Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also discuss the resignation of a GOP congressman convicted of campaign finance fraud, a Republican effort to knock a Trump favorite off the ballot in Tennessee, and recent court rulings that struck down gerrymanders in Maryland and … Alaska? Yep, Alaska!
David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir:
And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency from Senate to city council.
David Beard:
Please subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. But let's go ahead and get into today's episode. What are we going to be covering, Nir?
David Nir:
Today we are for the first time opening up The Downballot mailbag. Folks have been sending us their requests all week at thedownballot@dailykos.com and tweeting at us to @DKElections. And we have a whole range of topics that I'm really looking forward to digging into, including legislative races in Georgia, the Wisconsin Senate race, the value of handwriting post cards to voters, and a whole lot more. But before we jump into the mail bag, we are going to be discussing our weekly hits. We have a Republican congressman convicted of campaign finance fraud. We have a GOP candidate for the House that other Republicans are trying to keep off the ballot in Tennessee. And we have, as always, a whole bunch of redistricting news to discuss. So let's get started. All right, Beard what have you got to kick us off for our weekly hits?
David Beard:
I'm going to start us over in Nebraska where we've got another Republican scandal that in this case is coming to an end, it looks like. Congressman Jeff Fortenberry is resigning from Congress after being found guilty on three counts, one on illegal contributions and two for lying to federal agents, which is never a good idea. So the FBI discovered that a Nigerian billionaire had been funneling cash into the campaigns of four Republican politicians, one of which was Fortenberry. The other three all returned or donated the money just as soon as they were made aware, which is what you're supposed to do. If you get some money and you find out that you're not supposed to have it, as soon as possible you should get rid of it. Fortenberry, on the other hand, decided to hold on to it for two-and-a-half years, at least in part because he didn't want the scandal of returning the money. So we see how that worked out for him.
But then he also obviously went and was interviewed by the FBI, and clearly lied to federal agents as he was just convicted of doing so. And so will now be resigning from Congress. He had been seeking reelection even while on trial to Nebraska's 1st district. It's a constituency in the Lincoln area in Nebraska. Trump would've carried the new district 54-43 and candidate filing closed a while ago. So there's no opportunity for new candidates to be on the ballot. But since Fortenberry already had a primary challenger, the assumption is that primary challenger is going to be the Republican nominee. And that is State Senator Mike Flood. He's a former speaker of the state's Unicameral Legislature. And he's actually already been backed by Governor Pete Ricketts and former Governor Dave Heineman. So he should really have no trouble at all beating Fortenberry on the primary ballot, because his name is still going to appear even though he won't be running anymore.
Democrats are fielding a real candidate: State Senator Patty Pansing Brooks. But as I said, Trump won the new district 54-43. So that's still going to be a very tough road to hoe this November. So there's going to be a special election. And that has to take place before the end of June for the final months of Fortenberry's current term, that's going to take place under the old map. Where Trump won the existing first district, 56 to 41. So a slightly larger margin than the new map and state party leaders rather than primary voters are going to be choosing these nominees. So there's not going to be a primary, just straight to the general election. But again, since it's an even tougher district than the new lines, it's really expected that whoever is the Republican nominate there will likely win that special election. But another Republican scandal in the books, this one following Van Taylor, who we covered just a few weeks ago and I'm sure there'll be another one coming up soon.
David Nir:
It would be political malpractice, Beard, if I didn't mention the story that Jeff Fortenberry was most famous for prior to his conviction on federal charges a few years ago: Some total wag defaced a Jeff Fortenberry sign somewhere in his district and renamed him Jeff Fartenberry, and the tagline said strong families, strong communities and strong odor. There were googly eyes on the sign. The reason why this became a national story though, is because some professor in the area liked the photo of this defaced sign on Facebook and then Fortenberry's chief of staff decided to try to threaten his job. And it totally blew up. And I guess now when you Google Jeff Fortenberry, finally, a different story is going to be the first thing that comes up, about him. What a price to pay.
David Beard:
And really we're just learning important basic rules here. If somebody makes an embarrassing sign of you, don't cause a scandal that's going to blow it up everywhere. Don't keep campaign contributions you're not supposed to. And don't lie to the FBI. These are pretty basic things, but hopefully Fortenberry has learned an important lesson.
David Nir:
We're going to head over into Tennessee to discuss a different question about whether someone will appear on the ballot. Tennessee's 5th Congressional District. This is a seat in the Nashville area that Republicans shredded. The old 5th District was an oddly blue seat that covered the City of Nashville. The GOP decided to gerrymander the area and split Nashville between three districts, causing the Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper to retire. So Tennessee's 5th is now solidly Republican turf. And of course that means a whole bunch of Republican candidates are lining up to run there, including one, a former Trump spokesperson named Morgan Ortagus who has Trump's endorsement. The problem for her is that local Republicans really don't seem to like her and in fact appear to have targeted her with a new bill that just passed through the Legislature and is waiting before the governor right now.
This bill would set up a requirement that any candidates for the U.S. House live in their district for at least three years before they run for office. Ortagus only just moved from D.C. to Tennessee last year. What's interesting about this is that as far as we know, this bill is actually unconstitutional because in 1995, the Supreme Court ruled against bills that were popular nationwide at the time during the Gingrich era imposing term limits on members of Congress and what the Supreme Court said is that states can't add requirements to the requirements already listed in the Constitution. And the requirements for seeking office in the Constitution set a pretty low bar. You have to be a certain age; for the House you have to be 25 years old. You have to have been a citizen of the United States for seven years and you have to live in the state, not your district, but the state that you want to represent if you are running for the House.
So Republicans are obviously trying to ding Morgan Ortagus this way, except a lawsuit against this measure would very likely succeed if it's signed into law, unless the Supreme Court changes its mind, which it very well could since that old anti-term limits decision was decided with former Justice Kennedy. It was a swing justice joining the liberal majority on the court. The problem, though, for Republicans is that this could come back and bite them because the main move nationwide to add requirements to federal candidates who are seeking office has been in blue states where Democrats have tried to make it a requirement that candidates disclose their taxes, which was of course an effort to target Donald Trump. So if the Supreme Court rules that states could add a residency requirement for House candidates, then it's certainly very possible that we could actually see other requirements become law.
And that could really make a total mess of things as you'd have very different sets of requirements for candidates from state to state. But it's still not clear even whether Governor Lee will sign this and exactly what might happen legally. But Ortagus definitely does not seem to have very strong Tennessee bona fides. She went on a radio show not long ago. And the host quizzed her about various facts about the state and her district, including he asked her the name of a famous NASCAR driver who owns an auto dealership in the district—that would be Darrell Waltrip. She had no idea who he is; who knows if she'll succeed? Trump's endorsement has of course often been beneficial for candidates, but we've just as often seen it not be the difference maker.
David Beard:
Exactly. And that was the one thing I wanted to highlight from all of this. As we talked about in Alabama, in Georgia, Trump's endorsement is not really doing what you would expect for some of these big-name candidates that he's endorsed. And now here in Tennessee, again, you think that his endorsement would go a long way and it's clearly not—at least among what you would think of as the Republican elite in this state, which is the state legislature and all the members there. We've seen a lot of this polling showing that Trump's endorsement is not moving voters. It's also not moving Republican elites in this case. It's a real case where Trump's endorsement is certainly worth something, but it's much, much less clear exactly what it is worth in some of these primaries.
David Nir:
Yeah. And in fact, the sponsor of the bill targeting Ortagus, State Senator Frank Niceley said, "I'll vote for Trump as long as he lives, but I don't want him coming out here to tell me who to vote for."
David Beard:
Yeah. Then that's a really good summary of it actually. So now I'm going to take us up to Maryland, which is one of the, now again, many states that has not yet finished redistricting. It feels like this is never going to end this year. I assume at some time it will before November of 2022. But here we are up in Maryland, a state court struck down the map that was passed by Democratic lawmakers over the veto of Governor Larry Hogan. It was a map that had seven safe Democratic seats and one very competitive seat out in the Eastern shore. The state court called it an impermissible partisan gerrymander under the state constitution. So the legislature has now already passed a new map. That new map makes the Eastern shore-based first district once again, very safely Republican. And it makes the 6th district Western Maryland, which was safely Democratic at 60 to 38 Biden, down to a 54-44 Biden seat.
Now you think in most years that's still a pretty safe seat for Democrat, but we could certainly see in a very good Republican year that become a competitive seat. The other thing it does is it also cleans up a lot of the very ugly lines that you see in the Baltimore area and in the D.C. suburbs, which doesn't really have a strong change to the partisanship of these districts. These are all safely Democratic districts, but for various reasons, incumbent congressmen or for parochial reasons, there are these very messy lines and the new map cleans a lot of that up. Now it's important to note that this legislation that passed a new map includes a clause that would return the state to the original map. If the court's ruling was reversed on appeal and the Maryland attorney general has not decided whether or not to appeal yet. So that's something that's still up in the air.
David Nir:
You talked about the lines being, "cleaned up." And this is such an interesting phenomenon because when most people look at a map of election districts, they respond very viscerally to how nice it looks. Do the districts look tidy? Are they compact? Do they seem to make sense to the eye? And this can be a very superficial way of looking at things and is often misleading. But I think it really does, nonetheless, have potency. Sandra Day O'Connor, former Supreme Court justice, once struck down a North Carolina district because of its "bizarre shape." And I feel there's a chance that Democrats would have done better in court had their original map simply looked prettier and just given less offense to the judge. Now, maybe it wouldn't have made a difference at all, but like you said, those lines were really twisted and contorted for the most parochial, almost embarrassing, of reasons. And there's just no good existence for them.
David Beard:
Yeah, no, I think that we've seen up in Massachusetts, which has a very similar partisanship to Maryland, that they have nine districts that are very Democratic. It's relatively clean up there and there's never really been much of an issue. Whereas Maryland has come up repeatedly as an argument against Democrats’ arguments for more fair maps because they say, "Oh well Maryland's gerrymandered." When in fact Maryland is not very gerrymandered for partisanship with the exception of the 6th District out on the west, which was moved down to make it a little bit more Democratic in the previous cycle. But it's mostly gerrymandered for, as you said, parochial reasons that really don't have anything to do with partisanship. So it really doesn't make any sense that they've done that so much.
David Nir:
One interesting thing though, is that the Maryland congressional map was the first Democratic map in the nation drawn this cycle to get struck down. But that's against a much larger number of GOP maps that have been invalidated by the courts, including very unusual case in Alaska of all places. Now, Alaska only has one congressional district. So of course there's no congressional districts to worry about there, but every state has to worry about redrawing its state legislative maps and Alaska uses something that a few other states use. It's called nesting, where a certain number of districts in the lower chamber are combined to form a single district in the upper chamber in Alaska. It's two state House districts for every one state Senate district. And in Alaska, redistricting is handled by a Republican-dominated board. And what the commission did here is they paired two districts that didn't belong together.
One was a swingy district in Anchorage and the other is a sprawling rural district that is dark red. And the two districts really have nothing in common. They do literally join one another, except they are separated by a mountain range. And the Alaska Supreme Court said that combining these two districts into a Senate district represented an illegal partisan gerrymander, and essentially ordered the redistricting board to come up with new and more appropriate district pairings. And it might not sound like a big deal, but Alaska's Senate is actually pretty closely divided. And it's also the smallest legislative chamber in the entire nation. It has just 20 members. The switch of one seat from red to blue potentially could actually be a very big deal, especially because in the Alaska legislature, there have often been bipartisan coalitions between Democrats and more moderate Republicans. That is a very nice win for the cause of fair districting way up north.
David Beard:
And I think in Alaska specifically, when you say divided by a mountain range in the contiguous 48, you would think of like, "Oh, communities of interest or, oh, that makes a little longer to get to." In Alaska divided by a mountain range can mean there are no roads between these two areas. I don't know if that's exactly the case here, but that's often the case in Alaska where you have to travel by boat or by plane to get to certain places. So those are very real concerns for that state.
David Nir:
Well, right. We are going to, for the first time ever in The Downballot history, be taking your questions. So stick with us and we'll be back after the break to open up our mail bag.
We are back with the first ever Downballot mailbag. You've been sending us your questions all week on Daily Kos, by email, on Twitter. And we have rounded up a bunch of the most interesting and we're ready to get started. So Beard, let's kick us off.
David Beard:
Sure. I'm going to start in North Carolina as I like to do. We got a comment from Eve who was interested in North Carolina's 4th district, which is an open seat. They mentioned two female candidates who are running there, Nida Allam and Crystal Cavalier, and wanted to know if either of those candidates had a shot in the race. And so North Carolina 4 is an open seat. It covers part of the research triangle, including Chapel Hill and Durham. David Price is a retiring congressman. He's spent 34 years in Congress. And so of those two candidates that were asked about, Allam is a Durham County commissioner who's running for the seat. She is also the first Muslim woman ever elected to public office in North Carolina. She raised a decently good amount in the fourth quarter of 2021. So I think that she has a real shot to win.
The seat is a safe Democratic seat. So whoever wins the primary will almost certainly win the general election. So that's really where the competitive race is. The other candidate that was asked about is Crystal Cavalier. She's the founder of the North Carolina Missing Murdered Indigenous Women Coalition. So that's a very impressive point on her resume. The one issue that she might have is that she's from Alamance County, which is a much smaller county in the overall district. It's not where the population center of Chapel Hill and Durham is. So that could be tough for her.
A couple of other candidates of note, that I wanted to mention in this race: Valerie Foushee is a state senator from Orange County, which includes the Chapel Hill area. So she's going to have a lot of strength there. And then Clay Aiken is a well known former American Idol contestant, he's running there. So he's going to have a lot of name recognition as well. If I had to bet, I would bet that the race is going to come down to Foushee and Allam, but there's still a long time to go. There's eight candidates in total. So we'll just have to wait and see how the race turns out.
David Nir:
Our next question is from Kenneth A, who asks, "I've been volunteering with postcards to voters for several years. Is this an effective way of reaching out to potential voters?" And the answer is a definite: maybe. It turns out there has been some high-quality research into this question from our good friends at Sister District, which is an organization that helps elect candidates to legislatures around the country. The research has been led by co-founder Gaby Goldstein, who is going to be a guest of ours on an upcoming episode. And it turns out that there may in fact be a small effect in terms of motivating people to vote. But there are many factors that affect the effectiveness of this tactic, including whether we're talking about a primary, a runoff, a special election, whether you're encouraging someone to register to vote or actually show up to vote.
And there are even factors that affect this. Like what does the postcard look like? In other words, does it look like campaign literature or does it look like a landscape from Colorado that a friend of yours might send you? There are other factors as well, including the legibility of the handwriting and even potentially the postmark. Is it coming from the state that the campaign is located in or somewhere else? So more research is needed on this to really get a better handle on its effectiveness, but I will say this for folks who either are unable to, or prefer not to do in-person activities like going door-to-door or phone banking: This actually is a terrific way to spend your time because it definitely can have a positive impact.
David Beard:
Exactly. And I've seen there are a lot of campaigns where people come in and they want to help, but they're really not comfortable going door to door. They're not comfortable talking to people. And this is a great way to give them both something to do that they can be involved and make a difference in terms of being able to communicate with voters through the postcards and hopefully persuade people or turn out some people. So our next question comes from Twitter, from Yotweets; they're asking about Georgia. They wanted to see if an impending blue wave might be coming along with Stacy Abrams and how the Democrats might do in the Georgia State Legislature. So the Georgia State Legislature is definitely a long-term target for Democrats, but the Georgia Republicans passed a pretty defensive gerrymander. That's going to make it really tough to make a lot of progress in the short-term, particularly again, with 2022 being a mid-term year with a Democratic president. Now per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the revised Senate districts have 33 districts that tend to vote for Republicans and 23 that lean toward Democrats.
So that's actually an increase of one Democratic seat. And that's obviously due to the massive population growth of Democratic consistencies in and around the Atlanta area. Similarly, the new House map has 98 districts that favor Republicans and 82 districts that favor Democrats. So that's a potential gain of Democratic seats in the election if, again, every one of these seats were to go to the party, favored in it. And that's obviously not always a guarantee. So could there be gains from the current baseline? Absolutely. You might even say that's likely. But it's really hard to imagine Democrats taking these chambers in 2022.
Now as the state continues to evolve as population growth continues to take place in and around urban areas. Could you see a Democratic majority later on in this decade? Maybe even 2024, but certainly looking further on, definitely. But I do think it would be tough to imagine a majority in 2022. And as for Stacy Abrams, part of that depends on who she's going to face in the TOP primary between Governor Brian Kemp and former Senator David Perdue. Perdue might be a slightly easier target, though that's debatable—we don't really know exactly. But either way, the race is expected to be very, very close. There aren't really as many swing voters in Georgia as you might see in other states, a lot of people are already in their corners. So it's very much a turnout race. So that's something we're going to be following all the way up until Election Day. I think.
David Nir:
One thing I should add also is there is a pending lawsuit challenging Georgia's legislative districts for violating the Voting Rights Act. A federal judge ruled not all that long ago that it's likely that the maps fail to create a sufficient number of districts where black voters can elect their candidates of choice. The real problem is first off, there won't be any changes to the maps; they're already going to be used this year. But as the case proceeds, the Supreme Court has been so hostile to litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act that we could very well see the eventual decision by this lower court ultimately rejected or diminished in some way, shape, or form.
Our next question is from Dwight O, who wants to know how he can donate most effectively and get the best bang for his buck when it comes to giving to Democrats running for office.
This is a fantastic question because Dwight really gets at the heart of what the Daily Kos endorsement program does. And we've been running endorsements at Daily Kos for almost two decades. And we take into account many, many factors, but among the most important is whether we think that small grassroots donations can actually have a real impact in a particular race. And so for that reason, we very seldom endorse incumbents. We won't endorse candidates running in safe blue seats. We know that we need to gain power from Republicans. And that means targeting Republican seats for the Senate, for the House, for governors, for state legislatures—that if you don't have majorities, you can't govern. And that's really our most important philosophy when it comes to endorsements. But also if someone is self-funding, we're very disinclined to endorse them because they simply don't need those small-dollar grassroots donations.
We try to strike the right balance between some of the big-name races that are of high importance that everyone wants to get involved in—something like, for instance, last year's Senate contests in Georgia. But those are also paired with a lot of endorsements in races that are getting less attention and that can include races for the U.S. House and also winnable races in state legislatures where we can flip the legislature. So I would encourage Dwight and everyone else to closely follow Daily Kos' endorsements. We always post them on the site, since it's still relatively early. We only have a few underway so far, but right now we have endorsed Jessica Cisneros who is running against the last anti-choice Democrat in the House, Henry Cuellar in Texas's 28th district. Stacey Abrams, who of course we were just talking about running for governor in Georgia, and also Cheri Beasley who is running for Senate in North Carolina.
We definitely will get involved in many other Senate and the House races. That's going to be coming soon because of redistricting. We have not yet launched new House endorsements on the Senate side; we are waiting for a lot of primaries to resolve themselves. Daily Kos generally is opposed to getting involved in primaries—unless there's a really good reason to, like you have someone terrible, like Cuellar for instance—in Pennsylvania. And we're going to talk a little bit later about Wisconsin. There are a lot of good candidates running and we want to let local voters make their choices before we decide to get involved. But like I say, keep tabs on our endorsement process. We certainly will be talking about that more on the show and you'll also find it on the site as well.
David Beard:
Yeah. If you're looking for a places to is to send your money, Daily Kos always provides really good candidacies that could really use your support.
David Nir:
And one other thing I should mention, one thing that I think really sets us apart from other organizations is we try to be really clear-eyed with our community when a race is difficult. Most endorsement press releases that you'll read are very rah, rah and we are reality-based. And if a race is going to be difficult, then we're going to say so, and we're not going to endorse in the easy races because what's the point? So I hope you can trust us that we are being honest with you about where to give your hard-earned dollars.
David Beard:
Yeah, it's really easy to rack up a very high win rate if you endorse a bunch of Democratic incumbents and safe blue seats, but that doesn't actually make things better. It just gives you a shinier win rate.
So our next question comes from G Night. They're asking about inflation and the idea that voters often vote based on how their personal economic situation is going or how the economy seems, more broadly. And they've observed that there's been a lot of focus in the media and by Republicans on rising inflation. And they're asking, "Is this hurting Democrats’ election chances? And if so, what could be done to change the perception here?" And so I think there's a couple of factors to talk about here. One, while I certainly think inflation is being hyped by the conservative media. They always like to push things as hard as possible that might hurt Democrats.
It is also very much a real issue in people's lives that we need to take seriously and need to be addressing. So I don't think it is as much changing perceptions as really showing to voters how Democrats are going to tackle and deal with inflation. Now, the Federal Reserve plays a big role here in setting interest rates, but that's very distant from voters and it's not really an election issue that you can really campaign on. So I think the key thing here is for Democrats to talk about how they can do things both in the short-term that might provide for relief for families to make their situation a little better. And then also in the longer term about fixing supply shortages; we've seen a lot about shipments from overseas. You can look to the infrastructure bill, that's going to do a lot to improve our infrastructure and resolve some of these supply changes that can help with shortages.
And those are things that might not happen this year, but you can talk about them as ways that Democrats are working to fix this problem. And that's what's important to show the Democrats are taking it seriously, that they're working to deal with inflation. And I think broadly, you can also talk about building a fairer economy. Taxing the rich is something that's very popular. We've seen that year after year. It gets shot down by Republicans and a very small number of Democrats because of their rich donors, but it's very popular among voters. And it's actually something that would contribute to bringing down inflation. If you think about it, take some of that money that might be contributing towards inflation because there's so much spending and taking it out amongst the richest voters without hurting working-class families. And so building a fair economy is a way to tackle inflation when you frame it in the right way.
David Nir:
Beard, I'm curious if you have an opinion on gas tax relief. We've seen some states take action toward temporarily suspending taxes on purchases of gasoline. There's even been talk about federal action on that. What do you think of that?
David Beard:
It's tough because in terms of a solution for inflation, it doesn't actually help the inflation problems because one of the problems why gas is expensive is because more people want to buy gas than is available. So that's causing the price to go up. So just taking away the taxes doesn't necessarily actually make the price go down, but it is something to really show if you're in power: "We hear you, you're hurting because the price of gas is high. We want to try to do this to help you and help your pocketbook a little bit in the short-term." So if it's a way that you really think as a Democrat, that this could help you stay in elected office and do a lot of good things as remaining a senator or congressman or a governor, I don't think you should not do it, but is it from an economic perspective, a great solution? Not really.
David Nir:
The next topic comes from Peter F, who is interested to hear about Mandela Barnes, who is running for the Senate in Wisconsin and hoping to be the Democratic nominee against Republican incumbent Ron Johnson. So there is a multi-way primary going on in Wisconsin and Barnes is one of four leading candidates. The other three are Sarah Godlewski, who is the state treasurer, Alex Lasry, who is an executive with the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team, and Tom Nelson, who is a county executive from the Northeastern part of this state. Barnes, I personally find very interesting. He was elected lieutenant governor in 2018 when he and Governor Tony Evers ousted the odious Scott Walker, and he was the second black person ever to win statewide office in Wisconsin; he would be the state's first black senator if he wins. There have been a number of polls of the Democratic primary to date. Barnes has had pretty healthy leads in almost all of them.
And what's interesting is that his lead appears to be fairly durable despite pretty high spending from some of his opponents, including Lasry. I think that he is the odds-on favorite to take the nomination. However, Wisconsin has a pretty late primary. It's not until August. So there is a lot time left on that clock, but regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, there's no question that Wisconsin is going to be one of the top Senate battlegrounds this year. Ron Johnson is definitely the most vulnerable Republican senator who is up for reelection. And also I would say, hmm, Beard, what do you think? Is he the most hated Republican senator up for reelection this year by progressives? Or would that be Marco Rubio in Florida?
David Beard:
I feel like in terms of hate probably Johnson ekes it out. I feel like Rubio is in line for a lot of mockery, but I feel like there's a real visceral dislike for Johnson, both just by so many of his statements and the fact that he beat Russ Feingold, who was a beloved progressive figure that there's a real, real visceral sense of, "We would love to get rid of this guy in November."
David Nir:
Yeah. And I think for that reason whoever is the nominee, whether it's Barnes or someone else, will have no problem raising lots and lots of money from engaged progressives who want to give Ron Johnson the boot.
David Beard:
Yeah. If you're in Wisconsin, if you're in Pennsylvania, if you're in North Carolina, if you're in Georgia, Arizona, you will be seeing a lot of TV advertising this summer and fall. So just prepare yourselves as best you can. Our next question is sort of a merge question, because there's very similar one from One BQ and one from Elfling and they were asking, "How do we get people to pay attention to state and local races? How do we learn more about state and local races? How do we get more involved and get people in general, more excited about them?" So first off, in terms of finding out about candidates in your area, I think a really good place to learn about this, both in terms of who are the candidates and what are the important races is often local Democratic parties. They're the ones who are involved in the nuts and bolts of this, particularly in competitive areas.
They're going to be working hard to get these candidates elected, in places where maybe it's more blue. So the campaign is in the primary and whoever wins the Democratic nomination is going to win the election. You can look to other progressive organizations that often pop up. They'll often have endorsements for these safe Democratic primaries, who they think would be the strongest candidate. And obviously you want to find an organization that aligns with your values in the community that you could get behind and work for these candidates or support candidates directly if you know someone running. Or if you just find somebody that you're passionate about, get involved in a local campaign there—you can do that work yourself. You can do, as we talked about earlier, canvasing or phone banking or writing postcards, social media, there's all sorts of ways to A: find out about candidates and get involved.
And then B: start doing some of that work yourself because as to the other point of the question, I would ask, how do we get people to care about downballot races? That's not something any one of us can solve. There's always got to be an inherent, lesser interest in these races than in the high-profile Senate race or the presidential race. That's just how life works. And so what you really want to do is think about from a very local perspective, what can you do? No one of us can solve this problem. You can't solve this problem, but what you can do, you can get involved in local races. You can talk to your neighbors, your coworkers, your friends, you can volunteer, you can get involved in the local parties and the other progressive organizations. And if enough of us are doing that, that's going to be pushing these races into the forefront. It's going to make us have more victories and it's going to really do the work that needs to be done. That makes America a better place.
David Nir:
I also want to add that in addition to asking for donations for candidates, Daily Kos devotes a lot of energy toward promoting volunteer opportunities of all different sorts, including remote phone banking opportunities and other things you can do without leaving the comfort of your own home. So if you're on our email list, our activism team is regularly promoting these events. And the other great thing of course is that if, as Beard was alluding a moment ago, if you're in a really blue area, you can this way figure out how to devote your time and energy toward helping flip seats in swingier or redder parts of the country, where your help is more greatly needed.
Our last topic today comes from Zen Trainer, who is interested in hearing more about the possibility that Virginia could have state legislative elections this year. Now, if you are a very astute observer of legislative politics, you know that Virginia is one of the oddball states that holds its legislative elections in odd-numbered years.
And in fact, it just held elections for the state House last fall, which saw Republicans win a narrow majority, taking back the state House from Democrats. There was a problem though, which is that those elections were held under old district lines because of the delays in getting census data due to the coronavirus pandemic and also the Trump administration's malfeasance. So these districts are badly mal-apportioned, meaning that there is a large gap in population between the smallest and largest district because they were drawn over a decade ago. These districts have been challenged in court, saying that the best way to remedy the fact that the legislature was elected using what are essentially unconstitutional districts would be to hold special elections this November using the new districts. Since that time, the state has adopted new districts via its new redistricting commission. And so a former Democratic Party official has actually brought a lawsuit asking that special elections be held this fall.
They would be for one-year terms, and then there would be new elections again next in 2023 for the normal two-year terms and also for the state Senate as well. It's really unclear the status of this case. The judge hearing it has gotten really unhappy with the state attorney general's office, saying that the AG's office has mishandled the case or is running out of time. It's already the end of the first quarter of the year. And I think that probably no politician in Virginia actually wants to run state House races in 2021, 2022, and 2023. It would be just a real crazy, back-to-back-to-back sort of set of elections.
But there is an argument to be made that because these people were elected on such malapportioned maps, that the only fair way to ensure the constitutional principle of one person one vote is to hold new elections this November. I think Democrats also probably really don't want to see that happen. I think they did fare poorly last year and probably would've expected to not fare well again this year, but that is simply one we're just going to have to keep an eye on.
David Beard:
Yeah, it's wild to me to imagine the idea that here it is almost April and we would be just creating a whole new set of races out of basically thin air. When people in Virginia are probably already looking towards 2023, which is only about 18 months away for those next elections to be like, "Oh, here's another whole set of elections that you'd have to run in." So obviously stranger things have happened in American politics, but it seems really hard to just practically pull off at this point.
David Nir:
Well, that's it for this week's mail bag. We really appreciate you sending in your questions. Please feel free to do so each and every week. You can email us at thedownballot@dailykos.com or tweet at us @DKElections. And we will definitely be getting to more of your questions in future episodes.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week, The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks also to our producers Cara Zelaya and Walter Einenkel and editor Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.
