This Week in Statehouse Action: The Cruelest Policies edition
... breeding Laws out of the dead statehouse, mixing Legislation and my ire
Can you believe April is more than halfway over?
Honestly, I long ago gave up on time meaning a damn thing or feeling the least bit linear, but I have two Effin’ Birds calendars and a GCal full of meetings and reminders that force me to deal with mundane concepts like “days” and “weeks,” which is why I know that there’s less of The Cruelest Month ahead of us than behind.
Speaking of cruelty …
Special elections have been super not nice to Republicans lately.
Last week in this(ish) space, I mentioned two upcoming special elections in Michigan.
… okay, yes, last week, they were upcoming. This week, they’re a few days behind us.
And they went pretty much as everyone expected, except actually they went even better than expected.
The two Michigan House seats opened up by Dems who’d won election to other offices last November took that chamber’s margin from 56 D/54 R to 54 D/54 R for a few months.
Republicans capitalized on this situation by spending a few months slowing down Democrats’ legislative agenda.
Annoying if you’re on Team Blue, sure, but absolutely the (functional) minority’s prerogative.
But on Tuesday, the Democratic candidates in these solidly blue seats (Joe Biden won HD-25 59-40 and HD-13 64-35 in 2020) unsurprisingly and handily won both special elections.
Dems’ House majority will return, and their trifecta of House, Senate (20 D/18 R), and governorship will get back to implementing progressive priorities (next up: passing the $80.7 billion state budget that would provide both free preschool and community college and approving a voting rights package to improve ballot box access for voters of color, voters with disabilities, and voters who rely on languages other than English).
It’s no surprise that Democrats prevailed in these elections, but it’s worth noting that they continued the trend of Democratic overperformance in specials that I so enjoy flogging in this space.
… not by a ton, mind you, but, again, these were solidly blue seats to start with.
Fun fact! Xiong's win makes her the first Hmong American elected to the Michigan House.
Barring something truly wild, these were Michigan’s last legislative special elections before House Democrats must once again defend their narrow majority (the governorship and state Senate aren't up until 2026) this fall.
But that endeavor got a little more complicated this year when a federal court approved a new map for the state House drawn by Michigan's independent redistricting commission to replace one judges determined had improperly factored in race.
The partisan impact of the new map appears limited, as Donald Trump would have won the same 56-54 majority of districts under both old and new ones.
Newly elected Rep. Xiong, though, will likely be in for a considerably tougher contest this fall: While Biden easily carried the version of HD-13 she won this week, the revamped version favored him just 50-48.
Democratic special election overperformances get sporadic mainstream media coverage, but if you’re a dork like me, you want the latest data all in one place (and maybe also have the related math done for you).
Fortunately for all of us, the beautiful folks at Daily Kos Elections exist and do this sort of thing.
I get all kinds of press releases about what special election wins mean for Democrats and Republicans, why Joe Biden is actually an alien, whether you should invest in Bitcoin, or why you should cut all foods that start with B from your diet (PR pitches are wild sometimes), etc., so it’s nice to have an actual source of actual data to check out before I just swallow and regurgitate some flack’s line for y’all.
Here’s what’s up:
In 2023, the 38 Democrat vs. Republican (uncontesteds aren’t useful data points and thus don’t count, although uncontested races are an indicator all their own) special elections saw Dems overperforming the 2020 presidential results in those same districts by an average of 5.1%.
The fact that only 17 specials have been held to date in 2024 keeps it from being an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s worth noting that Republicans have been doing just a smidge better so far this year: They’ve overperformed Dems in these contested specials by an average of 1.3%.
But U.S elections are structured as two-year cycles, so the most useful data comes from looking at both 2023 and 2024 together.
So far in the 2024 election cycle, Democrats are outperforming Republicans in contested specials (55 races, specifically) by an average of 3.2%.
So, not a runaway success for Team Blue, but based on this data, I’d still rather be your average Democrat going into this year’s general elections than your average Republican.
And yet … there’s a problem specific to Democratic state legislative candidates that forces them to overperform their colleagues at the top of the ticket to win majorities in state legislative chambers: downballot roll-off, which is that thing when a voter checks a box or two at the top of the ticket (president, senator, governor, etc.) but doesn’t keep voting down the rest of the ballot.
And 2022 research from Sister District revealed that Democrats are way more likely to “roll off” the ballot than Republicans.
Specifically, across 10 battleground states over 8 years, downballot Democrats in contested races experienced ballot roll-off 80% of the time, compared to only 37% for their Republican counterparts.
This kind of disparity makes an epic difference in state legislative races, which are often decided by just a few hundred votes.
Fun fact! In 2022, just 63 votes in one district flipped the entire Pennsylvania House from Republican control to a Democratic majority. Meanwhile, Democrat Josh Shapiro won the governor’s race 57%-42%.
Sister District figured it would be pretty pretty helpful to understand specifically which Democratic voters are rolling off their ballots and what Dems can do to address the problem, so the org partnered with Data for Progress to conduct focus groups and polling to collect some meaningful data on the topic.
Because I happen to be doing some work with Sister District, I’ve had an early look at the results, and it’s super interesting stuff that I expect a lot of state legislative-focused groups will be rushing to implement.
These findings will be publicly disclosed and discussed during a virtual briefing Sister District is hosting on Monday, April 22, at 3 p.m. ET.
I’ll be discussing those findings here later that week, of course, but why wait? You can join the briefing yourself by signing up for the Zoom link right here.
It’s impossible to talk about state legislative cruelty this week without discussing Arizona.
Not-so-fun ballot roll-off fact: In the 2020 elections, just 4,451 more votes for Dems would have won them the two seats needed to flip the chamber. That year, 584,000 people voted for Biden but didn’t vote all the way down the ticket. If Democrats had persuaded 0.8% of them (less than 1%!) to vote for their Democratic state legislative candidate, Dems would have won the chamber.
Democrats are two seats shy of majority control of both the Arizona House and state Senate, and those slim minorities really came home to roost after last week’s ruling by the state Supreme Court reinstated a Civil War-era abortion ban.
This week, Arizona House Republicans successfully blocked two attempts to repeal that ban.
One Republican representative even crossed the aisle to vote with Dems to green-light the repeal (the vote wasn’t on repealing the ban itself, but rather to enable the legislative process required to repeal the ban), but with a two-seat majority, that one crossover vote wasn’t enough to override GOP Speaker Ben Toma’s opposition.
But over in the Arizona Senate, things went a little differently.
Two Senate Republicans sided with Democrats to first shut down GOP attempts to block a repeal bill and then to introduce SB 1734, the actual legislation to repeal the abortion ban (which takes effect on June 8, by the by).
It’s impossible to say at this point whether the proposal to repeal the ban will get past the At Least It Exists stage, but Arizona Republicans are super aware that abortion bans are a losing issue for their party and are acting conveniently conflicted on the matter.
And by “acting,” I mean “acting” – vanishingly few Arizona Republicans are actually interested in reestablishing or protecting reproductive freedoms.
How do we know?
They told us!
Arizona is one of several states that will (or likely will) have a pro-abortion measure on their ballots this fall.
Proponents say they’ve collected enough signatures to meet the ballot qualification criteria, but it’s not a sure thing quite yet.
Voters in Florida, Maryland, and New York will definitely send pro-abortion ballot measures to voters this fall.
In addition to Arizona, voters in Arkansas, Nevada, Montana, Missouri, and South Dakota will probably be voting on measures to protect reproductive rights to varying degrees.
Arizona Republicans aren’t super keen on letting voters decide for themselves whether they want abortion protections enshrined in the state constitution, which is understandable, given how poorly recent statewide elections have gone for them.
So GOPers in the state House are trying to ratfuck the ballot measure.
A presentation that Arizona House Republicans viewed and discussed this past Monday on a private video strategy call reveals that they’re considering several “alternative” abortion proposals to send to the ballot this fall that range from a one they say would “complement” the progressive pro-abortion measure but in reality would place increased restrictions on the procedure, to others that would allow abortion only until the sixth or 15th week of pregnancy.
You can check out their powerpoint for yourself here.
The voter-led pro-abortion initiative that Republicans are so worried about has been dubbed the Arizona Abortion Access Act.
The measure asks voters to guarantee the right to an abortion up to “fetal viability” (generally around 24 weeks) with exceptions for later procedures medically necessary to protect the life or physical and mental health of the patient.
Republicans are considering various creative names for their anti-abortion proposals, including “Protecting Pregnant Women and Safe Abortions Act,” “Arizona Abortion and Reproductive Care Act,” or “Arizona Abortion Protection Act.”
no intentional confusion there, no siree bob
With such slim majorities in each chamber and a couple of above-mentioned pro-reproductive rights defectors making themselves known this week, it’s not clear that Republicans will even be able to send any of their ratfucking measures to the ballot.
But given that delulu Republicans seem to have forgotten what happened in Virginia last fall, they might well decide that a 15-week ban is “reasonable” and send that to the ballot to compete with actual reproductive rights protections.
Stay tuned!
Okay, home stretch.
hey it’s not my fault that there’s so much material for a cruelty-themed newsletter
Here are some worst hits from GOP lawmakers and/or legislatures around the country.
Louisiana: This week, HB 156, which would repeal a law that requires employers to provide a 30-minute meal break for minors working for at least five hours, began working its way through the House.
The bill’s sponsor, GOP Rep. Roger Wilder, owns a number of Smoothie King franchises across Louisiana and Mississippi – you know, the type of job someone in high school might have.
Wilder, apparently incensed at the backlash to the measure, aired his frustration during the committee hearing: “The wording is ‘We’re here to harm children.’ Give me a break. These are young adults.”
Wilder also claims “he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks.”
In case you were curious, yes, this monster has children of his own.
Someone call CPS
Alabama: The state Senate has approved a bill that would make it easier for anti-vaxxers to endanger kids by allowing parents to merely declare a “religious objection” to a local board of education – no evidence or approval required – to exempt their children from school vaccination requirements.
Vaccination rates in the state are already on the decline, according to state health officials.
Maine: The Democratic-majority House recently censured two GOP members for blaming last October’s mass shooting in Lewiston on a new law that expands abortion access to later in pregnancy (LD 1619).
Well, technically, one guy blamed the horrific gun attack on the law, and then a terrible lady got up and agreed with him.
A week and change ago, Republican Rep. Michael Lemelin compared a recently proposed measure that protects health professionals who provide reproductive or gender-affirming care from other states’ bans or restrictions on such treatments (LD 227) to last year’s law expanding reproductive freedom.
Lemelin straight up told his colleagues that God punished Maine for enacting LD 1619 through severe storms that have ripped through Maine over the past several months.
Lemelin then noted that the new abortion law went into effect on October 25 of last year – the same day of the shooting that killed 18 people and wounded 13 others.
“When 1619 passed and went into law on October 25, you told God life doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Keep in mind that the law came into effect on October 25. God heard you and the horrible events on October 25 happened,” Lemelin continued.
Lemelin went on to threaten that if lawmakers pass LD 227 — which the House and Senate ultimately did — there would be “severe consequences.”
Following Lemelin’s hateful diatribe, GOP Rep. Shelley Rudnicki rose to “say that I agree with Rep. Lemelin and everything he said.”
Which, like, gross
Lemelin and Rudnicki were censured the next day; the censure resolution passed by unanimous consent and without debate.
fwiw, those asshats did apologize
New Hampshire: Granite State Republicans have gone from Live Free Or Die to Things We Don’t Like Or Understand Scare Us And Should Scare You Too.
The GOP-controlled state Senate has passed (and the messy-ass 400-person, closely-divided state House is considering) two measures targeting LGBTQ+ kids.
more like Big Government Or Bust
Welp!
That’s quite enough cruelty for this week.
As always, I appreciate you hanging in!
And I appreciate you.
So take care of yourself out there.
You’re important.
We need you.