Lawyers for failed Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake on Thursday were fined $2,000 by the state Supreme Court for making “unequivocally false” allegations about November’s election.
“Sometimes campaigns and their attendant hyperbole spill over into legal challenges. But once a contest enters the judicial arena, rules of attorney ethics apply,” Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said.
The ruling came in response to a request by Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) to sanction Lake and her lawyers for falsely saying that over 35,000 ballots were sent to a third-party processing facility to be included in the final tally for Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county.
Hobbs defeated Lake, who has yet to acknowledge her 2022 loss, by over 17,000 votes.
Brutinel did not grant Hobbs and Fontes’ request for Lake to pay their attorney fees. The judge added that Lake’s lawsuit challenging the verification of signatures in Maricopa County’s early voting is still moving forward.
“We respectfully disagree with the Court’s holding but look forward to presenting our case at trial on the claim of illegal signatures and any other claim the trial court may consider,” Kurt Olsen, a lawyer for Lake, told NBC News.
The state Supreme Court in March struck down the majority of Lake’s lawsuit challenging her election loss, but overturned a lower court’s decision dismissing the Trump-supporting extremist’s challenge over early voting signature procedures. That case will be decided by a trial court.
Lake, and other GOP candidates in Arizona races in November, also claimed election printer problems. A report by a retired Arizona Supreme Court justice found the issues arose from paper changes and didn’t affect election outcomes.
Lake, who still claims Trump won the 2020 presidential election, is in Budapest this week for the Conservative Political Action Conference.
A lawyer for Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) on Monday accused The New York Times of waging a smear campaign against his client after the paper reported Santos misrepresented key aspects of his resume to voters.
In an explosive report earlier Monday, the Times revealed parts of Santos’ claimed background appear to be false, including his education and work record at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Neither company had any record of his employment.
Santos’ lawyer, Joseph Murray, did not address the discrepancies and instead attacked the questions as politically motivated.
“After four years in the public eye, and on the verge of being sworn in as a member of the Republican led 118th Congress, the New York Times launches this shotgun blast of attacks,” Murray said in a statement. “It is no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at the New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.”
Santos claimed to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010, but the school said it had no evidence of his graduation. Santos’ profile posted on the National Republican Congressional Committee’s website says he attended New York University, but the school found no record of his attendance.
A company called Devolder Organization, which Santos’ family reportedly owns and appears to be a source of his income, does not appear to have a webpage or exist on LinkedIn. His financial disclosures reviewed by the Times don’t appear to list any clients for the company.
Santos, who won November’s race for Long Island’s 3rd Congressional District defeating Democrat Robert Zimmerman, is the first openly gay GOP candidate to win a House race as a nonincumbent.
Santos, whose parents moved from Brazil to the U.S., unsuccessfully ran for the same seat in 2020.
Santos embraced former President Donald Trump’s election lies and at one point suggested his own defeat in 2020 was a result of voter fraud.
A new poll from the nation’s largest teachers union found that culture-war attacks on public schools largely fell flat in the 2022 midterm elections, proving less important to voters than concerns about school shootings and traditional concerns over school funding.
The findings help explain why a number of Democratic governors and gubernatorial candidates ― including Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly and Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs ― were able to successfully fight off conservative Republicans who made the treatment of transgender students, and the previously obscure academic framework known as critical race theory, into prominent issues in their races.
“A huge, huge amount of time and money was invested in CRT by conservative politicians and media,” said Margie Omero, a pollster at the Democratic firm GBAO Strategies who conducted the survey for the National Education Association. “Voters rejected what Republicans were offering, and their attempts to create a wedge issue on public schools.”
In Wisconsin, Evers successfully portrayed GOP Gov. Tim Michels’ support for school choice as a threat to public schools. In Kansas, Kelly fought off multiple ads attacking her veto of legislation to bar transgender students from competing in sports aligned with their gender identity. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was able to shrug off ads suggesting that schools were more focused on a “woke” agenda than on reading, writing and arithmetic.
Republicans first become excited about the electoral potency of culture-war attacks during the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, when a host of education-related controversies ― including whether schools in the state taught critical race theory, a major suburban school district’s mishandling of sexual assault cases, pandemic-era closures and Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe downplaying of the role of parents in education ― helped now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin win.
But the precise role of critical race theory in Youngkin’s win was up for debate among political analysts. And even before the 2022midterms, there were clear signs the GOP was struggling to turn the education culture wars into a winning issue. Just 1.7% of Republican ads mentioned CRT, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. A September memo from the Republican National Committee told GOP campaigns they needed to connect culture war issues to existing voter concerns, including pandemic-era learning loss.
The survey found that a full three-fifths of midterm voters said school shootings were a major factor in their vote, more than any other education issue.
Voters placed far less importance on right-wing culture war topics. Forty-three percent were worried about schools teaching critical race theory to be “politically correct,” while 42% said they worried about indoctrination from “radical left-wing teachers.”
By comparison, voters were notably more concerned about book bans and conservative attempts to censor history. Fifty-five percent said a major concern for them was students “not getting a complete, honest history of our country,” and an identical percentage expressed worry about “too many politicians … banning books or topics that don’t align with their personal beliefs, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Holocaust.”
The findings reflect that while the idea of critical race theory fired up Republican base voters, it did not significantly move persuadable voters in 2022. “Culture war issues do not resonate with independent voters much at all,” the poll bluntly states.
Voters also had more practical and traditional concerns about education funding and learning. Fifty-five percent said schools failing to get enough funding was a major concern, while 54% said the same about pandemic-era learning loss and about low teacher salaries causing a staffing shortage at schools.
Moreover, the poll found that a relatively low percentage of voters were animated by school choice issues. Just 38% of voters said school vouchers taking money from public schools was a major factor in their vote, and only 29% said the lack of school choice options for parents was a major factor.
The poll also found that the public still has positive views of public schools and teachers. Fifty-seven percent said they have a favorable opinion of K-12 schools in their neighborhood, with just 18% holding an unfavorable opinion. Nearly two-thirds have a favorable opinion of teachers, with just 15% holding a negative opinion.
Notably, very few voters view themselves in political opposition to teachers. Sixty-two percent of voters said they are aligned with teachers on public education issues, while only 17% said they are opposed. Even among Republicans, a 39% plurality of voters said they are aligned with teachers, compared to 34% who are opposed.
There are still signs that Democrats have not fully regained the edge they had on education issues before the pandemic, with a number of pre-election surveys showing them with a smaller edge than would be typical. Some successful GOP campaigns, including the reelection effort of Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.), attacked their Democratic opponents for supporting pandemic-era school closures.
GBAO conducted the poll from Nov. 10 to Nov. 19 via landlines and cellphones, surveying 1,200 voters who cast a ballot in the midterms. The margin of error on the poll is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.
Varney ― a former Trump ally who once insisted the then-president had never told the American people a lie ― devoted a segment Tuesday to criticizing Trump for backing dud candidates in the recent midterms. He also took issue with Trump’s attempt to take back remarks he made over the weekend calling for parts of the Constitution to be terminated to accommodate his desire to be re-installed as president.
“He was talking about terminating parts of the Constitution. That plays right into the Democrats’ hands,” Varney said. “He’s trying to walk it back today but the damage has been done.”
Varney also said Trump “appears to be losing what used to be his iron grip on the GOP,” noting candidates he endorsed in key midterm races in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania had all lost.
And with Georgians voting Tuesday for the runoff election between Republican Herschel Walker and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D), Varney noted that there is a lot at stake: “More than just the balance of power in the Senate. It’s about the state of the Republican Party and Trump’s role in it.”
Fox Business’ Stuart Varney — once a staunch Donald Trump defender — lists all the Trump-backed candidates who lost their midterm election and goes after Trump’s call to terminate the Constitution:
Varney predicted Trump would not take responsibility for the outcome unless it was favorable.
“If Walker wins, Trump will take all the credit, guaranteed. If Walker loses, Trump will blame Walker for not inviting Trump into the state,” he said.
To cap it off, Varney quoted from a Wall Street Journal editorial that warned Republicans they’ll effectively be “terminating” the GOP should they choose Trump as their nominee for president in 2024.
Varney has repeatedly criticized Trump in recent weeks. After Trump announced his intention to run in 2024, Varney said the speech lacked some of the “old magic.” He has also accused Trump of “dragging the Republican Party into the mud” with his attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his potential rival for the party’s nomination.
The host’s segment comes amid reports that Rupert Murdoch and news organizations in his right-wing media empire are backing away from Trump and turning instead to DeSantis in 2024. While Trump still has allies and former surrogates at Fox News, he’s increasingly attracted friendly fire from Murdoch-owned media, including the New York Post, Fox networks and, in particular, the Wall Street Journal.
The Democratic candidate’s defeat in the general election in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District was a double blow for progressives, at once helping give Republicans their razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and also denying the left a chance to show that one of their own could prevail in a marginal seat after ousting a centrist incumbent in a primary.
Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a regional emergency response coordinator and attorney, lost to Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the former mayor of Happy Valley, in the Nov. 8 election.
McLeod-Skinner had become the Democratic nominee after ousting Rep. Kurt Schrader, a business-friendly centrist, in the state’s closed primary election in May.
McLeod-Skinner’s biggest gripes against Schrader were that he was too oppositional to President Joe Biden and too cozy with corporate America.
The Democratic establishment “always says, ‘You can beat these shithead Dems like Schrader, but then you lose us the seat,’” a progressive strategist, who was active in a coalition working on McLeod-Skinner’s behalf, told HuffPost in September.
A win for McLeod-Skinner gave progressives a chance to “put a lie to that,” said the strategist, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “If we can pull it off, it’s sort of the perfect one.”
McLeod-Skinner now joins a short list of swing-district progressive candidates to prevail against establishment favorites in contentious Democratic primaries ― and then lose a general-election bid to a Republican. Other recent examples are Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Dana Balter in New York and Randy Bryce in Wisconsin.
“Regardless of why this happened, the reality is that Republicans and Democrats will leverage this against progressives,” said Christopher McKnight Nichols, a history professor at Ohio State University who analyzes Oregon politics. “Both moderate Democrats and Republicans in the Pacific Northwest looking to this race now have ammunition to argue that progressives can’t win in the way that they purport.”
Narratives aside, though, the question of why McLeod-Skinner lost to Chavez-DeRemer is complicated.
“Ultimately this comes down to who had the money to get their message out and who had the money to counterattack.”
– Leah Greenberg, Indivisible Project
Moderates, who maintain that Schrader or another centrist would have had an easier time against Chavez-DeRemer, and progressives, who note that McLeod-Skinner got limited help from Democratic super PACs, have arguments in their favor.
“While there are no guarantees that Schrader, a moderate incumbent, would have won, it seems likely that he would have,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president of the centrist group Third Way.
Bennett noted that virtually all non-incumbent progressive candidates who won their House races this year did so in “navy blue,” or heavily Democratic, districts. He cited the cases of Reps.-elect Greg Casar (Texas), Jazmine Crockett (Texas), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.) and Delia Ramirez (Ill.).
“The implications therefore are clear as a bell: If the left is interested in winning elections and creating majorities, they will not run against Democrats like Kurt Schrader, a strong supporter of President Biden, in places where they simply cannot win,” he said.
At the same time, progressives note that, among other confounding factors, McLeod-Skinner did not get the support of House Democrats’ main super PAC, the House Majority PAC. House Republicans’ super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, by contrast, spent nearly $7 million in the race, contributing to a massive spending advantage for Chavez-DeRemer.
“Ultimately this comes down to who had the money to get their message out and who had the money to counterattack,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible Project, whose political arm endorsed McLeod-Skinner in the primary. (Indivisible Action, the political group, funded a small direct-mail initiative for McLeod-Skinner in the general election.)
“We didn’t have a fair test because in a fair test, we’d actually have a candidate who was resourced to run the race through the finish line,” she added.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) lost the support of influential local Democrats for breaking with President Joe Biden on a handful of priorities.
Tom Williams/Getty Images
A Flawed Incumbent Turned Sore Loser
Seeking a seventh term in Congress in 2020, Schrader faced a typically weak Republican opponent. The GOP nominee, Amy Ryan Courser, spent slightly more than one-tenth of what he spent.
Still, Schrader received 52% of the vote, defeating Courser by less than 7 percentage points. Biden, by contrast, won 53.6% of the vote in Schrader’s district, besting then-President Donald Trump there by nearly 10 points.
Despite this discrepancy, Schrader joined other moderate Democrats in blaming progressive rhetoric and policies for the party’s lackluster performance in House elections in 2020.
“When [voters] see the far left that gets all the news media attention, they get scared,” he told The Washington Post. “They’re very afraid that this will become a super-nanny state, and their ability to do things on their own is going to be taken away.”
Schrader went on to become one of the biggest dissenters in the House Democratic Caucus, playing an oppositional role more common among Democrats in Republican-leaning districts.
He likened the speedy House impeachment of Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol to a “lynching” before walking that comment back and apologizing. He was one of only two Democrats to vote against the House’s version of the American Rescue Plan Act (Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill), though he went on to approve the version sent back by the Senate.
And most significant, Schrader was one of three Democrats to vote in committee against legislation empowering Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices for seniors.
Although the legislation was already a weaker version of what House Democrats passed in 2019, Democratic leaders had to water down the bill further to mollify Schrader, an heir to the Pfizer fortune and top recipient of pharmaceutical industry PAC money, and a handful of like-minded Democrats. Among other concessions, the compromise that became law reduced the roster of drugs subject to potential negotiation and postponed the effective date of the changes to 2026.
“He stood with Pharma against the will of voters who overwhelmingly want action, and the most effective possible action taken, to lower prescription drug prices,” David Mitchell, president of the group Patients for Affordable Drugs, told HuffPost in April.
“I was better positioned to win the general than Schrader, given his past underperformance.”
– Jamie McLeod-Skinner, Democratic candidate for Congress
To Schrader’s critics on the left, the lack of a political rationale for his decisions ― a point of contrast with, say, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s defense of the coal industry ― was especially galling. The vast majority of the public supports letting Medicare negotiate lower prescription drug prices for seniors, which is why it appears so frequently in vulnerable Democrats’campaign ads.
Due to redistricting, Schrader had not represented much of Oregon’s new 5th Congressional District, which went south and southeast from Portland rather than south and west along the coast.
The seat in which Schrader would have to run for reelection was less Democratic. Biden carried the new district by 8.8 points rather than the 9.8 points he’d carried the older district by.
But before Schrader would face off against any Republican, he had to contend with a restive contingent of progressives in the Portland suburbs and the greater Bend area, many of whom were unfamiliar with him.
McLeod-Skinner had a following in Deschutes County, where Bend is located, thanks to her 2018 run for Congress and 2020 run for secretary of state. She capitalized on local discontent ― and lack of familiarity ― with Schrader, picking up the support of four county Democratic parties and numerous labor unions.
Asked to explain the local upswell against Schrader, Judy Stiegler, a former Democratic state representative from Bend, told HuffPost a year ago, “It isn’t just that he is more moderate, but he has been oppositional” to key elements of Biden’s agenda.
Schrader nonetheless had every advantage imaginable against McLeod-Skinner, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s expertise and the support of Biden, who made Schrader his first endorsement of the cycle. Schrader spent more than five times what McLeod-Skinner spent and got an additional boost from super PACs that spent nearly $2 million on his behalf.
When the mid-May primary came around, Chavez-DeRemer clinched the Republican nomination before McLeod-Skinner’s race against Schrader was called.
Responding to her win, Republican TV commentator Rebecca Tweed said, “If it’s between her and Congressman Schrader, Lori Chavez-DeRemer has a better chance of taking that seat.”
McLeod-Skinner ended up defeating Schrader by nearly 10 percentage points in the primary.
Although Tweed was relatively vague when explaining why she thought McLeod-Skinner would be a more formidable opponent than Schrader, McLeod-Skinner and her allies point to, among other things, his poor showing in the primary as evidence of his weakness as a campaigner.
“I was better positioned to win the general than Schrader, given his past underperformance … and polling showed his high unfavorables, based on his record and broken relationships,” McLeod-Skinner told HuffPost in a lengthy email response to questions about the election results.
McLeod-Skinner and her allies also lament that Schrader sought to turn his claims that McLeod-Skinner would be less competitive in a general election into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Schrader never endorsed McLeod-Skinner, and he cast doubt on her electability shortly after losing the primary, predicting in a television interview that “the red wave begins in Oregon ― Oregon’s 5th District.”
Days before the general election, he told The Washington Post he was still undecided between the two candidates.
In Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, by contrast, the more progressive primary candidate, Doyle Canning, united behind Democratic nominee Val Hoyle, who is now the congresswoman-elect, McLeod-Skinner noted.
“The inability to pivot from a competitive primary to a unified general election cost Democrats the presidency in 2016 and may have cost Democrats OR-05 in 2022,” McLeod-Skinner wrote to HuffPost.
A fire burns outside the federal courthouse in Portland in August 2020. Backlash to civil unrest in the city was a political obstacle for many Oregon Democrats this election cycle.
Noah Berger/Associated Press
Left-Wing Associations
Of course, Schrader’s dissension was not the only reason that McLeod-Skinner failed to win over the most conservative elements of the Democratic coalition.
In other cases, stakeholders were simply more wary of her progressive views than they had been of Schrader’s.
Local 29, a regional branch of the Iron Workers union, was the only labor union to endorse Chavez-DeRemer. The union disapproved of McLeod-Skinner’s opposition to the Jordan Cove Energy Project, a now-shelved proposal to build a natural gas pipeline across Oregon that would be used to export natural gas to Asia.
The union, which endorsed Oregon Gov.-elect Tina Kotek and backed Schrader in the past, was also impressed with Chavez-DeRemer’s professed support for union rights as the daughter of a member of the Teamsters. She promised to support continued application of the Davis-Bacon Act, which creates a floor on wages for federal construction contracts, and even said she would vote for the PRO Act, a bill protecting organizing rights that has very little Republican support.
“We need pro-prevailing wage Republicans in office,” Lorne Bulling, Local 29’s political coordinator, told HuffPost. “And we really value the need for an open discussion [about energy] and especially having all parties at the table, not just extreme environmental groups.”
Perhaps more significant, the same public backlash to rising crime, homelessness and left-wing activism in Portland that kept the gubernatorial race so close hurt McLeod-Skinner and other candidates down-ballot as well.
“Those issues really did matter and in a district like this might have made the difference,” said Nichols, the Ohio State historian.
Portland, long a byword for left-wing culture, has experienced an uptick in violent crime similar to other U.S. cities in recent years.
But other aspects of what the city has endured are unique. Peaceful marches following the May 25, 2020, police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis gave way to more radical demonstrations, including a prolonged and often violent protest outside the federal courthouse that prompted a controversial intervention by the federal government.
Seeking to address a growing homelessness and drug addiction crisis in Portland, the state also decriminalized hard drugs without even what many supporters of the policy believed was adequate funding or planning to realize the policy’s goals.
“People are scared to go [to downtown Portland],” said Jeff Eager, a former Republican mayor of Bend. “And it’s not just a partisan thing. It’s a ‘am I going to be safe’ thing.”
“The fact that Democrats won’t admit that it’s worse hurts them.”
– Jeff Eager, former mayor of Bend, Oregon
Though Oregon’s 5th District contains only a sliver of the city of Portland, the city’s reputation looms large ― even three hours away in Bend, where some longtime residents fear the slightest hints of a Portland-like trajectory.
Portland is “just worse” than it has been in the past, Eager said. “And the fact that Democrats won’t admit that it’s worse hurts them.”
McLeod-Skinner never embraced the most politically radioactive components of the left-wing criminal justice agenda. For example, she has never been on record calling to “defund” the police.
But McLeod-Skinner, who lives with her wife on a plot of farmland in central Oregon, also had a history of saying things that, though uncontroversial in progressive circles, nonetheless made it easier for Republicans to tie her to the most radical forces in Portland. For example, in August 2020, she tweeted that the rioting that erupted in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake reflected “righteous anger.”
The opposition dossier that national Republicans assembled on McLeod-Skinner for use by Chavez-DeRemer and GOP super PACs also noted that the Working Families Party and Indivisible, early supporters of McLeod-Skinner, have endorsed calls to “defund the police.” They also highlighted McLeod-Skinner’s December 2021 interview with HuffPost in which she refused to say whether she supported reducing police funding in order to free up money for other public safety programs.
A barrage of TV ads by Chavez-DeRemer fused all of those elements ― as well as McLeod-Skinner’s stint as a city council member in Santa Clara, California ― to depict McLeod-Skinner as a far-left extremist from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Chavez-DeRemer’s second TV ad placed the phrases “defund the police” and “Green New Deal” alongside a photo of McLeod-Skinner as a narrator branded her “an out-of-touch San Francisco area politician pretending to be Oregonian.”
In one of eight ads that the Congressional Leadership Fund aired in the district, the GOP super PAC made it sound like McLeod-Skinner’s description of the situation in Kenosha was about Portland.
“When the mob raged, Jamie McLeod-Skinner sided with them,” the narrator says as an arrow on screen points to rioters and looters marauding city streets at night. “She called it ‘righteous anger.’”
The ad also misrepresented McLeod-Skinner’s praise for Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s work ousting federal law enforcement officials from Portland.
“McLeod-Skinner even praised Kate Brown’s disastrous riot response, saying, ‘Good job, Governor,’” the narrator says. “Really, Jamie?”
Rep.-elect Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.) succeeded in tagging her Democratic opponent as an extremist while evading similar branding for her opposition to full abortion rights.
Steve Dipaola/Associated Press
A Cash Disadvantage
It took McLeod-Skinner a few weeks to air a TV ad countering the narrative that she was an anti-police extremist. She rolled out a 30-second rebuttal spot with the former police chief of Bend on Oct. 7, at least a month after the first CLF ad tying her to the “defund the police” movement.
Both campaigns say that the polling in the race shifted in Chavez-DeRemer’s favor after the first few weeks of attack ads against McLeod-Skinner.
McLeod-Skinner’s rebuttal ad “took too long to air and did not have sufficient funds pushing it out,” McLeod-Skinner admitted to HuffPost, saying that the campaign had to wait for the former police chief to become available to film the spot.
Nicholas Trainer, a veteran Republican consultant who advised Chavez-DeRemer, offered a similar assessment, pointing to internal polling showing that Chavez-DeRemer had succeeded in defining McLeod-Skinner as a cop hater by the time the rebuttal ad aired.
But he also maintained that there was only so much McLeod-Skinner could do to moderate her image after years of running for public office as a staunch progressive.
“There was always the lingering activist sensibility about her,” Trainer said.
Trainer said that Schrader would have been “a lot harder” to beat. “We were able to occupy a ton of the middle in this campaign that we would have been fighting over with Kurt Schrader,” he said.
Campaigning for moderate voters meant characterizing Chavez-DeRemer as a suburban mom, small-business owner and trailblazer in Latino politics. Chavez-DeRemer and Rep.-elect Andrea Salinas (D) will be the first two Latina members of Congress for Oregon.
“We spent a lot of time talking about generational poverty and how we get more people of color to get more generational wealth,” said George Carrillo, a former Oregon state health official and Democratic candidate for governor who endorsed Chavez-DeRemer. “With those conversations I had, there was no way I couldn’t support her.”
Carrillo, who lives just outside the district, told HuffPost that his attempts to reach McLeod-Skinner for a similar conversation were not successful.
When it comes to the actual policy, Chavez-DeRemer is likely more conservative than the median voter in the district in key respects. During the GOP primary, she touted the legitimate concerns of “millions of Americans that doubt the integrity of the 2020 election” and suggested that those concerns were to blame for the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the general election, she refused to say whether Biden won the race fairly, conceding only that “Biden is the president of the United States.”
Likewise, Chavez-DeRemer supports restricting abortion rights. In May, she said she would support “heartbeat” legislation, which generally means prohibiting an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
“I don’t think the lesson is that a progressive can’t win.”
– Christopher McKnight Nichols, Ohio State history professor
But Chavez-DeRemer succeeded in avoiding Democrats’ efforts to paint her as an anti-abortion extremist. She claimed that she opposes federal abortion restrictions and wants the decision left up to the states.
The lack of an imminent threat to Oregon’s permissive abortion laws may have reduced the salience of her stances on the issue.
“If we were in a state that had a trigger law or had a Republican legislature that was moving toward doing something, that would have been an issue for us,” Trainer said.
The Republican spending advantage also made it harder to define Chavez-DeRemer one way or another on the airwaves.
“I don’t think the lesson is that a progressive can’t win,” said Nichols, who previously worked at Oregon State University. “I think the lesson is that it was a tight race. They should have invested a lot more resources in it.”
McLeod-Skinner did not suffer from the anemic fundraising of a fairy-tale progressive upstart by any stretch.
As of late October, McLeod-Skinner had raised about $1 million more than Chavez-DeRemer. And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), often criticized by progressives for being inadequately supportive of left-leaning candidates, spent $2 million on McLeod-Skinner’s behalf, including more than $1.8 million on TV ads.
In a statement about its involvement in the race, DCCC spokesperson Johanna Warshaw called Chavez-DeRemer an “anti-choice extremist” whose “career in Congress will be short-lived.”
But Republican super PACs heavily outspent Democratic super PACs in the district and, critically, began advertising weeks before their Democratic counterparts.
Not only did the Congressional Leadership Fund spend $7 million, its virtually bottomless coffers enabled it to get on air in early September without any concern that it would run out of money.
In the meantime, progressives are fuming at House Majority PAC, CLF’s Democratic analogue, for failing to spend in the race. “National Democratic PACs walked away and left Jamie to twist in the wind,” Joe Dinkin, national campaigns director for the Working Families Party, said in a statement. (Dinkin led a last-minute super PAC effort that spent about $600,000 on McLeod-Skinner’s behalf.)
The House Majority PAC’s internal polling never showed McLeod-Skinner leading, however. And it was forced to put out fires in neighboring Oregon seats with fewer resources than it would have liked for what turned out to be a far more favorable cycle than it had anticipated.
“Given what was believed by many to be a very challenging political environment … House Majority PAC had to make strategic resource allocation decisions, with many of our investments making a significant impact in races across the country,” HMP spokesperson C.J. Warnke said in a statement.
Duringthemidterm elections, Democrats girded themselves against a potential “red wave” of Trump-supporting Republican candidates seeking elected office. Instead, a “rainbow wave” of mostly Democratic LGBTQ+ candidates lapped upon the shores of every level of government.
Although previous rainbow waves brought milestone wins for LGBTQ+ candidates, this particular one marked the first time queer candidates were on the ballot in all 50 states, according to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, a political action committee that works to increase the number of LGBTQ+ public officials in office. In addition, more than 350 LGBTQ+ people won their respective elections in midterm elections across state and federal legislatures as well as on school boards and city councils.
The election was also a win for visibility and a staunch rebuke against campaigns supporting homophobic and transphobic legislation like the “Don’t Say Gay” state law in Florida. Once these newly elected leaders take the oath of office, they’ll be more likely to further in-depth discussions and support powerful legislation on the crucial issues that matter most to our communities. Here are a few that feel most pressing, and how having a queer person in office could shift the tide.
Marriage Equality
LGBTQ+ officials clearly need to stay at the forefront of the ongoing fight for marriage equality. Although same-sex marriage became legal across all 50 states in 2015, justices on today’s conservative-led Supreme Court have explicitly suggested they could and possibly should revisit same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marry. To prevent this, LGBTQ+ officials need to push for the codification of marriage equality into federal law. In fact, a bipartisan group of senators havealready reached an agreement on a revised bill that would protect marriage equality at the federal level. Today’s crop of local and state-level officials have the potential to hold political leaders accountable until the legislation has become law.
“Our elected officials are what we need to make progress,” said Annise Parker, current president and CEO of LGBTQ Victory Fund, former mayor of Houston, Texas, and former fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. “We’re always going to depend on allies to achieve equality, but it matters that we’re in the room too and we can talk about our own lives and our own lived experience.”
Abortion Rights
Our newly elected officials will influence abortion rights at a critical moment. While most of these leaders are pro-choice, their motivation goes beyond a right to choose: It’s also about a right to privacy. Many LGBTQ+ people have supported bodily autonomy in relation to their sexual orientation and gender identity – and the fight to be themselves, in general.
“[LGBTQ+ people] see it in a broader contract than a woman’s right to make this decision,” Parker said, citing a 2003 case where the Supreme Court ruled that criminal punishment for consensual sexual acts was unconstitutional. “The right to privacy is bigger than that. The Supreme Court knocked down sodomy statutes, next we should look at Griswold [v. Connecticut]. That’s why a vast majority of LGBT folks believe a right to privacy is crucial.”
Climate Change
Making a difference when it comes to climate change may depend more on officials at the city level. Given her experience as mayor of Texas, Parker sees LGBTQ+ officials at these levels of government as the key to making strides in climate protection. Since the Senate and House are often so gridlocked on climate change that there’s no legislation or fruitful discussions on the matter, it’s up to local branches of government — and the LGBTQ+ officials there — to do the heavy lifting that will have a cumulative, growing impact city by city.
“Cities are actually at the vanguard on climate issues,” she said. “Legislatures pass bills on the energy mix in your state, but cities can take direct action.”
What Will The Rainbow Wave Actually Get Done?
A lot, hopefully. But LGBTQ+ elected officials will also need to contend with differences in their own political parties. In fact, George Santos is a gay Republican who ran and won his race in New York’s Third District against another gay candidate, Robert Zimmerman,becoming the first openly gay Republican elected to a first congressional term. Through all of the obstacles of the political landscape, the rainbow wave of LGBTQ+ officials will need to stay the course.
“There are very few places where people can flip a seat and make a difference,” Parker said. “This is about being in a chamber and working long term to build the kind of trust where you can have professional conversations with people you disagree on serious issues.”
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Sunday said that it’s high time for the Republican Party to ditch former President Donald Trump, reasoning that Trump has cost his party the last three elections and that he’s “tired of losing.”
“That’s the definition of insanity, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, and Donald Trump kept saying ‘we’re going to be winning so much we’ll be tired of winning.’ I’m tired of losing. I mean, that’s all he’s done,” he added.
Trump has hinted of potentially running again for president in 2024, saying that he’ll make a “big announcement” on Tuesday.
Larry Hogan on Trump: “He kept saying, ‘we’re gonna win so much we’re gonna get tired of winning.’ I’m tired of losing. I mean, that’s all he’s done.” pic.twitter.com/OYcpGaUm2I
Hogan, in disparaging Trump’s leadership skills on Sunday, reminded that a number of the GOP candidates who lost in last week’s elections were Trump endorsed and they peddled his ongoing false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“People who tried to relitigate the 2020 election and focused on conspiracy theories and talked about things the voters didn’t care about, they were almost universally rejected,” Hogan said. He also blamed Trump’s divisive and at times racist rhetoric for putting the GOP party “in such bad shape.”
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) on Sunday also said that his party should have long ago moved on from 2020 election conspiracy theories, which he has himself denounced, and that a more moderate approach should have been taken regarding the issues voters care about.
“They [voters] said, ‘Look, enough of this. We have to start putting in folks that are definitely going to come together and work across the aisle,‘” he told ABC News’ “This Week.” “America has been asking for more moderation for quite some time. There’s just, you know, certain parts of the Republican Party that haven’t listened so well. We’ve just got to get back to basics. It’s not unfixable.”
Like Hogan, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) ― who voted to impeach Trump for inciting last year’s insurrection ― blamed the former president on Sunday for Republican losses in the midterm elections and said that he can’t imagine seeing him as the party’s 2024 nominee.
“Our party should be about the future. I think our next candidate will be looking to the future and not to the past, and I think our next candidate will win,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is projected to win her reelection bid, protecting Democratic control of the Senate in 2023 and giving the party a reassuring sign about its prospects in the pivotal swing state.
Cortez Masto defeated Republican nominee Adam Laxalt, who had previously served as the state’s attorney general like her. Laxalt ran a hardline conservative campaign compared to the more low-key centrist effort run by Cortez Masto. The latter became the first-ever Latina to win a Senate seat in 2016 with strong support from former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Democrats are now set to hold at least 50 seats in the Senate next term. Because Vice President Kamala Harris can serve as a tie-breaking vote, Democrats will be in charge of the chamber regardless of the outcome of the final Senate race in 2022, a contest in Georgia that will be decided by a Dec. 6 runoff election.
Despite Laxalt’s support for conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and his own family’s disavowal of him, polls showed him closing in on Cortez Masto for months. With support from national Democrats and Republicans, the candidates and their supporters spent more than $175 million on advertising ― turning the race into Nevada’s most expensive election ever.
Analysts expected Cortez Masto would gain some ground after the Supreme Court revoked Americans’ constitutional right to abortion in June. She highlighted the court’s move in her final months on the campaign trail, pledging to fight to protect reproductive health care and casting her reelection as critical to Democrats’ continued control of the Senate, which has a huge influence over the appointment of judges. Laxalt tried to downplay his years of support for anti-abortion policies.
Nevada has trended Democratic in recent elections, but the state previously had a long history of electing Republicans. The GOP hoped that defeating Cortez-Masto would boost its influence ahead of the 2024 presidential election. A super PAC connected to Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) invested heavily in the race, and former President Donald Trump cheered on Laxalt.
Despite Cortez Masto’s success, the closeness of the contest is a warning sign for Democrats because Nevada is central to most possible scenarios in which a Democrat can win the presidency.
It could be days, maybe even weeks, before we know who will control Congress. But here’s one thing about the election we know already: It turned out well for the Democrats and terribly for the Republicans.
In a midterm year, when the party in power typically suffers big losses ― and at a time when voters were anxious about inflation and crime, and just plain exhausted from three years of pandemic ― Democrats effectively fought to a draw in federal races while making some important gains at the state level.
My home state of Michigan is as good an example as any. Incumbent Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson all won easily. So did ballot measures to keep abortion legal and shore up voting rights. Democrats prevailed in some key, very close U.S. House races and a whole bunch of state races too, allowing them to get full control of the Michigan legislature for the first time since 1983.
The Democratic wins were so convincing that, except in a few places like Arizona, Republicans couldn’t even make their usual conspiracy claims about Democrats stealing elections. Instead, they went right to the recriminations stage, arguing with each other over who’s to blame.
For many conservatives, the culprit is obvious: It’s Donald Trump, for pushing the party to nominate untested candidates with fringe views, for keeping the focus on his attempts to relitigate the 2020 election, and for using his leverage over donations and money to undermine the work of official party organizations.
New Yorkers saw a version of this argument on newsstands Wednesday. The cover of the New York Post depicted “Trumpty Dumpty,” and columnist John Podhoretz wrote inside that “Toxic Trump is the political equivalent of a can of Raid” because he is “perhaps the most profound vote repellent in modern American history.”
The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal ― yes, another part of the Murdoch empire ― was just as harsh. It scorned Trump’s “perfect record of electoral defeat” since his surprise 2016 presidential win, and blamed him for creating a “political fiasco,” all under the headline: “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”
Here in Michigan, the GOP chief of staff issued a memo (obtained by the Detroit Free Press) blaming the party’s losses on Trump ― directly, because his influence had alienated some big donors, and indirectly, because the candidate he backed for governor, Tudor Dixon, turned out to be a terrible nominee whose Trumpy affect and extreme views dragged down the rest of the ticket.
“Independent voters were turned off by the top of the ticket and trickled down statewide,” the memo said. “We didn’t have a turnout problem. Middle of the road voters just didn’t like what Tudor was selling.”
As somebody who covered the Michigan campaign and paid close attention to others around the country, I wouldn’t dispute any of this. As in other states, Dixon’s support for abortion bans alienated independent and even some Republican voters. Her attempts to stoke anger about LGBTQ-themed books in schools didn’t win them back. Her refusal to acknowledge the 2020 election as legitimate came off as weird to some swing voters, and downright disqualifying to others.
But as a diagnosis of what ails the GOP, this focus on Trump’s influence strikes me as incomplete ― and, coming from these prominent conservatives and influential party leaders, just a wee bit lacking in self-awareness.
Yes, the Republican Party has a Trump problem. But Trump didn’t create the problem on his own.
Remember, The GOP Embraced Trump
The Trumpification of the Republican Party happened right in front of us in 2015 and 2016, when Trump was running for president. The conservative establishment and key players in the party had a chance to reject his candidacy, and some tried. But many backed Trump or at least made peace with his candidacy, because it was the shortest path to their goal of getting power and implementing their agenda.
They weren’t exactly wrong about that. But once in office, Trump alienated large swaths of the population right away, with a bullying, nasty attitude toward immigrants, communities of color and political enemies ― and a frontal attack on the Affordable Care Act. That effort failed, but he was successful at another project: packing the judiciary with conservatives. And that effort led directly to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, a highly unpopular decision that was a primary factor ― maybe the primary factor ― in the GOP’s midterm losses.
None of these things happened simply because Trump willed them. They happened because they were what the Republican Party and the conservative movement had wanted to happen for a very long time. Repealing “Obamacare” was a multiyear crusade. The project to end abortion rights ― and, more broadly, to fill the courts with deeply conservative judges and justices ― has been underway for decades.
And it’s not like the GOP or its supporters appear to be rethinking the party’s posture today. The Post’s cover line on the morning after the election was “DeFuture,” over a photo of Florida’s GOP governor, Ron DeSantis ― around whom the party establishment and its allies have been rallying. But while DeSantis may be smarter and less impulsive than Trump, his political posture isn’t particularly different. He’s even got the same mannerisms, which may or may not be accidental.
How this will all play out over the coming months and years is impossible to say, in part because Trump and DeSantis seem to be on a collision course over who should be the 2024 presidential nominee. A lot had to break the Democrats’ way this year, and it’s always possible that something resembling current GOP politics will fare better next time, in a different overall political environment.
But one other lesson of this election is that the Trumpification of the GOP has created what looks like an enduring political opposition, by animating voters to elect Democratic officials who could be in power for a while.
Michigan is once again an instructive example. The class of Democrats who first won in 2018 ― and have now won re-election ― includes Whitmer, Benson and Nessel, as well as Rep. Elissa Slotkin and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, whose floor speech against anti-LGBTQ bigotry earlier this year went viral and made her a fixture on cable television. It’s not coincidental that they’re all women, relatively young, and in sync with the more open-minded cultural values of a new generation of voters whose support was a critical part of Tuesday’s victories.
The influence of these voters will only grow with time, creating a long-term challenge for the GOP. And it’s not a challenge the party can overcome simply by ditching Trump, even if that’s possible.
The problem for young voters ― and plenty of not-so-young voters ― isn’t that Trump is part of the Republican Party. The problem is that he belongs there.
Donald Trump wants everyone to know he received more votes in Florida during the 2020 presidential election than Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) received during his reelection campaign in the state this week.
Of course Trump’s 2020 numbers were from a high-turnout presidential race while DeSantis’s figures were from a midterm election.
It also may not give the ex-president much comfort to look at it from another perspective: Trump beat President Joe Biden in Florida by about 3.4 percentage points while DeSantis romped to victory against Democratic rival Charlie Crist by nearly 20.
Given that Florida was one of the GOP’s few bright spots on the electoral map during an otherwise disappointing midterm, a growing number of voices on the right say DeSantis could beat Trump in the race for the 2024 presidential nomination.
In a critical victory for progressives, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) won a second term as the state’s top law enforcement official on Tuesday, beating back an energetic Republican challenger who accused him of responding inadequately to an uptick in crime.
The outcome solidifies Ellison’s place in the national political firmament after his prosecution of the Minneapolis police officers who killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, on May 25, 2020, made him a household name. It also preserves the Democratic Party’s control of the office of Minnesota’s attorney general, which has continued uninterrupted since 1971.
Ellison, one of the highest-ranking Muslim elected officials in the country and one of Minnesota’s first Black statewide elected officials, defeated Republican Jim Schultz, an in-house attorney for a Minneapolis hedge fund.
“This election was tough. Millions of dollars were spent to sow division, hate, and fear,” Ellison said in a Wednesday morning statement touting his victory. “And we overcame it: we were positive, and Minnesotans responded.”
He thanked the voters and his staff, as well as Democratic U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith and other elected officials who endorsed him.
“I promise to continue helping you afford your lives and live with dignity, safety, and respect every day,” he said.
Ellison won over voters by touting his work protecting Minnesota consumers from COVID-19 pandemic price gougers, slumlords, bad employers, negligent gun sellers and Big Pharma. When it came to the pharmaceutical industry, he was proud of his work advocating for a state law capping out-of-pocket insulin costs and defending that law in court.
“This entire fight is one of the many versus the money,” he said at a Nov. 1 news conference about his work on the insulin law. “That is the challenge: Will we be able to afford our lives?”
He also argued that Schultz, who is personally opposed to abortion rights, could not be trusted to faithfully uphold Minnesota laws protecting abortion rights — notwithstanding Schultz’s assurances to the contrary.
“The stakes [of this race] are whether or not women can count on safe, legal abortion into the future,” Ellison told HuffPost.
Schultz had accused Ellison of supporting an effort to “defund” Minneapolis’s police force, because Ellison had spoken up in favor of a failed 2021 referendum that would have transformed policing in the city.
The referendum, Question 2, had proposed transforming the city’s police force into a more holistic “public safety” department with a public health approach to preventing crime. The ballot measure included language eliminating minimum funding requirements for the city police force and empowering the City Council to play a greater role in managing what would be a new department of public safety. And the camp of people advocating for Question 2 was closely associated with proponents of reducing police funding or even abolishing the police.
But Ellison pointed to his record of supporting full funding of police departments, regardless of what other referendum supporters had wanted. And he noted that in Minnesota, the state attorney general does not prosecute criminal cases unless a county asks them to step in.
“I’ve asked for literally millions of dollars over the course of four years of my term so that we can put violent criminals in prison when counties call on us to do it,” Ellison declared in a televised debate with Schultz in late October.
Instead, Ellison put Schultz on the defensive about how he would finance his proposed increase in resources for the criminal division of the attorney general’s office.
“Who’s going to do the opioid cases? Who’s going to do the landlord-tenant cases? Who’s going to do the wage theft cases? Who’s going to do just basic fraud cases?” Ellison told HuffPost. “He’s talking about changing the attorney general’s office in a way that it never has existed.”
There’s no question that Ellison suffered from the perception, in some voters’ eyes, that he is too left wing on policing and crime.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) won reelection against his Republican challenger by more than 7 percentage points.
At least one lifelong Democrat told HuffPost he was so turned off by Ellison’s association with the left wing of the Democratic Party that he voted for Schultz.
“We have to find a happy medium” between the extreme poles of the police policy debate, said Jesse Bissen, a graduate student who lives in North Minneapolis. “[Ellison] seems to be hiding his support for ‘defund the police.’”
Bissen had never voted for a Republican before and cast his ballot for Democrats on the remainder of the ticket.
But enough other Minnesota Democrats had different concerns when deciding for whom to vote.
“I prefer someone with some experience,” said Chris Fogelsonger, a writer from Wayzata, echoing Ellison’s criticism of Schultz’s qualifications. “And Schultz has apparently never tried a case in court.”
Allie Rose, a finance manager for a property management company who lives in Woodbury, said protecting abortion rights was a priority for her.
“I voted Democratic almost all the way down the ticket just because I’m trying to save my options for my bodily functions,” Rose said.
Rose also appreciates that Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006. (Ellison is one of the highest-ranking Muslim elected officials in the country and one of the only Black people to win statewide elected office in Minnesota history.)
“It’s important for inclusion for all people to be represented in the Congress at some point,” she said.
Another election result in metropolitan Minneapolis suggests that residents of the Twin Cities area may no longer be as motivated to punish the progressive Democrats whom they associate with efforts to “defund” the police.
In the race for Hennepin County attorney, Mary Moriarty, a former public defender backed by Ellison and other progressives, defeated the more moderate retired state Judge Martha Holton Dimick, by a wide margin. Moriarty is now due to take over criminal prosecutions in a county of nearly 1.3 million people that is home to the city of Minneapolis.
With key races in Arizona still undecided, there’s a dramatic legal conflict brewing over a small number of ballots that could end up playing a significant role in deciding some of the state’s (and the country’s) most important elections, including for the U.S. Senate, governor and secretary of state.
The dispute arose Tuesday as dozens of voting centers across Maricopa County — home to Phoenix and the majority of Arizona’s population — experienced printing errors: The ink was not dark enough on some ballots, resulting in voting tabulators failing to properly read the ink and spitting out the ballots without counting them.
Voters who ran into printing trouble had options. They could drop their uncounted ballots in a secure box attached to the tabulators, to be collected and counted at a central processing facility later; some 17,000 ballots were dropped in these boxes, known as “Box 3,” according to the county. Or they could “check out” of their polling place, leave, and try another polling place where the tabulators might have better luck reading the splotchy ballots. But Arizona Republicans have spent years spreading lies about election fraud in Maricopa County, and particularly about the dangers of using drop boxes, which led some voters to try their luck at another polling place. In Arizona, voters aren’t assigned a single voting site and have multiple options within their county.
Here’s the rub: In an unsuccessful lawsuit Tuesday evening seeking to extend voting for three hours, the national Republican Party and several candidates claimed that some poll workers failed to properly “check out” voters who opted to try a different polling place. As a result, when they arrived at the second polling place, the suit alleged, “these individuals remained inaccurately recorded in e-pollbooks as having already voted, and were either (a) required to vote using provisional ballots that will not be counted or (b) denied an opportunity to cast either a regular or provisional ballot.”
There were 7,000 provisional ballots total in Maricopa County — fewer than were issued in 2020, VoteBeat’s Jen Fifield noted. But Republicans could pursue legal action if the margin in an important race is smaller than that, arguing that the number of voters affected by the alleged “check out” issue could potentially change the election results, one Republican attorney said.
“We’re working with the county to determine how many votes are in this bucket, and if it has a potential effect on the outcome of the election, we’ll go back to court and make sure that those voters are treated fairly,” Kory Langhofer, an attorney for Republican Blake Masters’ Senate campaign, told HuffPost.
“If it has a potential effect on the outcome of the election, we’ll go back to court and make sure that those voters are treated fairly.”
– Kory Langhofer, attorney for Republican Blake Masters’ Senate campaign
There are still hundreds of thousands of votes left to be counted in Maricopa County — so the dispute over provisional ballots could end up a moot point. The court docket now shows a status conference for next Wednesday, as Capitol Media Services first reported. Langhofer said the hearing would concern whether and how to proceed with a legal challenge — namely, “whether to request a ruling on the provisional ballots at issue due to the failure to ‘check out’ voters.”
It’s also not clear how many ballots out of 7,000 provisionals could be related to the printing error and subsequent confusion over “checking out.” That’s part of the problem.
“Balancing the numbers in the vote centers where voters checked in, but left without casting a ballot nor getting ‘checked out’ will be difficult to reconcile,” said Tammy Patrick, senior adviser for elections at Democracy Fund and a former election official in Maricopa County. “There isn’t a process in place that allows for a voter whose record is flagged as having voted to dispute that and have their provisional count.”
During Tuesday’s hearing over the GOP’s effort to extend voting hours, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Tim Ryan rejected the GOP’s request, saying, “The court doesn’t have any evidence that any voter was precluded from their right to vote.”
Thomas P. Liddy, chief of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office’s civil division, similarly told HuffPost in an email, “We have no evidence that any voter who check-in to a vote center, chose not to vote and left the vote center without checking out.”
Liddy said such a situation was possible but unlikely.
“All of the poll workers were very well trained,” he said. “They know how to ‘check-out’ voters who Check-in, but then decide not to vote. It is part of the training class and it is in the training manual kept in the polling place.”
But Langhofer pointed to signed declarations from voters that he said showed otherwise.
“The inspector was confused and did not understand what I meant by ‘check out’ or ‘check in,’” said one voter cited in Republicans’ suit. Another claimed they saw voters ask to have their ballots spoiled so they could vote elsewhere, but that those individuals “were not instructed to ‘check out.’” Two voters, Nancy and Bill Mason, claimed they weren’t instructed to “check out” of their initial polling place after running into printer problems, and that they were unable to cast a ballot at a second location. Ultimately, they claimed they were only able to vote using provisional ballots.
“These people need to go to jail for what they did,” Bill Mason told HuffPost, noting he’d been escorted by police from the first polling place “because I wouldn’t leave, and I kept saying, ‘The election is rigged, that’s how you’re rigging it!’”
“I wouldn’t leave, and I kept saying, ‘The election is rigged, that’s how you’re rigging it!’”
– Bill Mason, Maricopa County resident who voted on a provisional ballot
There’s a clear irony in the situation: Had these voters trusted Maricopa County to truthfully tally their ballots, they may have simply opted to drop their ballots into “Box 3” to be counted by human beings at a central location. But voters primed by Republican disinformation didn’t trust that process.
“I don’t trust it to go in the box, the box may never make it down there!” one woman can be heard saying in an early viral video taken at a voting site with printer errors. “That happens all the time.”
Langhofer — who represented the GOP-controlled Arizona Senate during the bunk “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results, and represented the Trump campaign in Arizona before that — defended voters who might not trust the county’s human ballot-counters.
“Certain voters have heard about all of the concerns in election administration, and want to watch their ballot go into the tabulator,” he said.
Liddy, the Maricopa County attorney, pointed out that every voter had an opportunity to drop their ballots in “Box 3” if they were having tabulator issues. What’s more, he said, there are provisional ballots cast in every election.
“Was the voter provided a ‘reasonable opportunity to vote’ — that is the legal standard. The answer is YES,” he said. “Moreover, every affidavit provided by the RNC is signed by a person who voted.”
Mason, for his part, said he wanted to see his ballot tabulated “right then and there,” citing concerns about Maricopa County rigging elections. He pointed to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who for years has spread lies about election rigging, to explain why he didn’t want to drop his ballot in a secure box at his first polling place to be counted later at a central tabulating location.
“When it gets dropped in the box, that’s how they fix the election,” he said. “We don’t know where those ballots go or who’s counting them.”
In the 2022 midterm elections, Massachusetts voters approved Question One, a constitutional … [+] amendment that will create a new 9% income tax rate applying to income above $1 million.
getty
In the 2022 midterm elections, residents of California, like those of Massachusetts, voted to put Democrats in commanding control of their state government. Yet these two left-leaning electorates rendered opposing verdicts on similar tax measures seeking to raise state income tax rates on upper income households.
With 57% voting No, California voters resoundingly defeated Proposition 30, a ballot measure that would’ve added a new, 15.05% top marginal state income tax rate applying to income above $2 million. At 13.3%, California already levies the highest top personal state income tax rate in the country.
With the defeat of Proposition 30, upper income filers and thousands of small business owners avoided being hit with a 1.75 percentage point, 13% increase in their top marginal state income tax rate. According to IRS data, in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, more than 86,000 pass-through business owners filed under the individual income tax system in California and have income above $1 million. How many have income above $2 million is not delineated by the IRS data, but it’s likely ten of thousands of small business owners who would’ve seen their job creating and sustaining capacity diminished had Proposition 30 passed.
The ride-sharing company Lyft LYFT was the primary financial backer of Proposition 30, which directed the additional funding to the buildout of electric vehicle infrastructure. Had Proposition 30 been enacted, the new 15.05% income tax rate would’ve raised an additional $3 billion to $4.5 billion annually, according to projections from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Governor Gavin Newsom (D), along with the California Teachers Association, urged Californians to reject Proposition 30, in part, because it would make revenue collections less predictable. “California’s tax revenues are famously volatile, and this measure would make our state’s finances even more unstable,” Newsom said of the proposed income tax hike.
“Proposition 30 is a special interest carve-out — a cynical scheme devised by a single corporation to funnel state income tax revenue to their company,” Newsom said. “Californians should know that just this year our state committed $10 billion for electric vehicles and their infrastructure.”
“The election results are an unfortunate setback for the climate movement,” a Lyft spokesman said the day after the election. “Millions were spent by the opposition to confuse and misguide voters, however we are undaunted … we remain committed to achieving our collective climate goals.”
While Golden State voters rejected an income tax hike on high earners, in Massachusetts another “millionaires tax” proposal, Question One, passed with nearly 52% support. Question One is a constitutional amendment that will move Massachusetts from a flat to progressive income tax structure. Massachusetts currently has a 5% flat state income tax rate and passage of Question One will create a new 9% rate on income above $1 million dollars.
Question One is projected to raise an additional $1.5 billion annually for state coffers. Whereas the progressive tax hike rejected by Californians would’ve been used to fund EV infrastructure, the income tax increase approved in Massachusetts will use the additional funds to boost education and transportation spending.
While the state teachers union was a major opponent of the defeated California income tax increase, they were the top proponent and funder of the Massachusetts income tax hike. The California Teachers Association spent $5 million to defeat Proposition 30. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, meanwhile, spent $15.5 million in support of Question One. The American Federation for Teachers also kicked in $6.7 million to help pass the income tax hike.
While this tax hike was sold to Bay State voters as a way to make the rich pay more, small businesses will also be hit with this tax increase. According to IRS data, more than 19,000 owners of sole proprietorships, LLCs, partnerships & S corporations that filed under the personal income tax system in Massachusetts in 2019 would’ve be hit by the 44% income tax rate hike imposed by Question One had it been in effect at the time.
In Moving From Flat To Progressive Income Tax, Massachusetts Becomes A National Outlier
Question One marks the sixth time in the past 50 years that a measure seeking to move Massachusetts to a progressive income tax has been put on the ballot. The previous efforts occurred in 1962, 1968, 1972, 1976, and 1994. In 2022, Question One became the first progressive income tax proposal to receive voter approval.
By moving from a flat to a progressive income tax structure, Massachusetts is bucking a national trend, as more states have been moving in the opposite direction, going from a progressive to a flat income tax. In September, Idaho became the fifth state in the past two years where lawmakers enacted legislation moving from a progressive to a flat state income tax structure. Other states where lawmakers have passed legislation to move from a progressive to flat income tax over the past two years include Georgia, Mississippi, Iowa, and Arizona.
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (R) has a proposal to move his state to a flat tax. Until passage of Question One, enactment of Governor Burgum’s plan would’ve made North Dakota state number 25 with a flat state income tax rate. Approval of Question One, however, will reduce the number of flat tax states by one, bringing it down to 23 currently. That means enactment of the flat tax proposal pending in North Dakota would get the total number of flat tax states back to 24.
One of the now 23 states that has a flat tax, Colorado, had an income tax cut on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. Proposition 121, which was approved with 65% of the vote, will cut Colorado’s flat income tax rate from 4.55% to 4.40%. Passage of Proposition 121 marks the second reduction in the state’s flat income tax rate to be approved by Colorado voters in the past two years.
There are a number of possible take-aways from the results of these 2022 ballot measures. It’s clear that it’s very helpful for progressive tax hike initiatives to have the teachers unions on board, at least in states as blue as California and Massachusetts. Another potential take-away for many will be that, while the 2022 midterm elections went much better for Democrats than was expected going in, the results do not appear to represent an endorsement of progressive policies, even in Democratic strongholds.
And that continued right through Election Day, with a party platter that referenced one of Oz’s most infamous campaign flubs.
Reporters at Fetterman’s election night event spotted a “crudité” spread:
That’s a reference to an infamous video Oz made in a supermarket complaining about prices as he pretended he was buying ingredients his wife wanted for a “crudité.”
Fetterman retweeted the video with a crudité correction.
“In PA we call this a… veggie tray,” he wrote.
But on election night, Fetterman’s campaign couldn’t help but break out the jokey C-word:
That wasn’t Oz’s only screwup in the video, He also botched the names of two regional supermarket chains by claiming he was in a “Wegner’s,” apparently a mangling of Wegmans with Redner’s.
He later claimed the mixup was because he was “exhausted” by his campaign effort.
“I’ve gotten my kids’ names wrong as well,” Oz told Newsmax. “I don’t think that’s a measure of someone’s ability to lead the commonwealth.”
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is projected to win reelection in Wisconsin, blocking Republicans from taking total control of the swing state.
Evers defeated Republican construction company CEO Tim Michels, who conceded early Wednesday morning.
Michels won his primary with the backing of former President Donald Trump and largely embraced his backer’s lies about the 2020 election. He then proceeded to relentlessly attack Evers on the economy, crime and education.
Evers fought back with his own focus on education, arguing that he successfully guided the state’s schools through the coronavirus pandemic.
A mild-mannered executive, Evers has battled GOP efforts to strip away his power since his narrow 2018 victory over incumbent Republican Gov. Scott Walker. His vetoes have prevented the GOP from enacting a slew of different conservative policy goals.
Evers could still lose his veto powers, as a fresh gerrymander of the state’s legislative districts has given Republicans a shot at veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature.
The governor’s race was long considered a toss-up, with polls showing the two men within the margin of error.
A Michels win, along with continued GOP control of Wisconsin’s heavily gerrymandered state legislature, would have meant that Republicans would have had total control of one of the nation’s most crucial swing states. President Barack Obama won the state twice, though Trump won it in 2016 and Biden narrowly took it back in 2020.
Early Tuesday morning, Charlie Kirk, the influential right-wing activist with close ties to the Trump family, shared a video of a poll worker in conservative Anthem, Arizona, announcing to a line of waiting voters that one of the polling place’s two tabulators was broken. The other successfully scanned completed ballots only 75% of the time.
“It could be a printer issue, or it could be the tabulator itself,” the Maricopa County poll worker said before adding that voters experiencing difficulty could simply drop off their ballot in a box attached to the tabulator, labeled “Box Three,” to be counted later at a tabulation center — the method used by most Arizona counties.
The tabulation issues were affecting about 20% of polling locations, the county’s Board of Supervisors chair Bill Gates (R) said in a video posted on social media, before emphasizing that voters could also go to another polling place if they were experiencing issues. (Voters in Arizona can vote in multiple locations within a county rather than being bound to a neighborhood-specific polling location.)
Within a few hours, the county had identified and apologized for the issue: printer settings. “It appears some of the printers were not producing dark enough timing marks on the ballots,” a press release read. County Recorder Stephen Richer (R) assured voters that “every legal vote will be tabulated,” regardless of the machine errors.
But it was too late. Republican politicians had already primed voters to expect under-handed tactics from Maricopa County, a Democratic stronghold home to more than half of Arizona’s population and also the target of the conspiracy theory-fueled “audit” in 2021 that Republicans used to push false voter fraud claims. They knew what was really going on.
The video Kirk shared showed that people waiting in line were angry. Some began reciting GOP talking points about ballot tabulators: “You need to get rid of the machines!” someone says off camera. “I don’t trust it to go in the box, the box may never make it down there! That happens all the time,” another woman said before leaving the line.
“I don’t trust it to go in the box, the box may never make it down there! That happens all the time.”
– Maricopa County voter, responding to ballot tabulation issues
Before long, “cheating” was trending on Twitter, and a popular pro-Donald Trump forum had pinned a post on “Box 3” to the top of its page, NBC News reported.
Around the web, commenters said the problems were “by design” and evidence that “Democrats are cheating again,” according to the Election Integrity Partnership, which tracks election-related misinformation and disinformation.
Republican politicians across the country, especially in Arizona, have raised the prospect of rejecting election outcomes if they lose — tapping into widespread GOP beliefs of systematic election fraud — and only accepting them if they win.
But on Tuesday, the Arizona GOP faced a more immediate problem: How could they incorporate the tabulation problems into their existing false claims about widespread election theft without discouraging supporters enough to make them skip voting altogether? The answer: Demonize Maricopa County, but urge voters to stick with the process.
“There’s a lot of bad things going on. … They want to delay you out of voting,” Trump intoned ominously on Truth Social, urging Maricopa County voters to stay in line.
“Go overwhelm the BS,” Donald Trump Jr., his son, wrote on Twitter. “If you absolutely have to come back later, but cast your vote at all costs!!!”
Mark Finchem, the Arizona GOP secretary of state candidate who pushed the legally impossible proposal to “decertify” the 2020 election results, also weighed in on Twitter. “Why is it always Maricopa?” tweeted Finchem. Later, he tweeted at a congressional candidate who said, “this will be the last illegally ran election in AZ!” because Finchem would bring “competence” to the secretary of state’s office.
“Democrats are hoping you will get discouraged and go home,” Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters wroteafter wondering whether the problems were “incompetence or something worse.”
Two others — state GOP chair Kelli Ward and Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor — claimed that the problem disproportionately affected conservative areas. There was no clear evidence supporting those claims, and neither Lake’s campaign nor the Arizona GOP responded to HuffPost’s questions.
“PSA: Hey, Maricopa County voters! Go vote in a Democrat stronghold. The machines and ballots seem to be fine there,” Ward wrote.
In “the heart of liberal Phoenix,” Lake said, “they’ve had zero problems with their machines today.”
Still, as the day progressed, there were signs that Republicans were changing their strategy to adapt to the machine issues. In a Tuesday morning flier, Ward urged voters, “do not put your ballot in ‘box 3’ or ‘door 3.’” A few hours later, Finchem shared a graphic from the Lake campaign advising supporters to use the boxes “as a last resort.”
And, in a lawsuit filed in a Maricopa County court Tuesday, the national Republican Party sought to extend polling place hours until 10 p.m. After a 20-minute hearing, a judge denied the request.
After an NAACP chapter alleged voter intimidation in a predominately Black community in Texas, a federal judge ordered officials at a polling place in Jefferson County not to harass or intimidate voters. This includes refraining from asking them to read their addresses aloud or standing near them as they fill out their ballots.
The judge, Donald Trump appointee Michael J. Truncale, emphasized that he was not making “a finding of fact.” Still, he did grant a temporary restraining order stopping the reported behavior and instructing the county’s clerk to implement the order by 7 a.m. Tuesday.
White poll workers at the John Paul Davis Community Center, including a GOP-appointed election judge, “repeatedly” asked Black voters in “aggressive tones” to recite their addresses within earshot of other voters, poll watchers and poll workers, “even when the voter was already checked in by a poll worker,” according to the lawsuit. Around 90% of people who vote at the community center are Black, the suit claimed.
By contrast, the election judge at the community center did not ask white voters to recite their addresses, the complaint continued.
The named plaintiff, Jessica Daye, who is Black, “plans to try to vote somewhere else on Election Day because she fears that — among other things — the poll workers at the Community Center will ask her to recite her address out loud in front of everyone,” according to the suit.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which helped bring the suit and operates the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline, said in a press release Tuesday that it had “received multiple complaints about white poll workers at the Beaumont polling place asking Black voters to loudly recite their addresses after already being checked in and verified to vote, in a gross instance of invasion of privacy and voter intimidation.”
White poll workers also allegedly “followed” Black voters and voter assistants around the polling place, including standing “two feet behind a Black voter and the assistant” as the voter was casting their ballot. Poll workers also allegedly helped white voters scan their ballots into voting machines but did not similarly help Black voters.
Jefferson County, the county’s commissioners’ court, the county clerk, and the specific election judge in charge of the community center were named defendants in the lawsuit. Lawyers representing the county didn’t respond to HuffPost’s request for comment Tuesday. However, a court record shows that an emergency hearing Monday night lasted approximately three hours, including recess and time for the court’s ruling.
The complaint noted that before filing the suit, a pastor who is also a member of the NAACP chapter relayed concerns about the center’s election judge, Mary Beth Bowling, to the county clerk, but “no action was taken.” Plaintiffs alleged the actions they described violated the Voting Rights Act, as well as the U.S. Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments. Plaintiffs also submitted several affidavits from pollworkers, a voter assistant, and the president of the Beaumont Chapter of the NAACP flagging the behavior.
“I have never before gotten so many complaints about how uncomfortable and difficult it has been for my congregants to vote at the Community Center,” wrote affiant Airon Reynolds, Jr., an NAACP member and pastor at the Borden Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, a short drive from the polling place. Reynolds said he went to the polling place and asked Bowling to “adjust” her behavior — saying that “drilling” voters about their addresses was “demeaning” — but she refused.
The voter assistant, Joyce Roper, wrote that Bowling “stood right behind me as I was assisting an elderly Black man” and only moved after being asked twice. Over 10 days of early voting, Roper added, more than 60 Black voters “told me they felt intimidated, uneasy, and uncomfortable voting in the Community Center.”
Reynolds’ own experience was similarly fraught. He wrote: “When I walked into the Community Center, there were two white poll workers standing and looking at me suspiciously. They watched every step I took. When I went to the voting booth, they came closer, walking toward me. They both stood about five feet behind me and watched me like I was getting ready to steal something. After I voted, they stared at me as I put my ballot into the scanning machine and as I walked outside. I saw them do the same to a handful of other Black voters who were in the polling place at the same time as me.”
In his order Monday, Truncale denied the plaintiff’s requests to prohibit Bowling from working as an election judge. But he granted their request prohibiting election workers and others “from requesting or ordering any voters to publicly recite their addresses before allowing them to vote,” as well as prohibiting them “from positioning themselves near voters who are marking their ballots such that they can view voters’ selections,” aside from certain exceptions spelled out in Texas law.
Truncale also prohibited election workers at the community center from turning away eligible voters.
In a press release Tuesday, Beaumont NAACP President Rev. Michael Cooper wrote that he was “thankful for Judge Truncale’s fair assessment to ensure that Black voters in Beaumont won’t face any additional violations as they exercise their right to vote.”
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Some of Pennsylvania’s largest counties scrambled Monday to help voters fix mail-in ballots that have fatal flaws such as incorrect dates or missing signatures on the envelopes used to send them in, bringing about confusion and legal challenges in the battleground state on the eve of the election.
Elections officials in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, announced measures they were taking in response to state Supreme Court rulings in recent days that said mail-in ballots may not be counted if they lack accurate handwritten dates on the exterior envelopes.
The Department of State said it was unclear just how many ballots are at issue across the state. The agency over the weekend asked counties to provide the numbers, broken down by political party. Officials said some counties were not letting voters fix their mistakes.
Lines formed at City Hall in downtown Philadelphia on Monday and over the weekend with voters waiting to correct their ballots. Some people on social media said the office did not get to everyone Monday.
Voters wait in line to make corrections to their ballots for the midterm elections at City Hall in Philadelphia, on Nov. 7, 2022.
The Pennsylvania litigation was filed by Republican groups and is among legal efforts by both political parties in multiple states to have courts sort out disputes over voting rules and procedures ahead of the midterm election.
A new federal lawsuit over the envelope dates was filed Monday in Pittsburgh federal court by the national congressional and senatorial Democratic campaign organizations, two Democratic voters and Fetterman’s U.S. Senate campaign. They sued county boards of election across the state, arguing that throwing out ballots that lack proper envelope dates would violate a provision in the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act that says people can’t be kept from voting based on what the lawsuit calls “needless technical requirements.”
In Wisconsin, the Republican chair of the state Assembly’s elections committee, along with a veterans group and other voters, filed a lawsuit Friday seeking a court order requiring the sequestering of military absentee ballots in the battleground state. The lawsuit seeks a temporary injunction requiring elections officials in Wisconsin to set aside military ballots so their authenticity can be verified.
A judge Monday refused that order.
Also on Monday, in Arizona, a judge blocked Cochise County’s plan to conduct a Republican effort to count all ballots by hand. The lawsuit aimed to stop the county board of supervisors from expanding what is normally a small hand tally used to verify machines’ accuracy to include all early ballots and all Election Day ballots as well.
A challenge against voting by absentee ballot in Detroit was also thrown out Monday after a judge ruled that a Republican candidate for secretary of state “failed dramatically” to produce any evidence of violations in the majority-Black city.
Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, Leigh Chapman, on Monday urged mail-in voters who think they may have made technical errors to contact their county elections offices. If the county won’t let them fix the problem, they should go to their local polling place on Tuesday and request a provisional ballot, she said.
In Allentown, Lehigh County officials reached out to all the voters they could locate whose ballots have problems, election director Tim Benyo said Monday. He said there are a few hundred ballots at issue.
“People have been very interested in curing their ballots,” Benyo said. “We’ve been busy.”
Allegheny County elections officials posted online the names and birth years of voters who have sent in ballots in envelopes that either lack any date or are dated outside the permissible range of Sept. 19-Nov. 8 for mail-in ballots and Aug. 30-Nov. 8 for absentee ballots. Those voters can fix their ballots in person at the elections office Monday or Tuesday, or vote provisionally at their regular polling places.
Allegheny reported that, as of Sunday, more than 600 incorrectly and nearly 400 undated ballots had arrived to be counted. Philadelphia said it has received about 2,000 undated ballots and several hundred more that appear to have been incorrectly dated.
Philadelphia Deputy Commissioner Nick Custodio said the court decision last week and the tide of ballots rolling in ahead of Election Day has made it difficult to issue direct notifications.
“So far we have only been able to put out a list on our website, but we are exploring whatever other options are available given the short time-period,” Custodio said.
Dozens of voters seeking to fix their ballots showed up at City Hall over the weekend, and Custodio said more visited city offices Monday. Volunteers from several groups are contacting those voters to see if they need help getting to the elections office.
A judge in Monroe County, a swing region in eastern Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, on Monday denied a Republican request to stop efforts by county election officials to notify voters about defective absentee and mail-in ballots and give them a chance to fix them.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that mail-in votes do not count if they are “contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes,” then supplemented that with a follow-up order on Saturday that specified the allowable date range for mail-in and absentee ballots.
Ballots without properly dated envelopes have been the topic of litigation since mail-in voting was greatly expanded in Pennsylvania under a state law passed in 2019.
Mail-in ballots must be received by 8 p.m. Tuesday, so at this point officials are urging people who have not done so to deliver them to elections offices or drop boxes by hand.
This story has been corrected to say mail-in ballots must be received by 8 p.m., not 8 a.m.
___ AP reporters Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, Bob Christie in Phoenix and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this story.
The 2022 election cycle has found the GOP more competitive in New England than it has been in years. Former Providence Mayor Allan Fung (R), who is running to fill the open U.S. House seat currently held by Congressman Jim Langevin (D), is up in the polls heading into Election Day. In New Hampshire, meanwhile, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Don Bolduc, received financial backing in the primary from Senator Chuck Schumer because Democrats viewed Bolduc as a more beatable opponent in November. Yet Bolduc now has a very real chance to win, with the Real Clear Politics polling average showing him to be in a dead heat with incumbent Senator Maggie Hassan (D).
In Maine, however, the last poll released before the election has Governor Janet Mills (D) with an eight point lead over her Republican challenger, former Governor Paul LePage (R). Yet even if Mills wins reelection, there is a decent chance she’ll be forced to work with a Republican-led statehouse, at least partially, for the first time.
The Portland Press-Herald reported that a Mills reelection means Democrats “would have the power to implement policies on issues such as abortion, taxes, health care and energy.” Yet that’s only true if Democrats also maintain control of both chambers of the state legislature in Augusta and polling shows that’s far from certain.
The Maine Democratic Party and outside groups backing Democratic state legislative candidates have outspent Republicans in an effort to maintain control of the legislature. Of the 151 seats in the Maine House of Representatives, Democrats hold 76. With nine seats vacant and three held by Independents, Republicans will need to gain 13 seats to take control of the chamber.
Control of the Maine Senate, where Democrats hold 22 seats and Republicans have 13, is also in play. Most of the spending on state legislative races in Maine this cycle, in fact, has gone toward state senate races. Democrats have deployed resources to defend prominent members of their Senate caucus, including Senate President Troy Jackson (D-Allagash). In the race to oust the Senate President, whose district went for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, more than one million dollars has been spent on both sides according to a November 3 report.
Louis Jacobson with the Center for Politics at UVA wrote on October 20 that the Maine Legislature is “one of the GOP’s prime opportunities for a legislative takeover.” Jacobson added that “openness to ticket-splitting, both in New England generally and Maine specifically, could produce a flipped legislative chamber or two.”
If Republicans win control of the Maine Senate, that will make it fives times in the past seven elections that partisan control of the upper chamber in Maine has flipped. Republicans would prefer to win back control of both legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion, no doubt. But even if the GOP takes control of only one legislative chamber, be that the House or the Senate, that would have significant policy implications that greatly affect the type of legislation to be enacted in Maine over the next two years.
2022 will be the third election cycle under Maine’s controversial ranked choice voting system for federal candidates, which no other state uses except for Alaska. Last year, Governor Mills and the Democratic-led legislature made Maine the first state in the nation to enact an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program, which will place a fee on all consumer goods sold in plastic packaging. Since the enactment of that bill in Augusta, Governors Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), Kate Brown (D-Ore.), and Jared Polis (D-Colo.) signed similar legislation. One Illinois legislator liked the Maine EPR bill so much she introduced a version that even maintained the EPR fee exemption for frozen wild blueberries included in the Maine law.
The days of Maine Democrats implementing progressive policy proposals not yet tested anywhere else will come to an end if Republicans take control of just one legislative chamber. If Republicans capture only one chamber of the state legislature and nothing else, that would also mean tax hikes are likely off the table, at least for the next two years. That’s because Maine Representative John Andrews has worked hard to get fellow incumbents and candidates running for House or Senate to sign the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Among current and prospective office holders, nearly 70 incumbents and challengers for a seat in the Maine House or Senate have signed the pledge this cycle, as has Paul LePage.
“We must elect a majority of legislators committed to lowering the tax burden on the hard working people of our state,” says Maine Representative John Andrews (R-Paris). “Thankfully, a record two-thirds of Republican incumbents in the Maine House have signed the Pledge and will be faithful to it. That is how we chart a course to prosperity in Maine.”
The commitment that these incumbents and challengers in Maine have made to voters is the same promise that Governors Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Greg Abbott, and fourteen other governors have made. While 17 incumbent governors have signed a pledge to oppose and veto any bill that would result in a net tax hike, that number could grow in 2023. That’s because a number of 2022 gubernatorial candidates who polls show have a good chance of being sworn in come January — such as Tudor Dixon in Michigan and Kari Lake in Arizona — have also made that same commitment to voters.
If Republicans were to take back control of all of Maine state government, that will mean it was a phenomenal midterm election for the GOP. But Republicans don’t have to win back everything in Maine to change the direction in which the state is heading in from a policy standpoint. The way many see it, Maine is at a fork in the road when it comes to the direction of state governance. The outcome of the 2022 midterms will determine whether the future of policy and governance in Maine looks more like New Hampshire or Vermont.
“Maine faces a pivotal election on November 8th and every vote will matter,” Representative Andrews added. “It is imperative that liberty lovers and fiscal conservatives vote in record numbers to restore our foundational and economic freedoms.”
Maine won’t become a no-income-tax state like New Hampshire if Republicans only win back control of one legislative chamber. But winning one chamber will certainly prevent Maine from continuing to compete with the like of Oregon, California, and Vermont when it comes to the implementation of novel progressive reforms.
“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver is calling “bullshit” on a key right-wing talking point being used to subvert the results of U.S. elections.
That’s the notion pushed by Donald Trump and his allies that there’s a vast conspiracy to swing elections in favor of Democrats.
“For the record, one of the big clues that these conspiracy theories are bullshit, is that so many of them are predicated on the belief that the Democratic Party is well organized,” he said on Sunday night. “Who on Earth is stupid enough to buy that bullshit?”
Oliver spent more than half an hour on the right’s relentless assault on election integrity.
But he did find one moment he couldn’t get enough of ― and that’s footage from the days after the 2020 election of Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, certifying President Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
As he was about to sign the papers, his phone rang.
He pulled it out of his pocket, and set it on the table next to him ― unanswered ― while he finished signing the papers.
The ignored caller, it turned out, was Trump, who had been trying to threaten and cajole officials in multiple states into overturning the results.
But Ducey ignored him in a moment carried on live television.
“I have to say: Watching someone screen your call is one of the most devastating things a human being can possibly experience,” Oliver said after playing the footage. “And I am so glad that it happened to Donald Trump.”
