This Week in Statehouse Action: Free Fallin’ edition
It's autumn, and we're plummeting towards Election Day together.
Happy autumn!
It’s finally officially fall, and regardless of where you stand on pumpkin spice, we know that the equinox heralds the breakneck run towards Election Day, whether we’re ready for it or not.
And we’d sure as heck better be ready for it; it’s really not hyperbolic to say that democracy is on the ballot in state legislative, secretary of state, and other down-ticket races.
All Falls Down:
In fact, Republican candidates who still cling to the “big lie” that Donald Trump won the 2020 election (he didn’t) are on the November ballot in at least one-third of attorney general and secretary of state races, according to States United Democracy Center.
This is plenty terrifying on its own, considering the power of secretaries of state and attorneys general to:
Make voting more difficult,
Permit and execute unwarranted audits into election results,
Overzealously prosecute supposed election fraud,
Refuse to prosecute actual election crimes like voter intimidation,
Refuse to certify election results, and
Actively sow distrust in those results.
Those Republican election deniers running in attorney general races are:
Alabama: Steve Marshall of
Arizona: Abraham Hamadeh
Florida: Ashley Moody
Idaho: Raul Labrador
Kansas: Kris Kobach
Maryland: Michael Peroutka
Michigan: Matthew DePerno
Nevada: Sigal Chattah
South Carolina: Alan Wilson
Texas: Ken Paxton
The Republican election deniers running for secretary of state– to LITERALLY RUN ELECTIONS– are:
Alabama: Wes Allen
Arizona: Mark Finchem
Connecticut: Dominic Rapini
Indiana: Diego Morales
Massachusetts: Rayla Campbell
Michigan: Kristina Karamo
Minnesota: Kim Crockett
Nevada: Jim Marchant
New Mexico: Audrey Trujillo
Vermont: H. Brooke Paige
Wyoming: Chuck Gray
Sure, GOP election deniers have no shot in some of these states - stares at Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maryland - but in the deep red states on these lists, they’re all but guaranteed to win.
But, you might argue, what’s the harm of an election denier winning the election in a state that’s probably not going to be competitive for Democrats in our lifetime?
Well, obviously election subversion and voter suppression are bad, no matter what state they happen in.
But the real scary thing here is that these election deniers’ political careers probably won’t stop at attorney general or secretary of state:
Like state legislatures, these offices tend to be pipeline positions: folks who get elected to them tend to run for higher-profile federal offices later, like U.S. House, U.S. Senate … even president.
And in those offices, they have the power to do far more damage to democracy than in their home states.
Scarier in the shorter term, though, is the prospect of election deniers being in these powerful offices in swing states for the 2024 cycle:
A one-two punch of GOP election deniers as attorney general and secretary of state of Arizona, Michigan, or Nevada puts Democratic election wins in those states next time around in real jeopardy.
I Fall Apart:
And that’s to say nothing of all the Republican election deniers running for statehouses:
According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, over 1,000 election deniers are running for state legislative seats across the country, including 16 who are so convinced that Trump won the 2020 election that they came to DC on Jan. 6, 2021.
And many of those election deniers are running in states where chamber control is absolutely in play in November, including:
So yeah, the threat to democracy this November is quite real.
Falling Down:
But maaaaaaaaaaybe someone should tell rich progressive donors?
Despite these GOP election deniers coming right out and telling us who they are and what they plan to do, many of their Democratic opponents for secretary of state and attorney general trail in fundraising:
The Democratic Party committees tasked with winning these elections – DLCC, DAGA, DASS – are perennially pulling in less money than their GOP counterparts.
True, the Dobbs decision overturning the abortion protections of Roe v. Wade did prompt a massive influx of small-dollar grassroots donations to the Democratic Attorneys General Association that brought their fundraising to parity with RAGA for the first time ever, but there have been zero reports of high-dollar donors stepping up and writing the kinds of checks that Republicans seem to have no problem raking in.
And this is despite the fact that about 40 of “the party’s most influential operatives, former White House officials and past members of Congress,” (some of whom surely have the ear of a rich liberal or 10) convened way back in early June to discuss these extremely real threats to democracy posed by Republicans in these down ballot contests:
Attendees were reportedly “disturbed” and found the presentation they received on the matter “sobering,” but there’s no indication to date that the meeting resulted in any real movement of Democratic resources into these lower-tier, lower-profile races.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to demonstrate that they truly, deeply understand the value in investing in these down-ticket contests:
In fact, Republicans get the importance of down ballot races so well that they’re taking the functional aspect of the statehouse-to-Congress pipeline and making it a real, coordinated, and funded effort.
This week, the Republican State Leadership Committee (which, as you may recall, includes the Republican Legislative Campaign Committee, the Republican Lieutenant Governors Association, the Republican Secretaries of State Committee, and more) announced an innovative partnership with the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Through this new program, the RSLC will formally commit to financial investments to replace Republican state lawmakers who run for Congress. In turn, the NRCC has pledged to support mentorship programs, which means that former state lawmakers who now serve in Congress will advise the “next generation”, i.e. state lawmakers who will run for higher office.
It’s a really good idea that takes the lower-to-higher office path that already very much exists and puts real strategy and resources behind it:
Fun fact! In the 117th Congress, 190 full members of the House of Representatives and another 45 U.S. Senators served in their state legislatures at some point.
Sure would be nice to see the DCCC get on this
And if you’re not yet convinced that the RSLC is basically Scrooge McDucking in his money bin this cycle, maybe this will convince you:
That organization has so much money just sitting around that it’s already pumped $800,000 into state legislative races in Oregon.
Oregon.
A state Biden won in 2020 56.5%-40.4%.
Sigh
Okay okay, I just can’t leave y’all like this.
It’s not all bad news, I swear.
Fallin’ for You:
Take Michigan, for example:
It’s an incredibly important state this year, and not just because the Democratic governor, attorney general, and secretary of state are running for reelection against GOP election deniers.
And not just because Michiganders will be voting on a ballot measure that would enshrine protected access to abortion care in the state constitution.
And not just because Democrats have a chance to either expand or lose their narrow 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court.
Which is not to say that all of these things aren’t incredibly important. Because they are.
But for the first time in over a decade, Democrats have a real shot at flipping one or both chambers of the Michigan legislature.
And it’s all thanks to good redistricting reform.
I say “good” because not all the redistricting reforms of the past few years have been terribly effective:
Take Ohio, for instance.
The “reform” voters approved there effectively allows the GOP to re-gerrymander state maps every four years (instead of the typical 10).
And yet, that wasn’t sufficient for Ohio Republicans this time around. Instead, they passed set after set of unconstitutional maps over the past year in a clear effort to run out the clock ahead of this year’s elections.
They didn’t even try to comply with the modest partisan fairness provisions in the anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendments voters approved in 2015 and 2018.
Or Virginia, where a bipartisan commission process was approved by voters at the ballot box just ahead of this latest round of redistricting.
But to the surprise of no one who actually understands how redistricting works, the evenly-divided bipartisan commission deadlocked, sending the process to the state Supreme Court as a last resort.
The resulting maps are generally regarded as pretty fair, but the “reformed” process was a failure.
Michigan, however, appears to have gotten redistricting reform right.
In 2018, voters approved a ballot initiative that took map-drawing power out of the hands of the state legislature and gave it to a 13-person independent commission–one that included independents and third-party members as well as Democrats and Republicans.
To further shore up the commission’s independence, its members are barred from being current or former elected officials or from having close ties to elected officials or to partisan politics, and members can’t immediately run for office under the lines they draw.
The results of this real redistricting reform are some of the most politically balanced maps in the country:
They’re not perfect, but they’re a damn sight better than last decade’s maps, which Republicans drew so effectively that Democrats could win the popular vote in both legislative chambers and still not have a majority of seats in either of them.
The maps for this decade, however, give Democrats a fighting chance in both the state House and Senate:
All 148 seats are up this year (110 in the House, 38 in the Senate), and (largely because of term limits), 66 seats are open. All but two are contested.
And Democratic candidates in Michigan won’t just benefit from fairer maps, quality candidates, and open seats:
With abortion rights literally on the ballot in Michigan this year, women and Democrats are apparently outregistering their counterparts.
Between the Dobbs ruling and mid-August, new women voters out-registered new men voters by 8.1 percentage points, and Democrats are out-registering Republicans by 18 percentage points.
Those numbers don’t guarantee Democratic wins at the ballot box in November, obviously.
After all, all the new Dem voter registrations in the world don’t do a lick of good if those folks don’t actually show up and vote.
But it’s a little ray of sunshine I’ll absolutely take.
Welp!
You made it!
I’m so glad you did!
And I’m so glad you’re a reader.
Really, to give the likes of me some of your precious time? It’s amazing!
And you’re amazing.
So take good care of yourself.
You’re important, and we need you.
