‘Mainstream Republicans”?

“Not even a majority of Republicans are MAGA Republicans,” Joe Biden said in his speech in Philadelphia on September 1.

It’s a bold claim, and one upon which may hang the Democratic Party’s prospects for turning a squeak-by election victory into a blue tidal wave.

But is it wishful thinking on the part of the Democratic leadership to view the MAGA movement as a small but vocal G.O.P. fringe?

Surveys of G.O.P.-Registered and G.O.P.-Leaning voters conducted over the past 45 days by NBC News, Quinnipiac, and CNN are in agreement that while Biden’s claim of ‘a majority of Republicans” may be overstated, there is a meaningful degree of truth in the claim that all Republicans are not MAGA Republicans:

3 in 5 voters – and even 1 in 4 Republicans – are now convinced that Trump/MAGA is a threat to democracy.

More than half of Republicans prefer a 2024 candidate other than Trump… and 1 in 4 is expressly opposed to a Trump nomination.

But among the core of Registered Republicans who determine the outcome of Republican primaries, support for Trump is still above 70%. His supporters have been working tirelessly since 2016 to install themselves in positions of party influence at the state level, and the 2022 primary season has demonstrated Trump’s continuing ability to influence the outcome of statewide elections. Even today, Trump’s overall public approval rating continues to hover around 40%.

Some 69% of attendees at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) expressed a preference for a Trump run in 2024, almost identical to the 70% share of Registered Republicans who support a Trump run.

It’s noteworthy that while Ron DeSantis was preferred over Trump by only 24% of CPAC attendees, preference for him in a scenario in which Trump does not run jumps to 65% – close enough to Trump’s 69% to strongly suggest that MAGA will survive – and continue to drive the G.O.P. – whether led by Trump or not.

A lot can happen to change the political landscape by 2024, but (absent a criminal conviction), the current numbers suggest a high likelihood that Trump will be re-nominated in 2024.

But the data also suggests that if Trump secures the nomination in 2024, ‘mainstream’ Republicans would – at minimum – cast no vote for President and – at extreme – vote Democratic. It remains an open question whether 8 years of disillusionment among ‘mainstream’ Republicans will translate into deeper and longer-lasting changes in party allegiances.

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U.S. citizens in Mexico: Diversos!

The 1 million+ U.S. citizens in Mexico are an incredibly varied population…. the largest community of Americans living outside of the U.S…. and have the potential to change the outcomes of increasing tight election races.

Much is written about the contingent of American retirees, non-Mexican in ancestry, who were born – and lived most of their lives – in the U.S.  These citizens are largely – but not exclusively – concentrated in enclaves along Mexico’s Pacific and Gulf coasts.

But not all of Mexico’s gringos are senior citizens… in fact, far from it.

  • 2nd generation. There are the U.S. citizens born of parents who were at the time residing in Mexico.  Some of these parents remained permanently, founding and operating businesses in which their children have now succeeded them.
  • Tours-of-duty. Some are working-age professionals on tours of duty with U.S. companies operating in Mexico, many with school-age children.  Others are digital nomads just passing through for a few weeks or months.

These are, however, just the tip of an iceberg largely made up of U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry.

  • Border commuters. Tens of thousands of dual citizens live in cities and towns along the U.S. border commute to the U.S. daily, some as workers and others as owners of businesses ranging from currency exchange to auto insurance and nationalization that operate on both sides of the border.
  • Dependent families. Some U.S. citizens of Mexican birth return to Mexico to care for aged or infirm relatives, sometimes also to take up the reins of a family business.
  • Foreigner services. Others leverage their knowledge of English language and American culture to work in expat enclaves at businesses ranging from home construction/remodeling and retail to personal services.

U.S. citizens are not required by law to surrender their American citizenship in order to become citizens of another country, but the laws on Mexican citizenship have a far more restrictive history.

Until 1934, a Mexican woman who married a foreigner automatically forfeited her Mexican citizenship.  Not until 1950 was the law amended to allow her to retain it… but only if she and her spouse resided in Mexico. (This also allowed her to own property.)

Not until 1969 was Mexican citizenship automatically granted to children born of a Mexican mother, regardless of where the birth occurred.  And while a 1997 law limited citizenship for these children to the first foreign-born generation, a 2021 law removed this restriction

C O B A L T ‘S mission is to deliver – to all of these American citizens – its issue-focused, fact-based commentary on a progressive public agenda, and to promote U.S. voter registration among politically progressive American citizens living in Mexico.

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Senate race snapshot

With nine weeks remaining until the general election, polling on U.S. Senate races is becoming more frequent and the emerging picture is a mixed bag of certain outcomes and down-to-the-wire races (complete data last below).

FLORIDA:  Democratic Congresswoman Val Demings is poised to defeat incumbent Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.  Demings was on Joe Biden’s short list of prospective VP candidates in 2020.

GEORGIA:  Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock is in a tight race with Herschel Walker.  Warnock won the seat by defeating incumbent Kelly Loeffler in a 2020 special election.  Walker, a pro football Hall-of Famer and 1992 Olympics participant, is a graduate of the University of Georgia.

NEVADA: Polls are conflicted about re-election prospects for Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.  Cortez Masto, who holds the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Harry Reid, was twice elected as the state’s attorney general.  She is the first woman from Nevada – and the first Latina in the U.S. – to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

NORTH CAROLINA:  Democratic State Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley is in a tight race with Ted Budd for the seat vacated by Republican Sen. Richard Burr.

OHIO:  Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan is struggling in a race against J.D. Vance for the seat vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman.

WISCONSIN:  Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is poised to flip the seat held by Republican Sen. Ron Johnson.

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Labor unions reborn

Long before the current spike in inflation backed millions of workers into a financial corner, American workers have been getting a raw deal.  In real dollars, the buying power of the Federal minimum wage peaked in 1968!

But it wasn’t always this way. There was once a brief window in which American workers enjoyed the unfettered right to organize nationwide.

In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt and New Deal Democrats ended a brutal war that business – backed by police and military – had been waging against labor unions for more than 50 years.  But while passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 gave workers the right to bargain collectively, but unemployment levels of nearly 25% rendered the legislation largely symbolic.

World War II brought the return of jobs, along with price and wage controls.  And once American workers had won the war and prosperity returned, the first Republican Congress in 30 years promptly passed so-called ‘right to work’ laws that effectively neutered labor unions.  After that, it was straight downhill for organized labor.

That is, until 2022… when union election wins jumped 80% over the previous year.  The 2022 wins also represented more than twice as many workers as those in 2021.

Retail, service, health care, and transportation industries all saw growth in union formations in 2022, most notably at Starbucks, Amazon, and Apple.

Bloomberg reports that unions have won nearly 77% of this year’s elections, the highest rate since it began recording data.  Members overwhelmingly support their unions, and half of non-union workers surveyed say that they would join a union if they could.

But the embrace of unionism is occurring not just among workers, but among the American public, among whom 56% say that the decline in union representation has been bad for the country as a whole.

Among workers aged 18-29 who are leading the new push for unionization, support surges to 69%.

There was a time when unions were bashed as Big Labor over-reach, but in this era of multi-national companies presided over by American oligarchs, the pendulum is finally swinging back.

Yet is seems shameful that these ‘essential workers’ who kept the nation running through COVID have been made to wait so long for an expression of the nation’s gratitude where it counts most.

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Flipping Wisconsin

Mandela Barnes has never had time to waste. The son of a schoolteacher and a UAW night shift worker, his social activism began right out of college when he began working as a community organizer.

By age 27, he was serving as a Representative in the Wisconsin state legislature.

By age 31, he was elected Lt. Governor as Tony Evers’ running mate.

Evers named Barnes to head the Governor’s Task Force on Climate Change pandemic, but when COVID appeared he travelled exhaustively throughout his state, encouraging people to get vaccinated.

In 2020, in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings, opponents seeking to recall Barnes and Gov. Tony Evers failed to secure the number of signatures needed to place the issue on the ballot.

An August 27 poll has Barnes leading incumbent G.O.P. Senator Ron Johnson 49%- 47%, within the margin of error to make the race a dead heat.

Barnes, whose campaign accepts no PAC money, has raised more then $1.3 million, mostly from small donations.

Johnson, who has previously pledged that he would only serve two terms, is running for a third term. The senator has a long string of controversial remarks to his credit, most notably suggesting that “wokeness” and critical race theory were the cause of recent mass shootings in the U.S. Some of Johnson’s other quotes:

“It’s not law-abiding gun owners that are the problem – it’s Islamic terrorists.”
“I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change.”
“I think justice Scalia is really the gold standard of what a justice should be.”
“I’d be supportive of a minimum wage…for guest workers, so we’re not creating incentives to bring in immigrants.”

There are fewer clear-cut choices presented for statewide office than the one facing Wisconsin voters in November.

Learn more about Mandela: Campaign web site

Learn more about this race: Ballotpedia

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Abortion refugees

It is estimated that more than 100,000 women in need of an abortion will be unable to get one as states rush to pass restrictive laws in the post-Roe/Wade America. The primary reason is that the cost of travelling to a state in which abortion is legal is prohibitive for many low-income and minority households, locking them into a continuing cycle of poverty. For those who can afford to make the trip, workarounds are quickly springing up to meet the need.

Mexico.  At the Profem Tijuana clinic, within walking distance of the international border,  the the share of patients from the U.S. rose from 25% to 50% between May and July, 2022.          

Gulf Coast. Abort Offshore is a floating clinic that performs legal abortions up to 20 weeks of pregnancy in federal waters.  It draws patients from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  The shore-to-shore trip – including procedure – takes about 5 hours.

Illinois.  Hope Clinic is expanding services at its Granite City, IL., location, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis, MO.

Maryland.  Partners in Abortion Care is opening a clinic in College Park, MD.  Located within 40 miles of three major airports and interstate highways, it is convenient for patients from West Virginia and Ohio.  Beginning in July, nurse-midwives, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants were empowered to perform abortions in Maryland.

Minnesota.  An abortion clinic in Duluth, MN. Has long provided services to patients from adjacent states, but expects more traffic in the wake of a recent court ruling which expanded abortion access. The ruling ended a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, two-parent consent for minors and a requirement that physicians discuss medical risks and alternatives to abortion.  It also tossed out requirements that only doctors could provide abortion care, and that abortions after the first trimester had to take place in a hospital.

New Mexico.   Governor Michelle Lujan recently signed an executive order to build an abortion clinic in Las Cruces, about 45 miles from its Texas border.

Oregon.  Planned Parenthood in Willamette, OR is bracing for an influx of patients from neighboring Idaho. Oregon’s legislature has approved a $15 million expenditures to establish the Oregon Reproductive Health Equity Fund to aid women in need of abortions.

Planned Parenthood maintains a continuously updated report on the legal status of abortion state-by-state.

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Women staking a claim

While the extent to which the reversal of Roe v. Wade has influenced the big increase in women running for statewide and Federal office may not be clearly known, the rise in and of itself is remarkable.

The post-primary landscape reveals new records set for the number of women running both for Congress and for Governor:

U.S. House: 776

U.S. Senate: 84

Governor: 86

The 168 Black women represent new records set for number of Black female candidates for all 3 offices.

The 95 Hispanic women represent new records set for the number of House and Gubernatorial candidates.

While these numbers are encouraging, a steep slope remains:

  • Only 24% of current House members and 28% of Senators are women
  • Only 18% of Governors are women
  • There are 19 U.S. states that have never elected a female governor
  • Only 58 women have ever served in the U.S. Senate…none before 1932

Under-representation of women on the Senate and Gubernatorial ‘benches’ from which Presidential candidates are most often drawn continues to limit opportunities for women to achieve national visibility on the political stage. 

Although third parties have run women for the presidency far more often than men, women have appeared on the national tickets of the two major parties only four times, and only once as President:

  • Geraldine Ferraro (1984)
  • Sarah Palin (2008)
  • Hillary Clinton (2016)
  • Kamala Harris (2020)

The numbers leave little doubt that partisan divide is not only the biggest obstacle to racially-balanced representation, but also to one that is gender-balanced.

A staggering 71% of female candidates ran as Democrats this year.

And while White and Latina candidates were distributed almost evenly between parties, 70% of Black candidates ran as Democrats.

In House races, Black women running as Democrats outnumbered those running as Republican by almost 3:1.

In Senate races, the number of Black women running as Democrats outnumbered those running as Republicans by almost 4:1.

The cracks in the political glass ceiling are spreading, and2022 is shaping up to be the year that it finally shatters.

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Duel in the sun

First thing about Charlie Crist:  A Republican governor of Florida from 2007-2011, he broke with the GOP first by declaring himself an Independent in 2010 and then a Democrat in 2012.  In 2016 he won election to represent Florida’s 13th District in the U.S. House, and has since been twice re-elected.

Crist also served as Florida’s attorney general from 2003 to 2007 and its state education commissioner from 2001 to 2003.

Yesterday, he announced the choice of Karla Hernandez – president of the Miami-Dade County teachers union – as his running mate. Hernandez’s selection drives home Crist’s focus on education in a state where DeSantis has polarized voters with his hands-off approach to the coronavirus pandemic and his policies limiting classroom discussions of race and LGBTQ issues.

The ticket has been endorsed by the Florida Teachers’ Union and the AFL-CIO.

Crist – who has called out DeSantis as a “bully” who exploits cultural divides on gender, sexuality and race – is also campaigning to make it easier to vote in the state, including reversal of 2021 changes to the state’s mail ballot policies.

In Congress, he’s voted for:

  • American Rescue Plan Act of 2021
  • For the People Act of 2021
  • American Dream and Promise Act of 2021
  • Equality Act
  • Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
  • Build Back Better Act
  • Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021
  • COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act
  • Impeachment of Donald Trump

Learn more about Charlie Crist here:

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Voting rights at risk

Voter discrimination and other manipulations of the electoral process are nearly as old as the republic itself, but such abuses were dealt a decisive blow by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which barred jurisdictions with evidence of voting discrimination from changing their voting procedures without “pre-clearance” from Federal authorities.

And – not unlike Roe vs. Wade – the 1965 act was the law of the land for 50 years until 2013, when the Shelby County v Holder ruling released counties with histories of voter discrimination from Federal oversight.

Since then, states have been ramping up discriminatory voting practices.  Many of these, taken individually, may appear to have limited impact, but applied in combination they have a game-changing effect on electoral outcomes.

A Brennan Center analysis of data released by the Federal Election Assistance Commission found that nearly 11 million voters were purged from rolls between 2016 and 2018, overwhelmingly led by counties with a history of voter discrimination.

The telltale signs of discriminatory efforts to disenfranchise are many:

Registration

The simple failure to process voter voter registrations received prior to deadlines renders them void.  Many states also impose severe restrictions on – and its officers even harass – voter registration groups.  Other states mandate prejudicial qualification requirements for Deputy Registrars.

Voting

Attempts to restrict voting are far more insidious, and fall into two categories:

The first is the creation of logistical obstructions such as reducing and/or eliminating early voting dates. The most blatant, though, is gerrymandered consolidation/positioning of polling places to relocate them away from public transportation stops, and to reduce or eliminate them on Native American lands and college campuses.

Other election boards will – in selected precincts – reduce both the numbers of polling place staff and the amount of training that staff receives.  In those same selected precincts, they may also fail to assure adequate numbers of functioning voting machines, optical scanners, or electronic polling books, or alternatively to stock an insufficient number of paper ballots.

Another obstructive tactic is language discrimination both in the selection of polling place staff and wording of election documents.  Other blatant discrimination against minorities can include failure to accommodate voters with disabilities including barring assistance by family members.

Shortened deadlines for absentee ballot returns combine with complicated absentee ballot requirements to further deny access for those with mobility issues or irreconcilable schedule conflicts.

The second is the creation of administrative obstructions, among which the most prominent is excessive purging of voter registration rolls.

However, even a duly registered voter can be denied the right to vote by stricter photo ID laws, combined with gerrymandered closings of the DMV offices which issue them. This ID challenge tactic may imnclude failure to accept student ID’s issued by state universities, and/or Native American tribal IDs.  It also may include barring Native American voters living on reservations through “no P.O. Box” residential address requirements.

“Exact match” signature requirements are another ID challenge tactic to deny voters access to polls.

Practices less widely employed are:

  • Requiring the payment of outstanding civil fines/fees as a voting pre-requisite.
  • Failure to assist or accommodate voters displaced by natural disasters, and failure to inform formerly incarcerated persons of their voting rights.

The U.S. is unique among Western democracies placing the burden of voter registration upon the individual.

In Canada, a voter is automatically added to Federal election rolls at age 18, and remains registered even after a move. It is unsurprising that 93% of Canadians are registered to vote vs. only 68% of Americans.

These increasingly frequent abuses leave little question that after decades of progress toward universal enfranchisement, many states are rolling back voting rights in an echo of Jim Crow.

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The ‘drone view”

Senate candidates are the perennial stars of midterm elections, but perhaps never more so than in 2022 as control of the Senate hangs by a thread. 

With only one-third of senators up for re-election in each cycle, Senate races are easier for voters to monitor and candidates’ names are more widely known than for the House.

And of the 36 Senate races, polls still rank 11 as too close to call.

And while the House may have less star power, it has ably and amply demonstrated its value as a check on the influence of reactionaries on national policy.

The sweeping Democratic victory in the 2018 mid-terms has now dangerously eroded, and years of gerrymandering have acted to reduce the number of seats that can be viably contested. 

Of 435 House races, polls rank only 33 as toss-ups

Only 20 more are rated as “leaning”…but not completely secure

In other words, pollsters are saying that outcomes for 88% of House races are foregone conclusions… thanks in no small part to decades of gerrymandering.

But it’s not just about Federal offices

While most voters focus only on gubernatorial elections in their home states, recent years have reminded us that activist governors can have an outsized impact – for better or for worse – on policy that most impacts day-to-day life. And it should not be forgotten that 19 Presidents were previously governors, including Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan.

This fall, governors will be elected in 36 states.

Polls rank 11 of the 36 gubernatorial races with margins of 5% or less.

U.S. voters living abroad are reminded that online registration for local elections are unavailable in:

  • AK
  • ME
  • MI
  • MT
  • NH
  • ND
  • OK
  • SD
  • TX

Browse more COBALT blog posts on the 2022 elections – including highlights for individual races – here.

Those living in Mexico who are eligible to vote in U.S. elections (born in the U.S. or born to a U.S. citizen) have the opportunity to influence the outcomes in Federal elections in two ways:

  • Register online here and have your ballot mailed to you. The election is only 10 weeks away.
  • Contribute to like-minded candidates not only in your home state, but to those in hotly contested elections nationwide.  More here.
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