ReportWire

Tag: state constitution

  • Why a Blue-Leaning Swing State Is Getting Redder

    Why a Blue-Leaning Swing State Is Getting Redder

    [ad_1]

    Last week, when The New York Times and Siena College released a poll that showed President Joe Biden in trouble in battleground states, Democrats began to sound apocalyptic. The panic, turbocharged by social media, was disproportionate to what the surveys actually showed. Although the results in my home state, Nevada, were the worst for the president out of the six swing states that were polled, the findings are almost certainly not reflective of the reality here, at least as I’ve observed it and reported on it.

    Nevertheless, they bring to the surface trends that should worry Democrats—and not just in Nevada.

    The Times/Siena data show Donald Trump ahead of Biden in Nevada 52 percent to 41 percent, a much larger margin than the former president’s lead in the other battleground states. Could this be true? I’m skeptical, and I’m not alone. After the poll came out, I spoke with a handful of experts in both parties here, and none thinks Trump is truly ahead by double digits in the state, where he lost by about 2.5 points in the previous two presidential cycles. But Nevada is going to be competitive, perhaps more so than ever.

    Some of the Times/Siena poll’s internal numbers gave me pause. Among registered voters in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located and where 70 percent of the electorate resides, the poll found Trump ahead of Biden 50–45. But Democrats make up 34 percent of active voters in the county, compared with Republicans’ 25 percent, and Biden won Clark by nine percentage points in 2020.

    Other recent polls, not quite as highly rated as Times/Siena’s, have found the presidential race here to be much closer than the Times did. Last month, a CNN poll of registered Nevada voters found Biden and Trump virtually tied. Recent surveys from Emerson College, which has been unreliable in the state in the past, and Morning Consult/Bloomberg both had Trump up three points among likely voters. The Times/Siena polling outfit has a good reputation, but shortly before the 2020 election, it found Biden ahead of Trump in Nevada by six percentage points, more than double Biden’s eventual margin of victory.

    Read: Is Biden toast?

    Nevada is difficult to poll for a variety of reasons. Here as much as anywhere else, pollsters tend to underestimate the number of people they need to survey by cellphone to get a representative sample, and they generally don’t do enough bilingual polling in Nevada, where nearly a third of the population is Hispanic. Nevada also has a transient population, lots of residents working 24/7 shifts, and an electorate that’s less educated than most other states’. (“I love the poorly educated,” Trump said after winning Nevada’s Republican caucuses in 2016.) The polling challenge has become only more acute, because nonpartisan voters now outnumber Democrats and Republicans in Nevada, making it harder for pollsters to accurately capture the Democratic or Republican vote. (Since 2020, a state law has allowed voters to register at the DMV, and if they fail to do so, their party affiliation is defaulted to independent.)

    Nevada matters in presidential elections, but we are also, let’s face it, a tad weird.

    Still, Democrats have reasons to worry. Nevada was clobbered by COVID disproportionately to the rest of the country, because our economy is so narrowly focused on the casino industry. The aftereffects—unemployment, inflation—are still very much being felt here. Nevada’s jobless rate is the highest in the country, at 5.4 percent. That’s down dramatically from an astonishing 28.2 percent in April 2020, when the governor closed casinos for a few months. Although the situation has clearly improved, many casino workers still haven’t been rehired.

    Democrat Steve Sisolak was the only incumbent governor in his party to lose in 2022, and his defeat was due at least partly to the fallout from COVID. Fairly or not, President Biden wears a lot of that too, as all presidents do when voters are unhappy with the economy. The Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll illuminated the bleak pessimism of Nevada voters, 76 percent of whom think the U.S. economy is going in the wrong direction.

    Here, as elsewhere, voters are also concerned about Biden’s age, and that informs their broader views of him. Sixty-two percent of Nevadans disapprove of Biden’s performance, according to the Times, and only 40 percent have a favorable impression of him. Trump’s numbers, although awful—44 percent see him favorably—are better than Biden’s here, as well as in some blue or bluish states.

    In Nevada, and in general, Biden is losing support among key groups—young and nonwhite voters. The Times/Siena poll found Biden and Trump tied among Hispanics in the state, despite the fact that Latinos have been a bedrock of the Democratic base here for a decade and a half. In the 2022 midterms, polls taken early in the race showed Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate, losing Hispanic support, though her campaign managed to reverse that trend enough to win by a very slim margin.

    Democratic presidential nominees have won Nevada in every election since 2008. Democrats also hold the state’s two U.S. Senate seats and three of the four House seats, and the party dominates both houses of the legislature. But the state has been slowly shifting to the right—not just in polling but in Election Day results. In 2020, Nevada was the only battleground state that saw worse Democratic performance compared with 2016, unless you include the more solidly red Florida. Nevada’s new Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, is building a formidable political machine. Republicans have made inroads with working-class white voters here, leaving Democrats with an ever-diminishing margin of error.

    Ronald Brownstein: Republicans can’t figure it out

    Abortion, an issue that was crucial to Cortez Masto’s narrow victory, could help Biden in Nevada. The Times/Siena poll showed that only a quarter of Nevadans think abortion should be always or mostly illegal. A 1990 referendum made abortion up to 24 weeks legal here, and the law can be changed only by another popular vote. Democrats in Nevada, though, want to take those protections a step further next year and are trying to qualify a ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to guarantee the right to abortion. As the off-year elections last week showed, that issue, more than the choice between Biden and Trump, could be what saves the president a year from now. Nevada also has a nationally watched Senate race in 2024, in which the incumbent Democrat, Jacky Rosen, has already signaled that she will mimic her colleague Cortez Masto and put abortion front and center in her campaign.

    So many events could intervene between now and next November, foreign and/or domestic, and we have yet to see how effective the Trump and Biden campaigns will be, assuming that each man is his party’s nominee. Democratic Senator Harry Reid was deeply unpopular here in 2009, then got reelected by almost six percentage points; Barack Obama was thought to be in trouble in 2011, then won Nevada and reelection.

    Democrats clearly hope that if Trump becomes the Republican nominee, many voters will see the election as a binary choice and will back Biden. But if the election instead becomes a referendum on Biden’s tenure, including the economy he has presided over, Trump could plausibly win Nevada—and the Electoral College.

    [ad_2]

    Jon Ralston

    Source link

  • Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem

    Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem

    [ad_1]

    The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.

    The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.

    The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state.

    Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio

    In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.

    These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. Particularly since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s national leader, Republicans have solidified their hold on exurban, small-town, and rural communities, whose populations tend to be predominantly white and Christian and many of whose economies are reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture. Democrats, in turn, are consolidating their advantage inside almost all of the nation’s largest metro areas, which tend to be more racially diverse, more secular, and more integrated into the expanding 21st-century Information Age economy.

    New data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, show, in fact, that the counties that voted against the proposed abortion restrictions are the places driving most economic growth in their states. Using data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Brookings Metro at my request calculated the share of total state economic output generated by the counties that voted for and against abortion rights in five of these recent contests. The results were striking: Brookings found that the counties supporting abortion rights accounted for more than four-fifths of the total state GDP in Michigan, more than three-fourths in Kansas, exactly three-fourths in Ohio, and more than three-fifths in both Kentucky and Wisconsin.

    “We are looking at not only two different political systems but two different economies as well within the same states,” Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings Metro, told me.

    The Ohio vote demonstrated again that abortion is extending the fault line between those diverging systems, with stark electoral implications. Concerns that Republicans would try to ban abortion helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 elections in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, particularly in well-educated suburbs around major cities. Democrats won four of the six governor contests and four of the five U.S. Senate races in those states despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s job performance. Even if voters remain unhappy on both of those fronts in 2024, Democratic strategists are cautiously optimistic that fear of Republicans attempting to impose a national abortion ban will remain a powerful asset for Biden and the party’s other candidates.

    When given the chance to weigh in on the issue directly, voters in communities of all sizes have displayed resistance to banning abortion. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post calculated this week, the share of voters supporting abortion rights exceeded Biden’s share of the vote in 500 of the 510 counties that have cast ballots on the issue since last year (outside of Vermont, which Bump did not include in his analysis).

    But across these states, most smaller counties still voted against legal abortion, including this last week in Ohio. A comprehensive analysis of the results by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that in Ohio’s rural counties, more than three-fifths of voters still backed Issue 1.

    Opponents of Issue 1 overcame that continued resistance with huge margins in the state’s largest urban and suburban counties. Most voters rejected Issue 1 in 14 of the 17 counties that cast the most ballots this week, including all seven that cast the absolute most votes (according to the ranking posted by The New York Times). In several of those counties, voters opposed Issue 1 by ratios of 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.

    Equally striking were the results in suburban counties around the major cities, almost all of which usually lean toward the GOP. Big majorities opposed Issue 1 in several large suburban counties that Trump won in 2020 (including Delaware and Lorain). Even in more solidly Republican suburban counties that gave Trump more than 60 percent of their vote (Butler, Warren, and Clermont), the “yes” side on Issue 1 eked out only a very narrow win. Turnout in those big urban and suburban counties was enormous as well.

    Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says the suburban performance may signal an important shift for the party. One reason that Ohio has trended more solidly Republican than other states in the region, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he argues, is that women in Ohio have not moved toward Democrats in the Trump era as much as women in those other states have. But, he told me, the “no” side on Issue 1 could not have run as well as it did in the big suburban counties without significant improvement among independent and even Republican-leaning women. “In Ohio, women who were not necessarily following the Great Lakes–state trends, I think, now woke up and realized, Aha, we better take action,” Rusnak said.

    The Ohio results followed the pattern evident in the other states that have held elections directly affecting abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court decision. In Kansas, abortion-rights supporters carried all six of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Kentucky and Michigan votes, abortion-rights supporters carried eight of the 10 counties that cast the most votes, and in California they carried the 14 counties with the highest vote totals. Montana doesn’t have as many urban centers as these other states, but its anti-abortion ballot measure was defeated with majority opposition in all three of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Wisconsin state-supreme-court race this spring, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, who centered her campaign on an unusually explicit pledge to support legal abortion, carried seven of the 10 highest-voting counties. (All of these figures are from the New York Times ranking of counties in those states’ results.) For Republicans hoping to regain ground in urban and suburban communities, abortion has become “a huge challenge because they really are on the wrong side of the issue” with those voters, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.

    The results in these abortion votes reflect what I’ve called the “class inversion” in American politics. That’s the modern dynamic in which Democrats are running best in the most economically dynamic places in and around the largest cities. Simultaneously, Republicans are relying more on economically struggling communities that generally resist and resent the cultural and demographic changes that are unfolding mostly in those larger metros.

    Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, has described this process to me as Republicans exchanging “the country club for the country.” In some states, trading reduced margins in large suburbs for expanded advantages in small towns and rural areas has clearly improved the GOP position. That’s been true in such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, as well as in Texas, Iowa, Montana, and, more tenuously, North Carolina. Ohio has fit squarely in that category as well, with GOP gains among blue-collar voters, particularly in counties along the state’s eastern border, propelling its shift from the quintessential late-20th-century swing state to its current position as a Republican redoubt.

    But that reconfiguration just as clearly hurt Republicans in other states, such as Colorado and Virginia earlier in this century and Arizona and Georgia more recently. Growing strength in the largest communities has even allowed Democrats to regain the edge in each of the three pivotal Rust Belt states Trump in 2016 dislodged from the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

    In 2022, Democrats swept the governorships in all three states, and won a Senate race as well in Pennsylvania. Support for legal abortion was central to all of those victories: Just over three-fifths of voters in each state said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances and vast majorities of them backed the Democratic candidates, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media outlets. The numbers were almost identical in Arizona, where just over three-fifths of voters also backed abortion rights, and commanding majorities of them supported the winning Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator.

    Those races made clear that protecting abortion rights was a powerful issue in 2022 for Democrats in blue-leaning or purple states where abortion mostly remains legal. But, as I’ve written, the issue proved much less potent in the more solidly red-leaning states that banned abortion: Republican governors and legislators who passed severe abortion bans cruised to reelection in states including Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Exit polls found that in those more reliably Republican states, even a significant minority of voters who described themselves as pro-choice placed greater priority on other issues, among them crime and immigration, and supported Republican governors who signed abortion restrictions or bans.

    Ohio exemplified that trend as powerfully as any state. Though the exit polls showed that nearly three-fifths of voters said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, Republican Governor Mike DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the state’s six-week abortion ban. Republican J. D. Vance, who supported a national abortion ban, nonetheless attracted the votes of about one-third of self-described voters who said they supported abortion rights in his winning Ohio Senate campaign last year, the exit polls found.

    The fate of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s facing reelection in 2024, may turn on whether he can win a bigger share of the voters who support abortion rights there, as Democrats did last year in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. (The same is likely true for Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Republican-leaning Montana, another state that voted down an anti-abortion ballot initiative last year.)

    Read: It’s abortion, stupid

    Brown has some reasons for optimism. After the defeat of Issue 1 last week, the follow-on ballot initiative in November to restore abortion rights in the state will keep the issue front and center. The two leading Republican candidates to oppose Brown are each staunch abortion opponents; Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the probable front-runner in the GOP race, was the chief public advocate for last week’s failed initiative. Most encouraging for Brown, the “no” vote on Issue 1 in the state’s biggest suburban counties far exceeded not only Biden’s performance in the same places in 2020, but also Brown’s own numbers in his last reelection, in 2018.

    For Brown, and virtually every Democrat in a competitive statewide race next year, the road to victory runs through strong showings in such large urban and suburban counties. Given the persistence of discontent over the economy, it will be particularly crucial for Biden to generate big margins among suburban voters who support abortion rights in the very few states likely to decide control of the White House. The resounding defeat of Issue 1 this week showed again that Republicans, in their zeal to revoke the right to legal abortion, have handed Biden and other Democrats their most powerful argument to move those voters.

    [ad_2]

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio

    The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio

    [ad_1]

    Officially, abortion had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters rejected today. The word appeared nowhere on the ballot, and no abortion laws will change as a result of the outcome.

    Practically and politically, however, the defeat of the ballot initiative known as Issue 1 was all about abortion, giving reproductive-rights advocates the latest in a series of victories in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Fearing the passage of an abortion-rights amendment in November, Republicans in Ohio asked voters to approve a proposal that would raise the threshold for enacting a change to the state constitution, which currently requires a simple majority vote. The measure on the ballot today would have lifted the threshold to 60 percent.

    Ohio voters, turning out in unusually large numbers for a summertime special election, declined. Their decision was a rare victory for Democrats in a state that Republicans have dominated, and it suggests that abortion remains a strong motivator for voters heading into next year’s presidential election. The Ohio results could spur abortion-rights advocates to ramp up their efforts to circumvent Republican-controlled state legislatures by placing the issue directly before voters. They have reason to feel good about their chances: Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, statewide abortion-rights ballot measures have been undefeated, winning in blue states such as Vermont and California as well as in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.

    Read: The next big abortion fight

    In Kansas last summer, an 18-point victory by the abortion-rights side stunned members of both parties in a socially conservative state. By the final day of voting in Ohio, however, the defeat of Issue 1 could no longer be called a surprise. For weeks, Democrats who had become accustomed to disappointment in Ohio watched early-voting numbers soar in the state’s large urban and suburban counties. If Republicans had hoped to catch voters napping by scheduling the election for the dog days of August, they miscalculated. As I traveled the state recently, I saw Vote No signs in front yards and outside churches in areas far from major cities, and progressive organizers told me that volunteers were signing up to knock on doors at levels unheard of for a summer campaign. The opposition extended to some independent and Republican voters, who saw the proposal as taking away their rights. “It’s this ‘Don’t tread on me’ moment where voters are being activated,” says Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government advocacy group that helped lead the effort to defeat the amendment.

    Opponents of Issue 1 assembled a bipartisan coalition that included two former Republican governors. They focused their message broadly, appealing to voters to “protect majority rule” and stop a brazen power grab by the legislature. But the special election’s obvious link to this fall’s abortion referendum in Ohio drove people to the polls, particularly women and younger voters. “Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ohio constitution. They probably don’t spend a ton of time thinking about voting rights,” Turcer told me. But, she said, “the attempt to dilute voter power so that it would impact a vote on reproductive rights made it really concrete, and that was important.”

    Voters in South Dakota and Arkansas last year rejected similar GOP-driven efforts to make ballot initiatives harder to pass. But Ohio’s status as a large former swing state that has turned red over the past decade posed a unique test for Democrats who are desperate to revive their party in the state. “We’ve been beat in Ohio a lot,” Dennis Willard, a longtime party operative in the state who served as the lead spokesperson for the No campaign, told me. That Republicans tried to pass this amendment, he said, “is a testament to them believing that they’re invincible and that we cannot beat them.”

    The defeat of Issue 1 likely clears the way for voters this fall to guarantee abortion access in Ohio, and it will keep open an avenue for progressives to enshrine, with a simple majority vote, other policies in the state constitution—including marijuana legalization and a higher minimum wage—that they could not get through a legislature controlled by Republicans. Democrats, including Willard, are eying an amendment to curb the gerrymandering that has helped the GOP lock in their majorities. They also hope that tonight’s victory will put Ohio back on the political map. “Us winning sends a message to the rest of the country that Ohio has possibilities,” Willard said. “And winning in November demonstrates to people that you can’t write Ohio off anymore.”

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    For the moment, though, the GOP is in little danger of losing its hold on the state. It controls supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature; the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, trounced his Democratic opponent by 25 points last year to win a second term. One Ohio Republican, speaking anonymously before today’s election, told me that the defeat of Issue 1 and the expected passage of the reproductive-rights amendment in November could actually help the party next year, because voters might no longer believe that abortion access is in danger in the state. (The GOP performed better last year in blue states such as New York and California, where abortion rights were not under serious threat.)

    Republicans in Ohio, and in other states where similar ballot measures have flopped, are now confronting the limits of their power and the point at which voters will rebel. Will they be chastened and recalibrate, or will they continue to push the boundaries? It’s a question the proponents of Issue 1 did not want to contemplate before the votes confirming their defeat were counted. Their critics, however, are doubtful that Republicans will shift their strategy. “It’s unlikely that they will stop right away,” Turcer said. “It will take a number of defeats before they’re likely to understand that voters do not want to be taken advantage of.”

    [ad_2]

    Russell Berman

    Source link

  • The Next Big Abortion Fight

    The Next Big Abortion Fight

    [ad_1]

    For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God.

    “With all due respect, pastor, hell no!” shouted Betty Montgomery, a former Ohio attorney general. Montgomery is a Republican, which gave the largely Democratic audience even more reason to roar with approval. They had gathered at the Warren AME Church, in Toledo, to voice their opposition to a constitutional amendment that Ohio voters will approve or reject in a statewide referendum on August 8. Many of those in the boisterous crowd were experiencing a feeling unfamiliar to Democrats in the state over the past decade: optimism.

    If enacted, the Republican-backed proposal known as Issue 1 would raise the bar for any future changes to the state constitution. Currently, constitutional amendments in Ohio—including the one on next week’s ballot—need only a bare majority of voters to pass; the proposal seeks to make the threshold a 60-percent supermajority.

    In other years, a rules tweak like this one might pass without much notice. But next week’s referendum has galvanized Democratic opposition inside and outside Ohio, turning what the GOP had hoped would be a sleepy summertime election into an expensive partisan proxy battle. Conservatives have argued that making the constitution harder to amend would protect Ohio from liberal efforts to raise the minimum wage, tighten gun laws, and fight climate change. But the Republican-controlled legislature clearly timed this referendum to intercept a progressive march on one issue in particular: Ohioans will decide in November whether to make access to abortion a constitutional right, and the outcome of next week’s vote could mean the difference between victory and defeat for backers of abortion rights.

    A year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the back-to-back votes will also test whether abortion as an issue can still propel voters to the polls in support of Democratic candidates and causes. If the abortion-rights side wins next week and in November, Ohio would become the largest GOP-controlled state to enshrine abortion protections into law. The abortion-rights movement is trying to replicate the success it found last summer in another red state, Kansas, where voters decisively rejected an amendment that would have allowed the legislature to ban abortion, presaging a midterm election in which Democrats performed better than expected in states where abortion rights were under threat.

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    To prevent Democratic attempts to circumvent conservative state legislatures, Republican lawmakers have sought to restrict ballot initiatives across the country. Similar efforts are under way or have already won approval in states including Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, and Idaho. But to Democrats in Ohio and beyond, the August special election is perhaps the most brazen effort yet by Republicans to subvert the will of voters. Polls show that in Ohio, the abortion-rights amendment is likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote, as have similar ballot measures in other states. For Republicans to propose raising the threshold three months before the abortion vote in November looks like a transparent bid to move the proverbial goalposts right when their opponents are about to score.

    “I don’t think I’ve seen such a naked attempt to stay in power,” a former Democratic governor of Ohio, Dick Celeste, told the church crowd in Toledo. As in Kansas a year ago, the Republican majority in the state legislature scheduled the referendum for August—a time when the party assumed turnout would be low and favorable to their cause. (Adding to the Democratic outrage is the fact that just a few months earlier, Ohio Republicans had voted to restrict local governments from holding August elections, because they tend to draw so few people.) “They’re trying to slip it in,” Kelsey Suffel, a Democratic voter from Perrysburg, told me after she had cast an early vote.

    That Ohio Republicans would try a similar gambit so soon after the defeat their counterparts suffered in Kansas struck many Democrats as a sign of desperation. “The winds of change are blowing,” Celeste said in Toledo. “They’re afraid, and they should be afraid, because the people won’t tolerate it.”

    The upcoming vote will serve as an important measure of strength for Ohio Democrats ahead of elections in the state next year that could determine control of Congress. Democrats have had a long losing streak in Ohio. Donald Trump easily won the state in 2016 and 2020, and Republicans have won every statewide office except for that of Senator Sherrod Brown, who faces reelection next year. Still, there’s reason to believe Celeste is right to be optimistic. A Suffolk University poll released last week found that 57 percent of registered voters planned to vote against Issue 1. (A private survey commissioned by a nonpartisan group also found the August amendment losing, a Republican who had seen the results told me on the condition of anonymity.) Early-voting numbers have swamped predictions of low participation in an August election, suggesting that abortion remains a key motivator for getting people to turn out. Groups opposing the amendment have significantly outspent supporters of the change.

    Abortion isn’t explicitly on the ballot in Ohio next week, but the clear linkage between this referendum and the one on reproductive rights in November has divided the Republican coalition. Although the state’s current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, backs Issue 1, the two living GOP former governors, Bob Taft and John Kasich, oppose it as an overreach by the legislature.

    “That’s the giant cloud on this issue,” Steve Stivers, a former Republican member of Congress who now heads the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, told me. The Chamber of Commerce backs the amendment because, as Stivers said, it’ll help stop “bad ideas” such as raising the minimum wage, marijuana legalization, and proposals supported by organized labor. But, he said, many of his members were worried that the group would be dragged into a fight over abortion, on which it wants to stay neutral: “The timing is not ideal.”

    Read: It’s abortion, stupid

    Democrats have highlighted comments from Republicans who have departed from the party’s official message and drawn a connection between the August referendum and the abortion vote this fall. “They’ve all said the quiet part out loud, which is this election is 100 percent about trying to prevent abortion rights from having a fair election in the fall,” the state Democratic chair, Liz Walters, told me.

    But to broaden its coalition, opponents of the amendment have advanced a simpler argument—preserve “majority rule”—that also seems to be resonating with voters. “I’m in favor of democracy,” explained Ed Moritz, an 85-year-old retired college professor standing outside his home in Cleveland, when I asked him why he was planning to vote no. Once a national bellwether, Ohio has become close to a one-party state in recent years. For Democrats, citizen-led constitutional amendments represent one of the few remaining checks on a legislature dominated by Republicans. Moritz noted that the GOP had already gerrymandered the Ohio legislature by drawing maps to ensure its future majorities. “This,” he said, “is an attempt to gerrymander the entire population.”

    To Frank LaRose, the suggestion that Issue 1 represents an assault on democracy is “hyperbole.” LaRose is Ohio’s Republican secretary of state and, of late, the public face of Issue 1. Traversing Ohio over the past few weeks, he’s used the suddenly high-profile campaign as a launching pad for his bid for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2024.

    LaRose, 44, served for eight years in the state Senate before becoming Ohio’s top elections officer in 2019. (He won a second term last year.) He’s a smooth debater and quick on his feet, but on the Issue 1 campaign, he’s not exactly exuding confidence.

    In an interview, he began by rattling off a litany of complaints about the opposition’s messaging, which he called “intentionally misleading.” LaRose accused Issue 1’s opponents of trying to bamboozle conservative voters with literature showing images of the Constitution being cut to pieces and equating the amendment with “Stop the Steal.” “That’s completely off base,” he said. “We’ve had to compete with that and with a mountain of money that they’ve had, and with a pretty organized and intentional effort by the media on this.”

    LaRose likes to remind people that even if voters approve Issue 1, citizens would still be able to pass, with a simple majority, ballot initiatives to create or repeal statutes in Ohio law. The August proposal applies only to the state constitution, which LaRose said is not designed for policy making. Left unsaid, however, is that unlike an amendment to the constitution, any statutory change approved by the voters could swiftly be reversed by the Republican majority in the legislature.

    “Imagine if the U.S. Constitution changed every year,” he said. “What instability would that create? Well, that’s what’s at risk if we don’t pass Issue 1.” LaRose’s argument ignored the fact that Ohio’s rules for constitutional amendments have been in place for more than a century and, during that time, just 19 of the 77 changes proposed by citizen petitions have passed. (Many others generated by the legislature have won approval by the voters.)

    LaRose has been spending a lot of his time explaining the amendment to confused voters, including Republicans. When I spoke with him last weekend, he had just finished addressing about two dozen people inside a cavernous 19th-century church in Steubenville. He described his stump speech as a “seventh-grade civics class” in which he explained the differences between the rarely amended federal Constitution and Ohio’s routinely amended founding document. The laws that Ohio could be saddled with if the voters reject Issue 1, LaRose warned, went far beyond abortion: “It’s every radical West Coast policy that they can think of that they want to bring to Ohio.”

    The challenges LaRose has faced in selling voters on the proposal soon became apparent. When I asked a pair of women who had questioned LaRose during his speech whether he had persuaded them, one simply replied, “No.” Another frustrated attendee who supported the proposal told LaRose that she had encountered voters who didn’t understand the merits of the idea.

    Republicans have had to spend more time than they’d like defending their claim that Issue 1 is not simply an effort to head off November’s abortion amendment. They have also found themselves playing catch-up on an election that they placed on the ballot. “They got out of the gate earlier than our side,” the state Republican Party chair, Alex Triantafilou, told me, referring to an early round of TV ads that opposition groups began running throughout the state.

    David Frum: The humiliating Ohio Senate race

    The GOP’s struggle to sell its proposal to voters adds to the perception that the party, in placing the measure on the ballot, was acting not from a position of strength but of weakness. The thinly disguised effort to preempt a simple-majority vote on abortion is surely a concession by Republicans that they are losing on the issue even in what has become a reliably red state.

    When I asked LaRose to respond to the concerns about abortion that Stivers reported from his members in the Chamber of Commerce, he lamented that it was another example of businesses succumbing to “cancel culture.”

    Confidence can be dangerous for a Democrat in Ohio. Barack Obama carried the state twice, but in both 2016 and 2020, late polls showing a tight race were proved wrong by two eight-point Trump victories. A similar trajectory played out last year, when the Republican J. D. Vance pulled away from the Democrat Tim Ryan in the closing weeks to secure a seven-point victory in Ohio’s Senate race.

    “Democrats in the state are beaten down,” says Matt Caffrey, the Columbus-based organizing director for Swing Left, a national group that steers party donors and volunteers to key races across the country. He’s seen the decline firsthand, telling me of the challenge Democrats have had in recruiting canvassers and engaging voters who have grown more discouraged with each defeat.

    That began to change this summer, Caffrey told me. Volunteers have flocked to canvassing events in large numbers, some for the first time—a highly unusual occurrence for a midsummer special election, he said. At a canvass launch I attended in Akron over the weekend, more than three dozen people showed up, including several first-timers. As I followed Democratic canvassers there and in Cleveland over two days last week, not a single voter who answered their door was unaware of the election or undecided about how they’d vote. “It’s kind of an easy campaign,” Michael Todd, a canvasser with the group Ohio Citizen Action in Cleveland, told me. “Not a whole lot of convincing needs to be done.”

    The response has prompted some Democrats to see the August election as an unexpected opportunity to reawaken a moribund state party. The referendum is a first for Swing Left, which has exclusively invested in candidate races since it formed after Trump’s victory in 2016. “It’s a great example of what we’re seeing across the country, which is the fight for reproductive freedom and the fight for democracy becoming closely attached,” the group’s executive director, Yasmin Radjy, told me in Akron. “We also think it’s really important to build momentum in Ohio, a state that we need to keep investing in.”

    A win next week would make the abortion referendum a heavy favorite to pass in November. And although Ohio is unlikely to regain its status as a presidential swing state in 2024, it could help determine control of Congress. Brown’s bid for a fourth term is expected to be one of the hardest-fought Senate races in the country, and at least three Ohio districts could be up for grabs in the closely divided House.

    For Democrats like Caffrey, the temptation to think bigger about a comeback in Ohio is tempered by the lingering uncertainty about next week’s outcome—whether the party will finally close out a victory in a state that has turned red, or confront another disappointment. “It would be hard for Democrats in Ohio to feel complacent. I wish we would be in a position to feel complacent,” Caffrey said with a smile. “This is more about building hope.”

    [ad_2]

    Russell Berman

    Source link

  • How Abortion Defined the 2022 Midterms

    How Abortion Defined the 2022 Midterms

    [ad_1]

    Ask anyone what Mehmet Oz said about reproductive rights during last month’s Pennsylvania Senate debate, and they’ll probably tell you that the TV doctor believes an abortion should be between “a woman, her doctor, and local political leaders.” The truth is, that dystopian Handmaid’s Tale–esque statement did not come verbatim from the Republican’s mouth. But it may have cost him the election anyway.

    Instead, that catchphrase entered Pennsylvania voters’ consciousness—and ricocheted across social media—via a tweet by Pat Dennis, a Democratic opposition researcher. Dennis’s megaviral post included a clip purporting to show Oz pitching something akin to a pregnancy tribunal. But the clip was, well, clipped: In the 10-second video, Oz does not even say the word abortion. Did it matter? Not in the least. Here was Oz’s fuller, unedited response to the question:

    There should not be involvement from the federal government in how states decide their abortion decisions. As a physician, I’ve been in the room when there’s some difficult conversations happening. I don’t want the federal government involved with that at all. I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.

    Although that by no means utterly rebuts Dennis’s three-clause summary, it is different. Of course, voters zeroed in on—and recoiled from—the pithier version. Oz failed to shake his association with the thorny abortion hypothetical, much as he failed to shake the long-running joke that he actually lives in New Jersey. Abortion decided this race, and Oz was on the wrong side of history.

    Read: Why this election is so weird

    In red and blue states alike, reproductive autonomy proved a defining issue of the 2022 midterms. Although much pre-election punditry predicted that Pennsylvania Democratic nominee John Fetterman’s post-stroke verbal disfluency was poised to “blow up” the pivotal Senate race on Election Day, the exit polls suggest that abortion seismically affected contests up and down the ballot.

    Concerns over the future of reproductive rights unequivocally drove Democratic turnout and will now lead to the rewriting of state laws around the country. In deep-red Kentucky, voters rejected an amendment that read, “Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.” In blue havens such as California and Vermont, voters approved ballot initiatives enshrining abortion rights into their state constitutions.

    In Michigan, a traditionally blue state that in recent years has turned more purple, voters likewise enshrined reproductive protections into law, with 45 percent of exit-poll respondents calling abortion the most important issue on the ballot. In the race for the Michigan statehouse, the incumbent Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, trounced her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, who had said that she supports abortion only in instances that would save the life of the woman, and never in the case of rape or incest. Dixon lost by more than 10 percentage points and almost half a million votes.

    After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ended the federal right to abortion in June, many observers wondered whether pro-abortion-rights Democrats would remain paralyzed with despair or whether their anger would become a galvanizing force going into the election season. The answer is now clear—though, in fact, it has been for some time.

    Mary Ziegler: If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it can reverse anything

    In August, just six weeks after Dobbs, Kansas voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution that could have ushered in a ban on abortion. That grassroots-movement defeat of the ballot initiative was a genuine shocker—and it showed voters in other states what was possible at the local level.

    Nowhere in the midterms voting did abortion seem to matter more than in Pennsylvania. Oz, like his endorser, former President Donald Trump, spent years as a Northeast cosmopolitan before he tried, and failed, to remake himself as a paint-by-numbers conservative. That meant preaching a party-line stance during the most contentious national conversation about abortion in half a century. It came back to haunt him.

    At the October debate, Fetterman was mocked for (among other things) his simplistic, repetitive invocation of supporting Roe v. Wade. Even when asked by moderators to answer an abortion question in more detail, he simply kept coming back to the phrase. Whatever it lacked in nuance, Fetterman’s allegiance to his pro-abortion-rights position was impossible to misconstrue. This was an abortion election, and voters knew exactly where he stood.

    [ad_2]

    John Hendrickson

    Source link

  • What Does the Philadelphia D.A. Do Now?

    What Does the Philadelphia D.A. Do Now?

    [ad_1]

    Larry Krasner has been at the forefront of the progressive-prosecutor movement since becoming Philadelphia’s district attorney in 2017. Which means that he has also been at the center of an unending storm.

    Krasner has faced relentless battles with the police union, other local elected officials, and Republicans who control the Pennsylvania state legislature and are now making an unprecedented effort to impeach him. He’s also won support from many community leaders and criminal-justice-reform advocates. On Wednesday he reached a milestone: His office won a manslaughter conviction against a Philadelphia police officer for shooting a Black man in 2017—the first such conviction for on-duty action in Philadelphia in at least half a century.

    Darcy Covert: The false hope of the progressive-prosecutor movement

    Yet, like other progressive prosecutors in major cities from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to San Francisco, his political position remains precarious. These prosecutors received a huge burst of momentum from the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And they have an aggressive agenda aimed at reducing jail and prison populations, elevating alternatives to incarceration (particularly for juvenile offenders), emphasizing community services over tough enforcement to reduce gun violence, and imposing greater accountability for police-officer misconduct. (Beyond Wednesday’s conviction, Krasner is pursuing murder cases against two other police officers; previously no murder case involving a Philadelphia police officer had gone to trial in almost 40 years, The Philadelphia Inquirer found.)

    But rising crime rates have weakened these prosecutors’ standing. Though violent crime, particularly homicides, remains far below its peak, in the 1990s, the rates in many major cities spiked at the height of the pandemic to levels far above the totals earlier in this century—and have remained stubbornly high since. As of Monday, Philadelphia, for instance, has experienced 388 homicides this year, slightly more than in 2021 and double the number through that date as recently as 2015.

    Criminologists say the causes of these increases are complex. And crime rates often rise faster in places committed to traditional hard-line policing and prosecutorial policies, as the centrist Democratic group Third Way showed in an eye-opening report earlier this year. (The murder rate in red counties outside Pittsburgh grew much faster than Philadelphia’s did from 2019 through 2021, Krasner’s office pointed out to me.) Krasner and his allies in Philadelphia cite the Republican-controlled legislature’s repeated rejection of stronger gun laws, such as red-flag statutes and universal background checks, as a key cause of the city’s endemic gun violence.

    Yet none of this has insulated progressive prosecutors from an intensifying backlash. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled earlier this year; like-minded Los Angeles D.A. George Gascón narrowly avoided a recall election because opponents bungled their petition-gathering effort.

    Annie Lowrey: The people vs. Chesa Boudin

    The decision by the Pennsylvania General Assembly to explore impeaching Krasner marks the latest challenge to the movement. Last week the chamber voted to hold Krasner in contempt when he refused to provide documents it demanded as part of the probe. Krasner, for his part, has filed suit in state court arguing that the legislature lacks the authority to remove him, primarily because its impeachment power, under the state constitution, is limited to state officials, not local ones.

    Craig Green, a law professor at Temple University, told me he thinks Krasner is likely to win that argument. The General Assembly, Green says, has “never tried anything” like this possible impeachment before, even in cases where local officials were guilty of gross misconduct and corruption, which no one has alleged against Krasner. Craig is dubious that the state supreme court will conclude that the legislature’s disapproval of Krasner’s policy choices meets the standard of “improper or corrupt motive” the court has set as justifiable grounds for a potential impeachment.

    Even if Krasner doesn’t win in court, Republicans don’t have enough votes in the State Senate to reach the two-thirds majority they would need to remove him should the House impeach him. But the controversy over his approach isn’t going anywhere, either, particularly as Philadelphia struggles with the wave of gun violence that has spilled out from long impoverished neighborhoods on the north and west sides into its rejuvenated Center City. More than 1,700 people have been shot in the city this year, police statistics show.

    Yesterday at The Atlantic Festival, I sat down with Krasner to discuss his battles with the state legislature, his diagnosis for the rising crime rate, and his continued commitment to rethinking how the criminal-justice system operates. Below are highlights from that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

    Ronald Brownstein: Mr. District Attorney, you have been in the center of the storm since your election in 2017. And you’ve certainly got one brewing now with the Republican-controlled General Assembly in Pennsylvania trying to impeach you. Why is this happening, and where is it going?

    Larry Krasner: It’s happening because progressive prosecutors keep winning elections. There is a misperception that we’re losing; that’s actually incorrect. They can’t beat us in elections, so they try to remove us from office in other ways: by recalls, by impeachment. In my situation, what occurred is, for the first time in the history of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the legislature is trying to remove an elected official for their policies. I repeat: policies. You can get removed for crimes or deeply corrupt activity. That’s what impeachment is for. But you’re not supposed to be removed because your policy won by a landslide.

    Brownstein: Can they remove, in your view, a local official as opposed to a statewide official?

    Krasner: No, in my view, they can only remove statewide officials, because there is a separate impeachment procedure for cities. And I happen to be in a city.

    David A. Graham: How criminal-justice reform fell apart

    Brownstein: Well, the policy dispute is obviously about your approach and what is happening with crime in Philadelphia. And [according to] the police department, there have been 388 homicides in Philadelphia. That was the figure through Monday. We are still not back up to the levels of crime that we saw in the 1990s, but we are at an elevated rate from earlier in the century, not only in Philadelphia but in many other cities. What’s driving this?

    Krasner: Well, there’s been an uptick really since 2014 in Philadelphia. That’s more or less the low point nationally. I think a lot of things are driving this. But the main thing I bring up is guns. There are more and more and more guns every year. And if you look at the number of guns that are actually removed from the street by law enforcement, they are at least doubled or tripled by the new legal gun sales that are occurring. We have seen an accumulation of guns in this country at this point where we have one and a half guns per human being, more or less. And we have an NRA that would like to see a loaded gun tucked into a diaper. This is an NRA that would like silencers, which hasn’t happened since the 1930s. They would like us to be able to print our guns at home on 3-D printers. [It’s] the most damaging organization to public safety in the history of the United States.

    Brownstein: Let me ask you about guns, because that is certainly one of the flash points in the debate about your approach in Philadelphia. It’s also been a flash point in L.A., where I live: what to do with people who are caught with guns but haven’t used them yet in a crime. Your view, as quoted recently in The New York Times, is that it’s counterproductive to focus on arresting and incarcerating people caught carrying firearms without legal permit. Why do you think that?

    Krasner: So that view is not correct. It’s counterproductive to prioritize that more than solving gun violence. The reality is that if you want to stop gun violence, you should pursue gun violence. That means you should solve homicides. You should solve shootings. The current solve rate, or at least the most recent measured solve rate for gun homicides in Philly, is 28 percent. The most recent solve rate for shootings in Philly is 17 percent. Our conviction rate for homicides is approaching 90 percent; better than our predecessors, but we only get the cases [police officers] solve.

    So a lot of what has happened all across the country is coming from [fraternal-order-of-police] sources, right-wing sources: that the real problem is guns; it’s not the homicides. And the reason they’re saying that is they’re having terrible difficulty solving the homicides. I do not say that, by the way, to besmirch the police. There are certain tools that they need. There are modern ways to actually solve these cases, including some absolutely unbelievable forensics that would blow your mind. But you’ve got to invest in them.

    Brownstein: You had a landmark conviction of a police officer this week, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But I want to just be clear: What is your view about what should happen to people who are found with guns who have not yet committed a crime? Are you saying that they should in fact be prosecuted on a routine basis?

    Krasner: Yes, they should. And the fact is that the House itself, before they decided to impeach me, did a study and found that the sentences for gun possession were longest in Philadelphia. Just so we understand what’s really happening here. This is not coming from some real concern about crime. Our city is giving out longer sentences, including under my administration. So that’s a total red herring.

    Brownstein: Many of the other progressive prosecutors have talked about treating gun violence as a public-health problem. Again, the statistics as of Monday: 1,700 shooting victims. In Philadelphia, what have you learned about the opportunities and limits of a public-health strategy to combat gun violence? Do you feel like it’s stemming the tide with those kinds of numbers?

    Krasner: I’ve learned we haven’t tried it. This is a country that has not used public health to try to deal with addiction. We have not used public health to deal with mental illness and homelessness. We haven’t used public health to deal with criminal justice. Even though we do have reform going on in ways that are constructive, all of the money that’s being saved, which is an enormous amount of money, is not going back into rebuilding the mental-health system that was torn down about 85 percent during the period of mass incarceration. All that money is not going into public schools. And in Philadelphia, public-school kids are funded at half the level of the surrounding counties. But that’s another enormous problem. If we don’t take the money that we’re saving from doing stupid and put it into smart, then all we’re doing is building another tax break for wealthy people, and there is going to be some level of failing to succeed as much as we could.

    Brownstein: So give me your wish list to reduce those 1,700 shootings.

    Krasner: On the enforcement side, the biggest thing that we should be doing is investing very, very heavily in modern forensics. You can do absolutely amazing things with cellphones that we could not do before. You can do amazing things right now with tiny bits of DNA. You can do amazing things that would solve an enormous number of cases. And until we do that, the notion of deterrence is really not there.

    I don’t know why we are allowing anybody to have an AR-15. I don’t know why we’re allowing [young] people … to get them. I don’t know why we have gun shows at all. I don’t know why we have unregistered gun parts. I mean, the whole notion of a polymer gun or a ghost gun is that it’s a loophole. You can get an unmarked piece of plastic and a bunch of unmarked pieces of metal that you can buy on the internet. You can put them together in your basement and you can sell an arsenal round out the back door. And we see more and more ghost guns that are showing up at crime scenes, and it’s doubling and tripling and quadrupling every year.

    Read: The real reason America doesn’t have gun control

    Brownstein: Some of the prosecutors elected as part of this movement have opposed cash bail, sometimes in all cases. But you have taken a different approach, a more nuanced approach. You support high cash bail in cases of gun violence.

    Krasner: There’s a general misunderstanding of what “no cash bail” is. No cash bail has happened in D.C. for over 30 years. There’s only two stops on this train. One stop is you get out without having to pay money. You may have to go to a place that provides homeless services or mental-health services or addiction services, because whatever they’re sending you to is associated with your interaction with police. And those are nonviolent offenses, for the most part. But then there’s the other group who sit in jail, no matter how rich they are.

    But the problem in Pennsylvania is you’ve got a legislature that likes its bail-bonds people, makes a lot of money in donations off of their lobbyists, and they are in love with cash bail. What we did in Philly is we tried to simulate a no-cash-bail system by asking for very high bail, which is a million or more in some cases. And then no bail; we don’t ask for these $10,000 bail, $50,000 bail amounts, because they just make things worse.

    Brownstein: You won a landmark conviction of a police officer for an on-duty shooting, a manslaughter conviction—the first one, I believe, in at least 50 years. You have several more in the pipeline. What is the message you are sending with these cases?

    Krasner: The message is what it always should have been, which is that justice applies to everybody. We probably cleared 150 or 200 shootings toward or of civilians by police in uniform. But we have charged three officers with homicide so far. And I mean, to me, this is not complicated. If you commit a murder, if you shoot an unarmed person in the back and you don’t have a lawful justification, the fact that you’re in uniform doesn’t excuse that.

    [There are] a lot of really great cops in Philly. They just have a rotten leadership of their union. But there are a lot of really good cops in Philadelphia who are trying to do it the right way. And every time we knock down a corrupt police officer or a vicious, brutal police officer, we’re just lifting up the good ones, which also hasn’t been done in forever.

    Brownstein: There’s a sense that this [progressive-prosecutor] movement is on the defensive now, as you noted, with the recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, the attempted recall of Gascón, the fight that you are facing in Pennsylvania. Is it possible to maintain support for alternative approaches that focus less on incarceration while crime is going up?

    Krasner: The way to get it under control is criminal-justice reform, because doing things in a just way actually does make us safer. And I know that sounds like a platitude. But let me just give you an example of why I think they’re really at our throats.

    So, 10 years ago, there were essentially zero progressive prosecutors and no portion of the U.S. population lived in a jurisdiction with a progressive prosecutor. Two and a half years ago, 10 percent of the U.S. population [did]. Right now it’s about 20 percent; 70, 75 million Americans have elected or reelected a progressive prosecutor. They all want to talk all day about Chesa Boudin and his recall, all that. They want to talk about that. Who here knows that we have a new district attorney in Memphis who is a progressive and replaced a very conservative incumbent? Who here knows that in Alameda County, right across from San Francisco, Pamela Price is about to win and win big? And she lost four years ago. It is not the case that progressive prosecution is dead in action. The real case here is that even in this incredibly difficult time, it’s maintaining. I wouldn’t say it’s growing, you know, doubling in leaps and bounds like it did around the events surrounding George Floyd. But it is maintaining. So the reality is we’re doing really well, and they can’t beat us in elections, and they’re worried about that.

    The truth is, conservatives don’t actually care very much about crime. They really don’t. What they’re really worried about is that criminal-justice reform is something that connects to voters who are unlikely voters who are alienated from the system, who finally are seeing some reason to go to the polls, which is why we had insane turnouts in our off-year, low-turnout elections both times I ran. And we’ve seen this in many other jurisdictions. If I am a MAGA Republican, the last thing I want to see is any progressive prosecutor still standing. Because what it could be is the salvation of democracy. And they are out to destroy democracy.

    [ad_2]

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • Abortion Could Define California’s Elections

    Abortion Could Define California’s Elections

    [ad_1]

    CERRITOS, Calif.—Abortion rights dominated the message when the Democratic congressional candidate Jay Chen sent off a small group who had gathered to canvass for him here early on Sunday morning.

    “A right that we had all assumed we would have, the right of a woman to have control of her own health-care decisions, was taken away after 50 years,” Chen told the volunteers. He reminded them that his opponent, Republican Representative Michelle Steel, had co-sponsored “a federal ban on abortion” that would prohibit the procedure even in deep-blue California.

    “You name it, she’s on the extreme end of all these issues,” Chen said. “She’d be a complete outlier even in deep-red Kansas because even in Kansas they protected the right to an abortion. So for her to try to represent [this district] does not make any sense.”

    Chen’s exhortation captured the outsize role abortion rights could play across this year’s unusually large field of competitive U.S. House races in California, after the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer. The Golden State offers Democrats the nation’s single largest concentration of opportunities to offset losses elsewhere by flipping House seats now held by Republicans. And the abortion-rights issue offers Democrats their best chance to do so—particularly with a state constitutional amendment protecting access to the procedure also on the November ballot as Proposition 1.

    “Because we have this on the ballot, Republicans cannot run away from this issue,” says Dave Jacobson, a Democratic consultant who is advising Christy Smith, the party’s nominee against Republican Representative Mike Garcia in another Los Angeles–area district. “Every Republican in a competitive district is vulnerable with this issue at the top of the ballot as a constitutional amendment. I think it is going to drive turnout.”

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    California will provide a crucial measure of how broadly the abortion issue may benefit Democrats this year. On both sides, there’s agreement that abortion’s increased prominence will strengthen Democrats in districts with a large number of white-collar voters—including the coastal seats south of Los Angeles now held by Democratic Representatives Katie Porter and Mike Levin. Less clear is whether the issue will prove as powerful in districts, such as those held by Republican Representatives Garcia and David Valadao, with larger numbers of blue-collar and Latino voters who may be acutely feeling the effects of inflation. The district in which Chen is challenging Steel demographically falls somewhere in between.

    “Presumably you’ll see coastal Republicans split with the party on things like choice,” predicts Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist and the publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which analyzes state elections. “On the other hand, when you are looking at some inland and Central Valley districts, they are very different,” he told me. Although “there’s all this chatter that abortion is so important,” Sragow added, “I suggest most Americans do not wake up with abortion the thing they are most worried about,” particularly in working-class communities.

    Though solidly Democratic at the state level—Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is cruising to reelection this year without serious Republican opposition after defeating a GOP-backed recall effort—congressional contests in California have proved highly susceptible to swings in the national mood. As part of the “blue wave” in 2018, the party flipped seven Republican-held seats, reducing the GOP to its smallest share of California’s congressional delegation since the 1880s. But in 2020, Republicans recaptured four of those districts—a key part of their unusual success at gaining House seats nationwide while losing the White House.

    Earlier this year, when inflation was raging and the Democratic legislative agenda seemed stalled, Republicans were optimistic about advancing farther across California by potentially ousting Democratic Representatives Josh Harder in the Central Valley and Porter and Levin in Orange and San Diego Counties. Although Democrats acknowledge that those races (and another Democratic-held open seat) remain competitive, they now see the opportunity to go on the offensive against Steel, Valadao, and Garcia, as well as potentially Representatives Ken Calvert and Young Kim in Southern California; they also see an opportunity to contest a Republican open seat in the Sacramento area.

    Several other issues have also contributed to this reversal of fortune: increased attention to gun violence after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting; renewed focus on Donald Trump amid the revelations from the House January 6 committee and the firestorm over his mishandling of classified documents; and climate change after the passage of the Democrats’ slimmed-down reconciliation bill. But analysts in both parties see the Supreme Court decision reversing Roe as the pivotal factor shifting the congressional landscape across California. “We are just seeing an unprecedented level of outrage,” Representative Levin told me in an interview.

    As in other states, Republicans continue to express cautious optimism that frustration over inflation and disenchantment with the performance of President Joe Biden will outweigh views on abortion. “Of course [abortion] is going to be an issue, way more than it was in May of this year,” Lance Trover, a Republican consultant advising Representative Steel, who ousted a Democratic incumbent in 2020, told me. “But at the end of the day, the fundamentals of the economy are going to be key.”

    California Republicans face an unusually powerful headwind in moving beyond the abortion issue. Almost all Republicans holding or seeking congressional seats have staked out hard-line anti-abortion positions that directly collide with polls showing deep and broad support for abortion rights across the state.

    Polling in July by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that more than two-thirds of state residents opposed the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. That included about three-fourths of African Americans and Asian Americans, seven in 10 white voters, and just over three-fifths of Latino voters. About three-fourths of independents, whom Republicans need to compete in California, because they are so outnumbered by registered Democrats, opposed the ruling. Opposition to the decision was greatest in the big blue metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but even in areas where Republicans have traditionally performed somewhat better, such as Orange and San Diego Counties and the Central Valley, preponderant majorities opposed the decision.

    In another survey released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times, more than seven in 10 California voters said they intended to support the constitutional amendment inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution.

    “From a public-opinion perspective, it’s a settled issue in California,” Mark Baldassare, the PPIC president, told me. “We have seen what we would describe as overwhelming support for abortion rights in California consistently in our polls over many, many years … That’s pretty consistent across demographic groups and regions of the state.”

    The state’s Republican congressional delegation—as well as the party’s challengers in the key races—have placed themselves firmly on the opposite side of that consensus. Four of the House Republicans facing the potentially toughest contests—Steel, Garcia, Valadao, and Calvert—signed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. All of them but Calvert have co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, a Republican bill that would define the unborn as a person under the Constitution from “the moment of fertilization” and effectively ban abortion nationwide, legal scholars say. Representative Kim, another Republican facing a potentially competitive race in an Orange County district, did not co-sponsor that bill, but has described herself as a “proud pro-life woman” who believes “the rights of the child must be respected.” The GOP challengers to Harder, Levin, and Porter have also publicly declared their opposition to legal abortion.

    As signs have grown of the backlash to the Supreme Court decision—including the Democratic victory in a New York congressional special election and the resounding defeat of a Kansas ballot initiative that would have opened the door to state abortion restrictions—several of the California Republicans have tried to obscure their positions. For instance, although the Life at Conception Act offers no exceptions and Steel earlier this year said she supported legal abortion only when the mother’s health was endangered, she told me in a statement, “I am pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health and life of the mother, and baby.” In a statement to the Los Angeles Times this week, Representative Garcia backed the same exceptions—which, again, are not included in the “life begins at conception” bill he is co-sponsoring.

    In her statement, Steel downplayed the possibility that a Republican-controlled Congress would seek to ban abortion nationwide, though notably without disavowing the idea: “Discussions surrounding a nationwide ban on abortion are purely hypothetical at this point,” she declared.

    But such vague dismissals may not dispel the vulnerability California Republicans face over the possibility of a national ban on abortion, particularly amid the parallel debate over amending the state constitution.

    Though neither supporters nor opponents of the constitutional amendment have yet raised much money, Newsom, who is emerging as a national leader for Democrats on cultural issues, is expected to campaign heavily for it and raise its visibility this fall. “I don’t want to give away our plans … but I would expect him to play a very prominent role,” Sean Clegg, a senior strategist for Newsom, told me. Abortion rights and the constitutional amendment to protect them, he added, are “going to have an effect in every single race in California.”

    Conor Friedersdorf: Gavin Newsom, the Ron DeSantis of the left

    The proposed amendment on the ballot in November represents the third level of protection for abortion rights in California. In earlier rulings, the state supreme court has already decided that the procedure is protected under the state constitution’s guarantees of liberty and privacy. This amendment, placed on the ballot by Newsom and the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, adds an explicit guarantee that “the state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom … which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”

    Yet even all those reinforcing levels of protection for abortion rights in the California constitution would be preempted if Congress approved a national ban, legal analysts agree. The Life at Conception Act would surely face legal challenges if a future Republican-controlled Congress passes it, but should the law be upheld, it would override any California action to guarantee abortion rights, according to Cary Franklin, a constitutional-law professor at UCLA and the faculty director of its Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “If Congress were to pass a national ban on abortion, that would trump state law, even state constitutional law,” she told me.

    That’s a message Democrats are likely to pound across the state in the campaign’s final months. “If Steel has her way, she will pass a federal ban on abortion, which will override our protections here, and I think Californians are coming to realize that,” Chen, a Naval reservist and the owner of a business that manages commercial properties, told me. By contrast, Chen, like the other Democratic incumbents and challengers, supports legislation restoring a national right to abortion.

    Opponents of the state constitutional amendment, such as Steel, say it would authorize abortions at any point in pregnancy, ending current state restrictions after a fetus is viable outside the womb (unless the mother’s life is endangered). Its sponsors deny that interpretation, but it will likely become the centerpiece of the campaign against the amendment. “Pro-life people may have had enough,” Susan Swift Arnall, the vice president of legal affairs at California’s Right to Life League, told me. “They may say, ‘This is too far. This is too extreme … And we want to send a message back to the legislature that we don’t support abortion on demand for all nine months and even into the birth of the baby.’”

    But the greater likelihood is that the amendment mobilizes turnout among the decisive majority in the state who support abortion rights. “There’s no question the [Supreme Court] decision has really created a great deal of increased interest from women voters for sure, and not just Democrats,” Levin said. “We are talking about independents, even some Republicans. Those who historically haven’t voted in midterm elections, I think, are motivated.”

    By solidifying Democrats in suburbia, abortion rights’ growing visibility, like the increased focus on gun violence and renewed attention to Trump, may narrow the range of House districts the GOP can realistically contest both in California and nationwide, and lower the ceiling on their potential gains. But not enough voters may prioritize abortion to neutralize Republicans’ other advantages in economically strained areas. Like so much else in modern American politics, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe seems likely to further widen the chasm between white-collar and culturally cosmopolitan metropolitan areas trending toward the Democrats and blue-collar, socially conservative smaller places hardening in their support for the GOP, even in staunchly Democratic California.

    [ad_2]

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link