I... Also, Charles Gaba, shout out to him because he's one of the only other people who really focuses on downballot races, trying to raise money for them and I appreciate that because not enough people do as you and I have discussed many times.

David, I want to stick in Arizona because there was a ballot measure that I just have to say it's near and dear to my heart. Proposition 308. It allows for in-state tuition for non-citizens of Arizona. It was in 2004, Arizona passed a proposition that prevented essential services being provided to undocumented people living in the state. It was one of those vindictive things that a lot of Arizona Republicans did. You mentioned last week when you were talking with David Beard, you were talking about Arizona, SB 1070, that horrific papers-please law, that really set in motion a lot of organizing that really has gotten us to the point where we were able to have the elections we had this cycle.

And Prop 308 passed 51-49, a little over 51-49, a really big win. It was put on the ballot through the legislature, which was a Republican-controlled legislature in both the House and the Senate. Reyna Montoya and Jose Patino, they are founders of a group called Aliento Arizona. They worked it through the legislature; they went through several sessions trying to get it on the ballot. They were rebuffed repeatedly and told it couldn't happen, it wouldn't happen, not to do it. They got it on the ballot, a big win. And what's really remarkable about it is I do a lot of work in the immigration world and Arizona really has been ground zero in many ways. Starting with prop, I mean SB 1070, but the ads this cycle from the likes of Blake Masters and Kari Lake were so vicious and so horrible and so xenophobic that it didn't work. It didn't work. Pile on top of their ads Stephen Miller with his probably a hundred million-dollar super PAC of just pure-

David Nir:

I even got one of Stephen Miller's stupid mailers. I live in New York City.

Joe Sudbay:

They spent so much money ... I was driving up the Interstate 95 from Boston to Portland, and there were billboards all through New Hampshire with horrific messages. Now I knew what they meant because I was like, "Uh-huh. That's going to be a Stephen Miller. It was Citizens for Safety." They spent tons of money in Arizona and lost.

This is the issue. It does set the stage. We know that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, DACA, is on life support. The federal district court judges that were handpicked by Ken Paxton and other GOP AGs are going to get it found unconstitutional. They've got a case moving up to the Supreme Court. We have the next few weeks in Congress to maybe get it done.

I think that Prop 308 give a lot of impetus to showing that voters actually do care about this even when there's a deluge of money spent against it. So big shout out to everyone who worked on it, particularly Reyna and Jose. I love them. They are total badasses. They have made the world a better place for so many young people in their state.

David Nir:

It really is amazing. To pick up on something you said, Joe, Republicans were so sure, so sure, that they were never going to have to pay a price for their extremism. To be honest, I really wondered if they would myself. The traditional media has done such an abysmal job abetting them, because this whole supposed neutral journalism, both sides journalism makes it seem, well ...

“Democrats say that migrants are human. Republicans disagree.” I mean that's essentially where we are on most issues, and they paid a price. No matter what happens in every election for the rest of my life, I will always remember this and be grateful that they were so disgusting and extreme that there were voters in the middle who said, "No, this is just too much." I think Arizona, almost from top to bottom, is almost the perfect example of exactly that rejection of extremism.

Joe Sudbay:

Yeah, just one ... I agree with that wholeheartedly. As much as they attacked immigrants, they also attacked trans kids. I mean among the most vulnerable people in our population. It was so vicious and so cruel, and that didn't work either.

I will say, David, I saw reporters on Capitol Hill saying that Stephen Miller walked into Kevin McCarthy's office last week, obviously to plan more strategy. This week, Kevin McCarthy is down on the border doing more photo ops and stunts.

Stephen Miller still controls the GOP message. And you know what I say? Keep listening to him, Republicans. The really serious problem is that there's a death count attached with their ugly messaging. That is something that the media ... And also, David, the media has responsibility for it and culpability. But every corporate PAC that donates to Republicans who run those ads own it, too.

David Nir:

Yeah. I mean what just happened in Colorado Springs, it's on them. What happened at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, it's on them. We could spend another hour reciting all the things that are on them. So as much as their hateful rhetoric might be harming them at the ballot box, it's also harming real people and, like you said, leading to a death count. For that reason, we can never cheer it on. I think everyone listening also knows that. It's a disgusting phenomenon and we need to fight it and beat it back however we possibly can.

Joe Sudbay:

We did beat it back this year, David, at the ballot box. We've got to keep that up because that's how we do it more than any other way.

David Nir:

Absolutely. I mean that's something that you and I have always been devoted to. The most important thing that we can do as activists is beat them at the ballot box and win power from top to bottom. That's perfect segue for us to talk about a couple of totally different races, a little bit further to the west, in California, where Democrats won some amazing successes.

So Orange County, that, of course, is the hugely populous county in Southern California that has been talked about quite a lot in recent years, particularly starting in 2018, when Democrats flipped a large number of House districts in the area. They gave some of them back in 2020.

But the long-term trends in Orange County, don't call it the OC, are heading Democrats' way. We know this because this year, for the first time since 1976, Democrats managed to take control of the board of supervisors in Orange County. They now have a three to two majority.

In fact, prior to 2018, it was a 5-0 Republican board. Just to put that in a little further context, since 1936 when FDR won his massive landslide first reelection, no Democrat for president won Orange County until Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Since 2016, that was only six years ago, Democrats have now flipped the county board of supervisors.

That's not the only big county in the region where they've had success. In fact, in Riverside County, which is not too far away, Democrats also just took a majority of the board of supervisors. Strangely enough, the head of the board was a Libertarian, believe it or not, who might actually have been the highest ranking Libertarian elected official in the country. Anyhow, Democrats managed to beat him. And so, they have a 3-2 majority on that board as well.

What's really remarkable is that Democrats actually lost both counties in every statewide race in California this year, but still showed enough local strength that they flipped both of these boards.

There's also something else that I want to add. There are a lot of election analysts out there who love to obsess over counties. They talk about Republicans winning so many more counties than Democrats. This is certainly something favored on the right as well. There's Donald Trump's ridiculous stupid map that he supposedly printed out and gave to reporters. Donald Trump Jr. saying, "Impeach this," showing all the red counties and the tiny little blue slivers. Of course, anyone with any sense knows that that's BS because land doesn't vote. People do.

But let's talk about people. Riverside and Orange County are enormous. Riverside has 2.4 million people. It's the tenth largest county in the country. Orange County has 3.2 million people. It's the sixth largest county in the country.

So when we talk about Republicans flipping counties, it's almost always these really small counties. There was a lot of obsession about some small border counties in Texas in 2020. But let's talk about the Riversides and the Oranges, because that's where the people are.

Joe Sudbay:

Absolutely. It's really a big event when these things happen at the local level. Tip O'Neill famously said all politics is local. Again, Democrats winning at the local level, it creates a farm team; it creates good policy; it creates a record to show they deliver. Those are the hardest jobs, many of those are the hardest jobs, because you have to deliver for your constituents. I'm really excited about this.

David, I've been around politics for a while. I knew about Orange County because of Ronald Reagan. I knew we were going to be talking about it, so I was Googling around to see one of Reagan's last appearances as President. It was at a campaign rally in Fullerton, Colorado in 1988. The first lines, he said, "You are living proof of something I have said over and over. Orange County is where the good Republicans go before they die."

Well, okay. Okay. Okay, Ronald Reagan. I just love the fact that this county that Ronald Reagan loved so dearly is turning blue. Thank you to everyone who made it happen.

David Nir:

Well, and also let's not forget who else is from Orange County. Richard Nixon-

Joe Sudbay:

Oh my goodness.

David Nir:

... from Yorba Linda.

Joe Sudbay:

Yes.

David Nir:

I mean I love the thought of Nixon spinning in his grave right now.

Joe Sudbay:

It's so great. It's the changing America, and California has been on the forefront of it. When I was doing politics back in the day, California had Republican governors. Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, Republican Senators. They had some of the worst congressmen, Bob Dornan, who was one of the most vile congressmen to come out of any state. Then, of course, you can't-

David Nir:

Oh, B-1 Bob.

Joe Sudbay:

Right? And Dana Rohrabacher who was there until recently. I mean it's really great to see what's happened in that state. I keep hearing Republicans around the country say, "We don't want to be like California." It's a state with one of the best economies in the world. It feeds the world. It's got Silicon Valley. You could be so lucky, Texas, you could be so lucky, Florida, to be California.

David Nir:

I couldn't agree more. I certainly love it out there myself. Joe, since we're talking about Riverside County, there's a House race that's on my mind. At Daily Kos Elections, we asked on Twitter this week, which unsuccessful democratic candidates for House this year should try again in 2024? And we got a lot of really great engagement, a lot of excellent ideas. And one of the names that came up most frequently was Will Rollins, who ran against Ken Calvert in California's 41st district, which is based in Riverside. And I thought he ran a great campaign, and I know you would love to see him try again in two years' time.

Joe Sudbay:

Just a terrific candidate. He's gay, first-time candidate at this level, ran a terrific race. It was an uphill fight. Always is, running against an incumbent. And especially, remember this year was supposed to be a terrible year. He came very close to pulling it off. And I actually think when candidates lose and they run at this level, it's actually a good training ground. And I hope he does run again. He lost by just about 10,000 votes, and we know there will be bigger turnout in 2024. I'm really hoping Will Rollins runs again. I was just impressed with him. I was following that campaign pretty closely. It includes Palm Springs, which is a big LGBTQ hangout, and I think Will is definitely someone I hope runs again.

David Nir:

Yeah, it was 52-48. This district changed a whole lot. Ken Calvert had never had to run in a competitive district before. It still favored Trump slightly. But like you said, I think that the higher turnout in a presidential year should really offer a boost here. And one thing that I've heard, it might be a little bit of a wistful silver lining for a lot of candidates, but the best way to learn how to run a winning campaign, is to run a losing campaign. I mean, there is no experience in the world, in the world, that can prepare you for what it is like to run for office, especially federal office. These hugely expensive campaigns, meeting so many thousands and thousands of potential constituents, being in the spotlight, the glare of the media.

And there is nothing that can prepare you for that other than actually running for office. And of course, every first-time candidate wants to win their first time out. No one's stupid. But Rollins now has a level of experience that really few people have had. And I think his performance also should open eyes, and that he should get a lot more support from DC than he did this time because he really proved that he can run a real race and this is a competitive seat.

Joe Sudbay:

It's really important. And I feel like he learned a lot. He impressed us and hopefully moving forward, like you said, the national Democrats who can control a lot of money spigots, see how close he came and how much of a great candidate he was. David, there's another race that I hope that the Democrat who didn't succeed, runs again. And that's in Arizona's first congressional district. The Democrat is Jevin Hodge. I got to interview Jevin over the summer when I was on Sirius XM Progress. I was so impressed with him.

And I was following his campaign and checking it out and watching his ads. And there just was this sense of energy and a rarity that you'd find in the campaign, but joy. It just looked like they were having a great time and they knew their mission. He was running against David Schweikert, Republican, who's had some serious ethical issues. He lost by just a couple thousand votes. And again, one of these candidates who came so close. And I hope that people can look at this race too and realize this is a great recruit. Let's get him to do it again. I was just super impressed.

David Nir:

Yeah, I think also this is an area in the Phoenix suburbs that is probably trending our way. And Hodge would be the first Black member of Congress in Arizona history. So that would certainly be a nice first to make. And yeah, I really think he would also be an excellent candidate to run again. And on that Twitter thread, like I said, we got a lot of great suggestions. Democrats really had a pretty strong recruiting class this year, especially given that we were headed into a midterm and people thought it was going to be like any other midterm. I think recruiting is going to be incredible for '24 because everyone, including Republicans, believes that Democrats could take back the house in two years.

Joe Sudbay:

Absolutely right. And there were some very, very close races in California, in Arizona as we've mentioned. But across the country there were close races. Obviously your home state of New York. There were some very close races that need to be rectified in 2024.

David Nir:

Yes.

Joe Sudbay:

And it does say a lot about candidate quality. We talked a lot about candidate quality at the Senate level, but I was able to meet a lot of these House candidates, and I was so impressed. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez up in WA-03. Terrific candidate.

David Nir:

Oh, what a win.

Joe Sudbay:

What a great race. Right? And Gabe Vasquez down in NM-02, who in the days before the election, everyone was like, "Well, that's going to be a Republican seat again." No, he won. He won. He was even up in that New York Times Siena poll when they were telling us-

David Nir:

“Don't believe the New York Times Siena poll.” Right?

Joe Sudbay:

Yes. So yeah, those are some terrific wins. And the thing about both of those, WA-03 and NM-02, they were pickups of Republican-held seats and that was really important.

David Nir:

Important. Daily Kos Elections just put out just a little bit of data this week noting that when all is said and done, Republicans are almost certain to have 222 seats in the House. Democrats 213. There's one seat, California's 13th still hasn't been called yet. Republicans are leading there. If Democrats can somehow come from behind, it would be 221-214, even better for Democrats. But here's the interesting thing, and this is the data I'm referring to. Republicans, in the 118th Congress that will be seated on Jan 3, will hold 18 districts that Joe Biden won, blue seats or blue leaning seats. Democrats by contrast, are only going to hold five Trump districts. So that alone will give Democrats a nice head start heading into 2024. Now, Republicans in North Carolina are going to pass a new gerrymander. They're going to screw us in a whole bunch of seats, maybe as many as four seats.

We'll see what happens in Ohio. The New Mexico Supreme Court still is weighing a case. They might rule against the map there. That would be very tough news for Gabe Vasquez, who you just mentioned, Joe. But the fact of the matter is that Kevin McCarthy in the coming Congress is going to have an absurdly small margin for error, if he's even speaker. And there are now five Republicans, as of Tuesday, who have either said they don't think they want to vote for McCarthy or emphatically said “hell no” on McCarthy. And five is the magic number. Because the absolute most number of votes that Kevin McCarthy can afford to lose to another candidate is four. Because more than four, and he falls below 218. That's assuming if they have the 222 seats. You need a majority of members present to win the speakership. It's not simply enough to beat the second-place candidate.

A plurality doesn't cut it. Now look, who knows if these schmucks like Matt Gaetz can actually hold together, if they can increase their numbers by Jan 3. Maybe these are just idle threats; maybe they're just posturing. If there's one thing that we know that Kevin McCarthy is good at, he is good at groveling. And he will almost certainly have to make all kinds of concessions to keep these people on board. And he was already going to be a really weak speaker, even if he was going to be speaker and now his speakership is just going to be unthinkably feeble.

Joe Sudbay:

I just have to say, first of all, I agree with all of that. And Nancy Pelosi had 222 members, sometimes 221. And think of over the past few weeks since it became clear that this may be the outcome, all we've heard from everybody is some variation of this is going to be a show with Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans in control. We never heard that about Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. And what drives me crazy about it, David, how many times over the years have we seen the DC Press Corps run headlines, “Dems in Disarray?” If Nancy Pelosi sneezes at a press conference, that's the headline.

David Nir:

Democrats in Disarray.

Joe Sudbay:

Democrats in disarray. And we have Republicans in serious disarray. In the Senate for sure, in their presidential race, but in the House it is going to be a mess. And what's really important politically is you mentioned those 18 districts that are held by Republicans that Biden won. Those 18 are all going to be sucked into the craziness and the drama. And the question is, do... I mean, I don't think there's any such thing as a Republican moderate, but if you are one that's sort of moderate-ish and you're watching this play out, what do you do? What do you do? Do you decide that you think it's more important for you to win so you're going to show some independence, or are you just going to go along with it? I think most will go along with it. Most of them did after January 6th. But what the Republicans have been offering, they have offered nothing in terms of an agenda beyond investigations and impeachments and stunts and photo ops.

That's all they have. And it's really going to be fascinating to watch, because I agree with you. McCarthy is a weak, weak leader. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows it, and they're all going to try and take advantage of him. And let's see what happens in early January when the vote comes. It will be interesting to see if those hardcores stay strong. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And someone's going to have to cave here, or there's just going to be chaos, and I think it's going to be chaos either way, but what a mess. What a mess. And we can actually say, I actually saw a headline last week on Politico, that used the words Republicans and disarray in the same headline. I actually tweeted it out with sirens, saying I think this is the first time I've ever seen it.

David Nir:

Did an editor... Was there an editing mistake? I mean, the contrast with Democrats could not be stronger. Look at this absolutely seamless, out-of-nowhere transition of leadership on the Democratic side. I mean, I thought Pelosi might call it a day. And as sad as I am to see that happen, the fact that she got Hoyer and Clyburn to leave the stage with her all at the same time, there's just no dissent about this. Hakeem Jeffries is going to be the Democratic leader. When Democrats retake the House, he will be the speaker. And it's just such a stark contrast to the GOP. And to your point about those... Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein says, "Don't use the term moderate." And he's absolutely right. Use the term pragmatist. And I think that fits better because you have hardcore conservatives who are nevertheless political pragmatists, whether that means they want to get something done in Congress, and they're not just nihilists, or they at least have a sense of political self-preservation.

The problem for them... I think that right now, you're right. I don't think they have a majority vote in favor of Looney Tunes ideas like impeaching Joe Biden. However, we saw what happened to all the Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump. Out of the 10 of them, only two are going to be coming back in the next Congress. So if you are a Republican member of Congress who decides, you know what? The general election is more important to me. I'm not going to vote for all these crazy investigations of Hunter Biden's laptop and impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas and all this nonsense. You might draw a primary. You probably will draw a primary. You might lose your primary. So they are just... I mean, a rock and a hard place doesn't even begin to describe it.

Joe Sudbay:

And they did it to themselves, David, with-

David Nir:

Oh yeah.

Joe Sudbay:

... their gerrymandering and getting these ultra ruby-red districts so that they can just go more to the extreme. And it's bad for the country. It's bad for our... It probably could be bad for our economy. It's bad for our reputation. Hopefully it will lead to the self-destruction of this party because they have nothing to offer the American people. And of course, this is all going to play out against the backdrop of their one true leader running for president again. So we're going to have to pop a lot of popcorn over the next few weeks and months.

David Nir:

Tell me about it. Let's get Orville Redenbacher in bulk. So Joe, before we go, there is someone I want to give a shout out to. A little while back, we did a mail bag episode where we answered reader's questions, and we got a really great question from reader Ryan Dack, who asked us how voters go about the process of casting ballots, deciding who to vote for in school board races, which are typically nonpartisan and you don't necessarily know a lot about the candidates. And it was a very good question. Lot of food for thought. Definitely dig up that old episode if you want to see how David Beard and I answered it. But the reason why I'm referencing this now is that Ryan was on the ballot for a community college governing board member post in Orange County, and he won.

In fact, he kicked ass. He won 69% to 31% over his opponent. So congratulations, Ryan. You asked us an excellent question. We hope you have many more for us, but far more important than that, it's sounds like you won an amazing race. We wish you luck on the community college board and hopefully this is just the first of many victories to come for you.

Joe Sudbay:

Wow. Congratulations, Ryan. I love that. I just think these races are so important up and down the ballot and everybody has to make sure... I know our listeners do here at The Downballot, and also I say this on SiriusXM Progress all the time, make sure you vote the whole ballot. So many people just go in and vote top of the ticket. Those ballot measures and candidates further down, they're not less important. They have more of a direct impact on your life in many ways. Make sure you vote the whole ticket. The down ballot is the whole game.

David Nir:

Well, that's exactly right. Joe, it has been awesome, awesome having you join me on today's episode of The Downballot. You can find Joe on Twitter @JoeSudbay and I know that we will be having you back on in the very near future.

Joe Sudbay:

What a complete pleasure to spend time with you, David Nir. I love the opportunity to talk to you. As I always say, whenever I have you on SiriusXM Progress, we're going to geek out and do a deep dive and I love being able to do it on your show as well.

David Nir:

We love geeking out and doing a deep dive here as well. Thanks a lot, Joe.

Joe Sudbay:

Thank you.

David Nir:

That's all from us this week. Thank you to Joe Sudbay for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor, Trever Jones. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

The Downballot: Holy crap, what an amazing night! (transcript)

Holy crap, what an amazing night! Where do we even begin this week's episode of The Downballot? Well, we know exactly where: abortion. Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard recap Tuesday's extraordinary results, starting with a clear-eyed examination of the issue that animated Democrats as never before—and that pundits got so badly wrong. They also discuss candidate quality (still really important!), Democratic meddling in GOP primaries (good for democracy, actually), and "soft" Biden disapprovers (lots of them voted for Democrats).

The Davids then catalog the uncalled races for Senate and game out what might happen in the House; review the clean sweep for the good guys in five states that had abortion-related measures on the ballot; and finish off with some delicious, gourmet schadenfreude. You won't want to miss out!

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. And man, oh man, did we have some of those this week. David Beard, where do we even start?

David Beard:

I just feel like the entire life of this podcast has been us warning people. "Oh, it's a midterm, Democratic president, probably going to be a bad year, historically, yada, yada." And now here we are. And it was actually pretty good.

David Nir:

I mean, that's honestly awesome. I'd much, much, much rather it be that way, than it be the reverse of that. I think just about every other Democrat went into Tuesday night with extremely low expectations. I had tried to steel myself for the worst, and it was just one upside surprise after another. And I have been following elections for 20 years. I can't recall feeling that way on election night before.

David Beard:

Yeah, all you had to do was get past Florida, let the Republican wave of Florida wash over you, get past it. As we've learned, Florida will always break your heart. And then, the rest of the country was just victory after victory. It was incredible.

David Nir:

Yeah. We have gotten so used to disappointment that we almost forget what winning looks like. So let's talk about those wins and why we won.

And there's just no doubt in my mind that we have to focus on the one issue that we focused on more than any other on this podcast, as an organization at Daily Kos Elections this entire year, but especially since the end of June, and that is abortion. There is just no doubt about it. Despite the pundits in the fall who tried to tell us that this was not the right issue for Democrats to be pursuing, that Democrats were making a huge mistake in not focusing on the economy or other issues. Abortion was a massive factor in this incredible upset of a night.

David Beard:

And I think all those people, who said that Dobbs would just sort of fade away, and that after three months it was going to no longer be at the front of people's minds, were just crazy. Look at the history of the fight for abortion rights that has been going on for decades or longer, in some places across the world.

And the idea that this massive, massive change was going to cause sort of a temporary spike for a couple of months in Democrats' polling and then just fade away is, in retrospect, just a crazy, crazy idea. That is not how real regular people view politics. They don't view it as this narrative that so many people in [Washington,] D.C., in the sort of punditocracy, want to view it as like, "Oh, Dobbs happened."

Then there was a whole story about it, August special elections narrative, and then other things happened. So we have to move on in the narrative to other issues. But for millions and millions of people, this is a huge core issue that they're not going to forget about and they're going to vote on.

David Nir:

Yeah, this punditocracy was treating abortion rights like gas prices. Gas prices go up, voters get angry, gas prices go down, they start to think about other things. Well, you know what didn't happen since Dobbs? It’s that abortion rights weren't suddenly restored across the country. Nothing made that issue go away. And, if anything, everything that went on kept highlighting it. For instance, let's not forget about Lindsay Graham and his national abortion ban.

Republicans did a really good job of helping Democrats remind voters what the stakes were. Let's not forget the Kansas vote, over the summer, on the abortion amendment, which we'll circle back to, because I think that played a big role on Tuesday night as well.

So yeah, you're exactly right. This notion that it was going to be a flash in the pan, temporary blip... really not how people work.

David Beard:

And I think the other issue, obviously, that Democrats ran extensively on, and a lot of people dismissed as being unimportant, as not being something people would vote on, is democracy protection. And the core protections of the United States, as a democratic country, where people vote and the election results are respected. And a lot of people who are too smart for their own good went around and thought, "Oh, regular people aren't going to care about that. Regular people are just going to vote because of inflation or because their gas prices went up."

And what it turned out is that a lot of people do care about democracy. A lot of people do care about fairness and election results, and those being treated as important as they really are. And they voted on that. And we see election deniers losing race after race. We saw Democrats, who were going to protect elections rights, winning Governor's races, winning Secretary of State's races. And I really believe that issue did matter and did break through.

David Nir:

Yeah, it seemed as though Republicans believed there was no price to be paid for being an extremist, when it comes to authoritarianism, and rejecting democracy, and rejecting the rule of law. And frankly, a lot of reporters went along with this. The traditional way that the media works, of presenting both sides, and refusing to take a side, or calling out lies on one side and admitting that the other side is actually true and correct and right, that I think gave Republicans a lot of permission to think that there would be no price to pay. Because reporters didn't care. But reporters are not voters, and the voters really, really did care. And there are a lot of ways we can look at this. You mentioned all of the races where the big name GOP election deniers lost.

But one other interesting thing that I've been noticing, and will definitely be digging into more in the weeks ahead, is that in a number of these states, the races for secretary of state, the Democrats won by bigger margins in those races than in a lot of the other statewide races. And that blows my mind because I am a massive election nerd. I really care about this stuff. I have been talking about the importance of these kinds of races, especially Secretary of State races, for a really, really long time. And most people, they're not going to pay that much attention to what's going on in specific downballot statewide races.

But we have some pretty clear evidence this time that they really did, that more people were voting for Democrats running for secretary of state than for other offices. And there's only one possible explanation for that. And the answer is that, wow, they actually really, really care about democracy and fairness and elections, and the rule of law.

David Beard:

We spend, obviously, a ton of time thinking about elections, working on elections, as I'm sure a lot of our listeners spend a lot of time thinking about elections, that's why they listen to us. And the average person doesn't. The average voter doesn't. They spend most of their time on their job, on their families, on a lot of other interests, and they spend a very little amount of time thinking about who they're going to vote for.

And I think it can be easy to dismiss the idea that like, "Oh, then they just get a lot of TV ads, or mailers, or whatever, and that's what influences their vote." But I think particularly reporters and pundits can be dismissive of voters. Voters take elections seriously, most voters do, and they want to vote for the right candidate. And even people who strongly disagree with us, people who vote for Republicans regularly, some of them could clearly see that what you need is a Secretary of State, or an Attorney General, who respects the rule of law, who will not try to pretend that somebody who lost an election actually won it. And they were willing to go and vote for the Democrat who was willing to do that, even as they voted for a Republican for Senate, for Governor, down the ballot in other places.

David Nir:

In terms of voters taking elections seriously, I think that brings us to the next topic that we want to talk about, which is that candidate quality still matters. And this is another issue we hit over and over again this year.

But Republicans nominated just an extraordinary array of truly terrible candidates, some of whom were genuinely terrible human beings. And this had an impact. This had an impact. The GOP paid a price.

Now, maybe Ron DeSantis can skate because Florida's become such a weird, odd duck. But there are countless races that we can point to that Republicans lost on Tuesday night, or we found out on Wednesday that they lost, or going to find out in the coming days, simply because they nominated truly terrible people and they deserve everything that they're getting as a result of this.

And the problem is in no way symmetrical. In fact, it's really diametrically opposite. It's almost impossible to think of a Democrat, anywhere this year, who ran in any competitive race, who fumbled away a race because they sucked as a candidate or they were a bad person.

And this is a deep problem for the GOP and I have no idea how they can overcome it. And you know what? If they want to keep nominating terrible people and giving Democrats a huge and important advantage in close races, well, maybe that's something we just need to accept.

David Beard:

And it's really bigger than that because it's an incentive problem. And that's why it's so hard for the Republicans to fix. Because as long as it's Donald Trump's party, the type of people who Donald Trump are going to like and endorse, and probably win primaries. And the type of people who are going to want to run in Donald Trump's Republican Party, are charlatans, are people with bad histories, people who are extremists, who are election deniers. All of that stuff attracts people to Donald Trump's GOP. And as long as it's Donald Trump's GOP, those are the candidates you're going to get.

You can look at the five Republican candidates in the key Senate races this year, which is Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Donald Bolduc in New Hampshire, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Adam Laxalt in Nevada, and Blake Masters in Arizona. And that is not a murderer's row. It is some of the worst Senate candidates, probably, that any major party has nominated in recent history, particularly Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz. Like just terrible candidates with terrible favorables, lots of scandals.

And as a result, Oz lost. Walker is probably going to a runoff, and is slightly behind heading into the runoff. Masters is, I think, probably going to lose in Arizona. And you can chalk that up, in at least large part, to the fact that they're terrible candidates with terrible favorables.

David Nir:

And let's not forget New Hampshire. I mean, a blowout win in New Hampshire, especially after Maggie Hassan won her last race by 1,000 votes, that doesn't happen without, in part, Bolduc being so absolutely terrible.

David Beard:

Absolutely. And the other thing that we saw last night is that Democratic primary meddling mostly worked out. Tell us about that.

David Nir:

Yeah, it 100% worked out, in fact. That's the other part of this here, there was so much handwringing during the primary season about races where Democrats looked at the GOP primary field and said, you know what? We're going to have a better chance at winning in the general election if this total schmuck beats out the somewhat less bad guy. Democrats very wisely said, we're going to get involved here, and we are simply going to help the ultra-MAGA brigades do what they're already wanting to do, and that is nominate the worst of the worst, and if we do that then we're going to have a better chance at winning. And that's really important because we need the party that believes in democracy, i.e. the Democrats, to win elections. This isn't just about raw power or screwing with the GOP for the sake of it, this is about preserving democracy.

And so in all of these races where Democrats succeeded in helping Republicans to nominate their least acceptable candidate, on Tuesday night the Republican lost in every single one of these races across the country. People make it sound like this was some massive widespread phenomenon. Democrats did this probably in about 20 or so races, maybe in about half of them the worst GOP candidate actually won the nomination, so we're talking about maybe eight to 10. In all of those the terrible Republican lost. And there were so many handwringers who were worried that Democrats were playing with fire and almost suggesting that it was the Democrats’ obligation to help Republicans nominate non-awful candidates, and that's BS; that's their problem, not ours.

And I want to highlight one race in particular where this was really, really important and that I think prompted the greatest freakout, and that's Michigan's 3rd congressional district. It's a race we've talked about before on this show. It's a district that was redrawn by the state's new independent redistricting commission; it's around the Grand Rapids area; it became significantly bluer; and Republican congressman Peter Meijer, he did exactly one good thing in his life, which was he voted for Donald Trump's impeachment, so that painted a huge target on his back. And Democrats nominated a really good candidate there, Hillary Scholten, who ran a close race against Meijer in 2020, but Meijer drew a primary challenge from an absolute lunatic named John Gibbs. This guy actually suggested that he opposed the 19th Amendment, the one that granted women the right to vote, that's how out there John Gibbs was.

And the DCCC spent some money toward the end of that primary to help Gibbs win, and God, Twitter was absolutely insufferable at that point. Gibbs beat Peter Meijer, and what did Peter Meijer supposed moderate, supposed rule of law lover do after the primary? He endorsed John Gibbs, he proved that he's just like the rest of them. And guess what happened on Tuesday night? Hillary Scholten won. That was a huge, huge pickup for Democrats. We still don't know exactly what's going to happen with control of the House, but no matter what happens, having that seat in Democrats hands and electing another woman to Congress is incredibly important for ensuring either that Democrats hold the House, or are in a better position to retake the house in the future.

David Beard:

And what I want to highlight about that topic in general is that we're talking about money getting spent in these races. This was not some sort of situation where Democrats were going in, thousands and thousands of voters, going in and trying to vote for the more extremist candidate in these parties, it was simply the Democratic party spending some money to highlight the more extremist candidate, which then Republican primary voters eagerly lapped up. The fault ultimately for nominating Gibbs is upon the Republican primary voters who voted for him, not on the fact that the Democratic Party took advantage of the fact that the Republican Party is a big fan of extremists.

One other issue I wanted to highlight from a big picture perspective was the Biden approval/disapproval question that we'd talked about a fair amount on the podcast, around what might happen with these Biden disapprovers who were undecided. The fear would be that they would run to Republicans in the end and cause a Republican year to turn out. And while obviously exit polls have a lot of problems—so you want to take them with a big grain of salt—you can look at and get a general sense of how this turned out. And from the exit poll you can see there are about 44% of people who either strongly or somewhat approved of Biden, and they went obviously overwhelmingly for Democrats. And then there were about 45% of the voters who strongly disapproved of Biden, and they overwhelmingly went for the Republicans, both as you would expect.

And then there were 10% of voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden, you can call it soft Biden disapprovers, and they went slightly for Democrats, 49% to 45%. Now that's not going to be an exact figure, because this is an exit poll, so I wouldn't take that four-point margin as gospel, but I do think what it shows you is that there was about 5% of the electorate, give or take, who were Biden disapprovers who voted for Democrats anyway, either because they were actually disapproving of Biden from the left, or they were worried about Republican extremism, or they were worried about abortion rights, whatever the reason was, those voters took the fact that they weren't happy with Biden and they still went and voted for Democrats, and they were key to this result being as good as it turned out to be.

David Nir:

And I think one big reason for that analytical error is that you see Joe Biden, he's the president, he's in the White House, he sucks up so much attention, especially for reporters, and so you naturally presume that someone who disapproves of him is going to be a Republican voter. Except the problem is that there are two parties on the ballot, and if you're only looking at Biden approvals, then you're missing the part of the analysis that requires you to look at, how do people view the GOP? What are the favorables of the Republican Party? To an extent, what do people think of Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy? What do they think of Republicans generally?

And you're going to find that there are people who say that they don't like both, and knowing what those sorts of people are going to do, that's a tricky thing. And it turns out, Beard, as you were saying just a moment ago, that actually that this group of soft Biden disapprovers, who are probably also GOP disapprovers, well, they split pretty evenly. And you have to remember, you can't just look at presidential approval/disapproval ratings in a vacuum; there are always two sides to every election in this country.

David Beard:

And particularly when Donald Trump has obviously decided not to go away, or retire gracefully as so many former presidents do, and take somewhat of a step back from day-to-day politics, Donald Trump wants to be the center of attention all the time, and it's clearly bad for Republicans. The reality is Donald Trump has never won the popular vote, Republicans usually lose elections ever since he became their nominee in 2016, and he's a drag on the party, but they can't get away from him.

David Nir:

Well, I think now would be a really good time for us to actually talk about some of the elections that are still up in the air. Now we're recording this on Wednesday evening, the show will come out Thursday morning, some stuff will definitely have changed by the time you're listening to this, and especially if you're listening later on Thursday or on Friday. So we're going to keep this overview as general as possible, just be mindful that stuff, like I said, is going to change, so you should definitely be following us on Twitter at @DKelections. You need to be signed up to our newsletter, our free daily newsletter, called The Morning Digest, go to dailykos.com/morningdigest to sign up for that; we will keep you apprised of every call in every key race, I promise you. But for now we are going to do the best we possibly can to give you the lay of the land as things stand at the moment. Beard, what do we got?

David Beard:

There are four Senate races that haven't been decided yet—one of which, Alaska, is between two Republicans, so we're just going to set that aside, because that doesn't change the math of the Senate. So that leaves us with three states. Georgia has been called as a runoff between Senator Warnock and Herschel Walker, so that will be taking place on December 6th. That leaves us with two races where we're still waiting for results from Tuesday night to see whether Democrats will hold these two seats; they need to hold either both of these seats, or one of these seats and win the Georgia runoff, in order to get the 50 seats and retain a majority in the Senate.

So in Arizona we've got about 66% of the vote counted, as of Wednesday evening. Senator Mark Kelly, the Democrat, has an advantage of about five percentage points over his Republican opponent, Blake Masters. There are a lot of votes left to count, obviously most of those votes are votes that were either mailed in and received in the last day or two, so Monday or Tuesday, or mail votes that were dropped off on election day. The difference obviously is that the mail votes have to go through a different verification process than the actual election day votes—those obviously you get checked in and then you just cast your vote—but even if you drop off your mail vote on Election Day, that still has to go through the regular mail verification process.

So those votes don't really lean significantly one way or the other, looking at past history, compared to the early, early vote, which was strongly Democratic, as we expected, or the Election Day vote, which was strongly Republican. So those have been counted, and so mostly we have a big chunk of votes where we're not entirely sure which way those are going to lean, or if they're going to lean one way or another strongly. But I think the broad expectation is Kelly will probably be okay, but obviously with these many votes out, it's just not possible to make a call for anybody at this point.

David Beard:

Then in Nevada, we've got about 77% of the vote in. And there, Adam Laxalt, the Republican candidate, is narrowly leading incumbent Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto by a couple of points. The good news here is that the ballots remaining are almost entirely mail ballots that were either received Monday, Tuesday in the mail, or that were dropped off in person on Election Day.

And in Nevada, we would expect these to largely favor the Democrat. The question, of course, is exactly how many of those are left. And in Nevada, mail ballots can be received until Saturday as long as they were postmarked on election day. And so the question is how many of those ballots are still left to be counted and what exactly that margin will be because the mail ballot margin has jumped around a bit. They've almost always favored Democrats. But the question is, is it a small margin or is it a large margin? So that one is very much still up in the air and we just kind of have to wait for those mail ballots to be counted over the next few days.

David Nir:

And then amazingly, we're going to another runoff in Georgia. There is a really big difference though between this one and the one that took place last year, which is that after the 2020/2021 runoff that of course Warnock and John Ossoff won, Republicans were super pissed about those results. And you'll recall last year that they passed a huge package of voting restrictions to try to suppress the vote. And that bill included a provision that shrunk the runoff period from nine weeks to just four weeks. The runoff last year was in January. This time it's going to be on December 6th. Republicans seem to think that this offers them some sort of advantage. I'm not really clear why, especially since Warnock is such a vastly better fundraiser than Herschel Walker is.

One thing to note is that you might be aware that Donald Trump supposedly has some sort of announcement plan for November 15th, that's a week after election day, and everyone seems convinced that he's planning to announce a third bid for the presidency that day. But some of his sycophants are now begging him to put off that announcement until after the runoff on December 6th because he completely screwed up the last runoff. We can't say for certain what kind of impact that had on the race, but given that Democrats narrowly won those two runoffs, we can say that it probably wasn't a good thing that Donald Trump was running his mouth off. I think that a Trump presidential announcement next week would not be good news for Herschel Walker.

David Beard:

The other potential factor there is that there's a good chance that we'll know who controls the House of Representatives by the time the runoff takes place. And I think as we'll talk about soon, there's a good chance that's probably the Republicans, if extremely narrowly. And if Arizona and Nevada are both won by Democrats, that would also cement Democratic control of the Senate regardless of the result of the Georgia runoff. And then the race can become a lot less about which party controls Congress, will there be a check on the Biden administration if there's a Republican House in that case, and focus a lot more on the candidates. Because if there's not, that sort of national issue at the same level as there was when people were voting this past time, I think there's a chance that there are going to be Republicans who really, really don't like Herschel Walker who will either stay home and not bother with the runoff or even vote for Warnock if control of the Senate isn't at stake or if there's already a check on Biden in the House. So I think that could go to Warnock's benefit as well.

David Nir:

So let's talk about the House. Obviously it is a real moving target. There are so many races in play. How should we think about this?

David Beard:

So I think the Republicans are still pretty clearly favored to eke out at least 218 seats and have a majority. Whether that's a functional majority or not, we'll see, and we can talk about that later. But the Republicans, as I see it, currently either have called or are pretty strongly favored in 215 seats and the Democrats either have called or are pretty strongly favored in 207 seats, which leave about 13 seats, where it's really not 100% clear who is the favored party at this point, again, as of Wednesday evening. And this will continue to change in the days ahead.

So Democrats would need to win 11 of those 13 seats to actually get a majority of 218 seats. I have them currently, if I absolutely had to push them one way or another, I have them favored in eight, but it's so up in the air a lot of these seats that it's really, I think, not even useful to think about it in that way. I think it's best to think of there being 13 races where it's not clear which party is favored. And so if Democrats can somehow win 11 of those seats, they can win a majority. But I think that's a tough road. I think you most likely end up with Republicans somewhere in the nature of 220 seats, 221, something like that, and just an absolutely crazy majority that they have to wrangle for Kevin McCarthy, if he does end up becoming Speaker.

David Nir:

Yeah. We don't usually talk about the goings on in parliamentary maneuvering on Capitol Hill, but I think it's worth pausing here for a second to discuss that possibility. If Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House with let's say 220 members in his caucus, you are going to see such a stark difference between his skill set and Nancy Pelosi's. Nancy Pelosi, we talk about the 50/50 Senate and how well Democrats did with that, Nancy Pelosi did an incredible job managing more than four times as many members in her caucus with a majority that was almost as narrow. I mean, she had times where she had 1, 2, 3 seat real advantages in a lot of roll call votes, and she kept it together the whole time.

McCarthy, man, I mean Matt Gaetz is already reportedly whipping votes against McCarthy in a vote for Speaker of the House. Now, I would love to delve into the nitty gritty of how that vote would work. We'll save that for another day. The fact is that McCarthy would have virtually no room for error, and that guy is just one big error. Even if he becomes Speaker, I really don't see him having much control over that nightmare, nightmare caucus. Anyway, let's put a pin in that one. There's still a lot of game left to play. And of course, like I said, we will be tracking all of it really, really closely.

One area that we have to address today, of course we started talking about abortion at the top of the show, but you'll recall that abortion was literally on the ballot in five key states. There were ballot measures relating to abortion and reproductive rights that went before voters in California, Vermont, Michigan, Kentucky, and Montana. And it was a clean sweep for the good guys.

So we can group them into three categories. California, Vermont, and Michigan all had measures on the ballot to amend their state constitutions to affirmatively recognize the right to an abortion. So those states all passed those measures by considerable margins. And now those constitutions will enshrine a right to an abortion and hopefully serve as a model for other blue states that really ought to do the same thing. This means that especially in a swing state like Michigan, that even if Republicans do regain control of the state government... and by the way, one of the most amazing things that happened on Tuesday night was that Democrats have won a trifecta, meaning they won both chambers of the Michigan legislature and the governorship for the first time in a bajillion years. But if Republicans ever take back state government in Michigan, they would find having almost impossible time rolling back abortion rights because it's in the state constitution now.

Now let's talk about Kentucky. Kentucky had a measure on the ballot that was very similar to the one that was defeated in Kansas this summer that would've amended the state constitution to say it does not include a right to an abortion. And voters turned that back. Now, it was a much smaller margin than in Kansas, except Kentucky's much redder even than Kansas. Donald Trump won the state by about 26 points. So the fact that there was a pro-choice majority in deep red Kentucky is really, really amazing.

Similarly, in Montana, also another very red state, voters there rejected a measure that wasn't directly related to abortion, but that emerged from the same anti-abortion rights movement, the measure would have required doctors to provide life-saving care to infants who are born but have absolutely no chance of living. It was incredibly cruel. It would require doctors to wrench dying babies from the arms of their parents who just want to hold them for a few minutes before they give up their short little lives and do unspeakably cruel things to these fragile bodies that are already going to die. It was absolutely, absolutely evil stuff and Montana voters rejected it. So again, a huge clean sweep for progressives on abortion rights. We got to put abortion rights on the ballot everywhere every year, don't you think, Beard?

David Beard:

Absolutely. I'm not sure that there is a state in the country that would pass an abortion ban if they voted on it through a popular vote after Kentucky defeated theirs. There aren't many states out there that are more socially conservative than Kentucky. Again, I say that from love because I was born in Kentucky, but it's a deep, deep red state at this point.

The other flag I want to make is Michigan. Michigan was one of the ground zero states for this abortion fight. It was also one of the ground zero states for the democracy fight, and it had one of the best performances for Democrats in the whole country. They basically won everything at almost every level. And I think that shows that those issues, the more that they mattered and the more that they pushed through, the better Democrats did.

David Nir:

And there will be ballot measures on abortion on the ballot in 2024. Activists are already moving forward in South Dakota. And if they can win in Kentucky, like you said, then they can win in South Dakota and lots of other states like that. So stay tuned on that front because there will be plenty more to come.

David Beard:

And lastly, we want to wrap up with a bit of schadenfreude. Obviously after an election night like Tuesday and so many expectations around the incredible Republican red wave that so many people were so sure of. We can't help but look back at a few predictions that maybe were not quite right. But first I want to start with an anonymous top Pennsylvania Democrat, who after the John Fetterman debate performance, who people were concerned about, because obviously he stumbled over his words a number of times. There were some answers that weren't great and concerns about, obviously, his medical history and his recovery from the stroke.

But instead of having a reasonable response to that, this anonymous top Pennsylvania Democrat went to a journalist and said, "If I'm the Democrats," this person said, "I'm putting my money in Ohio." Well, that person shouldn't work in politics anymore, because Democrats won in Pennsylvania and they lost in Ohio, which is what I think most people would've expected based on the fundamentals and based on Fetterman's continued popularity throughout the entire campaign. So the over reliance on this one debate that probably changed very few minds is just absolutely, absolutely crazy.

David Nir:

Yeah, and that's a perfect example of Beltway Media Group think. And also, you know what? I am so beyond sick of these Democratic operatives and strategists and consultants treating reporters like their therapists. Go find a real therapist. Go out there and spend your time doing real work. Why was this supposed top Democrat wasting time talking to a reporter, to kvetch about John Fetterman, instead of helping John Fetterman win? Well, I hope Fetterman has some guesses as to who that is. I certainly have no idea, but that person ought to be persona non grata forever.

David Beard:

The other article I would like to quote a few excerpts from is from the New Yorker from November 4th, titled “Why Republican Insiders Think That GOP is Poised For a Blowout,” and it has such wonderful quotes such as, speaking about the defection of Hispanics to the GOP in Nevada, the Republican strategist told me, "The reasons that Democrats have fucked this up is that they won't stop talking about abortion. And the reason they screwed it up with Blacks is they won't stop talking about abortion. It's like they're a two-issue party. It's this and Trump. They can't stop. I don't think they have anything else." Well, it turned out we didn't need anything else. That was plenty.

David Nir:

Yeah. And let's not forget about the fretting about how Black voters, especially Black men, were deserting Democrats supposedly. Man, is there anything the pundits got right this year?

David Beard:

I know. There is so far no evidence. Obviously, there'll be lots of investigations into precincts and a lot of vote analysis, but it doesn't look like any of that came true. Then a couple more quotes before we wrap from that same article. "The Republican pollster who has been regularly surveying Pennsylvania, told me that when it came to the Democratic focus on abortion, there just doesn't seem to be any specificity. You'd want to do it with high-education, high-income supporters. It's like, no, they're running on abortion constantly.” I'm like, “Scranton.” And again, apparently abortion is something people like to have available in Scranton. Surprise, surprise.

David Nir:

Guess what? We won a huge race in Scranton last night. Democratic Congressman Matt Cartwright, who was running in a Trump district and a top GOP target. He won reelection, because they like abortion in Scranton. They like it everywhere.

David Beard:

And then to wrap on another quote from that same pollster, from the same article. "I can show you the trajectory of all our races. We took a benchmark in July. Okay, this is going to be harder than we thought. And then it looks like a V. We went straight down. And then once we finally got to October, we have enough money, the electorate becomes more fully engaged. And then the other side of the V is straight back up. I can show you the same story in probably 25 races." And what that tells me is that the polls were all over the place for Republicans, because I personally really, really doubt the idea that the electorate had this massive change up and down. And then obviously clearly didn't end up on the V for Republicans anyway.

But I don't think this is what was happening. I think the race was a lot more stable than that. And these insider polls that jump all over the place are not accurately reflecting what the public is thinking. And so that's something that we should take forward into future cycles as well. Like these insider polls that pop up and down and start influencing the narrative, they're probably not worth that much.

David Nir:

Yeah, there was this almost meme, this notion that during the summer when Democrats were doing well in Kansas and doing well in all of those House special elections, that somehow Democratic voters almost had the playing field to themselves. Republicans were disengaged. And then in the fall that they were going to become reengaged by the economy and inflation and GOP scaremongering about crime. And man, that just didn't happen. I mean, we still have a ways to go before we see what all the data looks like, but Tuesday felt certainly a lot closer to the summertime elections, than it did to an election in a normal midterm, that's for sure.

David Beard:

And in terms of looking at evidence that helps you predict an election, the things that really held up this election were A, the generic ballot polling from nonpartisan pollsters, which was right about neutral, give or take a point on either side. And that's probably about where we'll end up. And then the special elections that took place. And the Washington State top two primary that were actual elections that people voted in, in August, and surprise, surprise, were actually how people voted in November as well. So those are the kinds of things you can actually take from and extrapolate to think how an election might go. Random insider polls from Republican pollsters, probably not.

David Nir:

Yeah, there's obviously going to have to be a big rethink, not just from pollsters themselves, but also from analysts about how they consume polling. It is a huge, huge topic. I'm sure we will talk about it plenty in the coming election cycle. But for now, I think it's time to call a lid on this week's episode of The Downballot. Like I said, we are following all of the uncalled races like hawks. Follow us, DKElections on Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter, dailykos.com/morningdigest. You'll get that in your inbox at 8:00 AM Eastern for free every weekday.

We will cover everything and we will continue this conversation next week's episode. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope that The Downballot was illuminating and informative this entire election cycle. We will continue to be here for many, many, many weeks to come. So please tune in again next week. And thank you to those who have subscribed. We will have another great episode next Thursday.

Highlights from The Downballot: We recap an amazing election night

This week on The Downballot, hosts David Nir and David Beard unpack the amazing election night we had on Tuesday — especially in Michigan — and talk more about why Democrats need to keep abortion front and center in their platform. They also take a look at how Biden’s approval ratings affected downballot races, why the GOP keeps on choosing “terrible” candidates, and the enduring importance of election fairness and protecting our nation’s democracy.

You can listen below or subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find a transcript for this week right here. New episodes come out every Thursday!

Tuesday was, no doubt, a historic election night that defied the odds, with Democrats poised to maintain their majority in the Senate.

“I just feel like the entire life of this podcast has been us warning people. "Oh, it's a midterm, Democratic president, probably going to be a bad year, historically, yada, yada." And now here we are. And it was actually pretty good,” Beard said, relieved.

“I think just about every other Democrat went into Tuesday night with extremely low expectations. I had tried to steel myself for the worst, and it was just one upside surprise after another,” Nir replied. “And I have been following elections for 20 years. I can't recall feeling that way on election night before.”

Beard pointed out that Democrats just had to hold on past Florida, where there was a small Republican wave — “Florida will always break your heart,” he quipped — and then, the rest of the country was just victory after victory.

Democrats have gotten so used to disappointment, Nir said, that we almost forget what winning looks like. The hosts went on to unpack those wins and why we won.

Nir also urged Democrats to continue focusing on the issue of abortion rights. As he put it, “Despite the pundits in the fall who tried to tell us that this was not the right issue for Democrats to be pursuing, that Democrats were making a huge mistake in not focusing on the economy or other issues. Abortion was a massive factor in this incredible upset of a night.”

Beard agreed:

I think all those people, who said that Dobbs would just sort of fade away, and that after three months it was going to no longer be at the front of people's minds, were just crazy. Look at the history of the fight for abortion rights that has been going on for decades or longer, in some places across the world.

And the idea that this massive, massive change was going to cause sort of a temporary spike for a couple of months in Democrats' polling and then just fade away is, in retrospect, just a crazy, crazy idea. That is not how real regular people view politics. They don't view it as this narrative that so many people in DC, in the sort of punditocracy, want to view it as like, "Oh, Dobbs happened."

Then there was a whole story about it, August special elections narrative, and then other things happened. So we have to move on in the narrative to other issues. But for millions and millions of people, this is a huge core issue that they're not going to forget about and they're going to vote on.

Democracy protection also emerged as a main theme of Tuesday night. “It turned out is that a lot of people do care about democracy. A lot of people do care about fairness and election results, and those being treated as important as they really are. And they voted on that,” Beard said. “We [saw] election deniers losing race after race. We saw Democrats, who were going to protect elections rights, winning governor's races, winning secretary of state's races. And I really believe that issue did matter and did break through.”

Nir added that it seemed as though Republicans believed there was no price to be paid for being an extremist, when it comes to authoritarianism, and rejecting democracy, and rejecting the rule of law. He also called out reporters for going along with this narrative and buying into a “both sidesism” that simply ended up painting a false picture of the reality:

The traditional way that the media works, of presenting both sides, and refusing to take a side, or calling out lies on one side and admitting that the other side is actually true and correct and right, that I think gave Republicans a lot of permission to think that there would be no price to pay. Because reporters didn't care. But reporters are not voters, and the voters really, really did care. And there are a lot of ways we can look at this. You mentioned all of the races where the big name GOP election deniers lost.

In a number of secretary of state races in several states, the Democrats won by bigger margins in those races than in a lot of the other statewide races. This is also telling of how much Americans care about protecting election fairness and defending our nation’s democracy, Nir insisted:

[It] blows my mind because I am a massive election nerd. I really care about this stuff. I have been talking about the importance of these kinds of races, especially secretary of state races, for a really, really long time. And most people, they're not going to pay that much attention to what's going on in specific downballot statewide races. But we have some pretty clear evidence this time that they really did, that more people were voting for Democrats running for secretary of state than for other offices. And there's only one possible explanation for that. And the answer is that, wow, they actually really, really care about democracy and fairness and elections, and the rule of law.

In terms of voters taking elections seriously, this past election reinforced the idea that candidate quality still matters. Republicans nominated an array of terrible candidates, some of whom were “genuinely terrible human beings,” Nir argued, which had an impact. Ultimately, GOP paid a price.

Beard thinks it indicates an incentive problem, and that is why it's so hard for the Republicans to fix:

As long as it's Donald Trump's party, the type of people who Donald Trump are going to like and endorse, and probably win primaries. And the type of people who are going to want to run in Donald Trump's Republican Party, are charlatans, are people with bad histories, people who are extremists, who are election deniers. All of that stuff attracts people to Donald Trump's GOP. And as long as it's Donald Trump's GOP, those are the candidates you're going to get.

You can look at the five Republican candidates in the key Senate races this year, which is Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Donald Bolduc in New Hampshire, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Adam Laxalt in Nevada, and Blake Masters in Arizona. And that is not a murderer's row. It is some of the worst Senate candidates, probably, that any major party has nominated in recent history, particularly Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz. Like just terrible candidates with terrible favorables, lots of scandals.

And as a result, Oz lost. Walker is probably going to a runoff, and is slightly behind heading into the runoff. Masters is, I think, probably going to lose in Arizona. And you can chalk that up, in at least large part, to the fact that they're terrible candidates with terrible favorables.

Strategic Democratic primary meddling also worked out, which Nir expanded on.

Yeah, it 100% worked out, in fact … there was so much hand ringing during the primary season about races where Democrats looked at the GOP primary field and said, you know what? We're going to have a better chance at winning in the general election if this total schmuck beats out the somewhat less bad guy. Democrats very wisely said, we're going to get involved here, and we are simply going to help the ultra-MAGA brigades do what they're already wanting to do, and that is nominate the worst of the worst, and if we do that then we're going to have a better chance at winning. And that's really important because we need the party that believes in democracy, i.e. the Democrats, to win elections. This isn't just about raw power or screwing with the GOP for the sake of it, this is about preserving democracy.

And so in all of these races where Democrats succeeded in helping Republicans to nominate their least acceptable candidate, on Tuesday night the Republican lost in every single one of these races across the country. People make it sound like this was some massive widespread phenomenon. Democrats did this probably in about 20 or so races, maybe in about half of them the worst GOP candidate actually won the nomination, so we're talking about maybe eight to 10. In all of those the terrible Republican lost. And there were so many hand ringers who were worried that Democrats were playing with fire and almost suggesting that it was the Democrat's obligation to help Republicans nominate non-awful candidates, and that's BS, that's their problem not ours.

The hosts also highlighted one district in particular — Michigan's third congressional district, adn a race we've talked about before on this show. This is a district that was redrawn by the state's new independent redistricting commission, around the Grand Rapids area. With the new map lines, it became significantly bluer, and Republican congressman Peter Meijer, who had voted for Donald Trump's impeachment, ended up with a huge target painted on his back. Democrats nominated a strong candidate there, Hillary Scholten, who ended up winning.

At this point, Beard touched on Biden’s approval ratings and how that had played out, as many wondered what might happen with Biden disapprovers who were undecided. Beard’s assessment was as follows:

The fear would be that they would run to Republicans in the end and cause a Republican year to turn out. And while obviously exit polls have a lot of problems, so you want to take them with a big grain of salt, you can look at and get a general sense of how this turned out. And from the exit poll you can see there are about 44% of people who either strongly or somewhat approved of Biden, and they went obviously overwhelmingly for Democrats. And then there were about 45% of the voters who strongly disapproved of Biden, and they overwhelmingly went for the Republicans, both as you would expect.

And then there were 10% of voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden, you can call it soft Biden disapprovers, and they went slightly for Democrats, 49% to 45%. Now that's not going to be an exact figure, because this is an exit poll, so I wouldn't take that four point margin as gospel, but I do think what it shows you is that there was about 5% of the electorate, give or take, who were Biden disapprovers who voted for Democrats anyway, either because they were actually disapproving of Biden from the left, or they were worried about Republican extremism, or they were worried about abortion rights, whatever the reason was, those voters took the fact that they weren't happy with Biden and they still went and voted for Democrats, and they were key to this result being as good as it turned out to be.

There are also four Senate races that haven't been decided yet, which the hosts walked listeners through.

Alaska is between two Republicans, so they set it aside because that doesn't change the math of the Senate.

Georgia has been called as a runoff between Senator Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, so that will be taking place on December 6th.

In Arizona, around 66% of the vote had been counted as of Wednesday evening. Senator Mark Kelly, the Democrat, has an advantage of about five percentage points over his Republican opponent, Blake Masters. There are a lot of votes left to count, obviously most of those votes are votes that were either mailed in and received in the last day or two, so Monday or Tuesday, or mail votes that were dropped off on election day. The difference obviously is that the mail votes have to go through a different verification process than the actual election day votes, those obviously you get checked in and then you just cast your vote, but even if you drop off your mail vote on election day, that still has to go through the regular mail verification process.

So those votes don't really lean significantly one way or the other, looking at past history, compared to the early, early vote, which was strongly democratic, as we expected, or the election day vote, which was strongly Republican. So those have been counted, and so mostly we have a big chunk of votes where we're not entirely sure which way those are going to lean, or if they're going to lean one way or another strongly. But I think the broad expectation is Kelly will probably be okay, but obviously with these many votes out, it's just not possible to make a call for anybody at this point.

Then in Nevada, about 77% of the vote is in. There, Adam Laxalt, the Republican candidate, is narrowly leading incumbent Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto by a couple of points. The good news here is that the ballots remaining are almost entirely mail ballots that were either received Monday, Tuesday in the mail, or that were dropped off in person on election day.

In Nevada, we would expect these to largely favor the Democrat. The question, of course, is exactly how many of those are left. In that state, mail ballots can be received until Saturday as long as they were postmarked on Election Day. And so the question is how many of those ballots are still left to be counted and what exactly that margin will be because the mail ballot margin has jumped around a bit. They've almost always favored Democrats. But the question is, is it a small margin or is it a large margin? So that one is very much still up in the air and we just kind of have to wait for those male ballots to be counted over the next few days.

Nir pointed out one major difference though between this runoff and the one that took place last year, the 2020/2021 runoff that of course Warnock and John Ossoff won. Last year, Republicans in Georgia passed a huge package of voting restrictions to try to suppress the vote — and that bill included a provision that shrunk the runoff period from nine weeks to just four weeks. The runoff last year was in January. This time, it will be on December 6th. “Republicans seem to think that this offers them some sort of advantage. I'm not really clear why especially since Warnock is such a vastly better fundraiser than Herschel Walker is,” Nir quipped.

Beard and Nir also discussed how Donald Trump supposedly has some sort of announcement plan for November 15th, that's a week after election day, and everyone seems convinced that he's planning to announce a third bid for the presidency that day. Regardless of what he says, Nir thinks that a Trump presidential announcement next week would not be good news for Herschel Walker.

Beard moved on to talk about the fact that there is a good chance we'll know who controls the House of Representatives by the time the runoff takes place, and how that could shift the race further in Warnock’s favor:

If Arizona and Nevada are both won by Democrats, that would also cement Democratic control of the Senate regardless of the result of the Georgia runoff. And then the race can become a lot less about which party controls Congress, will there be a check on the Biden administration if there's a Republican House in that case, and focus a lot more on the candidates. Because if there's not, that sort of national issue at the same level as there was when people were voting this past time, I think there's a chance that they're going to be Republicans who really, really don't like Herschel Walker who will either stay home and not bother with the runoff or even vote for Warnock if control of the Senate isn't at stake or if there's already a check on Biden in the House. So I think that could go to Warnock's benefit as well.

Assessing the House races, Nir noted that remains a real moving target. With so many races in play, how should we think about this?

Beard thinks there is a very narrow road for Democrats as they seek to maintain their majority, but that things are still very much shaking out. Either way, he explained, it will be a difficult situation to handle for the GOP given how slim their majority will be:

So I think the Republicans are still pretty clearly favored to eke out at least 218 seats and have a majority. Whether that's a functional majority or not, we'll see, and we can talk about that later. But the Republicans, as I see it, currently either have called are pretty strongly favored in 215 seats and the Democrats either have called are pretty strongly favored in 207 seats, which leave about 13 seats, where it's really not 100% clear who is the favored party at this point, again, as of Wednesday evening. And this will continue to change in the days ahead.

So Democrats would need to win 11 of those 13 seats to actually get a majority of 218 seats. I have them currently, if I absolutely had to push them one way or another, I have them favored in eight, but it's so up in the air a lot of these seats that it's really, I think, not even useful to think about it in that way. I think it's best to think of there being 13 races where it's not clear which party is favored. And so if Democrats can somehow win 11 of those seats, they can win a majority. But I think that's a tough road. I think you most likely end up with Republicans somewhere in the nature of 220 seats, 221, something like that, and just an absolutely crazy majority that have to wrangle for Kevin McCarthy if he does end up becoming speaker.

The hosts closed out with a thorough discussion of the importance of putting abortion on the ballot, and front and center in Democrats’ platform.

Kentucky had a measure on the ballot that was very similar to the one that was defeated in Kansas this summer that would've amended the state constitution to say it does not include a right to an abortion — and voters turned that back. It was a much smaller margin than in Kansas, but Kentucky is much redder even than Kansas; it was a state where Donald Trump won by about 26 points. “So the fact that there was a pro-choice majority in deep red Kentucky is really, really amazing,” Nir said.

Similarly, in Montana, also another very red state, voters rejected a measure that wasn't directly related to abortion, but that emerged from the same anti-abortion rights movement. The measure would have required doctors to provide life-saving care to infants who are born but have absolutely no chance of living. “It was incredibly cruel … It was absolutely, absolutely evil stuff, and Montana voters rejected it. So again, a huge clean sweep for Progressives on abortion rights,” Nir observed. “We’ve got to put abortion rights on the ballot everywhere every year, don't you think, Beard?”

Beard agreed, noting that it would be hard to fathom a state in the country that would pass an abortion ban if they voted on it through a popular vote after Kentucky defeated theirs — as there aren't many states out there that are more socially conservative than Kentucky. “I say that from love because I was born in Kentucky, but it's a deep, deep red state at this point,” he added.

He also flagged what happened in Michigan, as Michigan was one of the ground zero states for this abortion fight — and a bellwether for what might be to come:

It was one of the ground zero states for the democracy fight, and it had one of the best performances for Democrats in the whole country. They basically want everything at almost every level. And I think that shows that those issues, the more that they mattered and the more that they pushed through, the better Democrats did.

The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts! As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at thedownballot@dailykos.com. Please send in any questions you may have for next week's mailbag. You can also reach out via Twitter at @DKElections.

The Downballot: Which state legislatures to watch in 2022 (transcript)

The end of Roe has returned the issue of abortion to the states, and that means few elections are more important than those for state legislature. On this week's episode of The Downballot, we're joined by Aaron Kleinman, director of research for the States Project, which works to flip targeted legislatures nationwide. Aaron reaches back to the notorious "Powell Memo" to explain why legislative power is so crucial; discusses how Pennsylvania's unusually high incumbent reelection rate poses an obstacle for Democrats; lays out the stakes for Democrats trying to keep Republicans from gaining supermajorities in North Carolina; and much more.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap this week's elections, starting with the massive upset in New York's 19th—a race Republicans expected to win handily. There were also two colossal Democratic primaries for neighboring House seats in New York City that finally got resolved, plus a near-win by the very worst MAGA candidate of them all in a district near Orlando, Florida. And we update the ongoing vote tally in Alaska, where a Democrat is in surprising contention for the state's lone House seat. 

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. We have a ton to talk about today, but we want to make sure that you've had a chance to listen to last week's episode, where we invited on none other than Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the star of Seinfeld and Veep, who has also been a committed activist for many years. We discuss with Julia state Supreme Court races, which are often overlooked but where progressives can make a huge difference. We encourage you to check out that episode and also contribute to our slate of endorsed candidates running for state Supreme Courts in Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio. You can do that by going to justicewithjulia.com.

David Beard:

This week was one of the last big primary weeks of the year, so we've still got a lot to cover. What are we going to be talking about today?

David Nir:

We had primaries in New York and Florida and Oklahoma, but above all else, we had some special elections in New York where Democrats scored a major and unexpected victory. There is also a still-unresolved special election for Alaska's lone House seat that could, amazingly, go Democrats’ way. We will dive into that one. And then our guest this week is Aaron Kleinman, who is the research director at The States Project, an organization devoted to electing candidates to state legislatures nationwide and flipping competitive legislatures. He is also a longtime Daily Kos Elections community member. So we are very excited to talk to him. Plenty to discuss. Let's get rolling.

David Nir:

Holy crap, Tuesday night was amazing. What a huge win. Beard, you got to get us started with the special election in New York's 19th District. Tell us everything.

David Beard:

Yeah. So New York 19 had a special election after Representative Antonio Delgado was appointed to the lieutenant governorship. And so it was expected to be a race that Republicans would likely win, even though Biden carried the district narrowly because as we've talked about over and over again this year, it looked like it was going to be a good year for Republicans. And so in this district that Biden won very narrowly, Republicans should be able to pick it up, but that is not what happened. Democrat Pat Ryan, who's an Army veteran and Ulster county executive, narrowly defeated Republican Marc Molinaro, who is the county executive of nearby Dutchess County by a 51 to 49 margin. This is in the Hudson Valley area.

David Beard:

It was really expected that Molinaro was going to win right up until polls closed and the results came in. The polling—which was sparse—but it all showed Molinaro ahead. And so it's certainly the kind of result that makes you rethink, particularly in combination with the other special election results that we've had recently and that we've talked about pointing towards better Democratic results than you would've expected in a red year that makes you rethink the entire sort of state of the 2022 election and makes you consider like, are Democrats potentially going to stave off a Republican wave year, going to have a neutral year, maybe even conceivably have a slightly better than neutral year? It really is a result that makes you stop and think, because as we've talked about, special elections are the best evidence that you can get as to how an election is going to go.

David Beard:

And with the election less than 100 days away, there's only so much time for things to change. And with special election after special election now showing Democrats outperforming what you would expect, it makes you think that things are possible that we thought would not have been possible if we had been talking about it six months ago.

David Nir:

Yeah. We can't emphasize that enough because the thing with special elections is you never want to read too much into just one race, but now we have multiple races. We had the special election in Nebraska's 1st District, which came about right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Democrats vastly outperformed the presidential margins in that district. Then we had the special election in Minnesota's 1st District—again, same thing, conservative district, Democrats lost, but they performed much better than the presidential results in that district.

David Nir:

Okay. That's two races. Except now on Tuesday night, we had another two races because not only the Democrats win in New York's 19th District, but they also outperformed the presidential margins in another special election in the much more conservative 23rd District as well. And on top of that, you of course have the constitutional amendment in Kansas that went down in absolute flames. So I think at this point we have enough data to say that the outlook really has changed. And the other thing that I have to add specific to the race in the 19th is that Marc Molinaro was a highly touted recruit. Republicans had wanted him to run for this seat in 2020. They were super stoked that he had finally said yes for 2022. He serves Dutchess County, as Beard mentioned, which is one of the largest counties in the district. He had something of a moderate profile.

David Nir:

He really is the kind of candidate that Republicans would love to be able to run everywhere and yet he still lost. And I should also add that Molinaro is going to be running for a full term in the new 19th District. The special took place in the old 19th District, but the new 19th District is even bluer than the old 19th. And also it doesn't contain any part of Dutchess County. So he doesn't have his base. Pat Ryan, the Democrat who won in the old 19th, is actually running for a full term in the new 18th. And that is also much bluer than the 19th. So Democrats by this unlikely victory have not only added such important data points to this post-Dobbs world, but they put themselves in much better position in this part of upstate New York vis-à-vis holding the House.

David Beard:

And one thing that we saw both in 2010 and 2014 was when Democrats had bad years, they had really bad years in upstate New York. And this is more evidence that is not going to be the case this year, the way it was in both of those midterms during the Obama presidency. The other thing that I want to flag from here was the differential turnout that we saw in different counties. Pat Ryan won two counties in the 19th District. He won Columbia County and Ulster County. And both of those counties way outperformed the turnout compared to 2020. If you look at how many votes were cast in the special compared to how many votes were cast in 2020 and how that sort of works as a percentage of the turnout, Columbia and Ulster County—the Democratic counties—way outperformed all the Republican counties that did not cast as many votes as you would expect if it was sort of equal across the board going back to 2020. And we've seen similar things happen in Lincoln, in Nebraska's 1st District, and in Rochester, in Minnesota's 1st District.

David Beard:

So this is both good news. Obviously we want to see this good positive turnout in these urban and suburban areas where Democrats are motivated and voting, and also a little bit of a cautionary tale obviously. If that is less of the case in November, if more rural turnout spikes or comes back up, that obviously could bring things back a little bit. So it's something to watch, but I think right now you have to take it as a good sign.

David Nir:

So one amusing thing is that on Wednesday, the day after the election, Molinaro tried to blame his loss on the fact that Democrats scheduled a special election for the same day as the state's congressional and state Senate primaries. And I find that deeply amusing because it just shows Republicans only think they can win if they suppress the vote and have the smallest electorate possible.

I realize that's no laughing matter, but in the case of Molinaro, it's totally pathetic. But that does mean that we did have a whole bunch of primaries that we ought to discuss. And in particular, there were two House races in very blue districts in New York City that received a ton of attention. In New York's 10th District, this was an open seat in Lower Manhattan and nearby liberal neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Dan Goldman was the winner there. He is a self-funder who had served as the House Democrats’ chief counsel during Trump's first impeachment. He beat Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou by just a 26 to 24 margin. Congressman Mondaire Jones who represents the 17th District in the Hudson Valley, that's well to the north of the city, took third with just 18%. This one led to a lot of gnashing of teeth. Goldman, who is an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and put a ton of money into the race and ran tons and tons of ads, was generally considered among the more moderate options in the race.

And progressives really split that vote. He only won just over a quarter of the vote. So perhaps in a future year, he might be more vulnerable in a primary if progressives rally around a single candidate, but for now he's on his way to Congress. This is a dark blue seat where he is assured of victory in November.

Just to the north is the revamped 12th District. This district takes in Manhattan's upper east side and upper west side. It's the first time in more than a century that a single congressional district has incorporated both of those neighborhoods. And it set up a titanic conflict between two 30-year veterans of the House: Congressman Jerry Nadler and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. Nadler's base was on the West Side. Maloney's on the East Side. But if you look at a map of the results, it scarcely looks that way. Nadler destroyed Maloney 55-24. A third candidate took the rest of the vote. This again is a safely blue seat. So Nadler will get another term in Congress and Maloney's career will come to an end.

David Beard:

We also had primary night in Florida on Tuesday where most races went as predicted, but there was a near major upset in Florida's 11th Congressional District on the Republican side where incumbent Republican Representative Dan Webster narrowly held off far-right troll Laura Loomer by just a 51-44 margin. Loomer is—of the many, many crazy MAGA candidates that we have discussed on this podcast and seen across the country, she is one of the top. She describes herself as a proud Islamophobe. She is banned on numerous different social media apps. She is banned on rideshares. She's so far out there she almost goes past a lot of the Trumpist stuff.

It is very, very strange candidate. She, of course, refused to concede when faced with this narrow loss. She is already spreading conspiracy theories about the primary, but more than anything, this is a huge warning sign to Webster, who is among a number of Republicans, incumbent Republicans, who have faced scares from these far-right Trump candidates and who really regardless of their sort of personal views—and clearly they're happy to endorse and work with Trump, to support Trump—are forced into these increasingly right-wing conspiracy theorist campaigns to prevent being beaten in these primaries by wild and crazy people.

David Beard:

And so it's not a great sign. The fact that these Republican seats are being increasingly contested by these fringe far-right candidates, but there's very little that Democrats can do other than try to beat them when that happens.

David Nir:

It's also important to bear in mind that Webster himself is an ultra-conservative. He voted against recognizing the election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania. He tried to run against John Boehner when Boehner was trying to win another term as speaker of the House. And that totally fell apart, but it just shows what an extreme conservative he is, but he's just not extreme enough.

David Nir:

Loomer is truly scary. Beard, you said that she's one of the worst. I think she might have been the single worst candidate on the ballot from the MAGA wing of the GOP. I mean, this is a woman who is so crazy, she was kicked out of CPAC—banned from CPAC. How nuts do you have to be to manage that? But her policy prescriptions are completely terrifying. She wants to deport millions of immigrants to this country. She wants to shut down legal immigration for 10 years.

David Nir:

She, of course, does not recognize Biden as the president of the United States. She is truly, truly scary. Someone like her is going to win and that person will make Marjorie Taylor Greene look normal.

David Beard:

And that's what you get with this extreme creep to the far right, where you get somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is clearly crazy and way out there on the far right. And then you get somebody even further to the right, like Laura Loomer, and then all of a suddenly you're like, oh, well I guess Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't that crazy, if you've got someone like Laura Loomer almost in Congress and it's a scary situation. But again, all Democrats can do is go and try to win as many elections as we can and keep them out of Congress.

David Nir:

Speaking of winning as many elections as Democrats can, there's something really interesting brewing up north in Alaska.

David Beard:

So this special election in Alaska actually took place last week, but we're still waiting for the results to be finalized, and then for the runoff tabulations to take place. This is the second round. We talked about the first round where Democrat Mary Peltola and Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich advanced, and then Alaskans voted. And what they could do is rank those three candidates, one, two, three, and then after this first round and all of the votes are tabulate, there would be a runoff. The third place candidate would be eliminated and their votes would be assigned to one of the top two candidates.

David Beard:

Right now, we're still waiting on the final results. There's still some more votes that they're waiting to get, but right now we have the Democrat Mary Peltola at 39%, Sarah Palin at 31%, and Nick Begich at 28%, and we don't expect those places to change. So in that case, Begich would be eliminated and his votes would be split between Peltola and Palin, depending on how his voters ranked them in terms of what their second choice was.

David Beard:

And of course, some of his voters may not have ranked a second choice at all. As you can imagine, if you are a modern Republican or conservative-leaning independent in Alaska, and you don't like Sarah Palin, but you don't really want to have your vote go to a Democrat either, you go—you vote for Begich and then you leave the second or third spot blank and that benefits Peltola because she's ahead in this initial round; any votes that are dropped that don't go to either candidate is beneficial to her. So it certainly seems conceivable that Peltola could get maybe a third of Begich's vote, have some other votes dropped, and actually narrowly come out in front of Palin.

David Beard:

I don't think that's necessarily the most likely result, but I do think it's very possible. So it's something we'll want to keep an eye on. We expect the final results and the runoff tabulation to take place next week sometime. So then we should know who's going to be going to Congress for the rest of 2022 from Alaska.

David Nir:

And while Sarah Palin is a special creature all of her own, the final round results between herself and Peltola should be interesting because that'll be just a straight-up Democrat versus Republican race. And we'll be able to compare those to Alaska's presidential lean, just like we've been talking about in all these other specials. And Alaska, of course, is quite a red state, supported Trump by double digits, and it's almost certain, though, that Peltola will outperform that. So again, it's looking like another good data point pushing back on the idea of any sort of red wave.

David Nir:

Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we are talking with Aaron Kleinman from the States Project, which helps to flip competitive state legislatures around the country. We have so many interesting things to discuss with him, so please stick with us.

David Nir:

Joining us today is Aaron Kleinman, who is the director of research for the States Project, which works to raise money for targeted state legislative races. But he is also a longtime community member at the Swing State Project and Daily Kos Elections. So we are very excited to have him on. Aaron, thank you for joining us.

Aaron Kleinman:

Thanks so much. Even though I was a member of the community, but unfortunately, I was never on Seinfeld. So I feel like, a little out of place here.

David Nir:

I think you might go for the Kramer role though in the remake.

Aaron Kleinman:

Maybe I could be the back of George Steinbrenner's head again.

David Nir:

Aaron, we would love to chit chat about our favorite Seinfeld episodes all day, but why don't you tell us about the States Project, what it does and how it got started?

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah. So I want to take you back way before we were started, all the way to the early 70s when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the Chamber of Commerce about how the right wing could defeat kind of the post-war liberal hegemony that had existed in the United States, basically since the end of World War II.

What became known as the Powell Memo highlighted a number of different areas. So one of them was building their own institutions, both media and academics. So that's how you got things like Fox News, The Heritage Foundation, and all these kind of right-wing funded think-tanks, basically. They also said we need to take over the federal judiciary. That's why you have the Federalist Society and really a 50-year concerted effort by the right wing to install ideological judges who will focus on outcomes beneficial to them and the Republican Party.

And the third element of it was state legislatures. And there was a real focus by the right, starting in the early seventies, to take over state legislatures. And what you saw, the group ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, was a big player here. But there are others founded by people—members of the new right like Paul Weyrich and Grover Norquist that really focused on state legislatures making it harder to govern states, making them more in hock to corporate special interests. And this was a decades-long effort that really you saw in 2010, for example, really almost culminated then with the Red Map initiative where the right really poured unprecedented resources into state legislative races, so they could gerrymander the country for the next decade.

And I think a lot of people woke up on Nov. 9, 2016 being like, how did we get here? And a lot of people looked at state legislatures like one of the reasons why is because we just haven't built the institutions here that the right has. And so in 2017, our executive director, Daniel Squadron, who used to be a New York state senator, founded what became the States Project. And we started working just trying to figure out how we as an organization can focus grassroots attention toward flipping state legislative seats and winning majorities that are in line with our values that will not work for corporate special interests, but will work to achieve the common good.

David Nir:

So I'm sure there are a million different answers to this question. It's one that I've thought about a lot, I've gnashed my teeth over a lot, but why do you think that Democrats spent decades really without a Powell Memo of their own? Why did conservatives seize these levers of power and progressives, Democrats to the left, whatever you want to call it, kind of almost abdicated the playing field?

Aaron Kleinman:

I actually love this question because I've been thinking about it a lot too. I think one reason is I think what you saw the new left that emerged in the late 60s, early 70s, you had a new right and a new left emerge, and the new left was really focused on a kind of litigation-forward strategy almost, kind of setting up ways for basically people to sue to get or stop things. And I think that litigation-forward strategy ended up backfiring. When that works is when you have a federal judiciary in state courts that are appointed by Democrats, but as kind of the right’s taking over judiciaries across the country, it's made it harder and harder.

And it's also kind of a move away from the organized labor movement as well has really led to declines in people really organizing around things that are really close to them, like state legislatures. And so it kind of left this vacuum there. And also I think, again, the right-wing effort, it took a really long time. I mean, if you look at before the 2010 elections, Democrats, they controlled legislatures in states like Alabama. Even in 2012, they were in the majority in Arkansas and West Virginia. And so it took a really long time for really the far-right to take over these state legislatures. Yeah. I mean, think that's a big part of it was just kind of how the new left constituted itself in a very kind of litigation and D.C.-centric way that channeled activists’ energy toward those areas.

David Nir:

I think that's a really interesting answer. So in a way, it's almost sort of like a multidecade frog boil.

Aaron Kleinman:

Yes.

David Nir:

This conservative plan unfolding over such a long period of time. And then in a way, as you pointed out with 2010, it suddenly sort of seemed to come to a head all at once.

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah, I think that's right.

David Nir:

So Democrats haven't ignored this issue obviously. Earlier this year we interviewed Jessica Post, who leads the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which is the state legislative equivalent of the DSCC or DCCC, and they were founded 30 years ago, but how does the States Project differ from the DLCC and how do you complement one another?

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah. I mean, I think that the biggest differentiator between us is, it's fundamental where the DLCC is a party organization and we are a nonpartisan organization. And so we will work with any lawmakers that share our values regardless of their party. And so you can see that in a state like Alaska for example, where you have the state House is governed by a faction of Democrats, independents, and Republicans who are opposed to their governor's really kind of far-right stances cutting social services for the people of the state. Being nonpartisan gives us the flexibility to work with a group like that. Another state that's like that is Nebraska, because in Nebraska you have nonpartisan state legislative elections. And so that gives you more wiggle room to try to find candidates that share your values but maybe not necessarily the party.

David Beard:

And so with these huge number of state legislative chambers and races, just into the thousands, how do you go and narrow down into the competitive chambers and competitive races that you want to focus on?

Aaron Kleinman:

So it basically starts the month after the previous election. And that's when we start collecting electoral data for all the legislative districts. Actually, this cycle, it's a little bit different because of redistricting. So it was really kind of as soon as states enacted new maps, we were trying to hit the ground running as quickly as possible with the electoral and demographic information about those new maps. And it's collecting all of that and then seeing which states have legislative chambers where we could either change, first of all the majority where either party has a path to change the majority or where there's a possibility to hit an important nonmajority threshold like preventing veto overrides or filibusters or things like that.

So we look at the electoral demographic debt and say, okay, the range of seats that a party could win based on these is roughly between X and Y. And if it's possible that there could be a change in control of a legislature, then we have to start looking at kind of, okay, are we going to go into this legislative chamber? Who are we going to work with? How are we going to do that? And then using that district-level analysis, we try to go into all those competitive seats and then we try to find the candidates who really match our values in those competitive seats. And then we try to see if there's a way for us to work effectively with them to increase their chances of winning.

David Beard:

And so let's talk about some of those competitive chambers that are up this year, and we can start off with Michigan and Pennsylvania, which are really notable. As you mentioned about redistricting this cycle, both of those states have fair or pretty fair maps for the first time, really, in decades after repeated Republican gerrymanders. Do you feel like the Democrats have done enough in terms of candidates, in terms of the races that they're running to put themselves in contention for one or more of those chambers in those states?

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah. Well, I'll start with Michigan because in Michigan you're as likely to flip a chamber in Michigan as you are in any other state in the country. There are only two seats away from breaking GOP control of state House, and only three seats away from breaking GOP control of the state Senate. Moreover, as you noted, they have fair maps for the first time in decades. You also have term limits there, which overall social science showed probably lead to worse outcomes at the state level, but it means in this particular election there's just a lot of open seats, especially with gerrymandering really kind of changing districts around a lot because they went from basically legislative drawn gerrymander to an independent redistricting commission that just threw everything they'd done out the window before. So taking all that into account with the thin margins and again, relatively fair maps, in Michigan, we are very, very close.

Pennsylvania we're a little further away from winning the majority there in terms of just you have to flip 12 seats in the state House out of 203, but still that's a bigger percentage than in Michigan. And another issue with Pennsylvania is that they do have fair maps and a lot of right-wing incumbents decided that now that they're in fair districts they'd rather retire than run for reelection, but there are a number that are running for reelection. In Pennsylvania, incumbents tend to win at higher rates than they do in other states, really outrunning their party. And this goes for both parties. There are Democrats in the Pennsylvania House who represent seats that Trump won by 40 points. And what we think is the case of Pennsylvania is they have a full-time legislature with kind of really robust staffing and relatively small districts and so it's just very easy for incumbents to have everyone in-district get to know them personally, and they can establish these personal brands that just become very difficult to beat.

Well, what does that all mean for 2022? It means that there are 103 seats that went for Biden in the House, 100 that went for Trump. There's a clear path there, but it's going to be really hard to beat every single Republican incumbent in a Biden seat. But what you can do is you can make a lot of progress this year. Again, it is possible that we could win all the Biden seats in a good year if it ends up being a good year. But even if it isn't, what you can do is you can really set yourself up to really narrow those margins, really make it so that the majority has less wiggle room in the next 2023, 2024 session. And then you can try to really flip it in 2024 when you'll have presidential level turnout and maybe the partisan fundamentals in those districts will override any incumbency advantage.

Another important point about Pennsylvania is lawmakers there can get sworn in at the start of December. Now that's important because if they try any post-election shenanigans in 2024, you could flip the chamber and get a majority of the legislature who doesn't want to end democracy in America. So that two-cycle play in Pennsylvania would still be really critical for that.

David Nir:

That's super interesting. I want to dig into something you mentioned. I was unaware of the fact that Pennsylvania had an uncommonly high incumbency retention rate at the legislative level. Are there any other states that also fall into this bucket or conversely on the other end of things of elect a lower rate of incumbents?

Aaron Kleinman:

I would say that Pennsylvania has an abnormally high number of incumbents in seats that can win—seats that basically go way against their party. You have Republican who won seats that Biden won by 20. You have Democrat seats that Trump won by 40. You just don't really see that outside of states like West Virginia or Massachusetts, for example, where one party is just so dominant that people who just want to put some type of check on that party will vote at the state legislative level for the other one. So in terms of a big swing state, I think Pennsylvania stands alone for that.

David Nir:

So switching gears from the big swing states where we all have a pretty good sense of the ones that are going to be most contested and most at play, and certainly just the ones that both parties want to win most. We want to talk about some of the smaller states that are on your list. And you mentioned Alaska a little bit earlier, where there's a bipartisan coalition that runs the House, but also we'd love to talk about New Hampshire, which tends to be a really swingy state where majorities seem to get swept in and out from both parties all the time. Maine also is another state that Democrats took control of not that long ago and is potentially up for grabs. So, on the smaller states that maybe are somewhat below the radar, what do you see that's interesting? What do you think progressives should be paying attention to this year?

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah, Alaska, especially for all the real ... If you're listening to this podcast, I think you're going to really be interested in what happens in Alaska because they have this democracy reform that I think is fascinating and I wonder if other states might ultimately try to replicate it, which is the top four candidates from a primary make the general election ballot and then they do instant runoff voting with those four candidates. We're hoping that in Alaska independent candidates who, again, are really focused on improving the lives of people in the state, they tend to overperform the fundamentals of their district and we hope to support a number of those. And it'll be interesting to see what happens with this new top four instant runoff voting system. And so that's something to really keep your eye on. Though, I will say Alaska tends to not count ... They're already kind of on the very western edge of the country and their returns come in late. So you might want to be patient as those come in on election night.

New Hampshire, like you mentioned, unfortunately they did sign basically a Republican gerrymander into law that makes it harder for us to take the majority, but definitely not impossible. The state Senate has 24 seats in it and half of them went for Trump, half of them went for Biden. Considering the state went for Biden by seven, that's not exactly fair. But it does at least provide a path to breaking control of the chamber and you do need a majority of votes to advance anything out of the Senate. So at the very least you can stop the worst things if you could do that.

And then thinking about the House, a majority of seats there did go for Biden, though the median seat in the House is still to the right of the state overall. And the New Hampshire House has 400 seats in it, it's the largest legislature in the country, other than the House of Representatives. And also the average lawmaker in the House represents about 4,000 people. So in addition, they might be smaller than the high school you went to.

David Nir:

I think that if the U.S. House of Representatives had the same population proportion as the New Hampshire House, we'd have 97,000 members in Congress.

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah. Yep. It's a very idiosyncratic chamber. We are looking at the best ways to intervene in the state. I think in elections that small, I think really what's important is making it so that candidates make face-to-face contact with as many voters as possible, which means getting them to knock on doors as much as possible. And so we're looking at ways that we can really do that. And hopefully that can be a way for us to break ... Again, because in New Hampshire, a lot of really bad right-wing laws get passed out of the legislature and the governor's—he's a Republican, but he's cagey enough to maybe not sign the worst of them. But he still will sign very partisan and unfortunate bills into law. And so just being able to stop the flow of those to his desk will be really critical.

And then across the border you have Maine, which is kind of the opposite story, where in 2018, we helped flip the state Senate, which led to a trifecta there. And basically right away people in Maine—the Maine legislature started passing a raft of really great bills that improved people's lives. One of them, for example, you might have seen that there weren't enough Republican votes to get a cap on out-of-pocket insulin costs for all patients into the IRA. Well, you could still pass such caps at the state level and Maine did that. So now in Maine, if you need insulin there's a cap on how much you have to spend out of pocket per month. And other bills protecting clean air, clean water, bills protecting the right to vote. And so in 2020, as Susan Collins carried the state, we actually increased the number of members of the state Senate, Democratic members of the state Senate. We spent about 1% of what Sara Gideon had left over in her account to do that.

That's something that I do want to hit on is, the average state legislative race, competitive state legislative race not just kind of a sleepy safe district affair, costs about 3% of a competitive U.S. Senate race. And so when you're talking about donating to these candidates, you can make just such a bigger impact at the state legislative level as a donor.

David Nir:

Obviously it varies a lot from state to state, but in dollar terms, what would be a common amount for a budget for a state legislative price?

Aaron Kleinman:

I mean, in Maine, it's like $40,000. In a state like Pennsylvania or Michigan, it will be higher, but still far, far less. It'll be six figures in a state like that, whereas any competitive federal election now, you're talking seven or eight. So by orders of magnitude, it's just so much easier to make a difference as a donor at the state legislative level.

David Beard:

So on your list, you've also got a couple of states that are focused on preventing Republican super majorities, namely Nebraska and North Carolina. Now, that might not be as exciting as taking a chamber, or holding a chamber like Maine, where we've been doing a lot of good progressive stuff, but that's still pretty important. So what are the stakes in those states, if we are able to prevent that?

Aaron Kleinman:

I can start with Nebraska. So in Nebraska you have a very strong filibuster tradition, where you need two-thirds vote to get most bills onto the floor. That is important in a lot of different ways. You might have seen recently that they were able to block a really restrictive abortion bill by preventing it from getting to the floor. The state budget, which we don't often think about at the national level, but they're really important, just the lives of the people in the state. The state budget needs a two-thirds vote. And so you can make sure that the state budget is providing the services that the people of the state need. And finally, for democracy, I'm sure most of the listers here know, that Nebraska allocates its electoral votes by congressional district. And the Omaha-based district is a swing seat, and it swung pretty heavily toward Democrats in 2020.

And being able to protect that both before and after the election will require us to keep having more than one-third of the seats in the legislature. And by the way, Nebraska is also the only state to have a unicameral legislature. And it's also the only state that has officially nonpartisan elections. So it's just a really unique and interesting state that people don't always think of as a real big political battleground, but it's a really important state if you want to make a difference in people's lives. North Carolina, their state government has been in the news a lot, especially their fights over fair districts. But for this cycle, the House has, not the map that I would have drawn, but is a map that provides a path to the majority in a good year, but also potential for Republicans to hold the supermajority if they have a good year.

And so, in North Carolina, you have a governor, Roy Cooper, who really is dedicated to improving the lives of the people in his state, but if he faces a legislature that can override his vetos, they could pass a lot of really restrictive laws, especially, again, around abortion. And as with Nebraska, these are both states that have a lot of very red states bordering them. And so you're talking about not just the people of that state, but also people in neighboring states. Really protecting those rights is really, really critical, just almost at the national level. So two states you might not think of as big state legislative places, but have huge consequences.

David Beard:

So as a native North Carolinian, there's always a ton of work put into these state legislative races. Breaking the supermajority is something that's been worked on in the past. I notice there's periodic optimism about trying to take one or more chambers.

David Beard:

You mentioned with a fair map in a good year, there's a potential for Democrats to take the state House. There's been talk in the past few weeks about this being a better year for Democrats than maybe we expected earlier in the year. Is that something you see as realistic? And if so, do you change how you're working in the state at all, if it seems like the situation is changing nationwide?

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah, and one great thing that we have as a group is that we really have great relationships with the caucuses in these states. So we can be flexible in how we allocate resources, especially down the home stretch there. And we've really worked at ways to improve the efficiency of how dollars are spent, ways that we can kind of purchase [inaudible 00:40:02] time, for example. That could be applied to a number of different candidates, because there are a lot of overlapping media areas because the districts are so small.

So yeah, I think we'll have the flexibility to adapt as circumstances on the ground change in North Carolina. Listen, Republicans are still the out-party in a midterm. So even though special election results have pointed to perhaps a more favorable atmosphere, we really need to make sure that we're protecting as many vulnerable seats as possible. And in North Carolina, especially with the VRA being eroded, you have a lot of rural areas with Black representatives that their district's got more Republican. And the federal courts are just less and less likely to put a check on that. And so we want to make sure that we're protecting these areas, because a lot of these representatives represent areas that really can benefit from a more active state government. And so we want to be sure in North Carolina that we're really protecting people in vulnerable districts as much as possible. In addition to potentially going for as many seats as possible narrowing it.

So even if maybe we can't necessarily flip the North Carolina house in 2022, we can set ourselves up for 2024. But when you think about the risk of potentially losing the super majority, that's just so important that it's hard to ignore the seats that are around the tipping point of the super majority.

David Nir:

So Aaron, when you talk to candidates or other folks on the ground, operatives, folks in caucuses, campaign staff, what are they telling you about what they're hearing on abortion from voters? And how are they talking about it, particularly in these sorts of swing districts that Democrats need to win in order to actually win or hold majorities in the legislatures?

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah. It's a huge concern, and it's an area where the state legislature is particularly important. If you want to go back to what we started talking about, the Powell Memo, the overturning Roe. It's part of that three-legged stool, where you have these right-wing institutions that are promoting the idea that it's a good thing.

You have a right-wing judiciary actually overturning it, and then right-wing state legislatures restricting it. And so I don't know how to end Fox News. I don't know what to do about the federal courts, but I do know that state lawmakers are the people who are most ... They now own this issue. And if you want to change the laws in your state, you have to change your state lawmakers. So because it's so proximate to their elections, it's just an issue that keeps coming up. And we are endorsing candidates that are going to side with women. And so we are really committed to that. So yeah, it's definitely something that comes up. It's definitely something that they're campaigning on. It's definitely something that's really important to state legislatures specifically. And so, you're just going to keep hearing a lot about it.

There's a reason why we keep talking about it, because it's such an important issue. And it also relates at a broader level to the idea that a lot of these right-wing state legislatures are restricting people's freedoms more broadly. Not just the freedom to choose, but also the freedom to choose their own president. Because there are so many state lawmakers, in really swing states that are on the right-wing side, that are willing to ignore the will of voters and want to choose electors contradicting the will of the people of their state. And it really plays into the broader message of a right-wing legislature is a threat to your freedoms.

David Beard:

So you've got a couple ways that people can get involved. You've got a GiveSmart slate of six candidates, and then you've got what's called giving circles. So tell us about how folks could get involved with the state's project through those two ways.

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. So StatesProject.org, everyone should go there, and you'll find all sorts of ways to get involved. A giving circle is when you and your friends and your network want to get together and be like, we want to work together. We want to find a state where the state lets ... Or choose your own state where the state legislature is really important and work together to try and flip it. And so you can pool your resources. And you can have all sorts of programming associated with that. We really try to make the experiences enjoyable and social as possible, if you want to do that. But if you're just like, "I got some money burning a hole in my pocket, and I want to donate to the candidates who need it the most right now."

Well, that's where our GiveSmart program is for. And so if you go to StatesProject.org, and you click on our GiveSmart page, right now we have six candidates: Cindy Hans, Kevin Hertel, Maurice Imhoff, Veronica Klinefelt, Christine Marsh, and Sam Singh. They're all in Arizona or Michigan. And they are the candidates that, based on our knowledge of those states and the campaigns, are the ones who need donations the most right now. And feel free to go there, check that out, and give whatever you think they need.

David Nir:

And does that slate change from time to time?

Aaron Kleinman:

So yeah, we update it pretty regularly, because we rotate candidates in and out based on the moment. Right now, those candidates, a bunch of them actually just got out of competitive primaries, because Arizona and Michigan had them at the start of the month. And so they need more resources now.

And I think as we head into the stretch run, in September and October, we end up kind of rotating them a little more frequently, because money tends to come in more often. And we are talking every day basically about who needs resources at the moment. And so, please do keep checking it, just to see when we update it. And I would hope we update it probably around Labor Day again. And then after Labor Day, I'm sure as you guys know, donations really start pouring in and they're just constantly checking to see if there are new opportunities for us. And also we get a better idea of how the election's going to look as we get closer to it. And we can see which districts candidates may need a boost in a little more clearly. But for now, those are the six where if you want to make a difference right now, they're the ones who really need the money the most.

David Nir:

And Aaron, you are a popular, and often very hilarious, presence on Twitter. Where could people find you?

Aaron Kleinman:

Oh, I'm @BobbyBigWheel. I chose that name more than a decade ago, and I still haven't changed it to my real name. I've been in it for so long. But yeah, maybe one of these days I'll change it. You guys still have a Hell of a Sandwich on staff, so ...

David Nir:

That's right, and our site is called Daily Kos, which was named after our founder's Army nickname. And he said he picked it, assuming that he would change it very shortly. And that was 20 years ago and we still have the same name.

Aaron Kleinman:

Yeah, so Markos and I are in the same boat on that one.

David Nir:

Aaron Kleinman, director of research for the States Project, which works on targeting state legislative raises and flipping chambers. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was really illuminating.

Aaron Kleinman:

Thank you so much for having me. I love that you guys have this now, and I am a Daily Kos Elections and Swing State Project partisan for life. And I encourage all listeners, I'm sure you already know Daily Kos Elections ... Especially before I really became full-time in politics, that's one of the best places to spend your time.

David Nir:

Well, we couldn't agree more. Thanks again, Aaron.

Aaron Kleinman:

Thank you.

David Beard:

That's all from us this week. Thanks to you, Aaron Kleinman for joining us today. The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing TheDownballot@DailyKos.com. If you haven't already please subscribe to The Downballot, and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks also to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor, Tim Einenkel.

The Downballot: Effective political ads + speaking to Black voters, with Terrance Green (transcript)

Black voters are the most stalwart constituency in the Democratic Party, but candidates cannot take them for granted. Media consultant Terrance Green joins us on this week's edition of The Downballot to discuss his career in politics communicating with voters, including leading the largest-ever paid media operation to turn out the Black vote on behalf of the Biden-Harris campaign. Immediately after that historic victory, he found himself targeting white voters on behalf of a Black Senate hopeful, Raphael Warnock, in Georgia's epic runoffs. Terrance also tells us how he's helped African American candidates turn back racist attacks and what he thinks the impact of having so many high-profile Black Senate contenders this year will be.  

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard, meanwhile, recap this week's races, including a special election in a conservative Minnesota House district that saw the Republican badly underperform Donald Trump; a surprisingly close call for one of the most vocal progressives on Capitol Hill, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar; and the Democratic primary for Vermont's open House seat, which means that, at long last, the state will almost certainly end its status as the only one never to send a woman to Congress come next year.

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 please leave us a five-star rating and review.

David Beard:

We had another exciting primary night this week. So what are we going to be covering on today's show?

David Nir:

We had a special election in Minnesota where Republicans dramatically underperformed the top of the ticket. We also saw the final conclusion to last week's primaries in Washington state, where yet another pro-impeachment Republican has lost. We have some primaries in Minnesota and Wisconsin and Vermont that we want to catch up on. And then we are going to be talking with political consultant Terrance Green, who among other things was responsible for running the Biden-Harris campaign's paid media outreach to black voters in 2020. Plenty to talk about on this week's show, so let's get rolling.

David Beard:

We had a number of primary elections this past Tuesday. But most importantly, we actually had a special election in Minnesota for the 1st district. So what happened there, Nir?

David Nir:

So this was a special election for the vacancy in Minnesota's 1st congressional district that was held by Republican Jim Hagedorn, who died earlier this year. And Republican Brad Finstad defeated Democrat Jeff Ettinger by a 51-47 margin. And you might ask, why do we think it's so important to talk about a race where a Republican held a Republican seat? The answer is that this is rather conservative turf in southern Minnesota. It includes the city of Rochester and also a lot of rural areas as well. Donald Trump won this district by a 54 to 44 margin in 2020. So he won it by 10 points. Finstad only carried it by four points, which means he ran six points behind Donald Trump. And simply put, that kind of underperformance is not the sort of thing that you would expect to see if the GOP supposedly is facing a favorable political environment for them, if they are on the verge of benefiting from typical midterm patterns, which invariably almost always harm the party that is in control of the White House.

David Nir:

That really isn't what should have happened. Finstad should have won by at least Donald Trump's margin, if not by a bigger margin. Now, this is a district that has been home to very close House races for the last three election cycles. So even though this district has moved sharply away from Democrats at the presidential level, it still often is likelier to vote for Democrats further down ticket. However, this is not the only recent data point we have that is confounding our expectations of what the 2022 election will look like. At the end of June, just four days after the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling, Nebraska held a special election in the similarly conservative 1st district, and the results were almost exactly the same. The Republican there ran six points behind Donald Trump. And then of course, last week, we saw the incredible 18-point victory in Kansas to defeat an amendment that would've stripped the right to an abortion from the state constitution.

David Nir:

So now we have three data points suggesting that maybe there really has been quite a shift in the political environment since the Supreme Court's ruling in the Dobbs case, overturning the right to an abortion. I don't want to draw too many conclusions as a result of such a small sample size, but we are about to have a whole bunch more data come in. In fact, there are three more special elections coming up in just the next two weeks. Next week, we have Alaska's at-large special election. And two weeks from now, we have two special elections in New York in the 19th district and the 23rd district. The 19th district is really going to be one to watch here. This is a seat that the Democrats hold, it's quite a divided swing seat. But the Democrat who's running in this race, Pat Ryan, has really made abortion a central issue in this race. He's run ads on it. He's really called it a referendum on abortion rights. And I think we're going to get a really good window into just how the Dobbs decision is affecting the electorate in a couple of weeks.

David Nir:

I don't want to revise my predictions for November yet. I am still relatively bearish on Democrats' chances for holding the House, but it's going to be really important to pay attention to what happens over the next two weeks. And if the results continue to indicate that abortion is a massive motivating issue for democratic voters, then democratic candidates have to lead and they have to lean into this one, because it could really change the trajectory of the midterm elections.

David Beard:

And special elections are important data points because there have been so many issues with polling over the past years, particularly favoring Democrats and leading to these bad surprises in 2016 and 2020, and in Florida year after year after year. And so special elections are like polls, except they're real live experiments basically in these individual districts of exactly how the elections will happen in November. And so they are better data points. Because they're so rare, you then struggle with the fact that like, “Oh, is there a weird situation here or an unusual candidate there?” But taken as a whole and the more data points, as you said, we can get here, the more representative it is of what we might expect to happen in November.

David Beard:

The other point I wanted to make was that last year in Virginia is another example of an actual election we can look to. And that election didn't go very well for Democrats and sort of was more along the lines of what you'd expect for a good Republican year, but that potentially has changed with these special elections. And again, we'll get to more data points, we'll see if that continues to happen. And the one that I think I would look at most closely is New York 19, as you mentioned. If Democrats have any potential shot to hang onto the House in November, given these special election results, they should be able to win and hold this seat. And so if that happens, that would really make me think twice about what sort of chances do Democrats have in November in the House.

David Beard:

Another really important result that we wanted to highlight is actually from last week's primary races in Washington, where votes continued to come in and resulted in a really significant change in one of the congressional races. In Washington's 3rd district, as we mentioned last week, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler was in a tough race. She was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump last year. She was facing off both against a Democrat, a Republican endorsed by Trump, and a number of other candidates who were also in the ballot.

David Beard:

The Democrat Marie Perez leads the vote with 31% and Herrera Beutler led the Trumpist candidate, Joe Kent, by a small but noticeable margin right after election night. But the votes that were counted later ended up being much more favorable to Kent than Herrera Beutler. And he ended up edging her out, 22.8% to 22.3% for the second general election spot. Of course, Washington state has a top-two primary. So Perez and Kent will be the two candidates advancing to November. That means that only likely two of the Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump will advance to the general election. Dan Newhouse in Washington's 4th district: He did survive as we talked about last week. And David Valadao in California. Liz Cheney still has her primary coming up, but she's a big, big underdog in that race. So it's most likely that only Newhouse and Valadao will make it to the general election.

David Beard:

The other notable thing about this race is that Herrera Beutler lost despite significant Democratic support. Democrats got 42% in the 2020 congressional primary, but only got 34% of the vote in this year's congressional primary. Republicans got 64% of the vote, which is much higher than they would've normally gotten. That leads to the fact that a number of Democrats crossed over and voted for Herrera Beutler in hopes that she would advance to the general instead of the Trumpist candidate. So the fact that she nearly lost… without those Democrats, she would've lost to Kent by a much, much larger margin.

David Beard:

I'll also point that potentially this race could be on the fringes of competitiveness. Obviously, Perez should pick up a lot of those Democrats who voted for her and Beutler. Is that enough to put it on the board? Still to be seen, but certainly at least worth keeping an eye on.

David Nir:

It also just goes to show that for all the handwringing about Democratic meddling in GOP primaries, this is truly what Republicans want. As you said, without Democratic help, Herrera Beutler would've gotten completely destroyed. So how is it that Democrats can or even should be responsible for the outcome of GOP primaries? These trends, these patterns are just far, far too strong, even when you have tens of thousands of Democrats switching sides.

David Nir:

Tuesday night, of course, we also saw a bunch of primaries. The most surprising results almost certainly happened in Minnesota's 5th district. This is a dark blue seat based in Minneapolis. And here, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar fended off former Minneapolis city council member Don Samuels by just a 50 to 48 margin. Omar's win was the weakest primary showing by a Democratic incumbent in the House since the Democratic Party merged with the Farmer-Labor Party in 1944 to create the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, best known as the DFL in Minnesota.

David Nir:

Omar reportedly did not run any television ads at all in this race, apparently due to a belief that her base constituted younger voters who would not be receptive to such a message. It seems like that was a huge mistake, and she got very, very lucky to win renomination. Samuels himself was a flawed candidate who wasn't necessarily the right fit for this sort of district, but winning just 50% in party primary, especially when you have the official DFL endorsement is a terribly weak showing and it suggests that a stronger candidate could unseat Omar in a future election cycle. Though I would certainly expect her to campaign differently in a future year, given how close a call this was.

David Beard:

And I think you can compare it to the other Squad members who have faced primaries and dispatched them very easily. The fact that Omar struggled so much in this race really points to a poorly run campaign. Hopefully, she learns from that, runs a stronger campaign in the future if she's facing the primary challenger so that this sort of near miss doesn't come out anywhere like that.

David Beard:

Another competitive race on Tuesday night was in the Wisconsin governor's race for the Republicans where a self-funding businessman, Tim Michels, defeated former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, 47% to 42%. Michels will be taking on incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers. Michels had Trump's endorsement, which of course goes a long way in these Republican primaries. He was also on the ballot previously, way back in 2004, when he lost the Senate race to Democrat Russ Feingold, 55% to 44%.

David Beard:

Michels jumped into this race very late in April, but of course he had a ton of money to spend to reintroduce himself to voters after not being on the ballot for almost two decades. And he decisively outspent Kleefisch after investing $12 million of his own money into his comeback. Kleefisch, of course, was Scott Walker's running mate in each of his campaigns and had his backing for the top job and seemed to be the clear front runner, but the amount of money that was spent and, of course, Donald Trump's endorsement of Michels went a long way into turning the race around and ended up causing Kleefisch's loss.

David Nir:

This of course is going to be one of the very, very top gubernatorial races in November. Evers only defeated Scott Walker by a very small margin in 2018. It really was one of the biggest Democratic upsets of the night in that big wave year. Democrats are also desperately trying to hold on to their current set of seats in the legislature. They want to avoid giving Republicans a supermajority. That's super important because even if Evers wins a second term, if Republicans can win two-thirds majorities in both chambers of the legislature, they will be able to override any of his vetoes.

David Nir:

And given Wisconsin's undoubted importance to the 2024 presidential election, just as it's been so important in all of these past presidential elections in our lifetimes, for Democrats to hang on to power in the Badger State is incredibly important.

David Beard:

And lastly, we wanted to highlight Vermont who will be likely sending a woman to Congress for the first time and will be the 50th and final state to do so. State Senate President Pro Tem Becca Balint beat Lieutenant Governor Molly Gray, 61% to 37% in the primary to replace Peter Welch, who is of course running for Senate to replace Pat Leahy, so the winner will likely become Vermont's only House member. She had endorsements from Bernie Sanders as well as the LGBTQ Victory Fund. She would also be the Green Mountain State's first gay representative.

David Nir:

Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we are going to be talking with political consultant, Terrance Green, who among many other things was responsible for the Biden-Harris campaign's media outreach to Black voters in the 2020 election. He also worked on the famous Georgia Senate runoff for Raphael Warnock, following the 2020 elections. We have a lot to talk about with him. So please stay with us after the break.

David Nir:

Joining us today is Terrance Green, who is managing partner at the political consulting group 4C Partners. Among many campaigns, he notably led the largest ever paid media operation to turn out the black vote by a presidential campaign in history on behalf of the Biden and Harris ticket in 2020. Terrence, thank you so much for joining us today.

Terrance Green:

Hey, thanks for having me on, appreciate it.

David Nir:

So we always like to start with hearing a little bit about our guest backstory. So we would love to have you tell us about how you got involved in politics, and how you became a leading democratic political consultant.

Terrance Green:

My journey here is probably similar to some other folks. A lot of people were just looking for a job that paid consistently. Sometime in late 1999 or in 2000, I was on the road as a trainer for bartenders at TGI Fridays. I gave up an illustrious career, serving food to the masses, to join politics where I now serve messages to the masses. But I was on the road, I received a call from a gentleman, whose name is Adam Ferrari, at a firm called GMMB. And they wanted someone to just help them out for a three-month period, in what was the fall of 2000, in the heat of Bush V. Gore? I didn't know much about politics or about political media. I didn't know this existed at all, but I knew that there was a job that was going to pay me, I don't know, I think a hundred bucks a day, and I jumped at it, because it wouldn't have to come home and smell like French fries. That three month gig turned into 13 years, and a lot of amazing things that happened along the way. So shout out to Fridays and I'm glad not to be there now.

David Nir:

So you mentioned that was a 13 year gig, but if we add that to 1999, that puts us in the early 2000's, early 2010s rather. So what happened next?

Terrance Green:

Well, after that... Look, my time at GMMB was really amazing. I was able to work on numerous presidential campaigns. I was able to use my degree. I went to American University, and I studied film and politics, and that's what I do today and that's what I've done for the last 20-plus years, which is pretty amazing. I have a lot of friends who went to school who do something way different than what they studied. And that's great, college is the time to learn about yourself, and what you might want to do.

Terrance Green:

But I was able to find and start training for what I was doing without knowing I was getting ready for that moment. So after my time at GMMB I was able to be a part of John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004, Barack Obama's campaign in 2008, and the reelection in 2012. And to have a real front seat in all these things and I was able to go to the White House and film the president, that's pretty amazing, able to go on the road with the President of the United States and film him and making history. Able to meet then-candidate Barack Obama in a hot sweaty office in downtown D.C. to get him to say his radio disclaimer, ‘I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message,’ way before the caucuses in Iowa and when people were still trying to figure out who was going to win at that point. Probably Hillary was the odds-on favorite.

Terrance Green:

So being a part of those pieces of history was a pretty amazing thing for a kid from Long Island, New York, who he grew up trying to figure out his own path in the world, and finding it later on doing these amazing things that I'm still, sometimes, you can't quite digest it. But being there for the moment Barack Obama was nominated for the Democratic ticket in Denver, something I'll never forget as a person, as an individual, or professional, just seeing the history happen, the looks in people's eyes, the energy. And the state of things that we're in right now, it's kind of hard to believe that actually happened not too long ago. But my time at GMMB and the people there, who are really groundbreakers and trailblazers in this field of political advertising, taught me everything that I know about what I do.

Terrance Green:

In 2012 after the Obama campaign ended, I started thinking about what my future looked like and wanted to forge my own path as my own person. And that's when I decided to leave the firm in 2013 and start my own company called Truxton Creative. And that led to opportunities down the line, which put me together with the 4C team. So now as a few consultants in this world , we have multiple brands, Truxton Creative is around, 4C is something I'm also an owner and partner of. And these are vehicles of our own making that allow us to do the same work, but to do it our own way, and to write the next chapter of how this type of work happens and who does it. And it's exciting to be a part of that.

David Nir:

One thing we love to do here on The Downballot is get into the nitty gritty of campaign operations and sort of pull back the curtain because everyone listening to this program has of course seen political ads on TV or heard them on radio, but how does one actually get made? Can you walk us through the steps from beginning to end, from conception, to actually getting the ad placed on the air? What is that whole process? What needs to happen before viewers at home can actually see an ad?

Terrance Green:

That's a great question and sometimes for us, we do this on autopilot. We do it so much that sometimes you don't think about the process, per se, you just are doing it. But I'll say the genesis of ads, look, no candidate runs a campaign so they can run political ads. Political ads are a means to an end, to get people to know who you are, and to help win an election. It's one of the tools that you use, same as direct mail, online video, yard signs. The thing with political ads is that a lot of people see them, and people love video, and people want to see and hear from candidates.

Terrance Green:

So this is a very niche and unique platform to do that with. Making an ad depends on your priorities, it depends on do we need to get people to know the candidate? Do we need to speak about an issue specifically? Do we need to attack somebody? So we have to make that determination before we start. But assuming that we've already made that determination and we have our direction and marching orders, it might involve getting a camera on a candidate. So I'll say, "Hey, you know what? I've got to have John Smith film a 30 second ad about this issue," abortion rights, gun control, you name it. And that may take a couple of days, or we may have a few weeks to organize that type of a filming. And we'll get that captured. That will be a high end camera, type that you might use for a movie, that will involve lights, that will involve an audio team, and sometimes a makeup artist, and a location which may be a candidate's house or something that we source a different way.

Terrance Green:

So those things need to happen. The candidates need to look and sound right, that is priority number one. The next piece will be post-production. We take these ads to video editors and skilled folks, sometimes at larger creative shops where they've got several editors, sometimes they're individual editors that we will use. And they're using the latest materials, the same stuff that people put together the TV shows with, and online videos and everything that you see, they're using the same materials and the same tools to put together these political ads that are 30 seconds of joy that we deliver into everyone's TVs and timelines from there.

Terrance Green:

Then we move to getting the ad distributed. The ad will go out very quickly, usually within a few minutes if it's for digital, or it could be within 18 hours or so if it's going to be for television. And the workflow for that has changed immensely over the years, used to be a lot more analog, but now it's almost instantaneous. And we're able to get our ads on broadcast television, cable, you name it, and get the message out.

Terrance Green:

Yeah, for independent expenditure [IE] ads, the process is a little different. There's a higher legal threshold you've got to meet. So there usually are a lot of lawyers involved as you're writing the script for it. There are certain things you can say or not say; you got to be able to substantiate whatever the claims are. Usually with third party sources like news clips, research documents, the statements of those candidates themselves, whatever words they use out of their own mouths, can be used against them in campaign ads or the court of law.

Terrance Green:

So those are the types of things that we will use to substantiate those types of ads. And we also have to be credible if you're out there swinging wildly and saying crazy things about folks, and you are an independent expenditure [IE], you could do more harm to the cause than good.

Terrance Green:

The first rule of independent expenditures is do no harm. So you don't want to undercut the candidate that you're supporting, if it's, say, that a Democrat running for House seat or a Senate seat, by making a third party ad that gets everyone in trouble, because you said something that wasn't true or it was too inflammatory. So there's certainly a code that must be followed when it comes to independent expenditures. And you want to be as helpful as possible with the cause overall. We make a ton of those types of ads, as we've seen in the recent years, those types of ads are in some ways the majority of the ads that are out there. And there's a reason why, the money allows people to do more of these types of expenditures.

Terrance Green:

So there's two different tracks of the types of ads that you can do. Depends if you're working on a candidate directly or independent expenditure. And there's two different approaches that we typically take to get those done.

David Nir:

I find that difference so interesting between candidate ads and third party ads, and if you're wondering why these standards are so different, it's because TV and radio stations are obligated by law, to run any ads from candidates that they receive. And so these stations said in response, "Well, if we're obligated to run these ads, then we shouldn't be able to be held liable for any defamatory content as a publisher of these ads." And the courts have agreed, whereas stations are not obligated to run ads from third party groups like Super PACs, so they can be held liable for any defamatory content and therefore, stations are more likely to take ads down from third party groups, something they'll never really do in fact, they really can't do with, candidate ads. So it's a huge gulf, and every so often you will see a third party group ad get taken down for making false statements. And like you said, it totally violates the do no harm principle, because then you have a whole new cycle about some false ad from some third-party group and no candidate ever wants stuff to deal with that.

Terrance Green:

Yep, a candidate ad, you can lie in your candidate ads, because it's the First Amendment, and it's covered by free speech and candidates have... We've seen many candidates from the president on down, say whatever they want in their campaign ads, and sometimes it's not true. And not to say that Democrats won't do it either because we can bend the truth with the candidate ads. On the independent expenditure ads, the Super PAC ads, there are lawyers involved on both sides, and people are looking with a fine-toothed comb, for you to mess up, and they want to get that ad taken down. And when an ad gets taken down, it becomes a news story, and it becomes a news story and it hurts.

The collateral damage is that it would hurt also the candidate that you're trying to support. So, we don't want to be a part of that. Someone's going to give you the stink eye and bad mouth you later. So, you don't want to be a part of those types of stories if you can avoid it.

David Beard:

As we mentioned at the beginning, you were working on the Biden campaign. You led their paid media effort targeting African American voters in that election. So, what were the biggest challenges that you faced during that election in terms of both persuading African American voters and focusing on them out?

Terrance Green:

Yeah, I mean, look, the Biden team called up to run a program that was evolving in real time to get Black voters engaged. I will give them so much credit for realizing that they had to have a separate program and also fund it. Those are two different things. Having a program is one thing because every presidential campaign has a program to get Black voters, but to really fund it the way that they did was something that I was really happy about and proud to be a part of. And alluding to my prior experience, I've been around several presidential campaigns, which even for the work that we do, not everyone has been a part of those types of campaigns. They're large, they're unwieldy, they are a whole different animal from Senate campaigns and from House campaigns. There's different things that happen in these races at scale that are tough to deal with.

Terrance Green:

But if you've been around it, you can at least not get overwhelmed with the prospect of running multiple ad tracks in multiple states. So, the challenges with running the ad campaign in 2020 were numerous. We were in the middle of a pandemic. We had a contentious primary where we had Biden come out of a crowded field, but didn't have the internal operation built up as maybe some other candidates would've in the past as they were coming out of a primary win. We were also dealing with a country in the state of great unrest with the killing of George Floyd. We saw riots and civil disobedience and demonstrations in a way we hadn't seen in a really long time in this country. So, in the midst of all that, and we had a President, who didn't seem to care much about doing much to solve the problems that we were facing.

Terrance Green:

There were a lot of things that we had to overcome in terms of putting a program together and then talking to Black voters and meeting them where they were. We had to meet that moment in time and it was an unprecedented moment. There was a lot of uncertainty, but there was a great desire to get President Trump out of the office. He was still the best turnout tool that you could ever ask for. Black voters, generally speaking, are done with the drama, they're done with the disrespect, and the chaos that defined the Trump years. We wanted something new. But we had to also realize that people weren't going to go vote just because they loved Joe Biden. Voting for Black folks has a different approach to it historically, we wanted to choose someone who is the best choice for us, who will be someone who can help move us forward or which candidate would hurt us the least.

Terrance Green:

That's also sort of the inverse question that had to be answered in some ways, as you're trying to frame the arguments. The messaging that we were going at this with was understanding that the choice for Black voters wasn't going to be Biden versus Trump. We're already done with Trump. It was Biden versus sitting this one out. Biden versus staying home. We had to make sure that people didn't see staying home or sitting out as a viable option for them. What's happening right now in the country, what was happening in 2020 was way too important for people to set it out. So, the very first ads in messaging that we had even before we had all of the research and polling was really about empowering Black voters and letting them know that they were going to be the ones that decided this election, and giving them that power, reminding them of the power that has been used in the past to make change in this country and calling on voters to do that once again.

David Beard:

And then right after the 2020 election happened, obviously we found ourselves in the situation of having these double-barreled Georgia runoffs would potentially control of the Senate. And we have seen over the past year and a half, how incredibly consequential those races ended up being with all of the legislation. Most recently, of course, the Inflation Reduction Act, as it's now called, that just passed the Senate. You moved very quickly to do work in these races. You did paid media on behalf of Raphael Warnock, but through Senate Majority PAC. So, through that IE campaign that we mentioned previously, and this was for general audiences, not just African American voters. What was the strategic plan in that race? How did it come about? What was the turnaround time when we only had 60 days to go from zero to sixty here?

Terrance Green:

That was such very trying time in life. I was very personally exhausted from the prior 150 days of running the Biden effort for Black voters. And the very next day had to find some more energy and some more gas in the tank to be a part of this next race. Because Biden's win wouldn't mean as much if we couldn't flip those two seats in Georgia. So, we were obviously up for the task and got into it. One thing that we like to say over here, and one thing that makes us stand out from some of the other folks who do this work is that on one day, this firm, this team is called on to get Black voters for Biden. And the very next day we're getting white voters for Warnock. That involves a lot of cultural competency, being nimble, and also being able to understand whatever assignment that is given to you.

Terrance Green:

The key for the Georgia runoff working with Senate Majority PAC was to understand the playing field. There was a lot of spending already going on. A lot of money being spent already in the state of Georgia and a lot more to come. We weren't planning on being the biggest fish in the pond when it came to advertising in the Atlanta media market and in some of the other major markets. But we wanted to understand which audience that we could impact on the margins. It was going to be a close race no matter what. We understood that from the jump. So, what we saw in the research, and this program relied heavily on a lot of research and ad testing, that we wanted to make sure that the current Senator, Kelly Loeffler, could be disqualified because of her actions as Senator, with a particular set of white voters who are not in the Atlanta media market.

Terrance Green:

So, we were working in all the other corners of the state from your Savannahs, your Macons, those little tiny markets on the Tennessee border and the Florida border, that's where we were playing. We wanted to get that half a percent, that 1%, which might end up making the difference. Let the other folks do the work with turning out folks in Atlanta Metro and having the battle there. So, the ads that we ran, we ran maybe a half a dozen but we made, I would say at least 15 or 20 that didn't see the light of day. Were tested with this particular set of voters, they were white voters, they were seemingly had a profile that they could be... I wouldn't say they were going to vote for Warnock, but they could be turned away from Loeffler. If these folks didn't turn out, that would be a win for us.

Terrance Green:

If they turned out to vote for Warnock, even better. But we wanted to make sure they didn't vote for Kelly Loeffler. Her stock scandal was the number one thing that popped the people's heads that happened earlier on that year, with her insider trading scandal was top of mind for a lot of voters. So, we used that against her and we also tried to see if we pivot to also pin the tail on the donkey with some other issues that were going on economically, with the pandemic, you name it. So, we did a lot of different variations to see which ones really stuck with voters. Most of our arguments centered around how small businesses were suffering while Kelly Loeffler was making a profit. In the end, everything that happened in that race mattered. Every group that spent money and was active because we won by the hair of our chins. And we were able to make a big difference and be a part of that. So, around January 5th or so, we were able to take a nap finally from the 2020 elections. Unfortunately the very next day, the world kind of went to hell.

David Beard:

That was such a jarring time to have this extraordinary success on January 5th and to feel on top of the world. And then all of a sudden, the very next day, we're still talking about that day.

Terrance Green:

We had no time to celebrate. That was the one thing with the 2020, there was no time to celebrate anything. Biden didn't really win on election night. So, there was no popping of champagne until a week later, but even that was muted. We flipped the Senate two seats in Georgia, history made, and the very next day chaos in the Capital. So, in some ways we haven't had time to really celebrate what we did here because the work was extraordinary. But with so many people, we just had one little piece of the story, but I'm still waiting for that celebration, maybe one day.

David Nir:

Well, I sort of feel as Beard alluded, every time a bill passes the Senate by a 50/50 margin with Harris breaking ties, I kind of feel like that's a moment to pop the bubbly.

Terrance Green:

Look, that feels good every time they call her into the chamber to break the tie because that doesn't happen without Warnock and Ossoff being in the Senate. And those were two wins that people didn't think were possible. But when you think about the prior cycles and the work that was done in Georgia to mobilize, especially the Black vote, even what Biden was able to do to enhance that, and we had some part of that story too in terms of keeping folks engaged, to keep voting and to make change. And we saw that, we won Georgia. Who would've thought: Democrats haven't won Georgia since the nineties. And we were able to do that three times in 60 days. I wouldn't have put a bet in Vegas on that likely, but we're not here to play the odds in that way. We still have to work just as hard and try to achieve that result that we're hired to do.

David Beard:

Turning to 2022 and the midterms of course, Joe Biden's approval is down across the board and Black voters are no exception. What is the general feeling, the sense you are getting from African American voters in terms of their feelings about Joe Biden and about voting in the midterms?

Terrance Green:

That's a great question. This is a real time thing that we are trying to figure out right now in a lot of different places. So, we're consulting on a bunch of different races in different corners of the country, from House races to statewides. And there have been a lot of focus groups that have already happened in other research tools. So, what I can share from that is sort of an amalgamation of those sentiments. Some of that research has involved focus groups with African Americans who can hear from people's own mouths what's going on? How do you feel about things? Generally speaking, Black folks are still with Joe Biden. They're not excited about Joe Biden necessarily, but they're generally with him. They're not with him with the intensity level that you'd need to really be successful in a midterm. So, that's something that we have to keep a really close eye on.

Terrance Green:

There's certainly a lot of discontent that not enough has been done as we were explaining earlier, the Herculean effort that it took in 2020 to get folks to the polls in the midst of the pandemic in all this uncertainty and unrest. I think people wanted more of a return on that investment and they're not feeling that. The prices of things are too high. We wanted some change with policing to get more justice and also safer communities, more action, tangible action on guns, better jobs, better wages, things like that. And those are things that people aren't really seeing or feeling in a tangible way. So, there's certainly some hesitancy about voting and if I come out, what's going to change? You said last time we were going to get somewhere and we are not there yet. We're also realizing though that the Supreme Court has really put a spotlight on our rights and our rights are under attack, and we're seeing how we can position ourselves when it comes to abortion rights, when it comes to some of the other rights that are seemingly also in the cross hairs of this conservative court, and putting Democrats on the right side of protecting those rights.

Who you can marry, what you can do with your body, your right to vote, all these things, having the chance to codify that. We've already moved to put some of those votes there. I think that it'll be important for Democrats to tell people what they've done when it comes to rights when it comes to economic issues, and also what they want to protect. Fear is always a healthy additive to this argument, too. If we tell people what the other guy's going to do is really bad, that will be very helpful as well.

Terrance Green:

When we're talking about getting black folks out, I think we have to also understand that we just can't take black folks for granted. Candidates have to pursue those votes, and invest in black votes. Those are still democratic votes to lose for now, but they must be earned. When you're thinking about your media plans. When you're thinking about your community investments, you've got to put the time in to make sure that African American voters are engaged early and often. Then they will come out to support. If you wait till too late, then those are voters that may choose to sit home and not come out.

David Nir:

Democrats have nominated or will soon nominate four African American Senate candidates in some of the most competitive Senate races this year, including of course, Rafael Warnock, as we've mentioned, Cheri Beasley in North Carolina, Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin and Val Demings in Florida. How does having an African American nominee in these races, in these states affect those races, both among the African American voters and their turnout and their enthusiasm for that and the general electorate?

Terrance Green:

I'm personally excited about all four of these candidates. To reelect Senator Warnock would be obviously a big deal in Georgia, but Barnes, Beasley and Demings are also extremely strong and exciting candidates. I think that the Black candidates in these statewide races have unique opportunity to shed the labeling of typical liberal that happens I think with some other types of candidates.

Terrance Green:

They can carve their own path about what type of Senator that they would be. I'll take one case in point of a candidate who's done that successfully. One of our clients is Antonio Delgado. He's now the Lieutenant governor of New York, but he got his start in 2018 running in a House district in upstate New York, which is 90% white.

Terrance Green:

Nobody thought he could win. A lot of people said that he should not even run. I will leave those names out of this podcast, but they're names that you know. We ignored their terrible advice and went to run a campaign the way that we wanted to run it. Delgado had an opportunity to tell people exactly who he was. He was from that area. He was grounded in the region. He was from upstate Schenectady, New York, which is a little bit out of the district. You don't say you're from Schenectady, unless you're from Schenectady. It's the kind of place that lets people know that you didn't grow up with a silver spoon in your mouth and you probably had to work pretty hard to get wherever you are in life today.

Terrance Green:

A lot of these candidates successful in their own rights, but they're from these states and they can make their own story as to why they understand the people from their respective states and would be a good representative for those states. Delgado ended up winning a competitive seven-way primary, and then went on to beat the incumbent by five points. He got reelected by double digits in the following race in 2020. He did that because he outworked everyone. He is super smart, he's disciplined. That built a lot of good will with a lot of people that didn't look like him.

Terrance Green:

Part of the reason is that his positions, well, he voted very much as a progressive. He was able to talk about it in very reasonable way as to why this is the way that he thought about things in one to approach policy and was able to get a receptive audience from a lot of these voters. Again, most of them white, a lot of them independent, and a whole bunch of them had voted for Donald Trump just a few short months before the 2018 election.

Terrance Green:

There is an opportunity to build that goodwill and look like a very reasonable candidate while not conceding your principles as a liberal, as a Democrat. Each state's going to be a little bit different. Each race is a little bit different, but if you can avoid being painted as a liberal or typical Democratic, liberal socialist, Marxist, and all those things, those labels don't stick as well to black candidates as we've seen recently, and I think that each of these candidates has a chance to run their own race and be their own person and connect with voters in a different way. I'm looking forward to seeing how they do.

Terrance Green:

Full disclosure on this. We are working with some Super PACs in support of Val Demings and Cheri Beasley in this cycle. We will be hopefully a part of the story of their success in their individual states.

David Nir:

Now, I'm glad you mentioned Delgado. We followed his 2018 campaign very closely. In my opinion, the ads that Republicans ran against him in that election were the most racist of any they ran that cycle. That is really saying something. In particular, they focused on his early career as a rapper. We thought that made him look incredibly awesome, but obviously it was designed to inspire fear in racist, white voters. How is that something that you combated, because he obviously did go on to some impressive wins in this district.

Terrance Green:

With the Republicans and race, when it comes to these types of ads, I would say that it's like a moth to a flame. We knew exactly what they were going to go for. There were probably some other things that Antonio's bio would've yielded a little bit more potency with the attack ads, but they couldn't help themselves to go ahead and run things that darkened his features, made him look like a tough gangster rapper.

Terrance Green:

Don't forget this man's a Rhodes Scholar. This man was an NCAA basketball player, went to an Ivy League school. He is the best of what folks have to offer. He's from upstate New York and he wasn't afraid to say that. The thing that we wanted to do was to disarm all of that racism in a subtle, yet head on way. We wanted to show that Antonio was a smart dude and that people liked him, people from that area. Most of the folks up there are white. We're going to make sure that we go and campaign with white voters.

Terrance Green:

The ad campaign that we ran in the primary, which also extended to the general election was called doors. We wanted to bring the campaign experience of door knocking to the doorstep of everyone who was watching these ads. We had simply Antonio walking up driveways and going through the various towns of upstate New York, talking to people about the stuff that mattered to them, healthcare jobs, the environment, women's health, all the things that were on the minds of voters and having a very reasonable and sensible smart guy to do that was something that helped turn the tide.

Terrance Green:

Now, when we looked at the outcome of that election and the types of voters that we were able to get, his numbers with white voters, particularly white women voters, were through the roof. They're the types of numbers that you don't normally see. The reason is that we disarmed voters from the normal way of thinking and were able to show Antonio as a human being who wanted to do something good for the community that he's from.

Terrance Green:

The more people saw those other ads play against that the less inclined they were to absorb that negative messaging, because he looked like someone who didn't deserve this type of nastiness. He's just a nice guy. It ended up having a negative effect on John Faso's election chances. Going back to the earlier comment about, do no harm from the IE's, at the end of the day, those racist nasty attack ads on Delgado did more harm than good for the Republican side.

Terrance Green:

It put more people in our camp because they didn't think they were fair. We were able to scoop them up with a positive message.

David Nir:

Well, I love hearing that there was a price for Republicans to pay for their racist ads. This is a fantastic conversation. We have been talking with Terrance Green, political media consultant and managing partner at 4C partners. Terrance, where can people find you online?

Terrance Green:

For those in the Twitter verse, I am @twgreen27. You can follow me for political news as well as sports updates. I'm a big baseball and football fan. Happy to have you join and I'll follow back. Promise.

David Nir:

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Terrance Green:

Thank you both.

David Nir:

That's all from us this week. Thanks to Terrance screen for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts, you can reach us by email at The Downballot, DailyKos.com. If you haven't already please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor Tim Einenkel we'll be back next week with a new episode.

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.

The Downballot: My Big Fat August Primary Preview, with Jeff Singer (transcript)

Whoa, mama! August has so, so many juicy primaries on tap, which is why we've brought Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer back to discuss all the best races for this week's edition of The Downballot. There's the GOP battle for Arizona's governorship, where Trump's pick has been absolutely slain by her drag queen ex-friend; two pro-impeachment Republicans in Washington state trying to keep their political careers alive; a heavyweight rumble between two 30-year veteran incumbents in New York City; and lots, lots more.

Co-host David Nir recaps the back-to-back dropouts in Wisconsin's Democratic primary for Senate that have solidified Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes as the undisputed frontrunner. He also criticizes the handwringing over Democrats' meddling in a Michigan primary, saying it's not the Democratic Party's responsibility to make sure Republicans nominate sensible candidates—that's the GOP's job (if it even cares to). David Beard, meanwhile, previews the snap election just called in Italy, where the right looks set to perform well.

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 would be particularly grateful if you would leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

David Beard:

We have got an extremely busy month of August coming up for politics. So, what do we have in today's episode?

David Nir:

We are going to be discussing some big developments in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin's extremely competitive Senate race this week, and a controversial move by the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] DCCC to meddle in a GOP primary for a key House seat in Michigan. A snap election has also been called in Italy, so we are going to preview what that looks like. But most importantly of all, we are bringing on Daily Kos Elections editor, Jeff Singer, once more to do a deep dive into the many, many races that we have on the docket in the month of August. There is a ton of ground to cover, so please stick with us for this terrific episode.

David Beard:

To start off our weekly hits, we've got the Wisconsin Senate Democratic primary, where some really surprising developments have taken place over the last week. So tell us what's going on there, Nir.

David Nir:

Yeah. So on Monday, one of the Democrats running to take on Ron Johnson, Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, dropped out of the race and endorsed Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who has led in most polling and in fundraising. And then on Wednesday, former Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry, who had been heavily self-funding his own campaign, also dropped out and also endorsed Mandela Barnes. So obviously a really good week for Barnes, who to my mind is the most electrifying and interesting candidate running in that race. He would be the state's first black Senator, among other achievements. He doesn't have the primary completely sewn up. There is still one other notable candidate in the race, state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski. But again, she has generally trailed Barnes on most metrics. And the overall theme of this week is the state Democratic party consolidating behind Barnes. I think he'll probably be very tough to beat.

David Nir:

Honestly, the only frustrating thing is it would've been nice to have had the past year to all rally around Barnes. Obviously, Ron Johnson is one of the most-hated Republican senators among progressives in this country. But at the same time, I'm not worried about Barnes having the resources he'll need for this race. We have seen it time and time again; Democrats in competitive senate primaries in recent years have seen their fundraising explode after they win their primaries. Certainly, this was true of John Fetterman in Pennsylvania just a few months ago, and I think the same thing will happen with Barnes. People are really geared up to help give Johnson the boot, especially with this being one of the most important Senate races this year. Again, Barnes still has to actually win this primary, but I am feeling good about his chances now.

David Beard:

It's definitely interesting to see these two candidates drop out so close to the primary. It's certainly not unheard of, particularly in races where there's one candidate of sort of one ideological stripe or there's a distinction and the other candidates sort of need to consolidate to defeat that candidate. But that wasn't really the situation here. There wasn't like a clear progressive/moderate division. There just seemed to be some acceptance that Barnes was comfortably ahead and was probably going to win, and these two candidates decided to just sort of get out in front of that, which is not something you see very often, but hopefully will sort of help jumpstart Barnes ahead of the primary.

David Nir:

It's something that we certainly wish we might see more often. The amazing thing is that Lasry spent more than $12 million of his own money on the race. So, a little bit late to come to this realization, but certainly better late than never. We are going to move over to another Midwestern state to talk about a House race in the 3rd congressional district, which is based in the Grand Rapids area. And thanks to Michigan's new nonpartisan redistricting commission, it just became considerably bluer. This seat is held by Republican freshman Peter Meijer, who was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump. Of course, that earned him a primary from a far-right candidate endorsed by Trump, named John Gibbs. And with just a little bit of time left before the primary, the DCCC went in and started spending money to boost Gibbs. They're doing this with the now very standard line that he's too conservative and handpicked by Trump. So, it's a very thinly veiled “attack.”

David Nir:

The difference here is that we have seen a huge outpouring of hand-wringing and pearl clutching in response to this. And I know that Democratic meddling in GOP primaries is often a divisive issue, but really, I think that a lot of the complaints are just total garbage here. It is not the Democratic Party's responsibility to make sure that the Republican Party runs sane, sensible pro-democracy candidates. That is the Republican Party's job. And to say that it is somehow hypocritical for Democrats to do everything in their power to try to flip this seat and ensure that Democrats retain control of the House of Representatives is absurd to me. Yes, Peter Meijer has very occasionally sided against the GOP and Donald Trump. But if he's reelected, he is going to vote for Kevin McCarthy or whoever Republicans put up for Speaker of the House. He is not going to vote for the Democratic candidate for Speaker. He won't even abstain. He is opposed to letting Democrats control the House, as well he should be. He is a Republican.

David Nir:

Yes, John Gibbs is crazier. He is further to the right. As an individual, he is certainly a more dangerous candidate. Should he win? But the Republican Party itself is an incredibly dangerous political party, and Peter Meijer winning renomination makes it more likely that he'll defeat the Democrat, Hillary Scholten, rather than John Gibbs. And if Peter Meijer wins, that makes it more likely that Republicans will pick up the House of Representatives, and that puts us much closer to a crisis of democracy. I am adamantly in favor of Democrats doing what they need to do and being aggressive to ensure that the party retains control of the house. Parties govern Congress, not people. Don't get hung up on who John Gibbs is. Get hung up on who the Republican Party is. They are scary and they must be defeated, and this is one of the tools that we have in our arsenal.

David Nir:

And let's also be clear; Republicans do the same thing. They just have fewer opportunities because Democrats put up far, far fewer unelectable candidates, but Republicans did try this in North Carolina in the Senate race in 2020. It didn't work for them, but they would certainly try it all the time if they could. So I am absolutely tired of this pearl clutching. I am tired of the concern trolling. I am tired of scolding reporters who claim that this undermines the Democrats' message about democracy. Regular voters are never going to hear about these kind of campaign tactics. It's only reporters who think that Democrats are somehow undermining their own message. But the fact of the matter is that, if Republicans do not want crazy candidates to represent them on the ballot, then they should run better candidates and help those candidates. That is their duty.

David Beard:

And I think if you want to question the effectiveness of playing in the other party’s primaries, that's one question I've often wondered how effective this actually is often, but that's totally separate from whether or not you should be able to do it. And then I also think that there were other options, like if the idea is that we need to protect Peter Meijer because he voted to impeach Trump, he could have run as independent. He could have said that he wasn't going to vote for Kevin McCarthy for a leader. He would only vote for somebody who denounced the Big Lie. Those were options that he could have taken if he wanted to separate himself from the Republican Party. But he didn't choose to do any of that. Did he take a courageous vote to impeach Donald Trump? Sure. Does that mean that we have to give him a free pass to be congressman for life until somehow the Republican Party has reformed himself? Of course not. So that's just the reality of politics. And if you don't like it, you're just going to have to deal with it.

David Beard:

Lastly, I want to take us across the Atlantic to Italy, where snap elections have been called after incumbent Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who led a government of national unity, resigned soon after the populist Five Star Movement, and then the right-wing parties League and Forza Italia, all subsequently left the national unity coalition.

David Beard:

So the elections are going to be on September 25th. And right now the right-wing coalition of the League, which you may know as its former name, which was the Northern League as it started out in Northern Italy and then rebranded itself as it became more popular throughout the country. But as the League, Forza Italia, and Brothers of Italy are currently the favorites to win the election and form the next government. If they do, Brothers of Italy leader, Giorgia Meloni is the favorite to become the first female prime minister of Italy.

David Beard:

The Brothers of Italy are polling neck and neck with the center-left Democratic Party for first place. But the other two right-wing parties are polling significantly stronger than any potential allies for the Democratic Party, which makes it hard for the center-left to form any sort of coalition to actually win the election and govern the country moving forward. Particularly the Five Star Movement, which got 32% back in 2018, is expected to fall to around 10%. Now, they're a populist anti-establishment movement that had really done very well in recent years, but it sort of collapsed among divisions within itself as these populist movements also often do. They sort of stood for a lot of different things that were anti-establishment, like some were pro the European Union and some were anti, and various issues like that. And then the longer they were sort of in power, the more that the infighting sort of caused the party to collapse. There's been a split in the party. And so it's sort of led to sort of a bit of a collapse for it, which really hurts the non-right-wing parties.

David Nir:

Well, that does it for our weekly hits. We have Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer joining us to do a preview of a very, very big month of primaries coming up in August. So please stay with us after the break.

David Nir:

We are about to flip the calendar on the month of August, and that means we have another huge ton of primaries in store for us. And so we're welcoming back Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer to preview all the big races with us. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on again.

Jeff Singer:

Thank you. It's great to be back.

David Nir:

Coming up this Tuesday, August 2nd, we have primaries in five states: Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington. A lot of very big states. In Kansas, in particular, we have already mentioned a race that's on the ballot that is not a primary, but rather the constitutional amendment that Republicans have put before voters to amend the state constitution to say that it does not include a right to an abortion. We have discussed that one a bunch. The one poll we've seen shows that race very close. But there are so many other primaries that we do want to hit. And you know what? Jeff, why don't you start off with the big statewide races in Arizona?

Jeff Singer:

Yes. So probably the biggest race to watch is the race for governor, where Republican incumbent, Doug Ducey, has termed out. And originally it looks like there'd be this big crowded Republican primary to succeed him, but the field has narrowed dramatically. And it's turned into yet another proxy battle between Donald Trump and a governor he once loved and now hates. Trump's candidate here is Kari Lake. She's a former TV news anchor who has fallen very, very, very deep in the far-right conspiracy rabbit hole. Ducey, meanwhile, is backing Karrin Taylor Robson, who's a member of the Arizona Board of Regents, which governs higher education. Robson is very wealthy. She's been using her money to outspend Lake, but most polls still have Lake up by varying margins.

Jeff Singer:

Even though Lake is in the lead, or maybe because she's in the lead, she's already laying the groundwork to cry foul for a loss. She said, "We're already detecting some stealing going on." And this is a Republican primary she's talking about. But Lake's opponents will remind everyone that she was an Obama and Hillary Clinton supporter just a few years ago. And to make things even more complicated, a prominent Phoenix drag queen named Richard Stevens recently responded when Lake targeted drag performers as "grooming and child abuse." He posted images of the two together during their now-severed friendship, and revealed he performed for Lake in drag multiple times. Not the image most far-right candidates have. That has made it into an ad starring a different drag queen, who's called Lake a phony. So this is quite the race we have here.

David Nir:

And what's going on on the Democratic side, who is most likely to take on the GOP nominee?

Jeff Singer:

The Democratic side has become a duel between Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who's one of the few Democratics who hold statewide office, and the former mayor of Nogales, Marco Lopez. There have been far fewer polls here. But Hobbs has led in what we've seen. And she's enjoyed this huge financial edge. So it would be a surprise if she's not the Democratic nominee.

David Nir:

So we also of course have to talk about the senate race. This is a key target that Republicans are hoping to flip just two years after Democrat, Mark Kelly flipped this seat from the GOP in a special election in 2020. So what's the deal here?

Jeff Singer:

There are five Republicans competing here. The front runner is Blake Masters, who is the protégé of Republican mega donor, Peter Thiel. Trump's also for Masters. It looks like Masters' main opponent is wealthy businessman Jim Lamon, who's been spending plenty of his own money on ads, portraying Masters as a California transplant who isn't a real conservative. One Lamon ad even showed Masters call the Unabomber "a subversive thinker that's underrated," which Masters himself admitted "probably isn't the best thing to say during a campaign."

Jeff Singer:

There are three other candidates here. One of them is Attorney General Mark Brnovich, but he's struggled with fundraising. Trump hates him because he didn't do enough to advance the Big Lie. He's been in third in most of the numbers we've seen. So it really looks like the question will be whether Masters can keep his lead against Lamon.

David Beard:

So let's move to Missouri, a race that we talked about a little bit last week, where Senator Roy Blunt is retiring. And there's a number of Republicans running in that primary. Obviously, most notably Eric Greitens, who's attempting a comeback. So tell us about that race.

Jeff Singer:

So Greitens looked like the front-runner at the beginning, mostly because of name recognition, even though he resigned in 2018 because of multiple scandals. He has several opponents, but the two main ones look like Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler. Hartzler has endorsement from Missouri's other senator, Josh Hawley, who the internet has had some fun with over the last week or so. But Trump's not so keen on the Congresswoman. He recently said, "She sought my endorsement, I told her no." Which as far as Trump goes, that's actually pretty nice, but not what she wanted. Greitens meanwhile has been on the receiving end of a very well financed super PAC, that's one ad's quoting testimony from his ex-wife alleging that he abused one of their sons and Schmidt has... He's taken his share of attack ads from Greitens's and Hertzler, but nothing to the same degree and some recent polls show him ahead.

David Beard:

Moving up to Michigan, we've got the governor's race where a number of Republicans are competing to take on democratic incumbent, Gretchen Whitmer, so what's the state of play there?

Jeff Singer:

If you asked me about this race in May, I would've given you a very different answer than I'm giving now, because that month two major candidates, former Detroit Police Chief James Craig, and wealthy businessman Perry Johnson were thrown off their Republican primary ballot after too many of their signatures ruled fraudulent. Craig, who was the front runner until then, is running a write-in campaign, but he struggled to get traction. So now candidates who were the underdogs are suddenly getting some second life.

Jeff Singer:

There are five of them. The front runner now looks like Tudor Dixon, who's a conservative radio host. She is the backing of some very influential Republicans, including the DeVos family, including Betsy DeVos. Dixon herself has been running quite far to the right. She says she wants to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. Her main opponent looks like wealthy businessman Kevin Rinke. He's been running ads suggesting that because DeVos resigned from Trump's cabinet riot for January 6th, Dixon is being controlled by never-Trumpers. There are a few other candidates, real estate agent Ryan Kelley, who made the news last month when he was arrested for his alleged role in the January 6th riot. Most polls have shown Dixon ahead by varying margins. Rinke looks like her main opponent.

David Beard:

And briefly, when news about Kelley came out, it seemed to briefly actually give him a boost in the Republican primary. But fortunately that is faded. So hopefully people getting arrested does not help them in winning elections, but we'll have to see. Then finally in Washington where they have a top two primary, so all of the candidates run on one primary ballot. And like in California, the top two candidates advance to the general election; we've got two congressional races we want to talk about, so tell us about those.

Jeff Singer:

So these are the races in two seats that Trump carried. Washington's 3rddistrict in the southern part of the state, and the 4th, just to the east. It has two Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, each running for reelection. Jaime Herrera Beutler in the 3rd, and Dan Newhouse in the 4th, against candidates Trump is endorsing. Herrera Beutler's main opponent is Army veteran Joe Kent, who has Trump's endorsement. Kent has ties to far-right figures, and he's defended Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but this is a top two primary, so all sorts of weird shenanigans happen. One of them is that an outside group has started airing ads to promote a third Republican, evangelical author Heidi St. John, who really hadn't been getting much attention beforehand. Kent said that this was an effort to try to split the far-right vote and help Herre Butler advance to the general election.

Jeff Singer:

And he probably is right about this. Kent is trying his own maneuvers though. He sent mailers out to Democrats, arguing that one of the Democratic candidates, auto repair shop owner, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, is the only pro-choice candidate, which seems to be his effort to try to get Democrats to vote for her instead of Herrera Beutler, and thus keep Herrera Beutler out of the general election, so this is a volatile one. Lots of maneuvers and counter maneuvers are happening. This one could get messy.

Jeff Singer:

Similar situation in the Fourth District, where Newhouse's main opponent is Loren Culp, who's a former small town police chief, and he was the 2020 nominee for governor. Culp lost that last contest to Democratic incumbent Jay Inslee by a wide 57 to 43 margin, but Culp refused to concede that obvious loss, which helps explain why Trump's for him. But Culp has struggled with fundraising. He's got some little outside support beyond the Trump endorsement. There are also five other Republicans and just one Democrat, so even though Trump carried the seat by a very wide margin, it's quite possible that, that one Democrat will advance and the fight is just over which Republican will join them.

David Nir:

Moving on later that same week, believe it or not. We have the Tennessee Primaries. We are not going to dive into any of those races right now, though keep an eye on the open, and heavily gerrymandered, 5th District. The weird thing you'll notice, though, is that Tennessee's primary is on a Thursday. This always happens, and every two years everyone asks, "Why is Tennessee's primary on a Thursday?" And the answer that researchers have come up with is absolutely nobody knows. So moving on to the following week, August 9th, we have four more states, Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont, and Wisconsin. The top of the list here for sure is Wisconsin: perennial swing state, always home to close elections. And here we have huge races for Senate and Governor. At the top of the show, we discussed the developments in the Senate race. So Singer, why don't you tell us about what's happening in the race to take on Democratic Governor, Tony Evers. What's going on the Republican side?

Jeff Singer:

So Evers in 2018, narrowly ousted Scott Walker. Republicans want that seat back very badly. Until April, the front runner was Walker's former Lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, but things got very complicated then when seemingly out of nowhere, wealthy businessman Tim Michels, who lost a 2004 Senate race to Russ Feingold, and really hadn't been seen since suddenly got in, started spending his own money heavily on ads to reintroduce himself, and then the polls showed him in a very close race with Kleefisch. Trump then endorsed Michels, and what's very interesting is just over the last few days, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dived as far into Trump's psyche, as you'd really like to go.

Jeff Singer:

And what the paper said was that Trump had told Michels how in 2019 Kleefisch's daughter had gone to her high school prom with the son of state Supreme Court justice, Brian Hagedorn, who is a conservative who's ruled against Trump on some attempts to steal the election. That did not sit well with Trump, so even though these are the kids of these two people, not either of them themselves. The two kids went to prom. That's enough to get Trump to say, "Ooh, I don't like that." It's Trump, so we'll never know why he does what he does, but it's possible when the story of this race is written, we'll say that if that prom date hadn't happened, Trump would've stayed out of it.

David Nir:

I mean, that story is both totally disgusting, totally hilarious, and totally believable when it comes to Donald Trump. So we're going to keep marching right along. The following week, August 16th, we have two more states, Alaska and Wyoming. Now, Alaska definitely requires a bit of extra background here because they radically overhauled their primary system. So why don't you tell us about the system they're using now and what's going on in the race for the seat that was once held by the late Don Young, the former Dean of the House.

Jeff Singer:

In 2020, Alaska voters narrowly voted to just do away with the primary system altogether. No more Democratic or Republican primaries, everyone runs on one ballot, and the four candidates with the most votes, the four, they advance to a general election. And in the general election, there's an instant runoff or rank choice ballot. So two big changes to the system.

Jeff Singer:

Everyone expected that the first time the system would get a workout would be for the August primaries, but everything changed when Don Young died suddenly. They had their top four primary in June. Four candidates advanced. One very, very well known: Sarah Palin. Another with a very familiar name, Nick Begich III. He's the rare Republican of what's been a very prominent Alaska Democratic family. Another, Al Gross, who's an independent. He was the Democratic nominee for Senate in 2020, and the fourth is Democratic former State Representative, Mary Peltola, but this four-way matchup isn't happening, because Gross, just after the primary, dropped out and endorsed Peltola. So because of when Gross made his departure, it was too late to substitute him on the ballot, so now there are three candidates instead of four facing off. So on August 16, three candidates, Palin, Begich, and Peltola will run against one another with a rank choice ballot. But at that same time, there will also be a different top four primary for the next term in Congress. So at the same time, if they're facing off, they'll be going up against over two dozen other candidates. And the four candidates who get the most votes will be facing off again in November for a regular two-year term.

Jeff Singer:

So quite a lot, quite complicated. Because Palin, Begich and Peltola are facing off in the specials, it's a pretty good bet all three of them are going to advance to November for the regular term. The question is who's going to be number four. That might be Tara Sweeney. She's a former Trump administration official who came in a close fifth in June. But things can get complicated here.

David Nir:

Also on that same day, we have Wyoming's primary, which has been watched with intense closeness. Of course, this is Congresswoman Liz Cheney in her fight for survival. Does she have any chance?

Jeff Singer:

If you believe the polls, no. It's looking very bad for her. Cheney knew she was taking a huge risk when she voted to impeach Trump, and kept trashing him afterwards, and joined the January 6th committee. That was a huge, huge risk in one of the most Republican states in the country. Cheney's hoping that she can encourage Democrats to cross over and vote for her in the Republican primary against Trump's candidate. But certainly, Harriet Hageman, who ran for governor in 2018, but the polls show Cheney far behind. If she wins, she's earned an upset for the ages.

David Beard:

And then finally on August 23rd, we have two more primaries, but they're pretty big ones. We've got Florida. And importantly, we've got the New York congressional races, which were delayed from New York's regular primary due to redistricting fallout from the New York courts. And so we've got a couple of really important congressional races taking place.

David Beard:

Then let's start with New York's 12th district where we've got two Democratic incumbents facing off.

Jeff Singer:

It's not unusual in a redistricting year to see two incumbents running against each other in a primary. We've seen that happen a few times this cycle already. But what's rare is that they're both 30-year incumbents, Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler. I don't think we've ever seen an incumbent versus incumbent race with two people who have so much seniority between them.

Jeff Singer:

This remains a safely Democratic district, but it's been transformed. It combines Manhattan's Upper East and Upper West Sides for the first time in over a century. Maloney represents about 60% of the seat. Nadler represents most of the remaining 40%. But, there's another complication. Attorney Suraj Patel, who lost to Maloney by a close 43 of 39 margin in 2020, is also running. There aren't many policy differences between the three candidates, but they're emphasizing different things.

Jeff Singer:

Maloney's talking about how important it's to keep a woman in office, especially in this day and age. She ran an ad saying, "You cannot send a man to do a woman's job." Nadler has been highlighting that he's the only remaining Jewish member of New York's delegation. Patel, who would be the first Indian American to represent New York in Congress, has also been positioning himself as an alternative between the two. We don't have any recent polls to go off of, so this could be anyone's race.

David Beard:

And then we have a special election in New York's 19th district. What's happening there?

Jeff Singer:

This seat in the Hudson Valley is open because representative Antonio Delgado, a Democrat, was picked to become Lieutenant Governor by Kathy Hochul, after her first choice was arrested in a campaign finance scandal. The fact that Delgado resigned from his swing district to become Lieutenant Governor of New York, which is not usually a very powerful position, surprised a lot of people. But it's off a special election.

Jeff Singer:

And because it's for the final months of Delgado's term, it's going to happen using the map that's been in place since 2012, instead of the new one. This is New York's 19th, which has been a swing district for a long time. Biden won it by a narrow 50 to 48 margin, four years after Trump won it 51 to 44, so quite competitive here.

Jeff Singer:

The Republicans nominated Dutchess County Executive Mark Molinaro, who was running against Delgado before he resigned. Molinaro was the party's 2018 nominee for governor against Andrew Cuomo. He badly lost statewide by a 60 to 36 margin. But he won this district 53 to 42. So quite a huge difference. Some of that was likely to this area having problems with Andrew Cuomo, but Molinaro leads a large county. He's a well-known guy, and he's had a huge head start running here.

Jeff Singer:

The Democrats are feeling a different County Executive, Ulster County's Pat Ryan, who ran against Delgado in the 2018 primary before he was elected county wide. This is a swing district; it can be very hard for Democrats to hold in a midterm. That's not looking too great. And even Ryan's poll recently showed Molinaro ahead by a few points. Ryan though, he's hoping that by focusing on abortion rights, he can pull ahead.

Jeff Singer:

To add to the complications, the two candidates are going to be running again in November, but under the new map in separate districts. Ryan's going to be running for the new 18th district while Molinaro is going to be running for the new 19th. So there's a chance that no matter how things go in August, the two are going to be serving together in January.

David Nir:

There are, of course, a ton of other races throughout the month of August. And if you want to stay on top of all of them, you have to sign up for our daily newsletter. It's free. It's called The Morning Digest. Go to dailykos.com/morningdigest. And before each big primary week, Jeff Singer puts together the most fantastic preview you could possibly imagine of every race, not just the ones that we've had time to mention on this podcast. Jeff, thank you once again for joining us and for illuminating all of these many, many races and candidates for us and all of our listeners.

Jeff Singer:

Thank you. It was great to be here.

David Beard:

That's all from us this week. Thanks to you Jeff Singer for joining us. The Downballot comes out everywhere. You listen to podcasts every Thursday. You can reach us by email at thedownballot@dailycoast.com. And if you haven't already, please like and subscribe to The Downballot and consider leaving 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.

The Downballot: Why Wisconsin is so dang important, with Ben Wikler (transcript)

No state regularly hosts as many hotly contested elections as Wisconsin, which is why we're talking to state Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler about all of this year's key races on this week's episode of The Downballot. He tells us about everything his organization does to ensure year-round investment in Democratic infrastructure; details the state of play in the battle to defeat Sen. Ron Johnson and re-elect Gov. Tony Evers; and previews a critical race for the state Supreme Court next year that could flip control from conservatives to progressives.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap several recent elections, including Sarah Palin's first-place finish in the special primary for Alaska's lone House seat, the defeat of a pro-impeachment Republican congressman in South Carolina, and a special election where the GOP picked up a Democratic-held House seat in heavily Latino south Texas.

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 email us your thoughts at thedownballot@dailykos.com or find us on Twitter @DKElections.

David Beard:

And please subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. But let's go ahead and get to today's episode. What are we going to be covering, Nir?

David Nir:

We have a bunch of elections to recap. There was a special election for a congressional seat in Texas. There were primaries in South Carolina that saw one pro-impeachment Republican go down to defeat and there was also an unusual Saturday special election in Alaska for the seat that had been held for decades by the late Republican Congressman Don Young so we'll be talking about all of that.

David Nir:

After we recap those weekly hits, we are going to be discussing Wisconsin with the chair of the State Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, who will tell us exactly what a state party like his does and the key races that they're focusing on this November, so please stick with us.

David Nir:

Primary season continues apace but we also had an election on Saturday. We'll get to that one in a minute, but Beard, why don't you kick us off with the top goings on from Tuesday night?

David Beard:

Sure. So we're going to start in Texas where there was a special election held to fill the remaining term for democratic representative Filemon Vela who resigned earlier this year to take a job at a lobbying firm. Conservative activists, Mayra Flores flipped this Rio Grande Valley-based district to the GOP. She won about 51% of the vote. There were four candidates on the ballot but just one major Republican and one major Democrat and then two very minor, one Democrat and one Republican who took a very small percentage of the vote each. And so, Flores won 51% of the vote, the major democratic candidate, former Cameron County commissioner, Dan Sanchez, won about 43% of the vote.

David Beard:

Now, there's a couple of mitigating factors here. Republicans spent over a million dollars on this race. They really invested. Democrats only began airing TV ads in the final week. They didn't spend very much money. This district is changing a significant amount. Biden won the current district which is still from the 2010 redistricting cycle by a 52-48 margin but Biden wins the new district that will go into effect this November by a 57-42 margin so it's getting noticeably more Democratic. And so, there wasn't a ton of investment in trying to hold this seat on the Democratic side.

David Beard:

That being said, that's definitely a shift in the margin from 52-48 Biden to, if you combine the Democrats and the Republicans, about 53% voted Republican and 47% voted Democrat so that's a noticeable shift. It's certainly in line with a more Republican-leaning year which is what we've been seeing with the polling and with other information that's been coming in. The other factor here that's certainly worth noting is that it was very, very low turnout so that can also be a factor in why there was somewhat of a shift. So you don't want to take this and just say, "Oh, we saw this shift. It'll translate all the way to November in every way," but it's certainly a signal worth acknowledging that it is certainly a sign of a Republican leaning environment right now.

David Nir:

The other thing to note is that had Flores not gotten a majority of the vote, the race would've gone to a runoff and Sanchez was actually quite angry at the democratic establishment and the DCCC in particular for coming in so late. It does seem that with a little bit more effort, Flores could have been held under the 50% mark and maybe Democrats would have lost in a second round but you'd certainly always rather have the chance to fight another day.

David Beard:

Yeah, I think the thinking of the Democrats is even if it's only going to be around for six months, it's still worth fighting for... Flores has only won 51% of the vote. You would think that a real investment here had the Democratic Party done that from the start, when the Republicans started investing, there was a good chance she could have been held under that and it would've gone to a runoff. And then, who knows? You never know with 100% certainty how an election's going to turn out.

David Nir:

So we'll switch gears to a couple of primaries in South Carolina that have been framed as Trump's revenge and he did, in fact, exact revenge against a Republican Congressman in the 7th district, Tom Rice, who was one of the ten who voted for impeachment. Rice got completely obliterated by State Rep, Russell Fry, who beat him 51-25. What was even more remarkable about this is there were five Republicans total challenging Rice so for Fry to get a majority of the vote was pretty unexpected. Even Fry claimed that his own polling showed the race going to a runoff.

David Nir:

Really though, this whole outcome feels pretty predictable. The 7th District which is in the Pee Dee region in the state's northeastern corner was actually Trump's best district in the 2016 GOP Presidential Primary and the seat really barely changed at all in redistricting. What I think matters most here is what this says for the remaining pro-impeachment House Republicans who still have primaries yet to come. Of the ten, four decided to retire. Rice is the first to actually lose and there is still one, David Valadao, on California whose primary hasn't been resolved yet. He probably will survive and then four more after that.

David Nir:

I think the two who are probably going to be at most risk right now are Peter Meijer in Michigan's 3rd Congressional District. And of course, Liz Cheney, where we've seen multiple polls now showing her getting completely obliterated. Rice, kind of an enigma. He was always a very low-key, extremely conservative guy, but he just felt that, Jan 6th, really, he had had enough. In remarks a few weeks ago before the primary, he even referred to Trump as a dictator and he seemed completely dispirited about the direction of the Republican party. He said that Trump just wants the entire GOP to be yes men and his diagnosis is exactly right, of course. Really, there's absolutely nothing to feel about this outcome except being deeply depressed at the state of the GOP going even further toward cult status.

David Beard:

I think what we can see, particularly as it looks like, as you mentioned, Cheney and Meijer are probably in very tough shape given this election result. That the only real protection for a Republican running after having voted to impeach Trump is to be in a state like California or Washington state where they do a top two primary so that they can outpace that person with other votes, potentially Democratic and independent votes, and don't have to face them in a Republican electorate. That's where the three, you mentioned Valadao and there's two in Washington state, who have a good shot to move onto the general election and honestly, at this point, I would be surprised if any of the other ones did.

David Nir:

The other South Carolina race that was really closely watched last night, I think, reinforces this as well. This is the 1st District where representative Nancy Mace beat former State Representative, Katie Arrington, 53-45 so she won without a runoff. Trump also despised Mason. He endorsed Arrington. Trump was pissed at Mace because right after Jan. 6, she made a few comments that were critical of him. But unlike Tom Rice who really stuck to his guns the whole way through, she very, very quickly backed off. She did not vote for impeachment and a number of press accounts refer to her as a Trump critic; that's complete bullshit.

David Nir:

A few months ago, Nancy Mace did one of the most humiliating things we have seen in an era when Republican politicians regularly humiliate themselves. The day after Trump endorsed Arrington, Mace went up to New York City, 800 miles away from her district, and filmed a video, it looked like it was filmed on a cellphone, of her in front of Trump Tower pledging her loyalty to Donald Trump. It was just super, super cringey, it was totally gross, and it totally worked for her. She really spent much of the race trying to prove her Trump-y bona fides. She also laid some effective attacks on Arrington who was responsible for this seat flipping to the Democrats in 2018. Mace picked it up for the Republicans again in 2020.

David Nir:

But really, the only lesson here is maybe you can get back in the graces of enough Trump-y voters, even if you can't win Trump back himself, simply by licking his boots. Man, if anything, not that Donald Trump is clever enough to see it this way, but winning back a one-time mild critic is almost more powerful because it just shows your absolute dominance. He was never going to get Rice back but now he's brought Mace back to heel, he can obviously do it with anyone else who even has dared utter any negative comments about him in recent years. So again, I think a truly dismaying outcome.

David Beard:

Yeah. That reminds me of the Ohio Senate Primary actually, where Trump ended up endorsing Vance and the talking point going around was that Trump actually likes when formerly Trump-critical Republicans come crawling back and go over the top to prove themselves loyal to Trump like Mace has done. So while his candidate didn't win, I don't think he'll be too upset about the outcome given how Mace has acted.

David Beard:

Our last election that we're going to cover in the Weekly Hits is the election that took place on Saturday. It was the special election for Alaska's at-large congressional seat that's taking place due to representative Don Young passing away earlier this year.

Alaska has a different electoral system. All of the candidates were in the ballot in this first round and the top four candidates will advance to a second round on August 16th. That ballot will use ranked choice voting to determine the winner which means that anybody who votes can rank the four candidates, 1, 2, 3, 4, and then the fourth place candidate from those results will get eliminated and if you had voted for that candidate, first, the candidate that you voted for second will then get your vote.

The same thing would happen with the third place candidate after those votes were reallocated. And then you would only have two candidates remaining. And the person then with the majority of those two candidates would be the person elected. Ballots are still being counted, but the AP has declared three of the four candidates who are going to advance to the second round, the first being former governor Sarah Palin, who has a clear lead so far with about 30% of the vote.

David Beard:

Of course, Palin is a Republican, as is the so far second-place candidate, businessman Nick Begich, who has about 19% of the vote. And then independent Al Gross, who is also the former 2020 Democratic nominee for Senate, but is running now as an Independent; he's also been called to advance. He has about 13% of the vote so far. And then, the fourth slot hasn't been called yet, but former Democratic state representative Mary Peltola is currently in that spot and will likely advance as well, unless late-breaking ballots are radically different than what's been counted so far.

David Beard:

Palin's strong first-round showing, getting over 30% of the vote, makes it likely that she'll be one of the last two candidates standing when this ranked-choice voting takes place. So, the big question is who's going to make it into that other slot where the fourth place candidate and then the third place candidate are eliminated?

David Beard:

If Begich advances, he's probably favored to consolidate the anti-Palin vote, as he's a fellow Republican but would probably collect the overwhelming number of independent and Democratic votes. But if either Al Gross or Peltola advance, then Palin would probably be the favorite as the only Republican of the two candidates when the ranked-choice voting takes place. But that's not certain. I don't want to say that one of the other two candidates couldn't beat Palin in that last two candidates portion, but we'll have to wait and see. I think Palin would be the favorite in that circumstance.

David Nir:

Palin was always a polarizing figure, but she has Donald Trump's endorsement, which makes it much more likely that Begich would pick up those Independents and Democrats, as you were suggesting, if it is those two facing off against each other at the very end of the instant runoff tabulations. One other thing we should note is that the second round, which you said is taking place on August 16th, that is also the day of the state's regular primary. And there is, once again, going to be a huge ballot of candidates seeking this position for a full term.

Usually, when you have these simultaneous elections, you see the same sets of candidates advance. But because things are so unusual, this is the first time any state anywhere has ever used this top-four system, we could wind up with a different group of four candidates who advance to the November general election, which again, will also be decided by an instant runoff. So, if for no other reason, just watching this unique electoral system unfold, it's going to be worth watching both of these races, the special and the regular election.

David Beard:

And incumbency in Alaska is so important, as we've seen. So, it'll be interesting to see, in that primary vote, they won't know who the incumbent is. So similar to this one, it'll be a free-for-all. As we saw, so many candidates ran in this first round.

David Nir:

Well, that wraps up our weekly hits. We are going to be talking, after the break, with the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, Ben Wikler, about all of the fascinating races that his state has in store for us this year. So, please stay with us after the break.

Every year, it seems that Wisconsin tops the list of states with incredibly important and incredibly competitive elections. That was certainly true in 2018, in 2020. And it's going to be true again this November, in 2022.

We have joining us today, on The Downballot, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, Ben Wikler, to tell us everything that is going on in his state this year. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

Ben Wikler:

Thanks so much Nir. Thanks so much Beard. It's great to be with the Davids.

David Nir:

Ben, you haven't exactly had what might be called a typical path to becoming chair of your state party. I would love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how it is you came to run the Wisconsin Dems.

Ben Wikler:

Sure. In the short-term, Wisconsin has a elected state party chair. You're elected by conventions to our state party convention. That happened with me in June of 2019. But if you go back in time, I grew up in Madison. I actually live in the house that I grew up in. I bought it from my mom who now lives four blocks away. And my wife, Beth, and I have three young kids. So, we have lots of helpful grandparent time, which is great.

Ben Wikler:

I got involved in politics a lot as a kid. And my godmother, a woman named Ada Deer, ran for Congress when I was 11 and became the first American Indian woman to win a congressional primary. So, knocking on doors for her and stuffing envelopes, putting up yard signs was kind of my entree into volunteering for campaigns.

I got to volunteer for a then state Representative who ran for Congress, named Tammy Baldwin, who's now well-known as our fantastic U.S. Senator. Worked on the governor's race. I also got very involved in activism and in comedy writing because The Onion was based in Madison. And so, my friends and I were obsessed with it. And we wrote for first, an underground student newspaper in middle school, another one in high school. And then eventually, we kept sending every issue to The Onion HQ. And eventually they wrote back and invited us to come in.

So, my friend, Peter Koechley and I, who went on to help launch Upworthy, started writing Onion headlines when we were seniors in high school. And that path led to, in college, I got very involved in activism and interned for Russ Feingold then, as a college student. I met my wife putting up posters for a protest together and fell in love with her.

And then, my senior year in college, I met a comedian who was increasingly involved in politics, named Al Franken. And my background with The Onion and doing political stuff, led him to hire me to work with him on the book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. And I worked at Air America Radio as one of the producers on his radio show. And that was kind of my entree to the national progressive movement.

That's where I first met Markos Moulitsas and people involved in Daily Kos and tons of folks. There was a Harvard professor that we would book on the show to talk about bankruptcy and the way that tax laws worked, named Elizabeth Warren. There were all these fascinating people who came through and were on the show.

When Al Franken moved to Minnesota, I moved to Ohio and worked for Sherrod Brown for Senate race and then worked for different advocacy and organizing organizations for a bunch of years until I was at MoveOn as the DC director in 2013 through, I guess, '18. And was involved, first in trying to stop Trump from getting power, and then in trying to organize the huge pushback to stop the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the gutting of Medicaid. I got to work with disability rights activists and so many people who were mobilizing all across the country.

During all this time, I had dreamed of eventually raising my family in Wisconsin. And my wife had heard me singing Wisconsin's praises from our first date on. In 2018, after our third child arrived, we decided to move back. And I volunteered a whole bunch for the Evers campaign and for Baldwin's reelection campaign at that point. And then, when we had actually landed in Wisconsin, the then state party chair decided not to run for a third term. So, I threw my hat in the ring and wound up crisscrossing the state, going to county party meetings, talking to all these people; learning everything I could about all the things we needed to do to win and was elected that June. And it has been a nonstop rollercoaster ever since, for the last three years. I was reelected in 2021.

David Nir:

Let's talk a little bit about what that rollercoaster ride has been like. I'm sure that some of our listeners are probably pretty plugged into their own state Democratic parties. But I'll bet that many folks aren't necessarily all that familiar with what their state parties do. And of course, the goal of any party organization is to get their candidates elected. But what exactly does the Wisconsin Democratic party do to make that happen?

Ben Wikler:

The biggest part of our budget and the crown jewel, the central thing that we do, on a year-round basis, is organize in every corner of the state. Our state party unusually uses the Obama campaign model, where our organizers actually build teams of volunteers that run door-to-door canvasing and phone banking operations in their own communities. And when you do that on a continuous basis, as we've done now since my predecessor, who launched these neighborhood teams in the spring of 2017, and we've built and built and built them; we now have hundreds across the state. When you do that continuously, you actually build momentum over time. So, every dollar you spend on organizing goes further, because you can have one organizer who's working with multiple teams to coach and support them and make sure they have the data they need. But you don't have to have a staff member at every canvas launch location.

Ben Wikler:

You can have teams running door-to-door canvases from their living rooms and from coffee shops around the state. So, that is one huge part. But it's now so much more than that as well.

We have a communications team that is doing everything we can to make sure folks know how terrible Ron Johnson is and how terrible the other Republicans running for governor and Congress and state legislature are. We have a voter protection operation that works, now, on a year-round basis. It didn't used to be year-round. But something we've really focused on over these last few years that works to make sure that local clerks aren't rolling back voting rights, that we're recruiting and supporting poll workers, poll observers; lawyers who are able to help voters resolve issues.

We run a voter protection hotline that any of our listeners who happen to be in Wisconsin can call. It's 608-DEM-3232. We have a data team that helps make sure we're figuring out where the voters we need to mobilize are and who we need to persuade.

Ben Wikler:

We have a political team that includes the staff that just make sure the party operates, in terms of supporting our county parties and congressional district parties, in youth caucuses; our state administrative committee, which is my boss. It's our statewide board. And organizes our state party convention. Every state party does one of these every year. Ours is coming up later this month, the 25th and the 26th of June in La Crosse, Wisconsin. It's going to be amazing.

Ben Wikler:

There's a coalitions team, which is also a year-round team that specializes in working with building the coalitions partnerships with Black and Latino, Asian American, Pacific Islander; Wisconsinites with tribal nations, sovereign nations across Wisconsin; with rural Wisconsinites, with LGBTQ Wisconsinites, to make sure that our big tent party includes and lifts up everybody.

Ben Wikler:

We have a candidate services team that, this spring, worked with hundreds of local candidates running for offices like school board and city council to make sure that they were able to run digital ads, to be able to send mailings to their constituents and to connect with our field organizers to make sure that we were knocking on doors and supporting folks running for those offices.

They'll be back at it this fall with state legislative races and other races. And all of this is supported by our finance and HR and operations teams that do all the kind of back-end work that makes an organization go. So there's a whole bunch of people, but the big idea here is candidates should have to be great at being candidates, but they shouldn't also have to be great at figuring out how to stand up an organizing program or doing things that really shouldn't just be starting when the general election begins. There were days in the past in Wisconsin, where if someone wanted to run for Senate, they would have to find a statewide organizing director and fill in all the levels of that organizing program.

 

Sometimes in just a few months at the end. In 2016, Hillary Clinton's team hired their first staff in Wisconsin that August and had no time at all to try to figure out who should be talking to whom. The party can take care of all that. If you have a well funded well run organization, it's like a permanent piece of campaign infrastructure. And then the candidates can just focus on things that only a candidate can do. All of our candidates across Wisconsin now with the democratic party trust and work with our coordinated campaign. So that when we knock on doors, we talk about everyone running up and down the ballot. And that means that people who might not run for office otherwise can do so. It's almost like a form of public financing where people know that they won't need to raise the money for those pieces of the work because the party can take care of that. And that's allowed us to welcome just an extraordinary group of folks running for office holding office.

Ben Wikler:

Now, it's one reason why we have these contested primaries for a bunch of the statewide offices in November, because folks know that they don't need to do every piece. They just need to focus in on the being a candidate part of being a candidate.

David Beard:

Yeah. I've often heard it described as running a campaign as like building a small business, except you do it in the course of six to nine months, maybe a year. And you build it with the entire idea of going to election day and then sort of all that throwing away that small business that you spend all this time creating. But of course, a state party like yours can do so much of the infrastructure work that makes that so much more feasible for so many more people.

Ben Wikler:

That's exactly right. And it's so, I mean, from a business perspective, it is so dumb to do all this work and all this research and all this hiring, and then lay everybody off. Like it just doesn't make any sense.

David Beard:

Amen.

Ben Wikler:

By having organizers on the ground year, over year, over year, you it's like a flywheel. It's like it keeps on spinning faster and faster. So we had more volunteer shifts this spring than we had in the spring of 2021 and more in 2021 than we had in 2020 when we had a much bigger staff because we have kept these neighborhood teams going. And so the kind of the impact of supporting a state party actually grows each time because you get all these things established and you don't have to start from scratch every time there's a new race on the horizon.

David Beard:

So let's dive into the upcoming Wisconsin elections this November, which has two extremely important races at the top of the ticket. You've already mentioned governor Evers and Senator Johnson. Johnson is one of the worst senators in the country. He regularly makes odious statements and claims. A lot of people outside of Wisconsin, I'm sure have heard about him and heard not good things about him. But tell us how that race is shaping up and the race against him on the Democratic side.

Ben Wikler:

Ron Johnson is so, so appallingly extraordinarily bad. He is... It's not just that he says that COVID can be cured with mouthwash or says that the January 6th insurrectionists where patriots, who love their country and love law enforcement, which is something he actually said. He said he would've been scared if it had been Black Lives Matter protestors, but he wasn't scared with the protestors that were actually there. It's not just all that stuff. It's that he's profoundly self-serving. His claim to fame as a Senator is that he insisted on an extra tax break on top of Trump's giant tax scam that personally benefited him and his biggest donor massively. It's one of the most regressive tax cuts ever passed through the United States Congress that he insisted on putting in, and that he's been billing taxpayers to fly him back to Congress from his vacation home in Florida.

Ben Wikler:

So we've been making this case against him. And so many independent and grassroots organizations have done the same thing. His approval rating is now 36%, which is stunning in a year that's supposed to be tough for Democrats and good for Republicans. The Political Report called him the most vulnerable incumbent from either party in the Senate in 2022. And meanwhile, on the democratic side, there's a contested primary. There's a bunch of candidates who've made the ballot, but we won't know our nominee until August 9th. And so this is a perfect kind of case in point for why having a strong party matters, because we have to build the whole general election apparatus before August 9th. It's like building a spaceship right on the launchpad. And then once we have the nominee, they jump into the cockpit and they hit ignition.

We do not want to do the ‘building the plane as you fly’ metaphor that people often use because that is not sound aviation safety practice. You want to actually have the thing built before there's a pilot. So that's the work that we're doing. But I think we really have a shot because he's just so repellent to so many voters. And it's not just that people don't want to vote for him, it's that the chance to vote against him will cause more people to vote.

He's a negative voter turnout machine for our side and we're going to do everything we can to make sure folks know just how bad he is and that they have the power to oust him, that it is worth getting up off the couch and going in or better yet casting an absentee ballot. So we know you voted in advance. Those things can make the difference, not just to defeat him. But also we hope to expand the democratic majority in the Senate and give us a chance to actually pass into law so many of the things Democrats are fighting for.

David Beard:

And we've seen negative partisanship be a real motivating factor. Most prominently at the presidential level, of course. But when you've got a Senator like Johnson, who's so prominent and has so many negative feelings rightfully created among so many Wisconsin citizens. Like that's a motivating factor for them, for sure.

Ben Wikler:

Absolutely. And I talked to folks, I mean, I will say some of our fundraising success this year has come because people want to make sure that Ron Johnson does not win and certainly there's volunteer shifts. It reminds me a lot of the campaign against Scott Walker in 2018 where people saw that he was vulnerable, saw that he was terrible, tons of candidates ran. And in that election, everyone came together around the nominee and we were able to prevail. I think, we're looking for a similar path in the Senate race and I think we have a very, very good chance of ending Ron Johnson's political career this November.

David Nir:

Can you tell us a little bit more about this spaceship that you're building on the launchpad for the eventual Democratic nominee for the Senate race?

Ben Wikler:

Absolutely. So it's all the pieces of the party that I spoke about; the digital, the data, the organizing, the voter protection, the communications, all these different elements. Specifically, in some cases with staff just focused on Ron Johnson and the Senate race. And then with each of the Senate campaigns, we want to make sure that they know that we're doing all these different pieces and understand what they anticipate their needs will be.

So whoever the nominee is, and I should mention our state party because of our state party constitution, we are bound and committed to remaining neutral in the primary. So we're not putting our thumb on the scale, but all the candidates have told us that once we have a nominee, they will work with the infrastructure that we've put in place. As opposed to doing what has often happened in different states around the country, which is you get a Senator nominee and they decide they want to reshuffle all the staff and reshape how the program works and all this kind of stuff.

Ben Wikler:

This is the same strategy we used for the presidential in 2020. We built a presidential scale campaign through the state party. We kept briefing all the candidates in the primary about it. And then eventually we had a nominee and the nominee just adopted our operation wholesale and added their in-state staff to do the things that the nominee needed. But the organizing whole structure, all these different pieces were held and carried forward. And that meant that we were the relationships we built, the trust we'd built, all that kind of stuff was actually preserved and accelerated as opposed to being broken down and then attempted to... There was no Humpty Dumpty situation with a fall and then a reassembly.

David Nir:

So in the race for governor, you almost have the inverse situation where we know who the democratic nominee is going to be. Of course, that's going to be governor Evers, but Republicans are in the midst of a really nasty primary that I don't think has gone, maybe exactly as at least some folks might have expected. So can you fill us in on who the major players are there and what you see happening and the final outcome being there?

Ben Wikler:

 I will say that we went to the Republican state party convention a few weeks ago and had a mobile billboard with an image, an animation of a dumpster fire and held the press conference in front of the dumpster fire mobile billboard. Because that is what the Republican gubernatorial primary is. This is a group of extremist candidates that keep on leapfrogging each other into the most radical fringes of the right wing fever swamps.

Rebecca Kleefisch was the first to announce. She was Scott Walker's Lieutenant governor. If you go to radicalrebecca.com, you can find out more about her. She is someone who just keeps like kind of lurching and grabbing to the right. I'll just give one example. Wisconsin has an 1849 ban on abortion. This is pre-Civil War law. The only exception it says in the statute, if two doctors agree that an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother, that's the only condition where it could be allowed.

Rebecca Kleefisch wants to remove that exception from that law. It's so far out of step with where our values and the vast majority of Wisconsinites are. She's also wants to completely scrap our bipartisan Wisconsin elections commission. She said that there should be an elected official in charge so they would be one throat to choke. That is a direct quote, one throat to choke in charge of the elections. And she was pushed on this by election officials who said, don't use these metaphors when you're talking about election administrators. And she said, oh, I use that phrase all the time. That was her big defense. It's alarming, but apparently radical Rebecca Kleefisch isn't extreme right enough for Donald Trump because Donald Trump has endorsed a different candidate, Tim Michels. Who jumped into the race very late and has been scrambling to get to the furthest right position in this primary that he can possibly find.

He, this week, came out against marriage equality, which is one of those arguments that you thought was over. He supports going back to the 19th century with the 1849 abortion ban in Wisconsin. He joins Rebecca Kleefisch and wanting to totally scrap our bipartisan Wisconsin's elections commission. He's talked about 2020 being rigged. He's one of these kind of Doug Mastriano ultra-hard right candidates who the more voters find out about what he actually thinks about things, the less support that he has.

There's two others in the race as well. There's a guy named Timothy Ramthun who wants to retroactively decertify the 2020 election, which just has no basis in the constitution or law, but that doesn't stop him. Tim Ramthun has a bill that would allow any election where the margin of victories is less than the number of absentee ballots cast in the race to be nullified. That bill so far has not moved through the state legislature. But I have now come to believe that nothing's impossible with these Republicans. And then the guy named Kevin Nicholson, who actually used to be the president of the College Democrats.

But now is the kind of pet project of Dick Uihlein, who is the biggest funder of the Stop The Steal rally and is right there with Rebecca Mercer in the kind of ultra hard right authoritarian billionaire category.

 

So that is the Republican slate of candidates for Governor. We won't know which one is the nominee until August 9th, but we can already tell that all of them are so far out on the right that we have a real shot at defeating them with a candidate as common, sensical and pragmatic and focused on doing the right thing as our democratic Governor Tony Evers. So Tony Evers won in 2018 by 1.1 percentage points, which I call a Wisconsin landslide. We’re the only state where four of the last six presidential races come down the less than one percentage point.

Tony Evers ran on a platform of protecting healthcare, supporting our schools and fixing the damn roads, which is a pretty salty language there. He has fixed the roads. He's paved enough roads to drive to Denver and back. He has restored funding to our schools, which are now back in the top 10 in the country. He's protected healthcare and gotten shots into arms. He's also kept his campaign promise to cut taxes from the middle class. He signed into law of 15% income tax cut and he's invested stimulus funds in small businesses. We've had 4,200 small businesses open storefronts and expand operations on Main Streets across our state.

So we have record low unemployment right now, and we have a state budget surplus. He's demonstrated that the Democratic kind of basic idea of investing from the middle out to grow the economy in a way that works for people can succeed in Wisconsin and that has made him someone that people basically trust. The last public poll, 40% of people disagreed with his statement, he cares about people like me. 54% of people agreed.

Most Wisconsinites know that he's on their side. It's such a clear contrast. Someone who just wakes up wanting to help people and do what's right as opposed to this group of Republicans who are supplicating for Trump's endorsement for the far right fringe of their party, and especially trying to rig the rules and potentially overturn our democracy. That's a contrast that works well for us. In a year that I recognize it's going to be tough nationally, I think we have a very good shot at winning two races that the Cook Political Report calls a tossup, both the Senate and the Governor's race.

David Nir:

For those of us who've watched Wisconsin from the outside, we've seen Governor Evers stand as a bulwark against some absolutely batshit legislation that Republicans have passed in the legislature. Maybe tell us about a few of the examples that Evers has prevented from becoming law.

Ben Wikler:

I appreciate that question. He called himself a goalie. He didn't realize that would be such an important part of his job when he was first running. In 2020, I should mention, Governor Evers put his campaign on hold and just focused on supporting state legislative candidates through a project called Save The Veto, that was a partnership with the state party, and we managed to stop Republicans from getting super majorities in both chambers.

If 3,500 votes had gone the other way, they would have those super majorities now. So it was down to the wire, but because he in veto bills and the state legislature sustains those vetoes, he was able to veto a bill they passed this spring that would allow people to bring loaded guns onto school property in their cars. That is not law because of his veto pen.

Ben Wikler:

He's vetoed 14 different voter suppression and election sabotage bills. He has vetoed a string of anti-reproductive rights bills, and Republicans are not only saying they would try to pass all these bills if they get a trifecta in the state, they have a lot more coming. The kinds of really hideous voter suppression bills that became law in Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Florida. Those would absolutely be law in Wisconsin if it wasn't for having a Governor who believes in democracy.

David Beard:

So you mentioned the upholding of the vetoes, which was allowed to happen because Democrats prevented the Republicans from getting a two thirds majority in the state legislature in 2020. Of course, Wisconsin has one of the worst Republican gerrymanders in the country. That's going to continue into the new decade. What are your goals as from the point of view of the state party for the state legislative elections that are coming in November? And is there a candidate or two you'd like to highlight for those races?

Ben Wikler:

Absolutely. Republicans have managed to re-gerrymander the maps, at least for now, with some help I should mention from the U.S. Supreme Court, which unlike in other states, decided to reach down and strike down our state legislative maps for reasons that will puzzle constitutional scholars for decades. So we have really, really tough maps this cycle.

Ben Wikler:

Republicans are explicitly trying to get super majorities in both chambers yet again, and we are explicitly determinedly working to stop them. We have great democratic leaders in both chambers that we're working closely with, Greta Neubauer in the Assembly, Janet Bewley in the State Senate. We have strong candidates across the state. Republicans are targeting folks like Katrina Shankland in central Wisconsin and Steve Doyle in western Wisconsin, really across the board in our state.

Ben Wikler:

Any place there's a Democrat, Republicans want to take them out. In those districts, we're going to absolutely support our candidates, and we will be organizing everywhere because we believe in the reverse coattails effect that having candidates on the ballot and supporting those candidates turns out voters who can affect the top of the ticket as well. That the essential thing is to make sure that they don't get the two-thirds majorities, and to win the governorship.

Ben Wikler:

Then next year, just to squeeze this in, in April of 2023, we have a state Supreme Court race. There will not be a lot happening across the country in election days that spring, but that race will be for the majority in Wisconsin state Supreme Court. If we can sustain the Governor's veto and if we have a non-hyper right wing majority in our state Supreme court, that sets us up to have a secure and fair and real legitimate election in 2024 when Wisconsin will probably be the tipping point state yet again. And so that is the kind of three hurdles that we have to jump through in order to make sure that the attempt that Republicans attempted in 2020 doesn't carry through in 2024.

David Nir:

It is almost a year off, but I would love to talk a little bit more about that state Supreme Court race because at Daily Kos, we have been obsessed with these sorts of races for many years, and only recently really I think has the broader progressive movement finally begun understood the importance of these races.

From my perspective, of course, I'd rather not be voting for judges at all, but this is the system that we have to live with, and the court right now is a four-three, usually conservative majority. We could flip that because of this Republican seat that's coming up. So can you tell us a little bit about the candidates who are running and how the whole timing of that election works because the time of year is even a little bit unusual?

Ben Wikler:

Sure. Six months after November 8th, 2022, it'll be April, early April 2023, and Wisconsin will have a statewide election, that will follow a February primary. There are already two kind of more progressive independent candidates who have announced their candidacy. On the right, the current justice is Pat Roggensack and she is retiring. She will be 81 when the election takes place, so it's an open seat. And the Republican rumored to be most likely to run is Dan Kelly, who's the candidate we defeated in 2020.

Dan Kelly is a hyperpartisan Republican lawyer who Donald Trump endorsed in 2020 in a big rally, and then kept talking about during his COVID briefings from the White House, which is arguably a Hatch Act violation right there. But Trump was all in for him because he thought that Dan Kelly would cast the deciding vote in our state Supreme Court to overturn the election results if he lost. As it was, we had one more vote against Trump than there were votes for Trump, and Trump was not able to overturn the election results in our state.

Dan Kelly is talking publicly about trying again and making sure that guy does not get in our state Supreme Court is just absolutely critical to people who want to live in a democracy nationally. There shouldn't be so much that rests on Wisconsin state Supreme Court decisions for the future of democracy in the entire United States, but this is where we are. I hope folks will circle in their calendar April of 2023, and we're going to need all the help we can get to mobilize and shoot up, turnout in an election that historically the kind of odd numbered year spring elections have not been a giant national and statewide focus.

David Beard:

So how can our Wisconsinite listeners get in touch with the Democratic party in their state and get more involved?

Ben Wikler:

Wherever you might be, you can support Democrats and the Democratic party of Wisconsin in fighting for victory for Governor Evers in defeating Ron Johnson, and I think Dems up and down the ballot, including defeating Derrick van Orden, who's an insurrectionist and is currently on probation for trying to bring a gun on a plane. He's running for Congress in the 3rd congressional district, which is an open seat. We need help across the board and you can get involved. You can become a monthly donor. That is the single, my favorite thing you can do.

If you go to wisdems.org/monthly, you can sign up to give a few bucks a month, that helps us to hire and know that we'll be able to keep our staff on month over month, year over year, and that in turn allows us to do the kind of deep, long term organizing building neighborhood teams that I've been talking about that helps us win, especially in these tough elections like the spring state Supreme Court race next year. So wisdems.org/monthly is great. Go to wisdems.org/convention to watch our state party convention, wherever you might be, or register and come to join us in lacrosse on June 25th to 26th.

And finally, I'll give the link wisdems.org/volunteer. You can join our virtual phone banks. You can join our volunteer operation to turn out every possible democratic voter. Races here are so close, so often. I was just talking to someone whose county board majority is in place because of a five-vote margin. That kind of thing is not uncommon across our state. And so helping turn out votes can have a huge impact, not just on the lives of Wisconsinites, but in the lives of everyone affected by who has the majority in the U.S. Senate or who the U.S. President is, or who is affected by the U.S. House majority, which is everybody on earth. So get involved wisdems.org/monthly, /donate, /volunteer and /convention.

David Nir:

We've been talking with Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party about all of the intensely competitive races coming up this year and in fact, next year as well in his state. Ben, thank you so much for joining us on The Downballot today.

Ben Wikler:

It has been my great pleasure. Thanks so much, Nir. Thanks so much, Beard.

David Beard:

That's all from us this week. Thanks to Ben Wikler for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcast. 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.