TO COMMENT CLICK HERE
welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
december 13, 2018
Noam chomsky: “Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites,”
what kind of democracy condones vote suppression?
The Informed American Voter
headlines
*ABSENTEE-BALLOT FRAUD SCANDAL SPEAKS TO WIDER ISSUE OF RACISM IN NORTH CAROLINA
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A woman says she was paid to collect absentee ballots by a convicted felon with ties to GOP campaign
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Republican Candidate May Have Literally Stolen Ballots From Elderly Black Voters
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Celebrates Eight-Year Sentence Against Woman Who Accidentally Voted Illegally(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Latino turnout up 174% in 2018 midterms elections, Democrats say
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WTF White Women?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Deadlocked House race in Maine will be the first decided by ranked-choice voting
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Throwback Thursday: Did Green Party candidate cost Democrats the Arizona Senate race?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HERE’S YOUR MIDTERM ANALYSIS: AMERICA IS BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY ANGRY OLD WHITE GUYS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*While America Voted, Many Chose Not to (or Couldn't)
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Ilhan Omar, 2018 Was the Year of Women of Color
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HERE IS HOW TO ‘FOLLOW THE MONEY’ AND LOOK FOR CORRUPTION WHEN IT COMES TO POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Hidden Money Funding the Midterms
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WHAT'S IN A NAME? ONE-THIRD OF U.S. VOTERS DON'T KNOW CANDIDATES: REUTERS/IPSOS POLL
(ARTICLE BELOW)
MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*MAP PORN: IF "DID NOT VOTE" WAS A CANDIDATE...( article below)
The Political Punchline
Putting the Mock in Democracy
Absentee-ballot fraud scandal speaks to wider issue of racism in North Carolina
The state elections board will not certify results in the ninth congressional race after reports of ‘ballot harvesters’ emerged
Khushbu Shahin Bladenboro, North Carolina
the guardian
Wed 12 Dec 2018 06.00 EST
One night last October, Jerry Ward, 49, was gathered with about a dozen other people at a relative’s house in downtown Bladenboro, a small city of just 1,700 souls in rural North Carolina. Then a young, white woman came to the door, asking about getting people inside to vote early in the upcoming and fiercely contested midterm elections.
“It was a whole house full of us and the girl came after dark and she was like saying that we could vote early and we was about to fill in them papers but we didn’t. She said, ‘I’ll fill them out for you’,” said Ward who, like the other voters quoted in this story, is African American.
The comment raised suspicions among those gathered, not least because in North Carolina, like much of the rural south, memories still linger about the fight for voting rights for black residents – and the equally fierce fight to resist them.
The group decided not to accept the woman’s offer. In the end, Ward voted in person. So did everyone else in the house that night.
They were right to be suspicious. After election day, which saw a narrow win for the Republican candidate, the North Carolina state board of elections announced it would not certify the results in the ninth congressional district in which Bladenboro sits. Within days, it emerged “ballot harvesters” had been hired by a veteran political operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, to pick up absentee ballots in Bladen county, the local news station WSOC-TV reported. Some of those ballots never turned up.
It emerged Dowless worked for the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, who beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by just 905 votes. Shortly after, McCready recanted his concession of the contest.
In an interview with WSOC-TV, one of the women involved in picking up ballots said Dowless “paid her $75 to $100 a week to go around and pick up finished absentee ballots”.
An analysis by the News & Observer found that the ballots of minority voters went unreturned to counting stations at a disproportionate rate. More than four out of 10 ballots requested by African Americans did not make it back to election officials, the analysis showed. That number jumps to more than 60% for Native American voters. In comparison, white voters’ ballots non-return rate was just 17%.
The news from Bladenboro and other towns in the district has sent shock waves throughout the country. Usually fights over voter suppression involve complex arguments over voter ID laws, how to register street addresses or disenfranchising felons. But the apparently brazen “harvesting” of ballots which then disappear without being counted has stunned many in the district and left them shaken.
Ward’s neighbor, Judy Willis, is upset about someone potentially trying to cancel votes. “It’s like you’re not a person any more,” she began, adding: “Some people have no conscience.” She is clearly rattled. “Stealing a vote? That means I can’t trust you to go and get a glass of water out of my kitchen.”
In the Ward’s house, family members have come to a consensus there should be another election. The state board of elections says an “investigation into claims of absentee voting irregularities is ongoing”, according to a press release on its website.
“They’ve been doing this for years,” said Ward’s sister-in-law Tiajuana Mock, 63, as she walked into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee. “I’m not surprised this happened in Bladenboro, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened anywhere. There are race issues here, definitely. People give you a look if you go into some of these restaurants where only white people work.”
A few streets over, Jeneva Legions, 30, stood outside her apartment door draped in a “Happy Holidays” sash at the Village Oaks Apartments, cigarette in hand. She said two women came by, a couple of days after she got her absentee ballot, instructed her on filling it out. A little while later, one of them returned and said they’d take care of it for her.
“This is the first time I did [absentee voting] and next thing I know, someone came by and said they could pick it up. She said, ‘Just don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it.’”
In North Carolina, according to the state board of elections’ website, “Only the voter or the voter’s near relative (spouse, brother, sister, parent, grandparent, child, grandchild, mother-in-law, father-in-law, daughter-in-law, son-in-law, stepparent, stepchild or qualified legal guardian) may deliver an absentee ballot in person.”
Legions’s ballot, according to the state’s voter lookup website, was not returned to be counted.
“This was my first time using an absentee ballot. Now I know to just go in and do it myself,” she said.
Her neighbor, Jessica Locklear, 26, was at a friend’s apartment, when a woman came up to the door at the neighboring apartment complex in the afternoon. The woman told her friend she’d be happy to take her ballot back for her, but that made the friend uncomfortable. In the end, when the woman came back, her friend told her she had ripped up the ballot and would go vote in person. Locklear watched her rip up the ballot.
“There’s too much weird stuff going on around here,” she said.
That’s the way the world operates, Mock said, back across town. The ballot fraud and the resulting investigation is just one part of the bigger racism issue going on in town, she added.
“They’re trying to get rid of us,” Mock said, referring to the disappearing absentee ballots. “But where are we going? We’re American.”
“It was a whole house full of us and the girl came after dark and she was like saying that we could vote early and we was about to fill in them papers but we didn’t. She said, ‘I’ll fill them out for you’,” said Ward who, like the other voters quoted in this story, is African American.
The comment raised suspicions among those gathered, not least because in North Carolina, like much of the rural south, memories still linger about the fight for voting rights for black residents – and the equally fierce fight to resist them.
The group decided not to accept the woman’s offer. In the end, Ward voted in person. So did everyone else in the house that night.
They were right to be suspicious. After election day, which saw a narrow win for the Republican candidate, the North Carolina state board of elections announced it would not certify the results in the ninth congressional district in which Bladenboro sits. Within days, it emerged “ballot harvesters” had been hired by a veteran political operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, to pick up absentee ballots in Bladen county, the local news station WSOC-TV reported. Some of those ballots never turned up.
It emerged Dowless worked for the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, who beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by just 905 votes. Shortly after, McCready recanted his concession of the contest.
In an interview with WSOC-TV, one of the women involved in picking up ballots said Dowless “paid her $75 to $100 a week to go around and pick up finished absentee ballots”.
An analysis by the News & Observer found that the ballots of minority voters went unreturned to counting stations at a disproportionate rate. More than four out of 10 ballots requested by African Americans did not make it back to election officials, the analysis showed. That number jumps to more than 60% for Native American voters. In comparison, white voters’ ballots non-return rate was just 17%.
The news from Bladenboro and other towns in the district has sent shock waves throughout the country. Usually fights over voter suppression involve complex arguments over voter ID laws, how to register street addresses or disenfranchising felons. But the apparently brazen “harvesting” of ballots which then disappear without being counted has stunned many in the district and left them shaken.
Ward’s neighbor, Judy Willis, is upset about someone potentially trying to cancel votes. “It’s like you’re not a person any more,” she began, adding: “Some people have no conscience.” She is clearly rattled. “Stealing a vote? That means I can’t trust you to go and get a glass of water out of my kitchen.”
In the Ward’s house, family members have come to a consensus there should be another election. The state board of elections says an “investigation into claims of absentee voting irregularities is ongoing”, according to a press release on its website.
“They’ve been doing this for years,” said Ward’s sister-in-law Tiajuana Mock, 63, as she walked into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee. “I’m not surprised this happened in Bladenboro, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened anywhere. There are race issues here, definitely. People give you a look if you go into some of these restaurants where only white people work.”
A few streets over, Jeneva Legions, 30, stood outside her apartment door draped in a “Happy Holidays” sash at the Village Oaks Apartments, cigarette in hand. She said two women came by, a couple of days after she got her absentee ballot, instructed her on filling it out. A little while later, one of them returned and said they’d take care of it for her.
“This is the first time I did [absentee voting] and next thing I know, someone came by and said they could pick it up. She said, ‘Just don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it.’”
In North Carolina, according to the state board of elections’ website, “Only the voter or the voter’s near relative (spouse, brother, sister, parent, grandparent, child, grandchild, mother-in-law, father-in-law, daughter-in-law, son-in-law, stepparent, stepchild or qualified legal guardian) may deliver an absentee ballot in person.”
Legions’s ballot, according to the state’s voter lookup website, was not returned to be counted.
“This was my first time using an absentee ballot. Now I know to just go in and do it myself,” she said.
Her neighbor, Jessica Locklear, 26, was at a friend’s apartment, when a woman came up to the door at the neighboring apartment complex in the afternoon. The woman told her friend she’d be happy to take her ballot back for her, but that made the friend uncomfortable. In the end, when the woman came back, her friend told her she had ripped up the ballot and would go vote in person. Locklear watched her rip up the ballot.
“There’s too much weird stuff going on around here,” she said.
That’s the way the world operates, Mock said, back across town. The ballot fraud and the resulting investigation is just one part of the bigger racism issue going on in town, she added.
“They’re trying to get rid of us,” Mock said, referring to the disappearing absentee ballots. “But where are we going? We’re American.”
A woman says she was paid to collect absentee ballots by a convicted felon with ties to GOP campaign
She also says she didn't mail in the ballots she collected, delivering them directly to the GOP operative instead.
ADAM PECK - thinkprogress
DEC 4, 2018, 9:52 AM
As investigators continue to figure out what exactly transpired on Election Day in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district — where Republican candidate Mark Harris increasingly appears to be the beneficiary of one of the largest cases of election fraud in U.S. history — one name keeps coming up: Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr.
Dowless, who goes by McCrae, is a fixture in local North Carolina politics. He was elected vice chair of the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation District, and has been attached to numerous Republican campaigns throughout the years, including the Harris campaign in 2018.
But Dowless is also a well-known convict. He served a six month prison sentence in the 1990s for a felony fraud conviction, and was indicted for perjury. His criminal record stretches back to the 1980s, and he has been implicated in previous schemes to illegally collect unreturned absentee ballots, most recently in 2016.
On Monday, local television station WSOCTV caught up with Ginger Eason, one of the canvassers whose signature frequently appeared on accepted absentee ballots as a witness. She told a reporter that she was paid between $75 and $100 per week by Dowless to pick up absentee ballots from around Bladen County.
“I was helping McCrae pick up ballots,” Eason told the network.
Eason also admitted to not mailing in the absentee ballots she collected. Instead, she delivered them directly to Dowless.
The station also tracked down Dowless himself, but he refused to answer any questions about his role in the unfolding scandal.
Harris has denied any wrongdoing, and continues to demand the state’s board of elections certify the results of Election Day. The nine-member panel has thus far refused, and will conduct an evidentiary hearing in two weeks to determine how to proceed. Though rare, the state could call for a new election entirely.
RELATED: Shady North Carolina election just got even shadier: Republican candidate knew suspected vote-rigger
Mark Harris reportedly even recommended his campaign's "independent contractor" to other politicians.
Dowless, who goes by McCrae, is a fixture in local North Carolina politics. He was elected vice chair of the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation District, and has been attached to numerous Republican campaigns throughout the years, including the Harris campaign in 2018.
But Dowless is also a well-known convict. He served a six month prison sentence in the 1990s for a felony fraud conviction, and was indicted for perjury. His criminal record stretches back to the 1980s, and he has been implicated in previous schemes to illegally collect unreturned absentee ballots, most recently in 2016.
On Monday, local television station WSOCTV caught up with Ginger Eason, one of the canvassers whose signature frequently appeared on accepted absentee ballots as a witness. She told a reporter that she was paid between $75 and $100 per week by Dowless to pick up absentee ballots from around Bladen County.
“I was helping McCrae pick up ballots,” Eason told the network.
Eason also admitted to not mailing in the absentee ballots she collected. Instead, she delivered them directly to Dowless.
The station also tracked down Dowless himself, but he refused to answer any questions about his role in the unfolding scandal.
Harris has denied any wrongdoing, and continues to demand the state’s board of elections certify the results of Election Day. The nine-member panel has thus far refused, and will conduct an evidentiary hearing in two weeks to determine how to proceed. Though rare, the state could call for a new election entirely.
RELATED: Shady North Carolina election just got even shadier: Republican candidate knew suspected vote-rigger
Mark Harris reportedly even recommended his campaign's "independent contractor" to other politicians.
Republican Candidate May Have Literally Stolen Ballots From Elderly Black Voters
Jack Crosbie - splinternews.com
11/30/18 4:16pm
On Thursday, we wrote about the extremely weird goings on in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District, where Republican Mark Harris beat Democrat Dan McCready by as few as 905 votes, according to unofficial returns. McCready conceded the race the day after the election, but state election officials quickly started to throw up red flags. On Tuesday, the elections board voted unanimously to not certify the results of the election; today, it voted to continue investigating and to hold a meeting on December 21 to “assess allegations of fraud,” according to the Washington Post.
The Post has more detail on those allegations today, and they’re absolutely shocking. From the Post:
The board is collecting sworn statements from voters in rural Bladen County, near the South Carolina border, who described people coming to their doors and urging them to hand over their absentee ballots, sometimes without filling them out. Others described receiving absentee ballots by mail that they had not requested. It is illegal to take someone else’s ballot and turn it in.
Among the allegations is that an individual who worked for the Harris campaign coordinated the effort to fill in, or discard, the ballots of Democratic voters who might have otherwise voted for McCready. Several of the affidavits come from elderly African-American voters.
What... the fuck. If these allegations are true, this is about as blatant as election tampering can get. Political operatives coming to the doors of elderly black voters and telling them to hand over their ballots, then discarding them if they were voting Democrat or filling them out for the Republican? Absolutely wild, and despicable.
We’re still waiting on a response from either the Harris or McCready campaigns, but we did get one from Rep. Robert Pittinger, the Republican incumbent congressman from the district who was primaried by Harris, a right-wing Baptist pastor, earlier this year. (As my colleague Nick Martin wrote yesterday, that election was also rife with weirdness.) Pittinger referred Splinter to an interview he did with a Raleigh news channel, in which he said there were “some pretty unsavory people out there, particularly in Bladen County,” when asked about irregularities in the election.
“Pretty unsavory” seems like an understatement. Local reporters are already starting to collect some of the affidavits as they come in:
If Harris pulled something like this in both the primary and the general, I’m honestly not sure what happens next. Per Gerry Cohen, a former special counsel to the NC general assembly, there could be “other remedies” involved, including the possibility of calling a whole new election, which would start over completely with a primary for both parties.
Who knows if that’ll happen, but a total election re-do would be a hell of a thing to see. We’re assuming that Harris would not be allowed to try to allegedly fraud the whole thing up again.
The Post has more detail on those allegations today, and they’re absolutely shocking. From the Post:
The board is collecting sworn statements from voters in rural Bladen County, near the South Carolina border, who described people coming to their doors and urging them to hand over their absentee ballots, sometimes without filling them out. Others described receiving absentee ballots by mail that they had not requested. It is illegal to take someone else’s ballot and turn it in.
Among the allegations is that an individual who worked for the Harris campaign coordinated the effort to fill in, or discard, the ballots of Democratic voters who might have otherwise voted for McCready. Several of the affidavits come from elderly African-American voters.
What... the fuck. If these allegations are true, this is about as blatant as election tampering can get. Political operatives coming to the doors of elderly black voters and telling them to hand over their ballots, then discarding them if they were voting Democrat or filling them out for the Republican? Absolutely wild, and despicable.
We’re still waiting on a response from either the Harris or McCready campaigns, but we did get one from Rep. Robert Pittinger, the Republican incumbent congressman from the district who was primaried by Harris, a right-wing Baptist pastor, earlier this year. (As my colleague Nick Martin wrote yesterday, that election was also rife with weirdness.) Pittinger referred Splinter to an interview he did with a Raleigh news channel, in which he said there were “some pretty unsavory people out there, particularly in Bladen County,” when asked about irregularities in the election.
“Pretty unsavory” seems like an understatement. Local reporters are already starting to collect some of the affidavits as they come in:
If Harris pulled something like this in both the primary and the general, I’m honestly not sure what happens next. Per Gerry Cohen, a former special counsel to the NC general assembly, there could be “other remedies” involved, including the possibility of calling a whole new election, which would start over completely with a primary for both parties.
Who knows if that’ll happen, but a total election re-do would be a hell of a thing to see. We’re assuming that Harris would not be allowed to try to allegedly fraud the whole thing up again.
justice in a shithole!!!
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Celebrates Eight-Year Sentence Against Woman Who Accidentally Voted Illegally
By MARK JOSEPH STERN - slate
NOV 29, 20185:16 PM
Earlier this month, the Texas 2nd Court of Appeals affirmed Rosa Maria Ortega’s eight-year prison sentence for illegal voting. Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the decision in a triumphant press release boasting of Ortega’s draconian punishment. But there is nothing just about the fact that Ortega may spend the next eight years languishing behind bars for unknowingly casting illegal ballots. To the contrary, her sentence is wildly out of proportion with her crime—the possible result of prosecutorial chicanery during closing arguments that has no place in a courtroom. And it’s yet another example of prosecutors using isolated cases of illegal voting to intimidate legitimate voters out of casting a ballot.
Although Paxton has presented Ortega’s conduct as evidence that voter fraud is a genuine problem in Texas, her case bears no resemblance to the paranoid myth of immigrants covertly swinging elections. Ortega is a lawful permanent resident who was brought to the United States as a baby. She has a sixth-grade education and did not know that she could not legally vote. In October 2014, she sent a voter-registration application to the Tarrant County Elections Administration, in which she indicated that she was not a citizen. When the office sent her a rejection letter, she called to ask why. An employee, Delores Stevens, explained that Ortega had checked the “No” box for citizenship and could not register unless she checked “Yes.” Ortega mailed in a new application, this time checking the “Yes” box to indicate U.S. citizenship.
The office was fully aware of the discrepancies between her two applications. It still registered her to vote.
Shortly thereafter, the Texas attorney general received a tip that Ortega was voting illegally. An investigator with the attorney general’s office began to examine her case and discovered that she had voted in Dallas County in 2012 and 2014. Official paperwork revealed that Ortega presented her resident alien card and Social Security card to register, acknowledging that she was not a citizen. For some reason, Dallas County registered her anyway. (She registered as a Republican.)
Investigators then interrogated Ortega at her house. She stated that she was not a citizen but had checked “Yes” on the citizenship box in Tarrant County because Dallas County had previously allowed her to vote. Three months later, prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant, charging Ortega with illegal voting. Ortega insisted that she had simply made an innocent mistake and rejected a plea deal, believing no reasonable jury would convict her. Instead, after a trial, a Tarrant County jury found her guilty on two counts of illegal voting. It sentenced her to eight years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Ortega promptly lost custody of her four children and will likely be deported once her sentence is finished.
By any measure, this punishment is extraordinarily harsh. Eight years imprisonment for a nonviolent crime—committed by an individual who did not realize she was breaking the law—is grossly disproportionate. The jury could have instead sentenced her to two years community supervision and no prison. Why did it choose to lock her away for 96 months instead?
On appeal, Ortega argued that prosecutors had biased the jury through inflammatory statements at the punishment phase of the trial. In urging the jury to impose a stringent sentence, one prosecutor declared:
And I just want to throw out one thought to you. You came back with the right verdict, that if you hadn’t, if you’d come back with a not guilty, can you imagine the floodgates that would be open to illegal voting in this county?
As civil rights attorney Sasha Samberg-Champion has noted, this admonition is totally inappropriate. Rather than encourage the jury to focus on fair punishment for Ortega’s offense, the prosecutors exhorted jurors to use her as an example, warning that a light sentence would directly increase “illegal voting.” It is, as Samberg-Champion put it, “conviction by Fox News fearmongering,” raising grave due process concerns. Ortega’s lawyers recognized the problem, quickly objecting that “that’s an improper argument here at sentencing.”
But the trial court overruled the objection. So Ortega asked the appeals court to overturn the sentence, alleging, quite sensibly, that it was impermissibly tainted by this “improper and inflammatory jury argument.” The court declined—not because it found the prosecutor’s statement to be permissible but because, it insisted, her attorney had not objected correctly. Clark Birdsall, Ortega’s defense counsel, should have said he objected because it was “outside the record,” the appeals court wrote. By failing to state “the specific grounds” for his objection at trial, Birdsall forfeited his ability to raise this claim on appeal.
Here, then, is the upshot of the 2nd Court of Appeals’ ruling: Prosecutors may well have unlawfully biased the jury, resulting in an unduly severe sentence, but there is nothing she can do about it because her lawyer failed to use three magic words--outside the record—when he objected. Ortega’s case will now go to the staunchly conservative Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
In his press release, Paxton said that his office would “hold those accountable who falsely claim eligibility and purposely subvert the election process in Texas.” But as he should recognize that Ortega did not intend to “subvert” anything, and her galling sentence will do nothing to boost public trust in the integrity of Texas’ elections. This case is about one thing: intimidating Americans into forfeiting their right to vote for fear that one mistake could land them in prison. The aggressive prosecution of voting is a potent form of voter suppressionmeant to deter people uncertain about their eligibility from casting a ballot. Ortega’s sentence does not affirm “the hallowed principle that every citizen’s vote must count,” as Paxton stated. It proves that vote thieves like Paxton won’t hesitate to destroy a hapless woman’s life in their ongoing quest to suppress minority suffrage.
Although Paxton has presented Ortega’s conduct as evidence that voter fraud is a genuine problem in Texas, her case bears no resemblance to the paranoid myth of immigrants covertly swinging elections. Ortega is a lawful permanent resident who was brought to the United States as a baby. She has a sixth-grade education and did not know that she could not legally vote. In October 2014, she sent a voter-registration application to the Tarrant County Elections Administration, in which she indicated that she was not a citizen. When the office sent her a rejection letter, she called to ask why. An employee, Delores Stevens, explained that Ortega had checked the “No” box for citizenship and could not register unless she checked “Yes.” Ortega mailed in a new application, this time checking the “Yes” box to indicate U.S. citizenship.
The office was fully aware of the discrepancies between her two applications. It still registered her to vote.
Shortly thereafter, the Texas attorney general received a tip that Ortega was voting illegally. An investigator with the attorney general’s office began to examine her case and discovered that she had voted in Dallas County in 2012 and 2014. Official paperwork revealed that Ortega presented her resident alien card and Social Security card to register, acknowledging that she was not a citizen. For some reason, Dallas County registered her anyway. (She registered as a Republican.)
Investigators then interrogated Ortega at her house. She stated that she was not a citizen but had checked “Yes” on the citizenship box in Tarrant County because Dallas County had previously allowed her to vote. Three months later, prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant, charging Ortega with illegal voting. Ortega insisted that she had simply made an innocent mistake and rejected a plea deal, believing no reasonable jury would convict her. Instead, after a trial, a Tarrant County jury found her guilty on two counts of illegal voting. It sentenced her to eight years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Ortega promptly lost custody of her four children and will likely be deported once her sentence is finished.
By any measure, this punishment is extraordinarily harsh. Eight years imprisonment for a nonviolent crime—committed by an individual who did not realize she was breaking the law—is grossly disproportionate. The jury could have instead sentenced her to two years community supervision and no prison. Why did it choose to lock her away for 96 months instead?
On appeal, Ortega argued that prosecutors had biased the jury through inflammatory statements at the punishment phase of the trial. In urging the jury to impose a stringent sentence, one prosecutor declared:
And I just want to throw out one thought to you. You came back with the right verdict, that if you hadn’t, if you’d come back with a not guilty, can you imagine the floodgates that would be open to illegal voting in this county?
As civil rights attorney Sasha Samberg-Champion has noted, this admonition is totally inappropriate. Rather than encourage the jury to focus on fair punishment for Ortega’s offense, the prosecutors exhorted jurors to use her as an example, warning that a light sentence would directly increase “illegal voting.” It is, as Samberg-Champion put it, “conviction by Fox News fearmongering,” raising grave due process concerns. Ortega’s lawyers recognized the problem, quickly objecting that “that’s an improper argument here at sentencing.”
But the trial court overruled the objection. So Ortega asked the appeals court to overturn the sentence, alleging, quite sensibly, that it was impermissibly tainted by this “improper and inflammatory jury argument.” The court declined—not because it found the prosecutor’s statement to be permissible but because, it insisted, her attorney had not objected correctly. Clark Birdsall, Ortega’s defense counsel, should have said he objected because it was “outside the record,” the appeals court wrote. By failing to state “the specific grounds” for his objection at trial, Birdsall forfeited his ability to raise this claim on appeal.
Here, then, is the upshot of the 2nd Court of Appeals’ ruling: Prosecutors may well have unlawfully biased the jury, resulting in an unduly severe sentence, but there is nothing she can do about it because her lawyer failed to use three magic words--outside the record—when he objected. Ortega’s case will now go to the staunchly conservative Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
In his press release, Paxton said that his office would “hold those accountable who falsely claim eligibility and purposely subvert the election process in Texas.” But as he should recognize that Ortega did not intend to “subvert” anything, and her galling sentence will do nothing to boost public trust in the integrity of Texas’ elections. This case is about one thing: intimidating Americans into forfeiting their right to vote for fear that one mistake could land them in prison. The aggressive prosecution of voting is a potent form of voter suppressionmeant to deter people uncertain about their eligibility from casting a ballot. Ortega’s sentence does not affirm “the hallowed principle that every citizen’s vote must count,” as Paxton stated. It proves that vote thieves like Paxton won’t hesitate to destroy a hapless woman’s life in their ongoing quest to suppress minority suffrage.
Latino turnout up 174% in 2018 midterms elections, Democrats say
Hispanic community will have record level of representation in Congress with at least 42 members: 34 Democrats and eight Republicans
Lauren Gambino in Washington and agencies
the guardian
Wed 14 Nov 2018 06.00 EST
The Democratic party says a $30m investment in engaging Latino and other minority voters helped it achieve a net gain of 34 House seats and improve on 2014 turnout.
Ben Ray Luján, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that compared to the previous midterm election, Latinos increased their participation by 174% in 2018. Pacific Islanders increased their numbers by 218% and African Americans by 157%.
“Latino voters played a pivotal role in taking back the House,” Luján said on a conference call hosted by the Latino Victory Fund, a political action committee. He said the Latino vote was especially consequential in a handful of House races across demographically diverse Sun Belt battlegrounds: Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Texas.
Luján, the first Latino to serve as DCCC chair, attributed high turnout among the Democratic base – which includes Latinos, millennials, African Americans, Asians and women – to the “unprecedented” $30m investment.
“Evidence is clear,” he said. “Early and active and robust outreach to communities of color — in this case, into the Hispanic community — clearly pays off.
“Latinos showed up to the polls because we talked to them, we listened to them, our candidates connected with their personal stories, we knocked on their doors and we reached out to them online.”
Luján said the engagement effort included an investment of at least $21m in Latino candidates and in 17 Spanish-language district-specific ads. His office also launched the first multi-state Spanish-language TV ad, in the last week before the election in the aim of getting out the vote.
The Democrats targeted 111 Republican House districts, 29 of which had at least a 10% Hispanic electorate.
Dan Sena, DCCC executive director, said the polling company Latino Decisions conducted nationwide focus groups to better identify the needs of Latino voters and to tailor a proper message.
As Donald Trump roiled his base with warnings about a migrant caravan and gang violence, Senasaid his group honed in on a positive message: trying to create an environment in which Latinos had something to vote for, rather than against.
“We wanted voting to feel good rather than simply what is at stake and kids in cages and Trump,” he said. “So we spent a fair amount of time really studying how to create urgency without making it feel overly heavy and overly sad.”
Sena added that the strength of the Latino vote was no longer a hypothetical.
“The proof is in the pudding,” he said, adding that investing in communities of color was “necessary to the longterm success of the party”.
In 2018, Latinos voted for Democrats by a margin of nearly three to one, according to Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions. His polling found that 73% of Latinos voted Democratic while only 23% voted for Republicans.
Barreto said Latinos identified healthcare as the most important issue, followed by immigration. Latino voters said they were “tired of the discussion of immigrants in such a negative and racist” overtones, which Barreto said was how the respondents characterized the commentary from Trump and Republicans.
During the campaign, Trump kept up a drumbeat of warnings about a caravan of “bad thugs” and potential terrorists supposedly intent on invading the US from Mexico. He suggested sending up to 15,000 troops to the border.
Luján highlighted the victory of Antonio Delgado in New York as an example of how a Latino candidate won, he said, by keeping a positive message even when facing racist attacks.
“Antonio did not get distracted by any of that,” Luján said. “What he did was he talked to the American people and the people of the 19th district of New York about the economic challenges that they are facing every day.”
The Hispanic community will have a record level of representation on Capitol Hill, with at least 34 Democrats and eight Republicans in both chambers. One House race featuring a Hispanic candidate has yet to be decided.
Ben Ray Luján, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that compared to the previous midterm election, Latinos increased their participation by 174% in 2018. Pacific Islanders increased their numbers by 218% and African Americans by 157%.
“Latino voters played a pivotal role in taking back the House,” Luján said on a conference call hosted by the Latino Victory Fund, a political action committee. He said the Latino vote was especially consequential in a handful of House races across demographically diverse Sun Belt battlegrounds: Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Texas.
Luján, the first Latino to serve as DCCC chair, attributed high turnout among the Democratic base – which includes Latinos, millennials, African Americans, Asians and women – to the “unprecedented” $30m investment.
“Evidence is clear,” he said. “Early and active and robust outreach to communities of color — in this case, into the Hispanic community — clearly pays off.
“Latinos showed up to the polls because we talked to them, we listened to them, our candidates connected with their personal stories, we knocked on their doors and we reached out to them online.”
Luján said the engagement effort included an investment of at least $21m in Latino candidates and in 17 Spanish-language district-specific ads. His office also launched the first multi-state Spanish-language TV ad, in the last week before the election in the aim of getting out the vote.
The Democrats targeted 111 Republican House districts, 29 of which had at least a 10% Hispanic electorate.
Dan Sena, DCCC executive director, said the polling company Latino Decisions conducted nationwide focus groups to better identify the needs of Latino voters and to tailor a proper message.
As Donald Trump roiled his base with warnings about a migrant caravan and gang violence, Senasaid his group honed in on a positive message: trying to create an environment in which Latinos had something to vote for, rather than against.
“We wanted voting to feel good rather than simply what is at stake and kids in cages and Trump,” he said. “So we spent a fair amount of time really studying how to create urgency without making it feel overly heavy and overly sad.”
Sena added that the strength of the Latino vote was no longer a hypothetical.
“The proof is in the pudding,” he said, adding that investing in communities of color was “necessary to the longterm success of the party”.
In 2018, Latinos voted for Democrats by a margin of nearly three to one, according to Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions. His polling found that 73% of Latinos voted Democratic while only 23% voted for Republicans.
Barreto said Latinos identified healthcare as the most important issue, followed by immigration. Latino voters said they were “tired of the discussion of immigrants in such a negative and racist” overtones, which Barreto said was how the respondents characterized the commentary from Trump and Republicans.
During the campaign, Trump kept up a drumbeat of warnings about a caravan of “bad thugs” and potential terrorists supposedly intent on invading the US from Mexico. He suggested sending up to 15,000 troops to the border.
Luján highlighted the victory of Antonio Delgado in New York as an example of how a Latino candidate won, he said, by keeping a positive message even when facing racist attacks.
“Antonio did not get distracted by any of that,” Luján said. “What he did was he talked to the American people and the people of the 19th district of New York about the economic challenges that they are facing every day.”
The Hispanic community will have a record level of representation on Capitol Hill, with at least 34 Democrats and eight Republicans in both chambers. One House race featuring a Hispanic candidate has yet to be decided.
WTF White Women?
by Laura Flanders | the smirking chimp
November 11, 2018 - 6:56am
2016 was bad. 2018 was worse. While fifty-two percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence in 2016, in 2018, seventy-six percent of white women voted for Brian Kemp.
This Tuesday, seventy-six percent of white female voters in Georgia cast their ballots against Stacey Abrams becoming this nation’s first black female governor. Fifty-nine percent in Texas voted for Republican Ted Cruz against Latino Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Fifty-one percent opposed Andrew Gillum becoming the first African American governor of the Sunshine State.
White women rained all over that new day dawning. Did they vote on the issues? Statistically, there aren’t enough anti-choice, anti-healthcare, anti-minimum wage, gun-mad voters out there to blame just conservative women.
So white women are either stupid or spoiled. I say spoiled.
We reap plenty of spoils from white supremacy. To name a few: we get to be race-less, sexy, vulnerable and at least relatively safe.
Structurally, the system’s set up such that white women earn more, own more, and live significantly longer than anyone else (except for our brothers and fathers and husbands and sons).
Single white women have, on average, 5 times more wealth than single black women, and white households have a staggering 13 times more wealth than black households.
Our life expectancy is above the national average, while the life expectancy of black women falls below.
We’re more likely to be cared for than killed when we’re having a mental health crisis and cops come to our door.
We’re more likely to be counseled than kicked out when we act up in school.
We’re way more likely to be hired and way, way less likely to be incarcerated. That’s in no small part because we’re more likely to be seen as beautiful and loved (in advertising, magazines and Hollywood), and far less likely to be seen as scary or a threat.
White supremacy spoils us, white women. It’s undeniable. Patriarchy, not so much. The particular patriarchs whom white women have put in office this November are on the record as anti-female. They’re even anti-white-female if you happen to be pregnant or foreign-born or poor or in imperfect health.
In 2016, I sought refuge in my superior, smart, anti-capitalist, queer difference. LGBTQ, young, non-christian, unmarried white women tend to know which end is up.
My sisters of color, however, are made to account for every last messed-up, stupid thing men of their same race do. (And yes, I know race is a phony concept, but its impacts are real.)
Accepting responsibility for my screwed-up het, cis, married, white, christian sisters is the least I can do in solidarity.
So what the hell, white women? Talk. Not too loudly, or everywhere, all the time, or remorsefully to your one girlfriend-of-color, but to me, or a white woman like me.
We don’t want 2020 to roll around and wish that one hundred years ago we’d never given white women the vote.
This Tuesday, seventy-six percent of white female voters in Georgia cast their ballots against Stacey Abrams becoming this nation’s first black female governor. Fifty-nine percent in Texas voted for Republican Ted Cruz against Latino Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Fifty-one percent opposed Andrew Gillum becoming the first African American governor of the Sunshine State.
White women rained all over that new day dawning. Did they vote on the issues? Statistically, there aren’t enough anti-choice, anti-healthcare, anti-minimum wage, gun-mad voters out there to blame just conservative women.
So white women are either stupid or spoiled. I say spoiled.
We reap plenty of spoils from white supremacy. To name a few: we get to be race-less, sexy, vulnerable and at least relatively safe.
Structurally, the system’s set up such that white women earn more, own more, and live significantly longer than anyone else (except for our brothers and fathers and husbands and sons).
Single white women have, on average, 5 times more wealth than single black women, and white households have a staggering 13 times more wealth than black households.
Our life expectancy is above the national average, while the life expectancy of black women falls below.
We’re more likely to be cared for than killed when we’re having a mental health crisis and cops come to our door.
We’re more likely to be counseled than kicked out when we act up in school.
We’re way more likely to be hired and way, way less likely to be incarcerated. That’s in no small part because we’re more likely to be seen as beautiful and loved (in advertising, magazines and Hollywood), and far less likely to be seen as scary or a threat.
White supremacy spoils us, white women. It’s undeniable. Patriarchy, not so much. The particular patriarchs whom white women have put in office this November are on the record as anti-female. They’re even anti-white-female if you happen to be pregnant or foreign-born or poor or in imperfect health.
In 2016, I sought refuge in my superior, smart, anti-capitalist, queer difference. LGBTQ, young, non-christian, unmarried white women tend to know which end is up.
My sisters of color, however, are made to account for every last messed-up, stupid thing men of their same race do. (And yes, I know race is a phony concept, but its impacts are real.)
Accepting responsibility for my screwed-up het, cis, married, white, christian sisters is the least I can do in solidarity.
So what the hell, white women? Talk. Not too loudly, or everywhere, all the time, or remorsefully to your one girlfriend-of-color, but to me, or a white woman like me.
We don’t want 2020 to roll around and wish that one hundred years ago we’d never given white women the vote.
Deadlocked House race in Maine will be the first decided by ranked-choice voting
Second-choice voters are likely to decide the winner in Maine’s 2nd district — and then it may wind up in court
IGOR DERYSH - salon
NOVEMBER 9, 2018 11:00AM (UTC)
An undecided U.S. House seat in Maine will likely become the first in the country to be decided through ranked-choice voting.
With 92 percent of precincts reporting, Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin leads Democrat Jared Golden by a 46.1 to 45.8 margin in Maine's largely rural 2nd district – a difference of just 702 votes, the Bangor Daily News reports. Another 8 percent of the vote went to independent candidates in the race.
Voters in Maine are allowed to rank candidates on their ballots under a set of recent voting reforms. Since neither candidate in the race received a majority of the vote, the contest is almost certain to go to an "instant runoff," in which the second choices of voters who backed independent or third-party candidates will be reallocated to the two leading contenders until one of them crosses the 50 percent threshold.
Here's how it works: First the last-place finisher's votes are allocated, then those of the candidate who finished next t0 last, and so on. If neither of the top candidates breaks the 50 percent, the process continues until all of the votes are assigned to the top two vote-getters.
The race featured two left-leaning independent candidates, attorney Tiffany Bond, who received nearly 6 percent of the vote, and teacher William Hoar, who got more than 2 percent of the vote. So it is highly plausible, although by no means certain, that Golden -- a 36-year-old Marine combat veteran -- will overtake Poliquin.
Secretary of State Matt Dunlap's office said that it is impossible to know how long the process will take, since this is the first time ranked-choice voting has been implemented in Maine. Indeed, it has never been used in a congressional race anywhere in the country. Dunlap spokeswoman Kristen Muszynski told the Bangor Daily News it could take around two weeks to sort through the ballots.
Golden, who is assistant majority leader in the Maine legislature, has said he will accept the results of the ranked-choice election. Poliquin, the Republican incumbent, has declined to comment on whether he would do the same. The method has not been court-tested in the general election, though the state's Supreme Court and a federal court allowed it to proceed in the state's primaries.
Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, and Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who represents Maine's 1st district, easily won their elections in the first round, getting the majorities they needed to avoid the allocation of second-choice votes.
Outgoing Maine Gov. Paul LePage has urged Poliquin to challenge the results of the election if he wins the first round but loses the ranked-choice count, arguing that the method is unconstitutional.
That remains to be determined. Maine's Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion last year saying it was unconstitutional to require state general elections to be won by majorities rather than pluralities of the vote, but it did not rule on federal elections like this House race. No other state has attempted ranked-choice voting in state or federal elections, though a number of cities, including San Francisco, have used the method in mayoral races.
The system was approved by Maine voters in 2016 after a series of elections in which winning gubernatorial candidates failed to get a majority of the vote. Supporters of the method argue that it allows voters to choose the candidate they prefer most without worrying that their choice will have a spoiler effect. Ironically, the system was not used in Tuesday's gubernatorial or state legislative races because of the court's opinion that it would violate the Maine constitution.
With 92 percent of precincts reporting, Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin leads Democrat Jared Golden by a 46.1 to 45.8 margin in Maine's largely rural 2nd district – a difference of just 702 votes, the Bangor Daily News reports. Another 8 percent of the vote went to independent candidates in the race.
Voters in Maine are allowed to rank candidates on their ballots under a set of recent voting reforms. Since neither candidate in the race received a majority of the vote, the contest is almost certain to go to an "instant runoff," in which the second choices of voters who backed independent or third-party candidates will be reallocated to the two leading contenders until one of them crosses the 50 percent threshold.
Here's how it works: First the last-place finisher's votes are allocated, then those of the candidate who finished next t0 last, and so on. If neither of the top candidates breaks the 50 percent, the process continues until all of the votes are assigned to the top two vote-getters.
The race featured two left-leaning independent candidates, attorney Tiffany Bond, who received nearly 6 percent of the vote, and teacher William Hoar, who got more than 2 percent of the vote. So it is highly plausible, although by no means certain, that Golden -- a 36-year-old Marine combat veteran -- will overtake Poliquin.
Secretary of State Matt Dunlap's office said that it is impossible to know how long the process will take, since this is the first time ranked-choice voting has been implemented in Maine. Indeed, it has never been used in a congressional race anywhere in the country. Dunlap spokeswoman Kristen Muszynski told the Bangor Daily News it could take around two weeks to sort through the ballots.
Golden, who is assistant majority leader in the Maine legislature, has said he will accept the results of the ranked-choice election. Poliquin, the Republican incumbent, has declined to comment on whether he would do the same. The method has not been court-tested in the general election, though the state's Supreme Court and a federal court allowed it to proceed in the state's primaries.
Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, and Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who represents Maine's 1st district, easily won their elections in the first round, getting the majorities they needed to avoid the allocation of second-choice votes.
Outgoing Maine Gov. Paul LePage has urged Poliquin to challenge the results of the election if he wins the first round but loses the ranked-choice count, arguing that the method is unconstitutional.
That remains to be determined. Maine's Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion last year saying it was unconstitutional to require state general elections to be won by majorities rather than pluralities of the vote, but it did not rule on federal elections like this House race. No other state has attempted ranked-choice voting in state or federal elections, though a number of cities, including San Francisco, have used the method in mayoral races.
The system was approved by Maine voters in 2016 after a series of elections in which winning gubernatorial candidates failed to get a majority of the vote. Supporters of the method argue that it allows voters to choose the candidate they prefer most without worrying that their choice will have a spoiler effect. Ironically, the system was not used in Tuesday's gubernatorial or state legislative races because of the court's opinion that it would violate the Maine constitution.
Throwback Thursday: Did Green Party candidate cost Democrats the Arizona Senate race?
In an unhappy flashback, it’s possible that Arizona candidate Angela Green will cost Kyrsten Sinema a Senate seat
IGOR DERYSH - salon
NOVEMBER 8, 2018 11:00AM (UTC)
An Green Party candidate may cost Democrats the Senate race in Arizona, even though she dropped out and threw her support behind the Democrat.
At this writing, Republican Martha McSally is at 850,043 votes in the race to replace retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., while Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is less than one percentage point behind at 834,135 votes, with 99 percent of precincts reporting. Green Party candidate Angela Green received 38,597 votes – more than twice the margin between the two major-party candidates.
The race has not yet been called, and the Arizona Secretary of State's office told The Hill that “thousands of ballots have yet to be processed” so it's possible Sinema can make up the difference.
"The counties receive hundreds of thousands of early ballots at their polling places," said Matthew Roberts, a spokesman for the secretary of state. "They are still transporting polling place votes to the counties themselves so there’s quite a bit of ballots that have not been tabulated yet."
Sinema did not address her supporters on Tuesday and told CNN she would not make remarks until the remaining votes are tallied.
Green, who was polling as high as 6 percent in some surveys, opted to drop out of the race just days before Election Day and endorsed Sinema, who began her political career as a Green Party activist.
Green told Fox News that she had no intention of being a spoiler in the race.
“I was doing it for the people of Arizona. They really need something new and different,” she told the network. “I don’t think people really understand it, because I wasn’t trying to do this to be a ‘spoiler’ or anything, I was doing it because I truly believe that we need something new in this country.”
She previously cautioned that her move was not likely to shift the race.
“If you think me withdrawing is going to put your party candidate over the top, I truly must beg to differ,” she wrote on her campaign website. “My voters, more than likely, would not have voted for either major party candidate or would not have even voted at all. And I can say that with the utmost confidence.”
After she dropped out, however, the Arizona Green Party said it would “disassociate” itself from Green's comments.
“Green does not speak for the AZGP,” the group wrote. “Her comments are her own. The AZGP does not endorse the candidates of the corporate ruling class.”
Green's percent of the vote total may have given Democrats flashbacks to the tens of thousands of votes Jill Stein received in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016, not to mention the 97,000 votes Ralph Nader got in Florida in 2000, when the official margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore was 537 votes.
But FiveThirtyEight election guru Nate Silver has said he doesn't “really buy it” that Green Party voters would have swung the 2016 race or other elections to the Democrats.
“The rub is Pennsylvania, which was close but not that close” in 2016, he wrote. “You have to assume that almost all of Stein’s voters would have gone to Clinton. But both pre-election polls and the national exit poll suggests that a lot of them wouldn’t have voted at all, if they’d been forced to pick between the two major candidates. The breakdown might have been something like 35 percent Clinton, 10 percent Trump and 55 percent wouldn’t vote. That doesn’t wind up netting very many votes for HRC.”
At this writing, Republican Martha McSally is at 850,043 votes in the race to replace retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., while Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is less than one percentage point behind at 834,135 votes, with 99 percent of precincts reporting. Green Party candidate Angela Green received 38,597 votes – more than twice the margin between the two major-party candidates.
The race has not yet been called, and the Arizona Secretary of State's office told The Hill that “thousands of ballots have yet to be processed” so it's possible Sinema can make up the difference.
"The counties receive hundreds of thousands of early ballots at their polling places," said Matthew Roberts, a spokesman for the secretary of state. "They are still transporting polling place votes to the counties themselves so there’s quite a bit of ballots that have not been tabulated yet."
Sinema did not address her supporters on Tuesday and told CNN she would not make remarks until the remaining votes are tallied.
Green, who was polling as high as 6 percent in some surveys, opted to drop out of the race just days before Election Day and endorsed Sinema, who began her political career as a Green Party activist.
Green told Fox News that she had no intention of being a spoiler in the race.
“I was doing it for the people of Arizona. They really need something new and different,” she told the network. “I don’t think people really understand it, because I wasn’t trying to do this to be a ‘spoiler’ or anything, I was doing it because I truly believe that we need something new in this country.”
She previously cautioned that her move was not likely to shift the race.
“If you think me withdrawing is going to put your party candidate over the top, I truly must beg to differ,” she wrote on her campaign website. “My voters, more than likely, would not have voted for either major party candidate or would not have even voted at all. And I can say that with the utmost confidence.”
After she dropped out, however, the Arizona Green Party said it would “disassociate” itself from Green's comments.
“Green does not speak for the AZGP,” the group wrote. “Her comments are her own. The AZGP does not endorse the candidates of the corporate ruling class.”
Green's percent of the vote total may have given Democrats flashbacks to the tens of thousands of votes Jill Stein received in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016, not to mention the 97,000 votes Ralph Nader got in Florida in 2000, when the official margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore was 537 votes.
But FiveThirtyEight election guru Nate Silver has said he doesn't “really buy it” that Green Party voters would have swung the 2016 race or other elections to the Democrats.
“The rub is Pennsylvania, which was close but not that close” in 2016, he wrote. “You have to assume that almost all of Stein’s voters would have gone to Clinton. But both pre-election polls and the national exit poll suggests that a lot of them wouldn’t have voted at all, if they’d been forced to pick between the two major candidates. The breakdown might have been something like 35 percent Clinton, 10 percent Trump and 55 percent wouldn’t vote. That doesn’t wind up netting very many votes for HRC.”
Here’s your midterm analysis: America is being held hostage by angry old white guys
Republican power is built on resentful white men who think the last good music was Skynyrd and Led Zep
AMANDA MARCOTTE - salon
NOVEMBER 7, 2018 7:15PM (UTC)
America is being held hostage by older white people — especially older white men. That, above all other things, is the moral of the 2018 elections. The CNN exit polls coming out of the midterm elections are stark in many ways, particularly tracking the growing gender and education gaps among voters, but what is most startling is how white people over 45 are heavily Republican and no one else is.
Since pollster Steve Koczela posted that screenshot, the exit polls adjusted slightly, showing that white people ages 30-44 are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But considering the age trend lines, it's nearly certain that's only because the over-40 crowd was pulling heavily to the right. Everyone else — black people, Latinos, white people under 30 — is overwhelmingly Democratic.
A huge, diverse nation is being controlled by a bunch of people who think the last good music was Led Zeppelin. The answer to why this is happening is complicated. Part of it is that older voters simply turn out in disproportionate numbers. Part of it, however, is the lingering effects of the baby boom, and the fact that there were just a whole lot of people born between 1946 and 1964. Part of it is the result of our increasingly outdated electoral system, which give a disproportionate share of power to votes in suburban and rural areas. That's how Democrats wound up losing several seats in the Senate this year, despite winning the popular vote by 15 percentage points.
And this is no doubt why Republicans continue to believe that as long as they hang onto the votes of middle-aged and elderly white people, the rest of the country's wishes don't matter. As has been evident for the last three years, Donald Trump believes the trick to keeping that voting bloc engaged and active is to be really, really racist. Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to declare victory for his way of doing politics.
Despite the usual Trumpian triumphalism, realities on the ground do not suggest that race-baiting is as clear-cut an electoral strategy as he would like to believe. A number of candidates that embraced Trump's racist tactics lost their electoral bids Tuesday night. Rep. John Faso, an upstate New York Republican, lost his seat in a purple district after trying to stigmatize his Democratic opponent, Antonio Delgado, for having put out a single hip-hop record a decade ago. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who made a name for himself leading efforts to create new Jim Crow laws to keep people of color from voting, was defeated by Democrat Laura Kelly in that state's gubernatorial race. Rep. Dave Brat of Virginia, a Tea Party-style Republican whose previous victories were based on scare-mongering about immigration, lost to Democratic challenger Abigail Spanberger in the upscale suburbs of Richmond.
But Trump isn't entirely wrong to believe that his tactics likely helped push some Republicans over the top. In the Florida gubernatorial race, Republican Ron DeSantis won with an overtly racist campaign, starting with an ad in which he bragged about indoctrinating his children into bigotry before they can even read and continuing with the on-air suggestion that Florida voters would "monkey" up the state if they elected his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, who is black. DeSantis, who has spoken at white nationalist conferences, also had Trump pitch in by tarring Gillum with racist stereotypes about black criminality.
Gillum was leading by nearly four points in the polls going into Tuesday -- which suggests, unfortunately, that a lot of people who wouldn't admit their racist beliefs to a pollster expressed them in the privacy of the voting booth on Election Day.
Unabashed white nationalist Rep. Steve King also won re-election in Iowa. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, despite being under indictment for using campaign funds to live the high life, also won by running a campaign based largely on accusing his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, of being an Islamic terrorist. (Campa-Najjar, who worked in the Obama administration, has had security clearance — something Hunter's indictment would block him from getting.)
These wins were not slam-dunks, with King and DeSantis, in particular, skating in on razor-thin margins. But it's likely that most Republicans, like Trump, will see this race as a vindication of using overtly racist appeals to turn out the aging white voters who, by dint of geography, have more power per vote than the more diverse and liberal voters packed into urban areas.
The fact that there was high turnout in many parts of the country will only fuel this belief. No doubt much of that turnout came from liberal voters eager to repudiate Trump, but it's also clear from the numbers that a lot of it was due to conservative enthusiasm, as well. The likely conclusion Republican strategists will draw is that racism activates a lot of white voters, and sadly, they may not be wrong.
All of which means that things are likely to get worse on the racial relations front in this country. Trump, emboldened by what he's decided is a big win, will double down on the appeals to bigotry, and many Republican politicians will follow suit. Once the 2020 campaign starts heating up, fear-mongering, racist ads will almost certainly flood the airwaves again. But even before that, we can expect Trump to return to the well of demonizing immigrants, black athletes and other people of color every time he feels the need to rally his base in the face of unflattering news.
And the news will only get worse for Trump. As David Corn at Mother Jones reports, House Democrats are already compiling a list of dozens of issues where they will consider opening investigations. As we get into 2019, it's reasonable to expect that a whole bunch of currently hidden information about Trump's corruption and criminality will start to become public, creating even more incentive for Trump to change the subject.
The results of all this extend well beyond bitter and divisive electoral politics. The rising tide of racial animosity is leading to a surge of right-wing terrorism, as evidenced by the "MAGAbomber," the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and other violent attacks in the weeks leading up to the election. While this is difficult to measure, significant anecdotal evidence suggest that white bigots are really feeling it themselves these days, and are more prone than ever to racist diatribes in public and efforts to use the police to intimidate people of color. All the fear and tension in American daily life will probably get worse before it gets better.
Despite all this, it's still a very promising sign that Democrats managed to eke out a victory in the House of Representatives. It's not just that they can offer a check on a rapidly deteriorating system. It's also that their victory was built on flipping a significant number of suburban districts from red to blue. That, along with the strong Democratic showing among white voters under 30, suggests that racial attitudes may finally be shifting among younger white people. It will be slow going — way, way too slow — but the movement seems to be, ever so haltingly, in the right direction.
Since pollster Steve Koczela posted that screenshot, the exit polls adjusted slightly, showing that white people ages 30-44 are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But considering the age trend lines, it's nearly certain that's only because the over-40 crowd was pulling heavily to the right. Everyone else — black people, Latinos, white people under 30 — is overwhelmingly Democratic.
A huge, diverse nation is being controlled by a bunch of people who think the last good music was Led Zeppelin. The answer to why this is happening is complicated. Part of it is that older voters simply turn out in disproportionate numbers. Part of it, however, is the lingering effects of the baby boom, and the fact that there were just a whole lot of people born between 1946 and 1964. Part of it is the result of our increasingly outdated electoral system, which give a disproportionate share of power to votes in suburban and rural areas. That's how Democrats wound up losing several seats in the Senate this year, despite winning the popular vote by 15 percentage points.
And this is no doubt why Republicans continue to believe that as long as they hang onto the votes of middle-aged and elderly white people, the rest of the country's wishes don't matter. As has been evident for the last three years, Donald Trump believes the trick to keeping that voting bloc engaged and active is to be really, really racist. Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to declare victory for his way of doing politics.
Despite the usual Trumpian triumphalism, realities on the ground do not suggest that race-baiting is as clear-cut an electoral strategy as he would like to believe. A number of candidates that embraced Trump's racist tactics lost their electoral bids Tuesday night. Rep. John Faso, an upstate New York Republican, lost his seat in a purple district after trying to stigmatize his Democratic opponent, Antonio Delgado, for having put out a single hip-hop record a decade ago. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who made a name for himself leading efforts to create new Jim Crow laws to keep people of color from voting, was defeated by Democrat Laura Kelly in that state's gubernatorial race. Rep. Dave Brat of Virginia, a Tea Party-style Republican whose previous victories were based on scare-mongering about immigration, lost to Democratic challenger Abigail Spanberger in the upscale suburbs of Richmond.
But Trump isn't entirely wrong to believe that his tactics likely helped push some Republicans over the top. In the Florida gubernatorial race, Republican Ron DeSantis won with an overtly racist campaign, starting with an ad in which he bragged about indoctrinating his children into bigotry before they can even read and continuing with the on-air suggestion that Florida voters would "monkey" up the state if they elected his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, who is black. DeSantis, who has spoken at white nationalist conferences, also had Trump pitch in by tarring Gillum with racist stereotypes about black criminality.
Gillum was leading by nearly four points in the polls going into Tuesday -- which suggests, unfortunately, that a lot of people who wouldn't admit their racist beliefs to a pollster expressed them in the privacy of the voting booth on Election Day.
Unabashed white nationalist Rep. Steve King also won re-election in Iowa. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, despite being under indictment for using campaign funds to live the high life, also won by running a campaign based largely on accusing his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, of being an Islamic terrorist. (Campa-Najjar, who worked in the Obama administration, has had security clearance — something Hunter's indictment would block him from getting.)
These wins were not slam-dunks, with King and DeSantis, in particular, skating in on razor-thin margins. But it's likely that most Republicans, like Trump, will see this race as a vindication of using overtly racist appeals to turn out the aging white voters who, by dint of geography, have more power per vote than the more diverse and liberal voters packed into urban areas.
The fact that there was high turnout in many parts of the country will only fuel this belief. No doubt much of that turnout came from liberal voters eager to repudiate Trump, but it's also clear from the numbers that a lot of it was due to conservative enthusiasm, as well. The likely conclusion Republican strategists will draw is that racism activates a lot of white voters, and sadly, they may not be wrong.
All of which means that things are likely to get worse on the racial relations front in this country. Trump, emboldened by what he's decided is a big win, will double down on the appeals to bigotry, and many Republican politicians will follow suit. Once the 2020 campaign starts heating up, fear-mongering, racist ads will almost certainly flood the airwaves again. But even before that, we can expect Trump to return to the well of demonizing immigrants, black athletes and other people of color every time he feels the need to rally his base in the face of unflattering news.
And the news will only get worse for Trump. As David Corn at Mother Jones reports, House Democrats are already compiling a list of dozens of issues where they will consider opening investigations. As we get into 2019, it's reasonable to expect that a whole bunch of currently hidden information about Trump's corruption and criminality will start to become public, creating even more incentive for Trump to change the subject.
The results of all this extend well beyond bitter and divisive electoral politics. The rising tide of racial animosity is leading to a surge of right-wing terrorism, as evidenced by the "MAGAbomber," the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and other violent attacks in the weeks leading up to the election. While this is difficult to measure, significant anecdotal evidence suggest that white bigots are really feeling it themselves these days, and are more prone than ever to racist diatribes in public and efforts to use the police to intimidate people of color. All the fear and tension in American daily life will probably get worse before it gets better.
Despite all this, it's still a very promising sign that Democrats managed to eke out a victory in the House of Representatives. It's not just that they can offer a check on a rapidly deteriorating system. It's also that their victory was built on flipping a significant number of suburban districts from red to blue. That, along with the strong Democratic showing among white voters under 30, suggests that racial attitudes may finally be shifting among younger white people. It will be slow going — way, way too slow — but the movement seems to be, ever so haltingly, in the right direction.
real citizens???
While America Voted, Many Chose Not to (or Couldn't)
DAVID GOLDMAN / The Associated Press - truthdig
NOV 07, 2018
ATLANTA — For some, it’s a privilege lost. Others are disillusioned by a system they say does nothing for them. Others still are turned off by the anger and divisiveness they see as ripping the country apart.
As Americans on Tuesday voted in midterm elections largely seen as a referendum of President Donald Trump’s first two years in office, many people stayed home.
According to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate, nonvoters said the biggest reasons for them not voting were they didn’t like politics generally and they don’t know enough about the candidates’ positions. Few said it was because they did not know where to vote, it takes too much time or they didn’t have the required identification.
Nationally, 70 percent of registered voters who chose not to vote in the midterm election were younger than 45. A wide share of those who did not vote — around 8 in 10 — did not have a college degree. About as many nonvoters were Democrats (32 percent) as Republicans (32 percent).
The Associated Press spoke to some who either chose not to vote or were not able to:
Truth Graf, 57, wasn’t able to vote after being convicted of arson and cocaine possession for what she calls “an act of desperation.” She burned her house down during the housing crisis to avoid foreclosure, and her right to vote won’t be restored until she’s off probation in 2040. “I’ll be 80 when I can vote again. It’s devastating to me to be sitting here on Election Day,” Graf said, as she rested her elbows on her kitchen table in Woodstock, Georgia. “I believe so strongly in the process of having a voice and my voice has been taken away.”
___
Debbie Key, 58, doesn’t believe her vote will make a difference. “I’m a little disillusioned,” she said as she walked out of the cooler while at work at Brenda’s House of Flowers in Woodstock, Georgia. “I am not educated enough on policy.” She added: “And what is presented to me through commercials, TV ads, forget it. It’s just not enough for me to have an opinion. I’m pretty much ambivalent. Nothing lights me up.”
___
Oscar Ramirez, 61, emigrated from Cuba and has voted in past elections, but the divisive political climate has given him pause. “I thank God and this country every day for what they gave me,” Ramirez said as he unloaded spices to be delivered to a market in Woodstock, Georgia. “It makes me sick the way they go at each other.” He added: “Republicans and Democrats, they just go at each other and all we get are promises. They worry more about each other than us. I see from the past once they get up there they forget about the little people.”
___
Charles Shields, 71, didn’t feel like he will get a fair deal, no matter who wins. “I didn’t see a reason to vote. I feel like if I vote, it really does no good,” he said as he stood on his porch with his dogs at his home in Atlanta. “I feel like a new man going in is a good man, but when he gets in there, that’s when he turns into a different person. I’ve heard just about everything they could say.” Still, he said, he contributes in other ways. “What I usually do is get a sign of who I like and ride around with it on my car so I feel like that is helping.”
___
Georgia State University student Ebony Short, 22, spent part of Tuesday studying in their room. “Neoliberalism is just as bad as conservatism. Capitalism is perpetuating the globalization of fascism, and that’s another reason why I’m not going to vote,” said Short, who has voted on local city council elections but sees higher-level races as furthering the cause of imperialism. “I’m not going to shame people for voting, but I want people to understand that you also on that same token shouldn’t shame someone who is using not voting as a tactic as well. How can you be upset at people who are demanding more from the system?”
___
Emory University student Omar Hernandez, 20, simply ran out of time. “I would have had to file an absentee ballot because I’m from Florida, and with exams and school, I’ve been just overwhelmed,” said Hernandez, who was studying organic chemistry on his laptop as he waited for a haircut in Atlanta. “In all honesty, I feel like voting is a place where everyone can feel like they’re making a contribution to society, just a way of keeping hope for the masses, like making them feel they have a say in the government and they really don’t.”
___
Jay Philbert, 38, said he decided never to vote again after voting for President George W. Bush and then for President Barack Obama. “Democrats, Republicans, same thing. Left wing, right wing. I don’t have time for it. I don’t know that my vote really counts,” Philbert said as he worked on a car at Intown Auto Care in Decatur, Georgia. “The Affordable Care Act is not affordable. I have a motto I live by. If it doesn’t make my life better, I don’t do it. Drinking don’t make my life better, I quit drinking. Smoking don’t make my life better, I quit smoking. Voting don’t make my life better, I quit voting.”
___
Justin Lee, 25, said he has never voted. “My friends told me I need to, and I know Georgia has a small Asian population, so it actually matters if I vote or not, to voice our population’s best interest. They tell me my vote counts and I think I should (vote),” said Lee who owns D92 Korean BBQ and said he works seven days a week, sometimes 12 or 13 hours a day. “I’m not well educated in politics, I spend all my time working. I wish it was easier to vote, like on the phone.”
As Americans on Tuesday voted in midterm elections largely seen as a referendum of President Donald Trump’s first two years in office, many people stayed home.
According to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate, nonvoters said the biggest reasons for them not voting were they didn’t like politics generally and they don’t know enough about the candidates’ positions. Few said it was because they did not know where to vote, it takes too much time or they didn’t have the required identification.
Nationally, 70 percent of registered voters who chose not to vote in the midterm election were younger than 45. A wide share of those who did not vote — around 8 in 10 — did not have a college degree. About as many nonvoters were Democrats (32 percent) as Republicans (32 percent).
The Associated Press spoke to some who either chose not to vote or were not able to:
Truth Graf, 57, wasn’t able to vote after being convicted of arson and cocaine possession for what she calls “an act of desperation.” She burned her house down during the housing crisis to avoid foreclosure, and her right to vote won’t be restored until she’s off probation in 2040. “I’ll be 80 when I can vote again. It’s devastating to me to be sitting here on Election Day,” Graf said, as she rested her elbows on her kitchen table in Woodstock, Georgia. “I believe so strongly in the process of having a voice and my voice has been taken away.”
___
Debbie Key, 58, doesn’t believe her vote will make a difference. “I’m a little disillusioned,” she said as she walked out of the cooler while at work at Brenda’s House of Flowers in Woodstock, Georgia. “I am not educated enough on policy.” She added: “And what is presented to me through commercials, TV ads, forget it. It’s just not enough for me to have an opinion. I’m pretty much ambivalent. Nothing lights me up.”
___
Oscar Ramirez, 61, emigrated from Cuba and has voted in past elections, but the divisive political climate has given him pause. “I thank God and this country every day for what they gave me,” Ramirez said as he unloaded spices to be delivered to a market in Woodstock, Georgia. “It makes me sick the way they go at each other.” He added: “Republicans and Democrats, they just go at each other and all we get are promises. They worry more about each other than us. I see from the past once they get up there they forget about the little people.”
___
Charles Shields, 71, didn’t feel like he will get a fair deal, no matter who wins. “I didn’t see a reason to vote. I feel like if I vote, it really does no good,” he said as he stood on his porch with his dogs at his home in Atlanta. “I feel like a new man going in is a good man, but when he gets in there, that’s when he turns into a different person. I’ve heard just about everything they could say.” Still, he said, he contributes in other ways. “What I usually do is get a sign of who I like and ride around with it on my car so I feel like that is helping.”
___
Georgia State University student Ebony Short, 22, spent part of Tuesday studying in their room. “Neoliberalism is just as bad as conservatism. Capitalism is perpetuating the globalization of fascism, and that’s another reason why I’m not going to vote,” said Short, who has voted on local city council elections but sees higher-level races as furthering the cause of imperialism. “I’m not going to shame people for voting, but I want people to understand that you also on that same token shouldn’t shame someone who is using not voting as a tactic as well. How can you be upset at people who are demanding more from the system?”
___
Emory University student Omar Hernandez, 20, simply ran out of time. “I would have had to file an absentee ballot because I’m from Florida, and with exams and school, I’ve been just overwhelmed,” said Hernandez, who was studying organic chemistry on his laptop as he waited for a haircut in Atlanta. “In all honesty, I feel like voting is a place where everyone can feel like they’re making a contribution to society, just a way of keeping hope for the masses, like making them feel they have a say in the government and they really don’t.”
___
Jay Philbert, 38, said he decided never to vote again after voting for President George W. Bush and then for President Barack Obama. “Democrats, Republicans, same thing. Left wing, right wing. I don’t have time for it. I don’t know that my vote really counts,” Philbert said as he worked on a car at Intown Auto Care in Decatur, Georgia. “The Affordable Care Act is not affordable. I have a motto I live by. If it doesn’t make my life better, I don’t do it. Drinking don’t make my life better, I quit drinking. Smoking don’t make my life better, I quit smoking. Voting don’t make my life better, I quit voting.”
___
Justin Lee, 25, said he has never voted. “My friends told me I need to, and I know Georgia has a small Asian population, so it actually matters if I vote or not, to voice our population’s best interest. They tell me my vote counts and I think I should (vote),” said Lee who owns D92 Korean BBQ and said he works seven days a week, sometimes 12 or 13 hours a day. “I’m not well educated in politics, I spend all my time working. I wish it was easier to vote, like on the phone.”
From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Ilhan Omar, 2018 Was the Year of Women of Color
One of the most exciting stories of Election Day was the historic firsts racked up by this diverse group of women.
Emily Shugerman - daily beast
11.07.18 12:26 AM ET
In what’s been called the “Year of the Woman,” her story is so familiar it’s almost rote: Discouraged and angry after the 2016 election, Veronica Escobar decided the best way to fight an administration she saw as dangerous was to run for office. Like a record-breaking 256 other women, she mounted a bid for Congress.
But Escobar wasn’t motivated solely by feminine rage. The 48-year-old former county commissioner is Latina, and lives in the border city of El Paso, Texas. She told The Daily Beast she decided to leave the local office she’d held for more than a decade after growing tired of the Trump administration's constant attacks on immigrants.
“I've told people that it almost feels like enlisting, like there's a battle happening in Washington D.C.,” she said. “And I felt this urgent need to participate in this battle that's going on and to fight on behalf of the community.”
On Tuesday, Escobar won the seat vacated by former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, joining Sylvia Garcia as the first two Latina congresswomen from Texas. Reflecting on her victory, Escobar said she was especially proud that, in the face of the administration's attacks on immigrants,“it is our community that is fighting back by making history.”
Her community was not the only one making history on Tuesday. In fact, while all eyes were on record number of women running for office, the most exciting story of Election Day may have been the historic firsts racked up by women of color.
Former Boston City Council member Ayanna Pressley won her race for Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District, becoming the first black congresswoman from the state. Michelle Lujan Grisham won the New Mexico gubernatorial race, making her the first Democratic woman of color to win a governorship.
Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan shared the distinction of being the first Muslim women in Congress, while Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Sharice Davids of Kansas became the first two Native American congresswomen. Davids will also be the first openly gay member of the Kansas congressional delegation and the first Democratic woman to represent her district.
The wave of historic wins won’t bring Congress anywhere near equal representation—women of color are currently 35 percent of the U.S. population and less than 8 percent of the House and Senate. But experts say the latest increase will help to make Congress more responsive to the communities it serves.
“Historically, we've had policy-making and laws being written by one really very small slice of the population, and their life experiences just aren't the same,” said Brenda Choresi Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign. “We can't expect one group to fully understand the range of perspectives and experiences of the whole population.”
Tuesday’s successes were due in part to growing pressure on the Democratic Party to support women of color. Just last year, prominent black female activists and leaders publicly accused the Democratic National Committee of failing to support black women running for office. Others accused prominent Democratic political action committees like Emily’s List of favoring white candidates in their endorsements.
As a result, Carter said, the Democratic Party “feels more accountable to women of color as a constituency probably than they ever have.”
That doesn’t mean things are perfect. A’shanti Gholar, political director for Emerge America, said it’s still difficult to for women of color to gain traction with traditional political gatekeepers like donors or party leaders. When these elites picture a viable candidate, she added, “they’re thinking ‘straight white man.’”
Gholar pointed to Lauren Underwood, a candidate for Illinois' 14th Congressional District, whom most party members “automatically wrote off” because she wanted to run in a majority-white district. Underwood was projected to win her general election on Tuesday.
Other experts singled out Jahana Hayes, a black woman who won the Democratic nomination for Connecticut's 5th Congressional District even though she didn’t have the party’s backing in the primary.
“This is just another antiquated notion that exists, that women of color cannot win in districts where people of color are not the majority,” Gholar said. “That is just false. Women of color can run and win anywhere.”
Increasingly, women of color have also found success by going outside the party system. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who challenged a Democratic incumbent in the primary, won the nomination without party support. She went on to win in Tuesday’s general election, becoming the youngest woman elected to Congress.
She and other renegades like Pressley were helped by new digital tools that allow candidates to solicit donors and mobilize voters without using the party as a middleman, Carter said. Other candidates have benefited from the assistance of new political groups like Higher Heights—a political action committee founded by and for black women.
Gholar felt the victories for women of color on Tuesday also reflected a change in voter preferences. She said voters responded positively to the fact that so many women of color chose to embrace their identities on the campaign trail and run as “their whole, true 100 percent authentic selves.”
"You have Stacey Abrams, a single black woman who rocks her natural hair and writes romance novels, in a dead-heat race with a white man for governor,” Gholar said, referring to the female Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia.
“That shows you how voters are connecting to their representatives who are women of color and it's because they're being authentic,” she added.
Hours after the polls closed, it looked unlikely that Abrams would win her race. But experts agreed that even those candidates who lost scored a victory for their peers in future elections.
“The presence of a much wider range of people on the ballot does a lot to kind of destabilize the myth of white male normalcy or the white male default in politics,” Carter said.
“I think having them on the ballot is a really powerful step in changing what's possible, what's perceived as possible, and the kind of idea of what we think a ‘politician’ is.”
But Escobar wasn’t motivated solely by feminine rage. The 48-year-old former county commissioner is Latina, and lives in the border city of El Paso, Texas. She told The Daily Beast she decided to leave the local office she’d held for more than a decade after growing tired of the Trump administration's constant attacks on immigrants.
“I've told people that it almost feels like enlisting, like there's a battle happening in Washington D.C.,” she said. “And I felt this urgent need to participate in this battle that's going on and to fight on behalf of the community.”
On Tuesday, Escobar won the seat vacated by former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, joining Sylvia Garcia as the first two Latina congresswomen from Texas. Reflecting on her victory, Escobar said she was especially proud that, in the face of the administration's attacks on immigrants,“it is our community that is fighting back by making history.”
Her community was not the only one making history on Tuesday. In fact, while all eyes were on record number of women running for office, the most exciting story of Election Day may have been the historic firsts racked up by women of color.
Former Boston City Council member Ayanna Pressley won her race for Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District, becoming the first black congresswoman from the state. Michelle Lujan Grisham won the New Mexico gubernatorial race, making her the first Democratic woman of color to win a governorship.
Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan shared the distinction of being the first Muslim women in Congress, while Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Sharice Davids of Kansas became the first two Native American congresswomen. Davids will also be the first openly gay member of the Kansas congressional delegation and the first Democratic woman to represent her district.
The wave of historic wins won’t bring Congress anywhere near equal representation—women of color are currently 35 percent of the U.S. population and less than 8 percent of the House and Senate. But experts say the latest increase will help to make Congress more responsive to the communities it serves.
“Historically, we've had policy-making and laws being written by one really very small slice of the population, and their life experiences just aren't the same,” said Brenda Choresi Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign. “We can't expect one group to fully understand the range of perspectives and experiences of the whole population.”
Tuesday’s successes were due in part to growing pressure on the Democratic Party to support women of color. Just last year, prominent black female activists and leaders publicly accused the Democratic National Committee of failing to support black women running for office. Others accused prominent Democratic political action committees like Emily’s List of favoring white candidates in their endorsements.
As a result, Carter said, the Democratic Party “feels more accountable to women of color as a constituency probably than they ever have.”
That doesn’t mean things are perfect. A’shanti Gholar, political director for Emerge America, said it’s still difficult to for women of color to gain traction with traditional political gatekeepers like donors or party leaders. When these elites picture a viable candidate, she added, “they’re thinking ‘straight white man.’”
Gholar pointed to Lauren Underwood, a candidate for Illinois' 14th Congressional District, whom most party members “automatically wrote off” because she wanted to run in a majority-white district. Underwood was projected to win her general election on Tuesday.
Other experts singled out Jahana Hayes, a black woman who won the Democratic nomination for Connecticut's 5th Congressional District even though she didn’t have the party’s backing in the primary.
“This is just another antiquated notion that exists, that women of color cannot win in districts where people of color are not the majority,” Gholar said. “That is just false. Women of color can run and win anywhere.”
Increasingly, women of color have also found success by going outside the party system. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who challenged a Democratic incumbent in the primary, won the nomination without party support. She went on to win in Tuesday’s general election, becoming the youngest woman elected to Congress.
She and other renegades like Pressley were helped by new digital tools that allow candidates to solicit donors and mobilize voters without using the party as a middleman, Carter said. Other candidates have benefited from the assistance of new political groups like Higher Heights—a political action committee founded by and for black women.
Gholar felt the victories for women of color on Tuesday also reflected a change in voter preferences. She said voters responded positively to the fact that so many women of color chose to embrace their identities on the campaign trail and run as “their whole, true 100 percent authentic selves.”
"You have Stacey Abrams, a single black woman who rocks her natural hair and writes romance novels, in a dead-heat race with a white man for governor,” Gholar said, referring to the female Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia.
“That shows you how voters are connecting to their representatives who are women of color and it's because they're being authentic,” she added.
Hours after the polls closed, it looked unlikely that Abrams would win her race. But experts agreed that even those candidates who lost scored a victory for their peers in future elections.
“The presence of a much wider range of people on the ballot does a lot to kind of destabilize the myth of white male normalcy or the white male default in politics,” Carter said.
“I think having them on the ballot is a really powerful step in changing what's possible, what's perceived as possible, and the kind of idea of what we think a ‘politician’ is.”
Here is how to ‘follow the money’ and look for corruption when it comes to political campaigns
Pro Publica - raw story
20 OCT 2018 AT 10:12 ET
Why do we care about money in politics?
There’s a phrase that pops up a lot when investigative journalists talk about politics: Follow the money. It won’t lead you to uncover large-scale corruption (but if you do, please holler at us). It will get you better acquainted with which industries are donating to the races you care about, and how your candidates are spending the money they raise. Get more information like this by signing up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy.
Money in politics gets a rap for being shady. But campaign finance isn’t just about the bad stuff.For the times when it is, we have campaign finance laws. A quick history lesson: After the Watergate scandal (which, in addition to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, involved campaign funds used toward the scheme), Congress passed a law requiring federal campaigns to report their political contributions and spending to the Federal Election Commission. This was designed as a check against corruption but also to empower voters and keep you reasonably informed about money in politics.
Let’s take a look at what money does in a campaign. Seeing where a candidate’s money comes from, as well as which groups are spending on behalf of (or against) their campaign, helps you understand their beliefs, the advice they’re getting and the kinds of policies they’re likely to support.
What does a donation get you?
If you’re a candidate… Receiving donations can help you win an election. It’s not the only factor, but by and large, donations get spent on the day-to-day expenses of running a campaign. Take a look at how your candidates are spending their funds this season here, using ProPublica’s FEC Itemizer.
It’s probably garden-variety stuff: lunch, plane tickets, campaign ads, hotel rooms and venue rentals for campaign events. The choices candidates make tell you something about their priorities: where they’re spending their time, which voters they’re trying hardest to win over (older voters with TV ads or younger folks online) and how much they pay their staff.
Of course, sometimes candidates try to get creative in describing their campaign expenses, like California Rep. Duncan Hunter, who, along with his wife, is under indictment for spending donations on family trips to Hawaii and Italy and private school for their children.
If you see something suspicious in your candidates’ spending, or have questions, let us know at itemizer@propublica.org!
If you’re a donor to a candidate… My colleague Justin Elliott recently reported on a major donor to Donald Trump, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who contributed $20 million to Trump’s campaign and an additional $5 million for inauguration festivities. Since then, the Trump administration has helped advance some of his financial interests. For example, Trump reportedly raised Adelson’s bid to build a casino in Japan during Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, and his tax plan included new benefits to companies like Adelson’s.
But this is not the norm.
Most of the time, campaign donors don’t see a “return” on their investment. If you donate to a candidate, chances are you’re getting one of two things:
Campaign donations are not supposed to be transactional — that’s considered bribery, and it’s a crime. But they are a way of establishing a relationship and opening the door to conversations between the donor and the government. This is why, for example, defense industry PACs give to candidates who sit on the Armed Services Committee. They have an interest in talking to the people who help govern their industry. Conversely, when Rep. Charles Rangel stepped aside from the powerful House Ways and Means Committee for ethics violations, his once-stalwart campaign donors disappeared because he no longer had an important role for their interests.
Yes, it’s murky.
But, thanks to the post-Watergate Congressional Class of ’74, we can at least see what’s behind the curtains. If you give $200 or more to a candidate, the campaign is required to report your name, address and employer or occupation to the Federal Election Commision. Based on these FEC filings, along with similar disclosures from political action committees, the Center for Responsive Politics (through their site OpenSecrets.org) determines which industries are funding the candidates in your race.
Take a close look at the types of sectors and interest groups donating to your candidates. These can signal who has their ear.
If you’re a donor to a super PAC… Mostly what you get are negative campaign ads. Some of the biggest players in the campaign landscape are super PACs. These are political action committees that don’t give directly to the candidate but spend independently in support of (or in opposition to) them. This outside spending is completely uncapped, freeing super PACs to raise any amount of money to influence any given race — typically for negative advertising. (You may balk at this, but, even if people claim to hate them, attack ads work.)
Think about the negative ads you’ve seen lately. Chances are they were funded by a super PAC, believing certain voters can be activated based on their message. Knowing who these groups are can help you better understand their motives (and better assess whether you buy what they’re selling). Here’s where you can find out more about independent expenditures in your state’s races.
Super PACs tend to represent three main categories:
Outside spending from super PACs can have a big impact on an election. ProPublica and Politico recently reported on Mountain Families PAC, a super PAC set up by allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to intervene in this year’s West Virginia Republican primary. The group spent $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a former coal baron who was considered the wild-card candidate, in a three-way race. Blankenship finished third, and Mountain Families shut down in May. Mission accomplished.
HomeworkProPublica has a tool called FEC Itemizer, which lets you browse electronic campaign finance filings from the commission. Until very recently, Senate candidates kicked it old school by only filing these reports on paper. That changed on Oct. 15, and now you can use the FEC Itemizer to follow the money in your Senate race, too.
Stay up on how the midterm election is going for voters like you across the nation, check out the latest from Electionland.
To get a personalized version of the User’s Guide to Democracy delivered to your inbox weekly through the midterm elections, sign up here.
There’s a phrase that pops up a lot when investigative journalists talk about politics: Follow the money. It won’t lead you to uncover large-scale corruption (but if you do, please holler at us). It will get you better acquainted with which industries are donating to the races you care about, and how your candidates are spending the money they raise. Get more information like this by signing up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy.
Money in politics gets a rap for being shady. But campaign finance isn’t just about the bad stuff.For the times when it is, we have campaign finance laws. A quick history lesson: After the Watergate scandal (which, in addition to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, involved campaign funds used toward the scheme), Congress passed a law requiring federal campaigns to report their political contributions and spending to the Federal Election Commission. This was designed as a check against corruption but also to empower voters and keep you reasonably informed about money in politics.
Let’s take a look at what money does in a campaign. Seeing where a candidate’s money comes from, as well as which groups are spending on behalf of (or against) their campaign, helps you understand their beliefs, the advice they’re getting and the kinds of policies they’re likely to support.
What does a donation get you?
If you’re a candidate… Receiving donations can help you win an election. It’s not the only factor, but by and large, donations get spent on the day-to-day expenses of running a campaign. Take a look at how your candidates are spending their funds this season here, using ProPublica’s FEC Itemizer.
It’s probably garden-variety stuff: lunch, plane tickets, campaign ads, hotel rooms and venue rentals for campaign events. The choices candidates make tell you something about their priorities: where they’re spending their time, which voters they’re trying hardest to win over (older voters with TV ads or younger folks online) and how much they pay their staff.
Of course, sometimes candidates try to get creative in describing their campaign expenses, like California Rep. Duncan Hunter, who, along with his wife, is under indictment for spending donations on family trips to Hawaii and Italy and private school for their children.
If you see something suspicious in your candidates’ spending, or have questions, let us know at itemizer@propublica.org!
If you’re a donor to a candidate… My colleague Justin Elliott recently reported on a major donor to Donald Trump, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who contributed $20 million to Trump’s campaign and an additional $5 million for inauguration festivities. Since then, the Trump administration has helped advance some of his financial interests. For example, Trump reportedly raised Adelson’s bid to build a casino in Japan during Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, and his tax plan included new benefits to companies like Adelson’s.
But this is not the norm.
Most of the time, campaign donors don’t see a “return” on their investment. If you donate to a candidate, chances are you’re getting one of two things:
- The satisfaction of backing a potential winner.
- Lunch. Or something like lunch, with a chance to share your perspective with the candidate once he or she has taken office.
Campaign donations are not supposed to be transactional — that’s considered bribery, and it’s a crime. But they are a way of establishing a relationship and opening the door to conversations between the donor and the government. This is why, for example, defense industry PACs give to candidates who sit on the Armed Services Committee. They have an interest in talking to the people who help govern their industry. Conversely, when Rep. Charles Rangel stepped aside from the powerful House Ways and Means Committee for ethics violations, his once-stalwart campaign donors disappeared because he no longer had an important role for their interests.
Yes, it’s murky.
But, thanks to the post-Watergate Congressional Class of ’74, we can at least see what’s behind the curtains. If you give $200 or more to a candidate, the campaign is required to report your name, address and employer or occupation to the Federal Election Commision. Based on these FEC filings, along with similar disclosures from political action committees, the Center for Responsive Politics (through their site OpenSecrets.org) determines which industries are funding the candidates in your race.
Take a close look at the types of sectors and interest groups donating to your candidates. These can signal who has their ear.
If you’re a donor to a super PAC… Mostly what you get are negative campaign ads. Some of the biggest players in the campaign landscape are super PACs. These are political action committees that don’t give directly to the candidate but spend independently in support of (or in opposition to) them. This outside spending is completely uncapped, freeing super PACs to raise any amount of money to influence any given race — typically for negative advertising. (You may balk at this, but, even if people claim to hate them, attack ads work.)
Think about the negative ads you’ve seen lately. Chances are they were funded by a super PAC, believing certain voters can be activated based on their message. Knowing who these groups are can help you better understand their motives (and better assess whether you buy what they’re selling). Here’s where you can find out more about independent expenditures in your state’s races.
Super PACs tend to represent three main categories:
- Single-Issue Groups: Think advocacy groups that focus on abortion, or the environment, or taxes.
- Partisan Groups: These are super PACs formed at the direction of key House and Senate leaders, like the Congressional Leadership Fund (affiliated with House Republican leaders) and the Senate Majority PAC (connected with Senate Democratic leadership). While lawmakers themselves are restricted from soliciting unlimited donations to the super PACs they’re tied to, the people running these groups can do so on their behalf.
- Family Interests: Basically, this is when a wealthy family member comes through (like Kansas House candidate Steve Watkins’ loaded dad).
Outside spending from super PACs can have a big impact on an election. ProPublica and Politico recently reported on Mountain Families PAC, a super PAC set up by allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to intervene in this year’s West Virginia Republican primary. The group spent $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a former coal baron who was considered the wild-card candidate, in a three-way race. Blankenship finished third, and Mountain Families shut down in May. Mission accomplished.
HomeworkProPublica has a tool called FEC Itemizer, which lets you browse electronic campaign finance filings from the commission. Until very recently, Senate candidates kicked it old school by only filing these reports on paper. That changed on Oct. 15, and now you can use the FEC Itemizer to follow the money in your Senate race, too.
Stay up on how the midterm election is going for voters like you across the nation, check out the latest from Electionland.
To get a personalized version of the User’s Guide to Democracy delivered to your inbox weekly through the midterm elections, sign up here.
The Hidden Money Funding the Midterms
Strategies that let super PACs delay revealing their donors until after the election are gaining popularity among both Democrats and Republicans.
by Derek Willis, ProPublica, and Maggie Severns, Politico - pro publica
Oct. 9, 5 a.m. EDT
Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a blind spot in campaign finance laws to undercut a candidate from their own party this year — and their fingerprints remained hidden until the primary was already over.
Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money in elections, are supposed to regularly disclose their funders. But in the case of Mountain Families PAC, Republicans managed to spend $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a mustachioed former coal baron who was a wild-card candidate for a must-win West Virginia Senate seat, in May without revealing who was supplying the cash.
The move worked like this: Start a new super PAC after a deadline for reporting donors and expenses, then raise and spend money before the next report is due. Timed right, a super PAC might get a month or more undercover before being required to reveal its donors. And if a super PAC launches right before the election, voters won’t know who’s funding it until after they go to the polls.
The strategy — which is legal — is proving increasingly popular among Democrats and Republicans. The amount of super PAC spending during the 2016 congressional primaries in which the first donor disclosure occurred after the primary election totaled $9 million. That figure increased to $15.6 million during the 2018 congressional primaries and special elections.
Backers of Mountain Families PAC didn’t respond to a request for comment. It is one of 63 super PACs this election cycle that have managed to spend money to influence races and postpone telling voters who funded them, according to an analysis by Politico and ProPublica of Federal Election Commission data.
Voters bear much of the cost when they head to the polls without information on who funded a PAC that tried to sway their votes, said Meredith McGehee, executive director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Issue One.
“The whole idea behind disclosure is that one of the factors that voters can, and understandably should, take into account in judging the message is who the messenger is,” McGehee said.
In total, super PACs have spent at least $21.6 million this cycle in 78 congressional races before disclosing who donated that money — $15.7 million of it during primary races. In many cases, that disclosure came after voters had gone to the polls.
Super PACs were created after the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision ruled that people and corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditures such as funding ads or mailers, but that they couldn’t hide that spending from the public.
But while they can’t keep donors secret forever, super PACs are increasingly figuring out methods of temporarily masking donor identities that are either legal or fall into gray areas that rarely attract regulators’ attention.
One tactic is the one Mountain Families PAC used, which is likely to be replicated for the general election. A new super PAC that starts between Oct. 18 and Nov. 6 could spend money right before Election Day without having to disclose its donors until after the midterm results are tallied. (There are 11 super PACs that together have spent at least $5.8 million since the primaries but should begin disclosing their donors on Oct. 15, when the next FEC filing is due.)
Another involves going into debt to pay for advertising and other campaign-related activities, and fundraising later to pay off those debts. A super PAC that does this would not have to disclose donors until well after the money is spent.
In the case of Mountain Families PAC, Blankenship was increasingly popular among the state’s anti-Washington set. So D.C. Republicans behind the PAC avoided disclosing they were behind ads attacking Blankenship — “Isn’t there enough toxic sludge in Washington?” asked one of them — until after the primary.
Then they revealed their identity and dissolved the super PAC entirely.
Here are more examples of PACs that have delayed disclosing their donors this cycle — and how they did it:
As Republican Martha McSally battled two opponents in the Arizona Senate primary, a super PAC called Red and Gold spent $1.7 million attacking McSally, airing television ads that said McSally had supported an “age tax” on older people’s health insurance. But shortly after filing its initial paperwork with the FEC, Red and Gold notified the commission it was going to file on a monthly basis, which meant its first disclosure wasn’t due until Sept. 20, three weeks after the primary election.
When Red and Gold finally disclosed its funders, it was revealed that Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, was the main funder of Red and Gold and had meddled in the primary in an attempt to hurt McSally’s chances of victory and boost a weaker Republican. Chris Hayden, spokesman for Senate Majority PAC, said that “Senate Majority PAC and Red and Gold have followed the FEC reporting schedule and follow the law governing super PACs.”
A super PAC called Ohio First PAC has been in operation since the start of April and has spent $774,822 helping Republican Jim Renacci in the Ohio Senate race. But it has only disclosed raising $79,200 from donors. Instead of disclosing donations, Ohio First’s filings with the FEC show the committee has hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to vendors for advertising and mailers, and almost no fundraising yet. The PAC did not respond to a request for comment.
The FEC has sent the PAC two letters about possible late filings for some of its spending; the committee said in correspondence in August that it is working to resolve any issues.
During the week leading up to a seven-way Democratic primary in Illinois in March, a super PAC called SunshinePAC blitzed the battleground 6th Congressional District with $130,000 in mailers and phone calls. Because it started spending money so late in the race, SunshinePAC didn’t have to reveal its donors before the primary.
But nearly a month after the election, SunshinePAC revealed its lone funder: Tom Casten, the father of primary contender Sean Casten — raising questions about whether the super PAC was really independent from the campaign. By then, Sean Casten had eked out a victory in the primary by 2,177 votes.
Tom Casten said in an interview that “there was no effort or conversation about reporting in the delayed form” when he gave to SunshinePAC, and that “I certainly didn’t ask for it.” Greg Bales, campaign manager for Casten for Congress, said in an email that “as with any outside group, there was no coordination between Sean or the campaign and that group on their spending or disclosure practices.” SunshinePAC did not respond to a request for comment.
Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money in elections, are supposed to regularly disclose their funders. But in the case of Mountain Families PAC, Republicans managed to spend $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a mustachioed former coal baron who was a wild-card candidate for a must-win West Virginia Senate seat, in May without revealing who was supplying the cash.
The move worked like this: Start a new super PAC after a deadline for reporting donors and expenses, then raise and spend money before the next report is due. Timed right, a super PAC might get a month or more undercover before being required to reveal its donors. And if a super PAC launches right before the election, voters won’t know who’s funding it until after they go to the polls.
The strategy — which is legal — is proving increasingly popular among Democrats and Republicans. The amount of super PAC spending during the 2016 congressional primaries in which the first donor disclosure occurred after the primary election totaled $9 million. That figure increased to $15.6 million during the 2018 congressional primaries and special elections.
Backers of Mountain Families PAC didn’t respond to a request for comment. It is one of 63 super PACs this election cycle that have managed to spend money to influence races and postpone telling voters who funded them, according to an analysis by Politico and ProPublica of Federal Election Commission data.
Voters bear much of the cost when they head to the polls without information on who funded a PAC that tried to sway their votes, said Meredith McGehee, executive director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Issue One.
“The whole idea behind disclosure is that one of the factors that voters can, and understandably should, take into account in judging the message is who the messenger is,” McGehee said.
In total, super PACs have spent at least $21.6 million this cycle in 78 congressional races before disclosing who donated that money — $15.7 million of it during primary races. In many cases, that disclosure came after voters had gone to the polls.
Super PACs were created after the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision ruled that people and corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditures such as funding ads or mailers, but that they couldn’t hide that spending from the public.
But while they can’t keep donors secret forever, super PACs are increasingly figuring out methods of temporarily masking donor identities that are either legal or fall into gray areas that rarely attract regulators’ attention.
One tactic is the one Mountain Families PAC used, which is likely to be replicated for the general election. A new super PAC that starts between Oct. 18 and Nov. 6 could spend money right before Election Day without having to disclose its donors until after the midterm results are tallied. (There are 11 super PACs that together have spent at least $5.8 million since the primaries but should begin disclosing their donors on Oct. 15, when the next FEC filing is due.)
Another involves going into debt to pay for advertising and other campaign-related activities, and fundraising later to pay off those debts. A super PAC that does this would not have to disclose donors until well after the money is spent.
In the case of Mountain Families PAC, Blankenship was increasingly popular among the state’s anti-Washington set. So D.C. Republicans behind the PAC avoided disclosing they were behind ads attacking Blankenship — “Isn’t there enough toxic sludge in Washington?” asked one of them — until after the primary.
Then they revealed their identity and dissolved the super PAC entirely.
Here are more examples of PACs that have delayed disclosing their donors this cycle — and how they did it:
As Republican Martha McSally battled two opponents in the Arizona Senate primary, a super PAC called Red and Gold spent $1.7 million attacking McSally, airing television ads that said McSally had supported an “age tax” on older people’s health insurance. But shortly after filing its initial paperwork with the FEC, Red and Gold notified the commission it was going to file on a monthly basis, which meant its first disclosure wasn’t due until Sept. 20, three weeks after the primary election.
When Red and Gold finally disclosed its funders, it was revealed that Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, was the main funder of Red and Gold and had meddled in the primary in an attempt to hurt McSally’s chances of victory and boost a weaker Republican. Chris Hayden, spokesman for Senate Majority PAC, said that “Senate Majority PAC and Red and Gold have followed the FEC reporting schedule and follow the law governing super PACs.”
A super PAC called Ohio First PAC has been in operation since the start of April and has spent $774,822 helping Republican Jim Renacci in the Ohio Senate race. But it has only disclosed raising $79,200 from donors. Instead of disclosing donations, Ohio First’s filings with the FEC show the committee has hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to vendors for advertising and mailers, and almost no fundraising yet. The PAC did not respond to a request for comment.
The FEC has sent the PAC two letters about possible late filings for some of its spending; the committee said in correspondence in August that it is working to resolve any issues.
During the week leading up to a seven-way Democratic primary in Illinois in March, a super PAC called SunshinePAC blitzed the battleground 6th Congressional District with $130,000 in mailers and phone calls. Because it started spending money so late in the race, SunshinePAC didn’t have to reveal its donors before the primary.
But nearly a month after the election, SunshinePAC revealed its lone funder: Tom Casten, the father of primary contender Sean Casten — raising questions about whether the super PAC was really independent from the campaign. By then, Sean Casten had eked out a victory in the primary by 2,177 votes.
Tom Casten said in an interview that “there was no effort or conversation about reporting in the delayed form” when he gave to SunshinePAC, and that “I certainly didn’t ask for it.” Greg Bales, campaign manager for Casten for Congress, said in an email that “as with any outside group, there was no coordination between Sean or the campaign and that group on their spending or disclosure practices.” SunshinePAC did not respond to a request for comment.
in the land of stupid!!!
What's in a name? One-third of U.S. voters don't know candidates: Reuters/Ipsos poll
Maria Caspani - reuters
OCTOBER 3, 2018 / 6:47 AM
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Less than five weeks before elections that will determine control of the U.S. Congress for the next two years, about a third of registered voters do not know the name of their party’s candidate for office, a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll found.
Name recognition is critical in motivating voters, is the reason candidates spend millions of dollars on TV ads and is a major factor in incumbents’ advantage in fending off challengers.
But it may be slightly less critical on Nov. 6 as many voters may view their choices as referendums on a man whose name will not be on the ballot: Republican President Donald Trump.
“With the current party polarization, voters increasingly vote based on party (read: like or dislike Trump) rather than the local candidates,” Robert Erikson, a professor of political science at Columbia University in New York City, wrote in an email.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 34 percent of Republican registered voters and 32.5 percent of Democratic registered voters said they did not know the names of their party's congressional candidates in their districts.
The poll of 2,597 registered voters taken Sept. 24-30 had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 3 percentage points.
The level of congressional candidate name recognition is about in line with recent elections, said Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina.
“People aren’t voting for their side as much as they are voting against the other side,” Hetherington said. “It really doesn’t matter what the names are these days.”
Generic party interest is not working to Republicans' advantage nationally. Some 54 percent of U.S. adults told Reuters/Ipsos they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the presidency and Democrats have a 9 percentage point lead in a generic question on which party they expect to vote for in Congress.
Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House to win a majority that they could use to more effectively oppose Trump's agenda.
Beyond party and name recognition, gender may play a role in voters’ decisions this year, said Michael Cornfield, an associate professor of political management at George Washington University. The #MeToo movement and protests around Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have played into that trend.
“In these cases, it’s not just the name,” Cornfield said in an email. “Gender relations may be the top issue.”
Name recognition is critical in motivating voters, is the reason candidates spend millions of dollars on TV ads and is a major factor in incumbents’ advantage in fending off challengers.
But it may be slightly less critical on Nov. 6 as many voters may view their choices as referendums on a man whose name will not be on the ballot: Republican President Donald Trump.
“With the current party polarization, voters increasingly vote based on party (read: like or dislike Trump) rather than the local candidates,” Robert Erikson, a professor of political science at Columbia University in New York City, wrote in an email.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 34 percent of Republican registered voters and 32.5 percent of Democratic registered voters said they did not know the names of their party's congressional candidates in their districts.
The poll of 2,597 registered voters taken Sept. 24-30 had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 3 percentage points.
The level of congressional candidate name recognition is about in line with recent elections, said Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina.
“People aren’t voting for their side as much as they are voting against the other side,” Hetherington said. “It really doesn’t matter what the names are these days.”
Generic party interest is not working to Republicans' advantage nationally. Some 54 percent of U.S. adults told Reuters/Ipsos they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the presidency and Democrats have a 9 percentage point lead in a generic question on which party they expect to vote for in Congress.
Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House to win a majority that they could use to more effectively oppose Trump's agenda.
Beyond party and name recognition, gender may play a role in voters’ decisions this year, said Michael Cornfield, an associate professor of political management at George Washington University. The #MeToo movement and protests around Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have played into that trend.
“In these cases, it’s not just the name,” Cornfield said in an email. “Gender relations may be the top issue.”
map of the hypocrites!!!
The Daily Kos Elections guide to the nation's religious populations, by congressional district
By David Jarman
Sunday Jan 07, 2018 · 5:15 PM PST
Religion is one of the driving forces in American culture; it always has been, and continues to do so even as American religiosity, in general, has declined. It tends not to loom as large as race in the American consciousness, but it’s still one of the main ways that Americans tend to identify themselves, and to divide themselves along “us” and “them” boundaries.
More specifically, religion is something that tends to correlate with, and be predictive of, one’s politics. This is especially the case in an era where cultural issues supplant economic issues in many people’s ideological framework. If you genuinely believe, for instance, that abortion means killing people, that often creates a moral imperative against which, say, your marginal tax rate pales in comparison.
You probably have a vague idea of which parts of the country are more religiously active, and where religion is more suffused into local politics (usually taking it in a more conservative direction), versus which parts of the country are more laissez-faire about religion and about social issues in general. You may also have a general sense of, say, which parts of the country are more likely to be Southern Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran; you may have even seen state or even county-level maps that depict this. What I’m doing in this article that hasn’t been done before, though, is to quantitatively show those differences at the level of congressional districts, where much of our politics actually happens, so we can get a better sense of how religiosity corresponds with people’s electoral choices.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that covers every CD, and what percentage of each CD’s residents belong to which religious tradition and denomination. One additional advantage of using district-level data is that it, as seen above, it lets us use the Daily Kos Elections 435-CD cartogram map, which breaks out the nation’s metropolitan areas into proper focus, and de-emphasizes the nation’s empty spaces (which has the effect of not making the country seem more evangelical, or more Mormon, than it actually is). As we continue, we’ll talk more about the methods and limitations behind these maps, and then zoom in on some additional data for certain denominations. Read More
More specifically, religion is something that tends to correlate with, and be predictive of, one’s politics. This is especially the case in an era where cultural issues supplant economic issues in many people’s ideological framework. If you genuinely believe, for instance, that abortion means killing people, that often creates a moral imperative against which, say, your marginal tax rate pales in comparison.
You probably have a vague idea of which parts of the country are more religiously active, and where religion is more suffused into local politics (usually taking it in a more conservative direction), versus which parts of the country are more laissez-faire about religion and about social issues in general. You may also have a general sense of, say, which parts of the country are more likely to be Southern Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran; you may have even seen state or even county-level maps that depict this. What I’m doing in this article that hasn’t been done before, though, is to quantitatively show those differences at the level of congressional districts, where much of our politics actually happens, so we can get a better sense of how religiosity corresponds with people’s electoral choices.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that covers every CD, and what percentage of each CD’s residents belong to which religious tradition and denomination. One additional advantage of using district-level data is that it, as seen above, it lets us use the Daily Kos Elections 435-CD cartogram map, which breaks out the nation’s metropolitan areas into proper focus, and de-emphasizes the nation’s empty spaces (which has the effect of not making the country seem more evangelical, or more Mormon, than it actually is). As we continue, we’ll talk more about the methods and limitations behind these maps, and then zoom in on some additional data for certain denominations. Read More
election funnies, etc
|
|
Map Porn: If "Did Not Vote" Was a Candidate...
NeoGreen
From Demo. Underground: ... posted in response to all those who want to blame their friends and neighbors who did their civic duty and opted to vote:
what stupid americans voted for
*destruction of medicare, social security, obamacare, abolition of women's rights
*keystone pipeline renewed
*dapl will be finished and destroy indian burial grounds and missouri river
*lower taxes for rich, death of social safety net
*destruction of public schools
*high probability of middle east war
*more racism, discrimination, and injustice
*thieves and conmen running the federal government
*no minimum wage hikes
*cut in food stamps, more starving poor children and families
elections do matter
when you allow a piece of shit to win office, don't be surprised when your state starts to smell
*gop plans in the house: The entire rest of the party is committed to gigantic cuts to welfare, as shown by the budget formulated by House Republicans. Their most recent plan would slash $5.3 trillion in spending over a decade, 69 percent of which would come from programs for the needy.
"THE ARKANSAS TRAVELLER" 1840
AN ELITE POLITICIAN CANVASSING IN THE BACKCOUNTRY ASKS A SQUATTER FOR REFRESHMENTS. THE SQUATTER, SEATED ON A WHISKEY BARREL BEFORE HIS RUN-DOWN CABIN, IGNORES THE MAN'S REQUEST. FOR A BRIEF INTERLUDE(BECAUSE IT WAS ELECTION SEASON), THE POLITICIAN WAS OBLIGED TO BRING HIMSELF DOWN TO THE LEVEL OF THE COMMON MAN. TO GET HIS DRINK AND THE SQUATTER'S VOTE, THE POLITICIAN, HAD TO DISMOUNT HIS HORSE, GRAB THE SQUATTER'S FIDDLE, AND SHOW THAT HE COULD PLAY HIS KIND OF MUSIC. ONCE THE POLITICIAN RETURNED TO HIS MANSION, HOWEVER, NOTHING CHANGED IN THE LIFE OF THE SQUATTER, NOR FOR HIS DRUDGE OF A WIFE AND HIS BROOD OF DIRTY, SHOELESS BRATS.
Henry A. Giroux
Trump is simply the most visible and vocal member of a fractured party made up of frightened Americans, religious fundamentalists, and self-serving economic extremists who believe that the market should arbitrate and dominate all aspects of government and society. Trump represents a new form of social disorder -- intolerant, authoritarian, and violent -- that sees preventable inequality as part of the natural order of things. Guns, walls, laws, surveillance, prisons, media, and wars are there to serve the interest of the wealthy winners, and to keep the rest of the population in check. Bankers who commit theft, fraud, and acts of economic mass destruction never feel the cold steel of handcuffs tighten on their wrists. Corporate suspects never get shot down accidently in the streets, as do unarmed Blacks, by white cops who feel threatened by skin color. Trump's rise reinforces these injustices and gives anxious whites a boastful businessman and TV celebrity to rule as their strongman.
The State Of America’s Voting Rights, In One Map
Power has shifted.
by Ian Millhiserby
From Think Progress: The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it would not reinstate North Carolina’s comprehensive voter suppression law, and the big headlines out of this announcement rightly touted this decision as good news for voting rights. Just below the surface, however, this order has ominous news for many Americans.
In 2016, a voter’s right to the franchise — even when that right is protected by the Constitution itself — may not amount to much if they do not live in the right state...
...Below is a map of the federal appellate circuits, the level of federal court below the Supreme Court, which predicts how these courts are likely to vote in voting rights cases. Dark blue circuits are dominated by left-of-center judges and are likely to be strong supporters of voting rights, while dark red circuits are the opposite. Lighter colored circuits still lean to the left or to the right on voting rights, but are more ideologically mixed.
In 2016, a voter’s right to the franchise — even when that right is protected by the Constitution itself — may not amount to much if they do not live in the right state...
...Below is a map of the federal appellate circuits, the level of federal court below the Supreme Court, which predicts how these courts are likely to vote in voting rights cases. Dark blue circuits are dominated by left-of-center judges and are likely to be strong supporters of voting rights, while dark red circuits are the opposite. Lighter colored circuits still lean to the left or to the right on voting rights, but are more ideologically mixed.
In coloring this map, I made several judgment calls. The Seventh Circuit, for example, is colored white because, although a majority of its judges were appointed by Republicans, two of its GOP-appointed members have broken with their more conservative colleagues in at least one major voting rights case. The Eleventh Circuit is colored light blue, despite the fact that Democratic appointees enjoy a significant advantage, because several of the judges on this court were appointed due to a compromise between a Democratic president and Republican senators — and at least one of these appointees is very conservative. The Fifth Circuit is coded light red because, although Republican appointees dominate this court, the full court recently held that Texas’s voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act.[...]