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megacircuit9universe · 5 years ago

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Pokemon Go to the Polls!

THU MAR 05 2020

The big news today was that Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the race.

She didn’t endorse either Bernie, or Biden, but she did at least get out of Bernie’s way.

As I wrote yesterday, when Pete and Klobi dropped out the day before Super Tuesday, the iron was hot, and their unexpected departures and endorsements of Biden made it hotter.

Warren’s departure isn’t like that... dropping out two days after Super Tuesday, when that iron is cooling off... but four days before the next round of states: Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington... which are all stone cold right now.

There is no fun name for these six states on March 10th. Consequential Tuesday is what it should be called, but I’d settle for Cool Tuesday, or even Casual Tuesday... anything. But no.

There will be no debate between Biden and Sanders before these states vote. And Warren isn’t going to endorse anybody beforehand.

Nevertheless, Washington and Michigan are two biggies, with Washington seemingly safe for Bernie Sanders, and Michigan a toss up. The other four are now presumed to be going to Joe Biden.

I think Warren’s exit will solidify Washington for Bernie, but he really needs to kill it in Michigan, if he’s gonna break the Super Tuesday spell and claim to be making a comeback.

And it would not hurt if Bernie stole one of the other four out from Under Biden.

The 18 to 38 vote here would make a huge difference, but will they turn out in force, like the cavalry, on Tuesday the 10th to save his ass?

Based on the primary season so far... no, they won’t.

Because they have not turned out in any numbers at all in Iowa, New Hampshire, and all the rest. And nobody in the media... not even in the alternative media, like TYT and the like on YouTube, are reaching out to this demographic in any meaningful way.

It’s a huge disappointment!

On TikTok, I am finally seeing this week, some peer pressure from fellow youngsters to get up off their asses and act, but not nearly enough.

When I think back to last summer, with the, Raid Area 51 Memes that everybody was doing... and to this past January with the WW3 memes that were just as viral... these few isolated videos I see where somebody is begging their fellow teens or twenty-somethings to vote in the primaries... it’s just sad how weak the signal is by comparison.

There is a meme that’s pretty viral called, “don’t make me vote for Joe Biden” that’s been going around all primary season, but... it got it’s start with jaded millennials on Twitter, and, was picked up by younger TikTockers who... are buying into the apathy of their 30-something counterparts without questioning it.

The central conceit of this meme is that they’re not going to vote at all until the general election in the fall... so please... old people... don’t nominate Joe Biden. Please, old people... nominate Bernie Sanders, who is our hands down fave!

Now, clearly, they all know they are allowed to vote in state primaries... but they’re all acting like... that level of involvement is a bit too much to ask of they, themselves... the hip and jaded youth. Going to the polls two times in one year? Come on! We have lives!

Never mind that for all these young adults, either on Twitter or TikTok, who are overwhelmingly white and/or affluent, their polling place is probably within easy walking distance of home... and that voting will take only about five minutes... is free... and is painless (it’s not like you have to get a shot or something)... it’s still a hell of a lot to ask them to do twice in the same year.

I put this mainly down to ignorance of the big picture. That big picture being: voting is the most important thing you can do to improve your life. It’s more important than school, work, dating, chasing your dreams, or even eating and using your toilet, because it’s fundamental to all of them.

Story time here...

When I was turning 18, in 1987, my home state of Illinois was still considered a red state. Reagan could rely on us both times around, and we regularly voted for Republican Governors.

This, of course was long before the internet, but there was a definite underground movement going on at the time, to get young voters registered and involved in the political process.

This is why I voted for Mike Dukakis right after I turned 18... and why I continued to vote in every single election, primary or general, local, state, and federal, for the rest of my life. It was instilled in my whole generation, here, that this was a fundamental civic duty that paid off.

So... I do not think it’s a coincidence that thirty years later, Illinois is considered as reliably blue as California and New York, and that in 2020, when so much of the Midwest, and the rest of the country are withering under far right oppression... we have a democratic Governor, Senate, and House, enjoy legal weed, are leading the Midwest on climate change and green energy, are a sanctuary for undocumented migrants, a haven for the LGBT rights, and doing better than most states with racial and gender equality.

This is what happens when you get a generation of young people to prioritize voting early and often, from the age of 18 onward.

It’s what should happen to every state, but what could happen in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas and Florida very soon, if anybody gave enough of a fuck to mobilize the young voters.

It seems ridiculous to me that here in 2020, when we have such a sophisticated internet, with hand held devices in every pocket... and with this ideal Presidential candidate... Bernie Sanders... champing at the bit to bring, not just the states mentioned above, but the entire country... into the 21st century in terms of universal health care, climate change, legal weed, etc... that the 18 to 38 demographic is sitting on their hands, pretending nobody under 60 is even allowed to vote for anything.

In normal times, I’d say... you’re gonna wait 30 more years for the stars to line up again like this with a national candidate who is anywhere near as progressive as Bernie. But these are not normal times, so... if you (they, we) do not take this opportunity... it may well never come again.

Climate change, pandemics, authoritarianism... economic depression... famine and war...

...all things which have been bearing down constantly on humanity since the dawn of civilization, and which only modern democracy has managed to hold back, the last 70 or 80 years...

...are right on the doorstep now, waiting to devour us... this time on a global scale.

Is that fear mongering? No. That’s reality. This is an emergency. All hands on deck, goddammit!

Generations of people dedicated their lives... or gave their lives... to defend this democratic system we have in the free world where intellect wins over ignorance, innovation over hardship, and enlightenment over brutality... and that system goes away tomorrow... if you don’t vote.

Elderly voters don’t give a shit about the future. They care about the past... and protecting themselves in their old age. Is that callous? Yes! Old people have no problem sending young people off to war to die... and no problem handing their own grandchildren a flaming pile of shit world... because they are selfish, brain damaged bastards, the whole lot of them.

That’s why a whole generation had to fight to lower the voting age to 18... because they were being fucking slaughtered in Korea and VietNam.

They won’t just make you vote for Joe Biden, if you let them... they will make you watch Trump destroy him, before he destroys you. Why the fuck would you sit back and let this happen?

Millenials and GenZ... and all the yet to be born generations to follow are crippled with debt out of college, have no hope of owning homes, are facing a planet that is slowly turning into a hellscape, and watching right wing fascists dismantle the constitution in front of their faces in real time... and doing nothing to stop it, by using the most powerful tool they have... the one that was won for them by blood sacrifices.

Why?

Just fucking go to your goddamn polling place and spend five minutes of your shitty life checking some boxes for fuck sake! Jesus, fucking Christ!

Okay, that seems like a good place to leave it tonight.

I’m going to bed.

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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The Rise of the Battleground Campus

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-rise-of-the-battleground-campus/

The Rise of the Battleground Campus

NextGen Arizona’s organizers Maria Eller and Dana Carey on the Arizona State University campus in Phoenix. | M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico

Kyle Spencer is a journalist who covers the confluence of education and politics. The reporting for this article was supported by a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University.

TEMPE, Ariz.—The vibe at Arizona State University’s sprawling main campus of palm trees and succulents was part carnival, part political convention. Hip hop and dance pop blasted from speakers as students handed out free popcorn and cotton candy on the lawn near the student union. Young men and women played bean bag and ball-toss games typically reserved for child birthday parties or the state fair, whilecheerful, clipboard-toting activists in T-shirts and flip-flops urged them to register to vote.

This mixing of junk food and civic zeal was a poll-tested and focus-grouped enterprise, as carefully constructed as a 30-second television advertisement. It was all part of September’s National Voter Registration Day, a 7-year-old aspiring holiday. It’s little known among people who aren’t election officials, political activists—or the college students in their sights. At ASU, the civic zeal regularly spills over into the rest of the week and well into the next, as young liberals seek to register as many students as possible, and while young conservatives seek to remind them that not every 20-something has to be a liberal.This year, there were so many volunteers registering their classmates in preparation for the state’s Democratic primary in March and the general election in November 2020 that canvassers had trouble finding a single student who hadn’t already been approached.

The College Republicans stood behind tables brimming with Constitutions. March for Our Lives organizers distributed flyers for a free pancake breakfast to talk about gun safety laws. And Turning Point U.S.A., the ubiquitous campus conservative group, not only handed out bags of potato chips and miniature Snickers bars, but also rolled out a giant “free speech ball” and asked students to write “whatever you want” on the ball with a black sharpie. Many did. The idea was to mock safe spaces and knee-jerk campus liberalism, but the ball ended up blanketed with as many far-left as far-right views.South America is America too. I love Donald Trump. We need government transparency. #Bernie2020.

As the 2020 election approaches, both parties are sinking money and time into college campuses, driven by the idea that students—often dismissed as low-turnout layabouts—could have a huge effect in a tight race in a swing state. The mega-campuses of the Brobdingnagian public universities and community colleges in states like like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania are sometimes called “battleground campuses” by organizers and activists on the ground. “In an election that could come down to a point or two either way in Arizona or Wisconsin, turning out voters at ASU, University of Wisconsin-Madison and other college campuses in these states could easily make the difference,” said Andrew Baumann, a pollster for Global Strategy Group, a consulting firm that spent 2018 trying to figure out what makes the would-be college voter tick for Tom Steyer’s NextGen.

“It’s pretty clear that 2020 is going to shatter records for turnout given what we saw in 2018, the Virginia and Kentucky elections a couple of weeks ago, and what we’re seeing in every poll that asks about enthusiasm to vote or motivation,” Baumann said. “And the group that has the most room to grow is young people.” While young voters still turned out at lower rates than older voters in 2018, their rate of increase in turnout was, he says, “by far” the highest.

In the Trump era, college students are voting in record numbers. In 2018, 7.5 million college students who were eligible to vote went to the polls. That was a 40 percent turnout, more than double the rate four years earlier, according to researchers at Tufts University. At ASU, of the students registered to vote in the most recent midterms, 59 percent pulled a lever, compared to 27 percent in 2014.

And there are more young people now than ever. In 2020, people between 18 and 23 will make up a tenth of the electorate, up from just 4 percent in 2016. Going beyond college-age Americans, voters between 18 and 29 now represent 21 percent of the population. That’s 46 million voters, compared to 39 million among seniors.

With multiple Starbucks, their own police departments, community engagement centers and polling booths, these massive universities are like small cities. In 2016, Trump took Arizona by 91,234 votes. ASU’s total 2018 enrollment was 111,249 (with 72,709 students on its campuses and 38,540 enrolled online). In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,748. The student population at the University of Wisconsin at Madison is nearly double that. Trump secured Pennsylvania with 44,292 votes. The student population at Pennsylvania State University at State College is more than twice that. And in Michigan, where Trump won by almost 11,000 votes, Michigan State University’s student body count is more than four times that number. College students really could help swing a state and therefore the presidential election, as well as make the difference for a U.S. Senate seat and other down-ballot races.

“You’ve got 50,000 kids living in a fairly compact area,” said Teddy Goff, a partner at Precision Strategies, a consulting firm in Washington that was founded by veterans of Barack Obama’s political operation. “If you’ve got people on foot going door to door or standing in a single location with a clip board and fliers there’s not a more effective way to get people registered and ready to vote.”

In advance of Trump’s reelection effort, his son Don Jr. has embarked on a near-constant tour of swing state universities, often with his girlfriend and former Fox News host, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Since announcing her 2020 run, the selfie-fueled Elizabeth Warren has addressed a 3,000-person audience in an auditorium at ASU about “money-driven corruption in Washington” and student loan debt. During a recent call inquiring about the preponderance of candidates addressing students the University of Michigan, I was told the press office was too busy to talk, as the university was planning a visit from Hillary Clinton, who came the next day, to share her wisdom on how to beat (or perhaps just get more votes than) Trump.

Yet polls also show that these young voters are less likely to identify with political parties, which they view as feckless entities corrupted by big business and bureaucrats, than they are to ally with specific issues like health care or LGBTQ rights. This aversion to parties can make them less predictable than boomers who have voter files that are decades-long.

In addition to untold student debt, many young college students also bear resentment that no one kept the semi-automatics out of their high schools. They aren’t really mad, according to surveys, polls and chats with people who spend a lot of time with them, as much as they are ready to take charge.

Even if they resistbeing identified as party members, most college students vote for the Democrats, so it would seem that Trump’s eventual opponent would have an obvious advantage on the nation’s campuses. Voters of ages 18 to 29 supported Democrats by a 44-point margin in 2018, Baumann says. That was up from a 25-point margin in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But with a well-funded and heavily coordinated band of conservative groups long used to outspending Democrats, it’s not entirely clear who is the David and who is the Goliath. The Leadership Institute, a school for young conservatives founded by Morton Blackwell, has trained more than 200,000 Republican-leaning activists since its inception in 1979. Among its graduates are Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Mitch McConnell. Last fiscal year, the institute had nearly $20 million in net assets and worked with close to 2,000 groups, holding nearly 6,000 campus activities. A review of dozens of tax documents indicate that this past fiscal year alone, conservative foundations spent more than $100 million on the long-term venture of drawing college students to their side, with groups like Young America’s Foundation, which has $70 million in net assets, alone spending more than $19 million on educational endeavors.

NextGen America, the progressive, get-out-the-vote group founded by California billionaire turned 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer, is the most prominent advocacy outfit aimed at the young left. It spent $38 million in 2018 and is expected to spend at least that much in 2020 on voter participation efforts, mostly on large schools in swing states. That’s made NextGen a campus darling and has helped it to infuse its well-tested strategies into other less impressively funded progressive groups.

But together conservative groups are expected to far exceed that. Students for Trump, the political arm of Charlie Kirk’s conservative Turning Point U.S.A., has announced that it will be spending an estimated $15 million, and Young Americans for Liberty is planning on spending a projected $13 million on campuses recruiting, training and canvassing for 150 libertarian candidates that the organization plans to endorse in state legislative races around the country.

Sitting at one of ASU’s five Starbucks, wearing a blue T-shirt that read Be A Voter, Azza Abuseif, who is the Arizona coordinator for NextGen, told me her team at ASU—111 volunteers, two paid organizers and a regional coordinator who oversees operations—was focused on one thing: “Register, register, register.” In 2018, the group registered more than 20,000 young Arizonans and aims to register at least as many for 2020. Other groups in the state will focus on stoking the state’s Latino population, or white suburban women, or Native Americans and African Americans. As Abuseif said, “We are going to bring the youth vote.”

“We believe we can change this election by targeting students,” she told me.

Austin Smith, the administrative director for the PAC overseeing Students for Trump, told me he wasn’t sure Abuseif’s plan would do the trick. It was lunchtime and he was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, despite the scorching heat. We were standing on the campus’ main quad a week after Voter Registration Day, and activists of all political persuasions were enticing students to their tables. Turning Point’s table—bursting with volunteers wearing T-shirts that said “Hate Us ‘Cause They Aint’ Us,” a nod to the group’s belief in American exceptionalism—seemed to be garnering the most attention.

Smith seemed to know that he wasn’t going to persuade a majority of his peers to vote to reelect Trump—but that isn’t the plan. If Students for Trump can distract its progressive rivals and shave off a few votes for the Democrats here and there, they’ll count it as a win, maybe even a decisive one. “We’re going to get a larger amount of votes than most political consultants and pundits think,” Smith told me. “We don’t need as many votes as the left does.”

Still, in 2016 in Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton won voters under 30 by just 4 points. Across the fabled and breached Blue Wall that year, college-aged field organizers grumbled bitterly that they’d been ignored by Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn. In Michigan, they alleged, frequent requests for campaign literature were denied by Brooklyn. In Pennsylvania, young canvassers said Brooklyn brushed aside their on-the-ground observations that Trump was more appealing than the campaign’s beloved data was indicating. And in Wisconsin, when Clinton failed to show up to a single Wisconsin college between the Democratic National Convention and Election Day, Wisconsinites, young and old, returned the favor. Trump won the state by less than 23,000 votes. Green Party candidate Jill Stein got 31,000 votes.

In the months after the 2018 midterms,Rachel Haltom-Irwin, Barack Obama’s 2012 get-out-the-vote director, presented an idea to the Democratic National Committeefor a national college student training program that would center on the swing state ground game and make efficient use of young activists. Called Organizing Corps, the multimillion-dollar program targets mostly students of color. This past summer, the program trained 300 students in an Atlanta classroom, and then sent them back to their swing states with instructors who continued to coach them on the ground for another seven weeks. The process is designed to resemble a “medical residency,” Haltom-Irwin said. There are currently 25 members in Arizona. More young Arizonians will be trained in Tempe in January.

On the Republican side, a similar interest in college students has surfaced but for the opposite reason. Although polls showed that support for Trump among younger voters was dismal, he surpassed expectations, earning 37 percent of the millennial vote,exactly what Mitt Romney had gotten in 2012. Trump did particularly well with young white males. Turning Point’s Kirk, who had spent months on the trail advocating for the president, believed the election was a sign. “The president won and a lot of young people who love our country realized he was looking out for us,” Kirk told me. “He was restoring the idea of America, our values and our pride.”

Weeks after the election, Trump’s staff began meeting with the leaders of student youth groups to explore how issues around campus speech could be pushed to generate more support for a president who was already developing an unlikely cult following among certain young, mostly white evangelicals and hardliners who related to his resistance to “PC” culture. They saw him as a rebellious rabble-rouser bucking a liberal establishment that had been snubbing them since they’d arrived on their campuses. Buoyed by the momentum, groups like Prager University, a conservative website that produces videos designed for young undecideds, looked to expand their reach. And the Leadership Institute reformulated a two-day training program so they could take it on the road to the growing number of conservative student conferences.

But it was Turning Point, the group that has touted as its mission for seven years “to identify, educate, train and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets and limited government” that saw the most drastic uptick. The group says it will have increased the number of its chapters to more than 600 by this fall. Members didn’t see Trump’s win as a victorious ending, but the beginning of a new movement to return conservative ideas to their campuses.

Nowhere has this uptick been more pronounced than in Arizona. On one side is a pack of heavily energized progressive organizations that sprouted to life in 2010 on high school and college campuses as a response to the state’s crackdown on undocumented residents, led by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. During the 2018 midterms, these young activists helped to elect a new secretary of state and a new schools superintendent, the first Democrats to hold those offices in decades. They began to believe that if they could strengthen their campus ground game even more, especially at schools like ASU, they might be able to play a significant role in defeating Trump in Arizona in 2020.

On the other side is a group of young Arizona conservatives driven by Tyler Bowyer, an ASU grad who landed a seat on Arizona’s Board of Regents in 2011. In 2016, Trump’s victory felt to Bowyer like a personal one. While leading the Republican Party of Maricopa County, the largest in the state, he had organized one of the nation’s first Trump for president rallies. Shortly after the election, when Kirk went looking for a place to build out Turning Point’s headquarters, Bowyer had already been hired to develop a leadership program for the nonprofit and was building Turning Point’s West Coast presence. Kirk chose Arizona, at Bowyer’s prodding, and hired him to run the organization’s daily operations from his home state.

Turning Point’s headquartersare in a warehouse in an office park purposefully situated a mere 10 minutes from the Phoenix Airport, so students from other campuses can easily fly in and out for three- and four-day training sessions. It buzzes with the activity of dozens of young employees, many of whom recently graduated from ASU. WhenI arrived on an early October morning, passing through a carpeted entryway, I was ushered into a conference room that overlooks one of Phoenix’s jagged mountain ranges, decorated with photos of a beaming Kirk—with Trump, with Kellyanne Conway, with Jordan Peterson. There I met Bowyer, an effervescent 34-year-old wearing jeans, a baseball cap and a fleece jacket with Turning Point’s logo on the lapel. He was on the phone with the White House, he said, discussing plans for a black leadership summit booked for that weekend where black college students were scheduled to meet the president, which they did.

Many conservative donors and Turning Point members believe, seemingly rightly, that campuses and the professors that teach on them aren’t just pushers of liberal thought, but promoters of the Democratic Party platform. The place is studded with framed posters and placards taped to cubicles that bash the political leanings of the average campus progressive: “Taxation is Theft,” and “If socialism is so great why don’t people flee from Florida to Cuba?” There are desk chairs draped in American flag quilts and little elephant statues, a nod to the Grand Old Party mascot, scattered about.

When I was there several young, casually dressed staffers were inputting data on the 600-plus chapters regional directors were helping to develop, collecting the names and phone numbers of hundreds of young conservatives. In front of oversized computer screens, graphic designers mulled color schemes and fonts—using specs found in a 126-page brand guide for Turning Point—for material that is mailed to campuses across the country. This headquarters is also where Turning Point oversees its Professor Watch list, a controversial online archive of college and university professors who are said to have expressed rage at the president or dismay at right-wing policies.

Turning Point has a professional TV studio that feeds directly to Fox News and a huge production area where editors design memes and videos that take down campus “snowflakes” and leftist politicians. In the back, Alex Clark, the ripped-jean wearing host of Poplitics, a five-minute multi-platform show that Turning Point launched late last month, was finishing up the editing of her first episode.

I stepped into the office of the events administrator, Gage Huber, who was planning the group’s upcoming annual summit, held every December at the West Palm Beach Convention Center. A list of needed purchases—lighting, grass carpeting, new furniture—was hastily scrawled on a white board next to the words: Sense of Urgency. This year’s summit, Huber told me, was going for the look and feel of Coachella, the music festival. There are 5,000 expected attendees, and Turning Point says it has reserved rooms in seven hotels to house them.

Students for Trump, the group’s newly formed political arm, Bowyer made a point of telling me, would be opening in a few days in a warehouse across the parking lot. It would be organized in much the same way as its sister organization, with paid staff members in all 50 states, divided up by regions and territories, using the same methodology to determine what types of communications best persuade college students. Most of its efforts, he told me, would be clustered on large campuses in the 2020 battleground states.

He propped up a large, color-coded posterboard map of the country carved up into regions and later showed me a flow chart of the group’s employees. The same structure would be used for Students for Trump.

“We are going to run this thing like a midsize sales company,” Bowyer said.

Studies of donor patterns suggest that Republican groups are better than their Democratic counterparts at soliciting funds early for upcoming elections. That fundraising edge is probably why Turning Point feels like it is hurdling headfirst into the social media obsessed future, while its local progressive rival, One Arizona, resembles a lightly staffed suburban accounting firm. An umbrella organization that helps coordinate the state’s progressive groups, One Arizona does its work 12 miles away, on the top floor of a 1970s-era brick and stucco office building, in a suite of carpeted offices above Arizona’s school employees union.

But One Arizona’s drab offices mask a sophisticated operation that, like Students for Trump, carefully tracks what get-out-the-vote tactics—doors, phones, digital ads, mail, radio—work best. On both sides, nothing in this regard is left to chance. Bowyer’s team at Turning Point have spent hours exploring what colors elicit the warmest response, in-person and online (“Green,” he told me), or what kind of tone should be used for a video designed to change a 20-something’s opinion. (“Keep it as simple as possible, as acceptable as possible, as tongue-in-cheek as possible. That’s what’s going to be shared,” he said.) The research is mixed on whether a young person with undeveloped views about which side to vote for wants to hear his peers bash Elizabeth Warren or pump up Trump. Not mixed is how much fear of “socialism” resonates with young, middle-of-the-road voters. And a greasy hipster is a good way to elicit annoyance about sloppy complainers who don’t want to work very hard. “There aren’t that many of them,” Bowyer said. “But everyone knows one.”

“It doesn’t necessarily work with this generation to make voting a political thing,” said Baumann, the Global Strategy Group pollster. “Many young people believe that politics is broken and not working. You don’t want to remind them of something they don’t like. You want to make voting a positive, empowering, community experience.”

Yet at the same time, campus politics and national politics seem to have merged. On a Sunday in early November, Turning Point fans in Arizona and across the country celebrated “MAGA Pride Day,” a predictable stab at college Pride celebrations, as part of the official launch of Students for Trump. Students tossed their red MAGA hats in the air and posted their photos online. On the winter schedule are a roster of campus stopovers for Kirk and Don Jr., who made a series of college visits in the past few weeks to talk about Biden and impeachment and to rile up Democrats over the $50,000 the University of Florida at Gainesville spent to have him and Guilfoyle show up.

The results of that tour, however, have been checkered. Don Jr. was booed off the stage not long ago at the University of California at Los Angeles during an event to promote his new book,Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. In that case, the alt-right did the booing. But Don Jr. is unsurprisingly getting it from all sides. This week, Michael C. Murphy, the student body president who invited him to speak at the University of Florida, was accused of “malfeasance” and “abuse of power,” theTampa Bay Timesand the university’s independent student newspaper theAlligatorreported, for deploying student fees to pay for the appearance.

Like the rest of American life, basically everything has become a part of, or a response to, the Trump show. At the University of Florida, a student senator said the student president “colluded,” not with Russia or Ukraine in this case, but “with a member of the Donald Trump campaign.” The remedy, naturally, is a resolution of impeachment.

#Battleground #Campus #Foreign #Politics

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dinafbrownil · 5 years ago

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‘We Vape, We Vote’: How Vaping Crackdowns Are Politicizing Vapers

Vapers across the country are swarming Twitter, the White House comment line and statehouse steps with the message “We Vape, We Vote.”

They’re speaking out after a slew of attacks on their way of life. President Donald Trump announced his support for a vaping flavor ban in September. Some states temporarily banned the sales of vaping tools or flavors. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned people to stop vaping until public health experts can find the cause of more than a thousand cases of lung injuries nationwide.

The backlash from vapers and vape shop owners is getting louder as they argue their small businesses and their rights to what some see as a smoking cessation tool are being trampled.

“Rather than just vote a party ticket, they may in fact change their vote for anybody who comes out and wants to have a critical conversation about vaping,” warned Alex Clark, the CEO of the Consumer Advocates for Smoke-Free Alternatives Association, a self-described tobacco harm-reduction nonprofit in Plattsburgh, N.Y.

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Political groups are noticing that vaping is an identity, not just a hobby. Conservative powerhouse Grover Norquist, whose Americans for Tax Reform group hosted over 200 vaping advocates last month in Washington, D.C., cautions this is an electorate Trump should not ignore for 2020.

Vaping activists have already claimed success in a handful of races. Now some advocates say this burgeoning anger could shape the votes of the nation’s more than 10 million adult vapers and 20,000 vape shop owners.

“Are there enough vapers to swing states like Michigan?” added YouTube vaping influencer Matt Culley. “Absolutely.”

The Vaping Electorate

Jason Volpe has owned a vape shop in Caledonia, Mich., for six years. He supports raising the age to buy tobacco to 21 and encourages young customers to use products with lower levels of nicotine.

Volpe, who voted for both President Barack Obama and Trump, is not afraid to talk about politics in his shop. He gives discounts on Election Day to customers with an “I voted” sticker.

Lately, he said, his customers come in angry at what they call government overreach. They are unhappy with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who temporarily banned the sale of nearly all flavors of vaping liquid.

“That’s not supposed to happen in America,” Volpe said. “Are they going to come after our guns next?”

He said his customers — from the liberal to the “very red farmers” — feel under attack. It’s a common grievance in a community that sees itself as continually marginalized by the government even after some vapers used the devices to quit smoking.

There’s a strong libertarian and conservative streak in the movement that the Libertarian Party has capitalized on, selling “I Vape I Vote” T-shirts online alongside a pledge to “vote for candidates who support vaping.” Issues surrounding vaping, like supporting small businesses and promoting personal liberty, are a natural fit for this segment of the right.

Clark, the “smoke-free” advocate, is a registered Democrat who is disappointed that the left isn’t embracing vaping. He considers it hypocritical for them to back marijuana legalization but not vaping.

Volpe just wants his shop to stay open. He feels betrayed that people with heroin addictions can have a safe place to use drugs and that flavored alcohol is still on the market, but not the blueberry maple syrup-flavored vape juice he uses. The stress around the flavor ban sent him to the emergency room last month. What he thought was a heart attack turned out to be anxiety.

A Vaper Voting Block?

Vocal vapers point to Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s shocking election victory in 2016 as proof of their power.

Johnson became a folk hero on vaping websites after pushing back on proposed Food and Drug Administration vaping regulations. But early in fall 2016, the incumbent was down in the polls and not expected to recover.

Then Mark Block got involved. He’s the former chief of staff for Republican Herman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign and owned an online vape store at the time. Block said he met with at least a hundred vape shop workers across the state and leveraged their networks to contact what he estimates was upward of 200,000 voters. Some shops registered people to vote. He also started a political action committee, Vape PAC, which raised over $3,000 and distributed some 400,000 postcards.

After Johnson’s victory, the senator specifically thanked vapers: “You made tonight possible; I truly appreciate it. I will be on your side.”

But Tom Russell, campaign manager for Johnson’s opponent, former Sen. Russ Feingold, doesn’t buy the idea that vapers swung the election, saying he didn’t see any money or data to that effect.

“The reality is to the extent there was a Tea Party, previously unmotivated voting bloc, they were motivated by Donald Trump,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t ‘Vape Nation.’”

Vaping advocates also point to a 2014 state election in New Mexico as an early victory for their growing cause. That year, state Rep. Liz Thomson, a Democrat, lost her reelection bid to Republican Conrad James, a pro-vaping candidate who got a last-minute boost from Clark’s CASAA and vaping groups. The American Vaping Association put out a celebratory press release, and Americans for Tax Reform called Thomson vaping’s “first victim.”

Thomson, though, considers the loss a fluke, not the work of vapers. “I do not believe they had any effect in my race,” said the legislator, who later won back her seat. “It was a confluence of factors that was bigger than their group.”

In 2018, Block joined the late stages of the California race of embattled U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter. Known as the vaping congressman, the Republican has helped create pro-vaping legislation.

But he was indicted for campaign finance violations in 2018.

Reusing the 2016 playbook, Block went to vape store after vape store in the last three weeks of Hunter’s race, handing out postcards with an illustration of the congressman vaping that say “Blaze your own trail.”

Hunter narrowly won.

What’s Next

Those races were almost like a practice run. Right now, vaping activists are scrambling to create the framework for a broader political campaign.

Clark said CASAA feels pressure to make a voting guide, but it doesn’t have the resources to figure out which candidates are truly pro-vaping. The group’s first attempt at a guide in 2016 involved surveys sent to some 900 candidates, but Clark said only 200 or so of the “most fringe” candidates responded.

The American Vaping Association, a nonprofit advocacy organization in Stratford, Conn., is training vapers on the basics of politics — how to speak at local government meetings, register people to vote and talk to the press and elected officials without getting worked up, said its president, Gregory Conley. He also is focused on targeting primaries, where he said it’s a lot easier and less expensive to have impact.

The seeds of a grassroots movement seem to be in place. The organizing and get-out-the-vote work is happening online and in vape shops, which Norquist calls the “megachurches” of this community.

The Vapor Technology Association, a trade group that represents e-liquid manufacturers, vape shops and other vaping professionals, said state and local associations are ahead of the national organization when it comes to voter mobilization.

“We haven’t really had to move them because they’re doing it already,” said Chris Howard, the association’s board treasurer.

Vapers are terrified they’re about to lose what they say is the only tool that saved them from smoking — and saved their lives. That’s a powerful motivating force, Culley said. Plus, all the jobs lost from a potential flavor ban — which Trump had announced his support for on Sept. 11 — wouldn’t be a good look for the president, he said.

Trump followed that announcement with a tweet two days later that was more ambiguous about his intentions for a ban: “While I like the Vaping alternative to Cigarettes, we need to make sure this alternative is SAFE for ALL! Let’s get counterfeits off the market, and keep young children from Vaping!”

The damage was already done, according to vape shop owner Mike Moran, who offers customers voter registration paperwork in his two stores in New Jersey. He blames Trump’s initial tweet for kicking off the wave of state bans.

“If Donald Trump lets this go down because of his misstatement, I’ll vote against him,” Moran said. “His words caused this.”

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/we-vape-we-vote-how-vaping-crackdowns-are-politicizing-vapers/

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

It’s a long time until the 2020 general election, but there’s a good chance it will be competitive. After all, we live in a politically polarized era where most presidential elections are decided by relatively narrow margins (since 1988, in the single digits). Which means if the margins are as slim as they were in 2016, the race could come down to swing voters, or voters that tend to switch their support between the two major parties from year to year.

So we were curious: Just how many swing voters are there? A number of researchers have tried to tackle this question, and it turns out, there’s a pretty big range of answers.

That’s because defining who is and isn’t a swing voter isn’t easy, as it’s a small group. But estimates I previously made based on a couple of data sets suggest that there were around 10 million voters who shifted from voting for one major party in 2012 to the other in 2016, which accounted for roughly 7 percent of all votes cast. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a lot of people, but these voters probably did play a role in helping President Trump get elected because around three-quarters of those voters swung toward him rather than Hillary Clinton.

One way to get at this question is to use the approach of Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer, who wrote a 2008 book on the subject. To identify swing voters, Mayer used a set of questions from the American National Election Studies that asked respondents before the election to rate their feelings toward the candidates in terms of degrees (like a thermometer scale), with 0 being very negative and 100 being very positive. Mayer then looked at how respondents actually voted. Unsurprisingly, someone who rated the Republican 100 degrees better than the Democrat was basically certain to vote for the Republican, and vice versa. But Mayer also found that people who had similar feelings about both candidates were also the swingiest — the voters most likely to switch which party they supported typically rated the candidates no more than 15 degrees apart.

So if we apply Mayer’s methodology to the electorate in 2016, voters who rated Trump and Clinton within 15 degrees of each other in the ANES survey made up 9 percent of voters for the two major parties.1 To be clear, that doesn’t mean every one of these voters switched their support, but in Mayer’s view, this was the group of voters most open to persuasion by the campaigns. So even if there is evidence that the overall number of swing voters is declining, we’re still talking about at least a tenth of the electorate who might be willing to switch parties — and the fact that they broke for Trump in 2016 mattered.

Swing voters mostly broke for Trump in 2016

Share of the electorate and whether they voted for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in 2016, by the difference in how warmly they felt about each candidate before the election (higher ratings mean more positive feelings)

2016 vote Difference in Candidate Ratings Share of Electorate Clinton Trump Clinton more than 15 points above Trump 49% 97% 3% Trump more than 15 points above Clinton 42 2 98 Candidates no more than 15 points apart 9 40 60

Respondents were asked to rate candidates on a scale of 0 degrees to 100 degrees, like a thermometer, with 0 being very negative and 100 being very positive. The difference in candidate ratings is simply the size of the gap between those ratings for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This analysis is limited to respondents who voted for one of the two major parties.

Source: American National Election Studies

However, some political scientists, like Corwin Smidt, who studies vote choice at Michigan State, argue that the percentage of swing voters is, in fact, much lower and in decline — he estimated just 6 percent of all Americans voted for a different party in 2016 than the one they backed in 2012. Smidt uses a much narrower definition of what a swing voter is — someone who consistently votes, but switches back and forth between the two major parties.2 In other words, he excludes people who only occasionally vote, even if they don’t identify strongly with one party.

But what if you include more casual voters? Could the number of swing voters in the U.S. be much higher? A new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation certainly seems to suggest that’s the case, classifying 30 percent of registered voters as swing voters. Why is KFF’s number so much higher than our estimates using Mayer’s or Smidt’s approach? For one thing, KFF is trying to account for people who might not always vote but could turn out if motivated. Part of the problem with understanding just how many swing voters exist is that many potential voters don’t consistently turn out. They may vote only once in a while (what Smidt calls “surge and decliners”) or they may not vote at all (what Smidt calls “repeat nonvoters.”) KFF tries to capture some of this in its polling — 24 percent of its swing voters didn’t vote in the 2016 election, or about 7 percent of their overall sample.3

However, the number of truly persuadable voters is probably much smaller than the 30 percent top-line number in KFF’s report — just 16 percent of all voters told KFF either that they were undecided or that there was “a chance” they might vote for the other party’s candidate. As for the other 14 percent of respondents who were classified as swing voters, they said they were probably going to vote for one party and would not vote for the other side — but they also said they might not vote, period. This suggests that many off-and-on voters aren’t actually that “swingy” in their voting preferences. In his research, Smidt found that rates of swing voting among these more intermittent voters had also declined, telling FiveThirtyEight that, “Polarization makes party differences so clear to even non-voters or sporadic voters that the potential swing they could provide in an election is shrinking.”

So while not all 30 percent of the registered voters who KFF grouped into its “swing voters” category are actually open to being convinced by a good campaign, its polling does suggest that if turnout increases in 2020, there could be more swing voters than in 2016, since some of them spent the last presidential election cycle on the sidelines. As for who these voters might swing toward, KFF found that, on average, these voters were younger, less partisan and more moderate than voters who have already made up their minds. Additionally, they’re less politically engaged, with about one-third saying it “doesn’t matter” or “somewhat matters” who wins in 2020. This is in stark contrast to the more than 90 percent of decided voters who said that it “really matters” who wins. Notably, KFF’s data also found that swing voters were slightly more likely to identify as Republican or Republican-leaning than Democratic or Democratic-leaning, which is different from people who are not registered to vote, who tend to lean Democratic. (People who aren’t registered to vote also tend to be young, but are more likely to be nonwhite than KFF’s swing voters.) Still, Trump’s net approval rating among these voters was negative — 44 percent approved of his job performance compared to 53 percent who disapproved — so it’s not entirely clear which way the bulk of these voters might swing.

And of course, it is the Electoral College that decides presidential elections, not the popular vote, so where swing voters are based geographically can have huge electoral consequences. Catalist, a Democratic data firm, recently found that the shifts in vote margin from 2012 to 2016 in many swing states were predominantly driven by changes in vote choice rather than changes in turnout. According to their analysis, the change in vote margin in the three key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could mostly be explained by people shifting which party they voted for, rather than by changes in turnout. On the other hand, using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a large nationwide survey that focuses on respondents’ political attitudes, other researchers have suggested that depressed voter turnout or votes for third-party candidates could also explain a big part of the national swing toward the GOP. So while estimating the number of swing voters is challenging — and the number will vary depending on what data and definitions you use — the importance of swing voters should not be understated. How they swing in 2020 could make all the difference.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Geoffrey Skelley

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melindarowens · 7 years ago

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Final stretch in Alabama – POLITICO

With Scott Bland and Daniel Strauss

The following newsletter is an abridged version of Campaign Pro’s Morning Score. For an earlier morning read on exponentially more races — and for a more comprehensive aggregation of the day’s most important campaign news — sign up for Campaign Pro today. (http://www.politicopro.com/proinfo)

Story Continued Below

TWO MOORE DAYS — “How Trump came around to an accused child molester,” by POLITICO’s Eliana Johnson and Alex Isenstadt: “Mitch McConnell had publicly disavowed Roy Moore when the Senate majority leader received one of several phone calls from President Donald Trump. McConnell wanted Trump’s help to push Moore out of the Alabama Senate race after he’d been accused of harassing or molesting teenage girls. Instead, the president’s response left the straight-laced McConnell aghast. Trump, according to three sources briefed on the discussions, cast doubt on the claims leveled by Moore’s accusers. … Trump’s sentiment — he has also complained privately that the avalanche of charges taking down prominent men is spinning out of control — helps explain the president’s evolving attitude toward Moore over the past three weeks, when he has gone from uncharacteristic silence to a full-throated endorsement of the controversial candidate. The shift has benefited both men, helping the scandal-tarred Moore bounce back from what looked like a probable defeat to become a slight favorite in Tuesday’s special election — and offering the president a chance to claim credit if Moore ekes out a win.” Full story.

HUH — “Did Roy Moore spend the final weekend of the campaign in Philly?” by POLITICO’s Isenstadt and Gabriel Debenedetti: “In the last weekend of Alabama’s wild special Senate election, Doug Jones barnstormed the state with A-list Democrats in a bid to turn out black voters he desperately needs to win in the deep-red state. Republican Roy Moore disappeared. … Two Republicans briefed on Moore’s schedule before this weekend said he intended to spend Saturday in Philadelphia at the Army-Navy football game — a long-planned trip that the West Point grad had insisted he would still take this year despite the election.” Full story.

ICYMI — “Republicans for Jones wage lonely fight against Moore,” by POLITICO’s Daniel Strauss and Luis Sanchez: “A small group of Alabama Republicans have joined forces with Democrat Doug Jones’ campaign ahead of Tuesday’s special Senate election. But they are having trouble swaying many friends and family members to cross the aisle, too. …The Republicans for Jones include Gina Dearborn, an Alabama lobbyist and former Shelby staffer who has backed Jones on social media and is married to White House deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn. … Jones needs votes from at least 1 in 10 Republicans if he is to win, according to Alabama-based Democratic pollster Zac McCrary.” Full story.

— “Shelby: My state of Alabama ‘deserves better’ than Moore,” by POLITICO’s Louis Nelson. Full story.

— “Trump to cut robocall for Moore,” by POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt: “Donald Trump has agreed to record a robocall for Alabama Republican Roy Moore ahead of next week’s special election, the president’s most direct involvement in Alabama on behalf of the embattled candidate to date.” Full story.

MINNESOTA SCRAMBLE — “Minnesota governor’s top choice mulling ’18 run,” via The Associated Press: “Gov. Mark Dayton’s top pick to fill Sen. Al Franken’s Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Tina Smith, is considering also running for the seat next year, as Dayton faces pressure from top Democrats in Washington to appoint more than a mere caretaker, according to two Democrats familiar with the discussions.” Full story.

— “Senate vacancy creates opportunity, complications galore,” via Capitol View’s Brian Bakst. Full story.

— Pawlenty says he’s considering run for Franken seat, via the Associated Press: “Franken’s resignation has forced him and others to think about how to improve the state and nation, he said. He spoke after addressing a local Chamber of Commerce event.” Full story.

… IN TEXAS — “Growing list of Republicans aiming to oust Farenthold in 2018,” by the Houston Chronicle’s Jeremy Wallace: “The latest candidate to jump in the race is Bech Bruun, the former chairman of the Texas Water Development Board who is from Corpus Christ but lives in Austin. Bruun officially [qualified] for the 27th Congressional District primary on Friday morning. Earlier this week Republicans Jerry Hall, Eddie Gassman and Christopher K. Mapp all qualified for the primary as well. And a week earlier, former Victoria County Republican Party chairman Michael Cloud qualified for the March 6 primary.” Full story.

— ICYMI from NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers: “’I think the filing deadline hasn’t happened in Texas and Blake Farenthold has some thinking to do about whether he wants to run for reelection or not,’ Stivers told Business Insider, adding that the GOP needs to ��push folks where there’s serious allegations or proven allegations aside.’ ‘We have zero tolerance for that kind of behavior and we’ve made that clear,’ Stivers said.” Full story.

Days until the 2018 election: 330.

Thanks for joining us! You can email tips to the Campaign Pro team at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

You can also follow us on Twitter: @politicoscott, @ec_schneider, @politicokevin, @danielstrauss4 and @maggieseverns.

BETWEEN THE LINES — Supreme Court adds another redistricting case for this term: Maryland’s Benisek v. Lamone, which challenges Maryland’s Democrat-drawn 7-1 congressional map as unconstitutional because it infringes on Republican voters’ First Amendment rights to political speech and association. See the SCOTUS order here.

— “Inside the gerrymandering data top Pa. Republicans fought to keep private,” by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jonathan Lai: “Lawyers for House Speaker Mike Turzai and Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati had fought to keep private a trove of documents as they prepared for the trial, which began Monday in Philadelphia. They also sought to block the documents in a separate, state gerrymandering trial that begins next week in Harrisburg. Among them are maps that contain detailed data on partisanship across the state, which experts said appear to confirm widespread suspicion that Republicans had intentionally drawn the map to favor their party. One map’s database contains details for each of the more than 9,000 voting districts in the state, including the races and ethnicities of voters and results from state and national elections from 2004 through 2010. Also included are metrics that appear to rate each voting district’s level of partisanship.” Full story.

2020 WATCH — “DNC ‘unity’ panel recommends huge cut in superdelegates,” by POLITICO’s Kevin Robillard: “A commission set up to help reform the Democratic presidential nominating process has voted to restrict the number of superdelegates as part of a slew of changes. The Democratic Party’s Unity Reform Commission is recommending cutting the number of superdelegates by about 400, equal to a 60 percent reduction. Many of the remaining superdelegates would see their vote tied to the results in their state. The commission is also suggesting that absentee voting be required as an option for presidential caucus participants. It is calling for automatic voter registration and same-day voter registration. And it wants to mandate public reporting of raw vote totals from caucus states.” Full story.

HOUSE INTERNAL — “Democrat commissions poll pointing to tough reelection for Ryan,” by POLITICO’s Edward-Isaac Dovere: “Paul Ryan might be facing a tough reelection race back home next year — provided anyone finds out who his biggest Democratic challenger is. A new internal poll from Randy Bryce, the ironworker who blasted onto the national political scene in June with a viral video, claims he trails by just 6 points in Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district, 46 to 40. But the same poll from the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group shows that 79 percent of likely voters surveyed in late November don’t even know enough about Bryce to say they view him favorably or unfavorably.” Full story.

— “Most approve of job Reynolds is doing, but nearly half want another governor,” via The Des Moines Register: “Just more than half of Iowans approve of the job Gov. Kim Reynolds is doing, but nearly as many are ready for someone new to hold the governor’s office, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows. … Yet just 35 percent say they would vote for Reynolds if the election were held today, and 49 percent say it’s time for someone new. Sixteen percent aren’t sure.” Full story.

POST-MORTEM — “After bruising losses, Virginia Republicans gather to find path out of wilderness ahead of 2018,” by The Washington Post’s Jenna Portnoy and Laura Vozzella: “Virginia Republicans tried to make the best of a grim electoral landscape this weekend at their annual retreat, which marked Ed Gillespie’s first public appearance since his loss in the governor’s race seemed to drive the party further into the political wilderness. Gillespie’s contest became a symbol of a party struggling to bridge the gap between President Trump’s populism and the need to appeal to minorities and independent voters in a purple state. The same forces will be in play in the coming year, when the GOP will try to unseat Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and has to defend seven congressional seats in the state.” Full story.

GETTING THE NOD — DFA endorses four California House challengers: Democracy for America announced it’s endorsing four Democratic House challengers in California: Bryan Caforio (CA-25), Laura Oatman (CA-48), Sam Jammal (CA-39), and Mike Levin (CA-49).

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I don’t think — President Trump has a fear of the Lord, the fear of the wrath of God, which leads one to more humility,” — California Gov. Jerry Brown on Trump, POLITICO reported.

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source https://capitalisthq.com/final-stretch-in-alabama-politico/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/12/final-stretch-in-alabama-politico.html

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everettwilkinson · 7 years ago

Text

Final stretch in Alabama – POLITICO

With Scott Bland and Daniel Strauss

Story Continued Below

— “Shelby: My state of Alabama ‘deserves better’ than Moore,” by POLITICO’s Louis Nelson. Full story.

— “Senate vacancy creates opportunity, complications galore,” via Capitol View’s Brian Bakst. Full story.

— ICYMI from NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers: “’I think the filing deadline hasn’t happened in Texas and Blake Farenthold has some thinking to do about whether he wants to run for reelection or not,’ Stivers told Business Insider, adding that the GOP needs to ‘push folks where there’s serious allegations or proven allegations aside.’ ‘We have zero tolerance for that kind of behavior and we’ve made that clear,’ Stivers said.” Full story.

Days until the 2018 election: 330.

Thanks for joining us! You can email tips to the Campaign Pro team at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

You can also follow us on Twitter: @politicoscott, @ec_schneider, @politicokevin, @danielstrauss4 and @maggieseverns.

Source link

from CapitalistHQ.com https://capitalisthq.com/final-stretch-in-alabama-politico/

#TrumpNews #CapitalistHQ.com

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project1461-blog · 8 years ago

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Failing democracy

“Yet, after all, we may now, in these days of disunion and terror, venture to ask if our government has, after all, ever been a Republic?” -- New York Times Editorial, March 14, 1861

It’s 2017 and the democratic experiment in America is failing. I do not say this as click bait or dramatic hyperbole. I’m stating in plain language the unavoidable truth of our current situation.

Our nation is becoming increasingly undemocratic, and we would be wise to take note of this and work to address this reality before the powder keg we are sitting on ignites. History has taught us, from the Revolutionary War to the Arab Spring, that the combination of government that is detached from the will of the people, and attached to policies that oppress, exploit and harm, is usually explosive. We are, in this historical moment, on the precipice. We can choose to intentionally make our system more democratic, more responsive to the will and needs of the people, and more just, or we can risk moving from a failing to a failed democracy.

The evidence to support this position, as I see it, is overwhelming.

Low Turnout in Elections A shockingly small percentage of our population turns out for elections. Even with well beyond a billion dollars spent on the presidential campaigns alone, turnout on Nov 8th was a pathetic 55.4%. This places us towards the very bottom of a comparative list of other wealthy, western democracies. The reasons for low turnout are plentiful, from the mess of a registration system we have, to the closing of polling locations and reductions in voting hours, to the pitiful conditions of precincts in many areas that make voting a long and costly process, to the massive efforts at voter suppression that are now in place in many states, to the low opinion people have of the available candidates, to the distrust many people have of a system where politicians are more accountable to their funders than their constituents. No matter how you slice it, when nearly 45% of our eligible population does not participate in elections, we have a crisis on our hands.

Misrepresentation in the Senate Among the many complexities built into our federalist system is the idea that the Senate would have equal representation for each state. This made for a strategic compromise among the 13 colonies who thought of themselves as sovereign entities, and gave some assurance to states with no major urban areas or centers of dense population. But today it means that the Senate is a glaringly undemocratic institution, which grants vastly disproportionate power to small, Republican leaning states, at the expense of the majority of the people in our country.

What this looks like at the extremes is that in California, the country’s most populated state, each of their 2 Democratic Senators represents 1 vote in the Senate per 19.6 million people. Whereas in Wyoming, the nation’s least populated state, each of their 2 Republican Senators represents 1 vote per 293,000 people. This means that people in Wyoming are represented with 67 times the weight as each person in California.

43% of our country lives in states that have elected 2 Democratic Senators (32% for Republicans) and a full 67% of the nation’s population lives in states that have elected at least 1 Democratic Senator. And yet despite this decidedly Democratic lean, we see Republicans holding a 52-48 majority in the Senate (including 2 Independent Senators who caucus with Democrats). And this does not even count the fact that the nearly 700,000 heavily Democratic leaning residents of Washington DC receive no representation in the Senate at all.

Gerrymandering in the House of Representatives Using presidential elections as a barometer, and since there are very few split ticket voters left in America, we would expect that representation in the House would closely mirror what we see at the top of the ticket. On Nov 8th, Hillary Clinton received 48% of the vote (Trump 46%), and nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump overall. We would expect then, that in the House we would see something close to a 50/50 split among Democrats and Republicans, with a likely edge to Democrats. The reality is troublingly different. Currently, of the 435 seats in the House, Republicans control 240 (55%) to Democrats 193 (44%).

The discrepancy is even worse in some of the most important swing states. In Michigan where the presidential election was a statistical tie, Republicans control 64% of the congressional seats. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania where there were comparable ties between Clinton and Trump, Republicans control 63% and 72% of the congressional seats respectively. And there are other dramatically disturbing cases like this in states like Virginia, Florida, and Ohio. This misrepresentation in congress gives the Republicans a nearly impenetrable majority on all votes, despite being the minority party nationally.

As Republicans have taken control of state legislatures and Governors mansions across the country, they have redrawn voting districts to favor their candidates. This is a mostly legal, but highly undemocratic practice known as gerrymandering. It has historically been done by Democrats as well, but with modern technology, it is being wielded by Republicans to create a political map whereby Republicans with views that are strongly out of line with the people can win and hold office despite major opposition. Currently Republicans control the governor’s office in 33 states, and control both chambers of the state legislature in 32 states. To any observer, this level of disconnect between the views of the people and the reality of those in power suggests a rigged system that is not accountable to the people.

The Electoral College A core principle of any democratic society (technically we mean a republic) is that the people will elect their representatives directly. We do this for every elected office in this country, from local school boards, to members of congress. The only elected position we don’t elect directly is the most powerful of them all, president of the United States. The Electoral College is offensive to democracy on its face. Its origins are reflective of the strong distrust of the masses that James Madison and our founding fathers had. That today we preserve this unnecessary institution is laughable. If any other nation on earth had such an institution, we would call their elections a sham, and perhaps suggest UN monitors be put in place. That twice in the last 17 years, the Electoral College has placed a president in power who did not carry the popular vote is shameful. No democracy can sustain itself when its single most important elected office is regularly given to a person and a party that does not reflect the will of the people.

Voter Suppression 2016 saw the first presidential election take place in more than 50 years without the Voting Rights Act in place. That the story of the systematic suppression of voting rights of African Americans, the elderly, the poor, college students, and other minority groups got little to no coverage during the campaign illustrates a media that was complicit in the Republicans’ return to Jim Crow style politics, and an unforgiveable failure of the Democrats to fight for some of their most loyal constituents. Following the horrific Supreme Court ruling stripping the Voting Rights Act of all meaningful power, 14 states enacted voter suppression laws, including many of the swing sates that decided Trump’s Electoral College victory. The measures they enacted varied from voter ID laws, to closing of polling places, to restrictions on early voting, to purging of voter rolls of thousands of registered voters of color. In a democratic system with abysmally low turnout already, that states would be putting into place intentional measures to suppress the vote is as strong a signal as there can be to the people that our votes are not valued.

The aggregate effect of these realities in our political system is extremely dangerous. From the right, we see the escalating fight to preserve power via an unrepresentative, and unjust system. Currently this manifests in a strong surge towards authoritarian rule, with leadership and support from some of the most virulent hate groups among us. And from the left it is fueling a potentially explosive combination of a majority that recognizes the need to protest and oppose those in power, while there is very little aspect of government that is responsive to their demands. If we continue to persist in this status quo, I fear we will come to face one of two outcomes, some version of corporate authoritarian rule, or violent revolution to prevent it.

So what can be done to take a different path? I would argue that there are some specific policies we could enact that would make our political system fundamentally more democratic and allow for a representative democracy that is responsive to the people, rather than corporate interests and wealthy funders. First, we must remove money from elections. Citizens United has been disastrous at accelerating the legalized corruption of politicians, but we must go further than overturning that decision. As long as politicians can be bought and sold through campaign contributions, dark money, and can use their office to personally enrich themselves, nothing will change. We need public funding of elections, stronger limits on individual contributions, and greater transparency around where any money in the system comes from.

Second, we must address gerrymandering with non-partisan commissions that draw districts equitably. Third, we need states to pass legislation stating that their electors in the Electoral College will cast their votes with the winner of the national popular vote. In the near future, it’s inconceivable that we would have a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, but we could have a critical mass of states adopt this type of law. Even if a few states, like Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio did this, it would revolutionize presidential campaigns and essentially guarantee the presidency to the winner of the popular vote.

Fourth, we need the reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act with even stronger provisions to ensure that states act affirmatively to expand voter participation. This should include more polling locations, longer hours, more early voting, weekend voting, transportation for those who need it, automatic voter registration, enfranchisement for those convicted of felonies, and pre-clearance for any law impacting voting from any state with documented history of voter suppression.

Wiser people than I have said that sometimes, when in a crisis, the only way out is through. It is going to be difficult for us to avoid the perils of authoritarian rule, and the unpredictability of violent revolution. But we have the choice to save what is left of our democracy and build upon it something new and better. I hope, for all of us, that we decide it’s worth saving.

Jeff Garrett is an educator, who has worked with historically underserved schools in New York City and Los Angeles, and is a passionate advocate for social justice.

#democracy #gerrymandering #california #senate #congress #house of representatives #electoral college #voter suppression #voter turnout #elections

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