This week on The Downballot, cohosts David Nir and David Beard took a look at the ever-shifting battleground leading up to November, including a number of primaries in New York, Florida, and Oklahoma, and special elections in New York where Democrats scored a major and unexpected victory. They also covered a yet-unresolved special election for Alaska's lone House seat that could amazingly go the Democrats’ way.
This week’s guest was Aaron Kleinman, a longtime Daily Kos Elections community member who currently serves as the research director at The States Project, an organization devoted to electing candidates to state legislatures nationwide and flipping competitive legislatures.
You can listen below or subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find a transcript for this week right here. New episodes come out every Thursday!
With so much happening in New York, the hosts opened the episode with a discussion of a shocking result out of New York’s 19th District, where Democrat Pat Ryan narrowly defeated Republican Marc Molinaro in a special election after Representative Antonio Delgado was appointed to the lieutenant governorship.
This was expected to be a race that Republicans would likely win, even though Biden carried the district narrowly, because it had been shaping up to be a good year for Republicans. Therefore, in this district that Biden won very narrowly, Republicans should have been able to pick up this seat — but that is not what happened. Molinaro was expected to win right up until polls closed and the results came in. The polling was sparse, but it all showed Molinaro ahead.
As Beard elaborated:
It's certainly the kind of result that makes you rethink, particularly in combination with the other special election results that we've had recently … pointing towards better Democratic results than you would've expected in a red year.
[It] makes you rethink the entire sort of state of the 2022 election and makes you consider like, are Democrats potentially going to stave off or Republican wave year going to have a neutral year, maybe even conceivably have a slightly better than neutral year? It really is a result that makes you stop and think, because as we've talked about, special elections are the best evidence that you can get as to how an election is going to go.
”With the election less than a hundred days away, there's only so much time for things to change,” he added. “And with special election after special election now showing, Democrats outperforming what you would expect, it makes you think that things are possible that we thought would not have been possible if we had been talking about it six months ago.”
Nir chimed in that there have been multiple races now where Democrats outperformed expectations:
We can't emphasize that enough because the thing with special elections is you never want to read too much into just one race, but now we have multiple races. We had the special election in Nebraska's 1st District, which came about right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade and Democrats vastly outperformed the presidential margins in that district. Then we had the special election in Minnesota's 1st District, again, same thing, conservative district, Democrats lost, but they performed much better than the presidential results in that district.
And not only did the Democrats win in New York's 19th District, but they also outperformed the presidential margins in another special election in the state’s much more conservative 23rd District as well. Nir and Beard also explored several other elections in New York, including a titanic conflict between two 30-year veterans of the House—Congressman Jerry Nadler and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney—that emerged after redistricting created a district that included both the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side in Manhattan.
Moving down to Florida, the pair also chatted about a near-major upset in Florida's 11th Congressional District on the Republican side, where incumbent Republican Rep. Dan Webster narrowly held off far-right troll Laura Loomer by just a 51 to 44 margin. Loomer describes herself as a proud Islamophobe, and is banned on numerous different social media apps and from ride shares.
But to continue on the theme of winning as many elections as Democrats can, Beard and Nir highlighted something curious brewing up north in Alaska.
A special election in Alaska actually took place last week, but results have not yet been finalized, and then the runoff tabulations have to take place. This is the second round. As Beard put it:
There's still some more votes that they're waiting to get, but right now we have the Democrat Mary Peltola at 39%, Sarah Palin at 31%, and Nick Begich at 28%, and we don't expect those places to change. So in that case, Begich would be eliminated and his votes would be split between Peltola and Palin, depending on how his voters ranked them in terms of what their second choice was.
While “Sarah Palin is a special creature all of her own,” Nir said, the final round results between Palin and Peltola will be just a straight Democrat versus Republican race. This means that it will be possible to compare the results to Alaska's presidential lean. “Alaska, of course, is quite a red state, supported Trump by double digits, and it's almost certain though that Peltola will outperform that. So again, it's looking like another good data point pushing back on the idea of any sort of red wave,” he added.
After a brief break, the cohosts welcomed Kleinman onto the show to offer his perspective on competitive state legislature races happening across the country.
Kleinman offered up a history lesson first before diving into the work he is currently doing. Before The States Project was started, in the early 1970s, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the Chamber of Commerce about how the right wing could defeat the post-war liberal hegemony that had existed in the United States basically since the end of World War II.
What became known as the Powell Memo highlighted a number of different areas. One of them was building their own institutions, both in media and academics—for instance, Fox News, The Heritage Foundation, and all of these kind of right-wing-funded think tanks, basically. “They also said we need to take over the federal judiciary. That's why you have the Federalist Society and really a 50-year concerted effort by the right wing to install ideological judges who will focus on outcomes beneficial to them and the Republican Party,” Kleinman said.
The third—and likely most crucial—element of the plan was state legislatures. Thus, there was a real focus by the right, starting in the early 1970s, to take over state legislatures. As Kleinman explained, much of the behavior and policies we have seen from the GOP did not happen overnight. Rather, it was built through decades of intentional action. Now, retaking state legislatures is a major impetus for the work The States Project does:
I think a lot of people woke up on November 9th, 2016, being like, how did we get here? And a lot of people looked at state legislatures like one of the reasons why is because we just haven't built the institutions here that the right has. And so in 2017, our executive director, Daniel Squadron, who used to be a New York State Senator founded what became the States Project. And we started working just trying to figure out how we as an organization can focus grassroots attention toward flipping state legislative seats and winning majorities that are in line with our values that will not work for corporate special interests, but will work to achieve the common good.
“So I'm sure there are a million different answers to this question. It's one that I've thought about a lot. I've mashed my teeth over a lot, but why do you think that Democrats spent decades really without a Powell Memo of their own? Why did conservatives seize these levers of power and progressives, Democrats to the left, whatever you want to call it, kind of almost abdicated the playing field?” Nir asked.
As Kleinman put it, the new left that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s adopted a litigation-forward strategy that did not see much success:
The new left was really focused on a kind of litigation forward strategy almost, kind of setting up ways for basically people to sue to get or stop things. And I think that litigation forward strategy ended up backfiring when that works when you have a federal judiciary in state courts that are appointed by Democrats, but as kind of the rights taking over judiciaries across the country, it's made it harder and harder.
And it's also kind of a move away from the Organized Labor Movement as well, has really led to declines in people really organizing around things that are really close to them, like state legislatures. And so it kind of left this vacuum there. And also I think, again, the right wing effort, it took a really long time. I mean, if you look at before the 2010 elections, Democrats, they controlled legislatures in state. It was like Alabama. Even in 2012, they were in the majority in Arkansas and West Virginia. And so it took a really long time for really the far right to take over these state legislatures. Yeah. I mean, think that's a big part of it was just kind of how the new left constituted itself in a very kind of litigation and DC-centric way that channeled activist's energy toward those areas.
“I think that's a really interesting answer. So in a way, it's almost sort of like a multi-decade frog boil,” Nir added.
The hosts also asked Kleinman about how The States Project differs from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC).
Kleinman noted that the biggest differentiator between The States Project and the DLCC is that the DLCC is fundamentally a party organization, and The States Project is a nonpartisan organization:
We will work with any lawmakers that share our values regardless of their party. And so you can see that in a state like Alaska for example, where you have the State House is governed by affection of Democrats, Independents and Republicans who are opposed to their governor's really kind of far right stances cutting social services for the people of the state. Being non-partisan gives us the flexibility to work with a group like that. Another state that's like that is Nebraska. Because in Nebraska you have non-partisan state legislative elections. And so that gives you more wiggle room to try to find candidates that share your values but maybe not necessarily the party.
The States Project’s work begins immediately after an election, according to Kleinman, as that is when they start collecting electoral data for all the legislative districts. This cycle, it was slightly different because of redistricting—so they started as soon as states enacted new maps. Kleinman emphasized the importance of trying to hit the ground running as quickly as possible with the electoral and demographic information about those new maps. The organization’s strategy is to collect all of that and then see which states have legislative chambers where either party has a path to change the majority, or where there is a possibility to hit an important non-majority threshold, such as preventing veto overrides or filibusters.
The trio also took a look at competitive races and chambers to flip in Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nebraska.
As the episode drew to a close, Kleinman offered listeners ways to get involved, highlighting in particular The States Project’s GiveSmart program:
If you go to StatesProject.org, and you click on our GiveSmart page, right now we have six candidates: Cindy Hans, Kevin Hertel, Maurice Imhoff, Veronica Klinefelt, Christine Marsh, and Sam Singh. They're all in Arizona or Michigan. And they are the candidates that, based on our knowledge of those states and the campaigns, are the ones who need donations the most right now. And feel free to go there, check that out, and give whatever you think they need.
The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts! As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at thedownballot@dailykos.com. Please send in any questions you may have for next week's mailbag. You can also reach out via Twitter at @DKElections.