We begin today, Election Day 2023, with Teo Armus of The Washington Post and his guide to the critical legislative elections in Virginia today.
With Republicans and Democrats splitting control of a narrowly divided General Assembly, the outcome on Election Day will shape both Youngkin’s trajectory as a presidential hopeful and Virginia’s status as a relatively liberal outlier among Southern states.
Democrats have so far blocked him from pushing a conservative agenda with their two-seat majority in the state Senate. But if Republicans flip that chamber and hold the House of Delegates, Youngkin will have the allies he needs to enact GOP priorities such as a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, with some exceptions.
This year’s “midterm elections” are also likely to serve as a referendum on the political novice’s two years in office. An increasingly blue Virginia seemed to boomerang back toward the center with Youngkin’s victory two years ago — and the midterms will offer a test for both where the commonwealth and the country may be headed politically.
The Virginia legislative elections are included in Bolts magazine’s excellent guide of the local and statewide races in play for this Election Day 2023.
More analysis of the Virginia legislative race from cnalysis.
The bottom line: Republicans would not have won in 2021 if Roe v. Wade was overturned that year. Glenn Youngkin famously slammed Terry McAuliffe in one of the 2021 gubernatorial debates: “My opponent wants to be the abortion governor. And I want to be the jobs governor.” Abortion was not *the* issue no matter how many times McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for Governor that year, would try and try to make it. You can’t get voters to see down the pike and vote on a future issue (Roe v. Wade would be overturned months later, so it’s not like he didn’t have a point), you can only get them to vote on the issues at hand. Now that abortion is an issue at hand, it is unlikely that Virginia Republicans will win either the House of Delegates or State Senate on election night. They seem better positioned than they were in 2019, however, and could win a majority in one or both chambers if they pull off some upsets.
Abortion isn’t the only issue at hand in this year’s state legislative elections. Education was a key issue that Republicans won in 2021, but a recent poll by the Washington Post showed that likely voters trust Democrats more on the issue now, and they’re going on the offensive characterizing Republicans as “book-banners.” Republicans are more trusted on taking care of crime, and though this hasn’t been a crucial issue, some Republican campaigns are pushing attack ads against Democrats as soft on crime. However, this isn’t a concern that most of the voters in competitive districts care about that much: this isn’t New York in 2022, it’s Virginia in 2023.
Not only are Democrats, in my view, winning on the issues in Virginia this year compared to flailing on that front in 2021, but the environment also should be pretty friendly to Democrats. State legislative special election results are usually a pretty good indicator of where the environment seems to be. In 2021, most special elections swung to the right. In 2022, that continued up until Dobbs was overturned, then results started swinging toward the Democrats. And that swing average has remained virtually unchanged this year.
Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect notes that while control of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will remain in Democratic hands no matter who wins today’s election for state Supreme Court justice, a win by Republican Carolyn Carluccio puts a Republican majority for the PA Supreme Court in play for 2025.
There is a vacant seat on the court that will be filled by an election on Tuesday, where Democrat Daniel McCaffery is facing Republican Carolyn Carluccio. Should Carluccio win, Democrats will still have a 4-3 majority, but the GOP will be that much closer to flipping the court back to its control, and three more liberal seats are up in 2025. Should Republicans win the majority of these supreme court seats, we know their blueprint for the aftermath: The party will instantly cement itself into permanent supermajority control of the state legislature, and start shoving a right-wing agenda down Pennsylvanians’ throats—above all by banning abortion. [...]
This is just what the Republican Party does. [...]
Now, as Alex Burness writes at Bolts, Carluccio is not exactly a howling MAGA maniac; in the GOP primary, she defeated Patricia McCullough, the sole judge in the entire country who agreed with Trump’s stop-the-certification lawsuit. But Carluccio has played footsie with election denial and signaled she is open to challenges to Act 77, a 2019 law that allowed any voter to get a mail-in ballot (at a time when Trump Republicans thought mail-in voting benefited their party). And as Politico reports, she has recently removed strongly anti-abortion language from her website, certainly in reaction to the anti-Dobbs backlash.
In other words, she is the kind of conservative who knows “their agenda is hugely unpopular and that they have to force it through under cover of darkness,” to quote Alex Pareene. Should she become part of a Republican court majority, the mask will quickly come off—in part because once she has been installed on the bench, Pennsylvania voters will have little recourse for many years.
Grace Panetta of The19thNews says that Ohio Republicans have controlled the flow of information around the Issue One abortion rights ballot measure and spread misinformation and disinformation as a result.
In August, Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected Republicans’ attempt to raise the threshold to pass citizen-initiated constitutional amendments, an effort squarely aimed at thwarting the abortion vote.
GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a top backer of the August vote and 2024 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, lost in the August special election. But he successfully worked to replace the word “fetus” with “unborn child” in the amendment’s summary language that appears at polling places. The summary also does not state that the amendment would guarantee a right to contraception, miscarriage care and fertility treatment, an omission its proponents argued was designed to hinder its support.
Elected Republicans have also exerted control over the flow of information surrounding the ballot measure. The attorney general’s office published a legal analysis that a former Democratic attorney general and attorney general candidate rebutted as flawed and misleading. And state Senate Republicans include misinformation about abortion on a taxpayer-funded website that online search engines promote as an authoritative source. The GOP state Senate, which runs the website, slammed an Associated Press article on the website as a “hit piece” and “woke censorship.”
“The disinformation and misinformation — that is a hallmark of the Ohio Republican Party,” Democratic Rep. Emilia Sykes, the former Ohio House minority leader, said after speaking at a Saturday morning rally in Akron. “They have been doing this for a very long time. They cannot win on their own merits — they have to cheat to win.”
The final Emerson College polling survey for the Kentucky Governor’s race shows that Republican Daniel Cameron has pulled into a dead heat with incumbent governor Democrat Andy Beshear.
Since last month’s poll of registered Kentucky voters, Beshear’s initial support has decreased by two points, 49% to 47%, while support for Cameron increased 14 points from 33% to 47%. Undecided voters have reduced by nine points, from 13% undecided to 4% ahead of the Tuesday election.
Spencer Kimball, Executive Director of Emerson College Polling, said, “Cameron appears to have gained ground by consolidating Republican voters who supported former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. In October, 54% of Trump supporters supported Cameron; now, as election day approaches, that number has jumped to 79% – a 25-point increase. Notably, October’s poll was of registered voters in Kentucky, while this final election poll includes only those who are very likely or have already voted in Kentucky.”
Support for Cameron has increased among older voters in Kentucky since the October poll. A majority of voters (58%) ages 50-69 now support Cameron for governor, a 22-point increase from October, where Cameron held 36% support among the same age group. Beshear’s support among 50-69-year-olds has dropped 9 points since October, from 49% to 40%.
Independent voters remain split between the two candidates; 48% support Cameron, while 46% support Beshear. Six percent would vote for someone else.
I noted that Bolts listed the Kentucky Secretary of State race and that the incumbent Republican Michael Adams is not an election denier. Al Cross of Kentucky Lantern also noticed that Adams is running an unusual ad.
A still photo of Adams appears, and a female narrator says, “Michael Adams put partisanship aside and brought us more days to vote.” That’s a message that in most states would be coming from a Democrat. Then Kentucky’s chief Democrat, Gov. Andy Beshear, appears for five seconds, calling Adams “a good, bipartisan partner.” An alternate version has a photo of Adams and Beshear shaking hands. Both say Adams “made it harder to cheat.”
The images are from 2020, when Beshear used his pandemic emergency powers to strike a deal with Adams to delay the primary election and hold it mainly by mail, then make a general-election agreement for no-excuse absentee voting and three weeks of early voting, a new thing for Kentucky. In 2021 the Republican-run legislature limited early voting to three days, but made other reforms, and as The New York Times headline in Adams’ ad says, Kentucky was “the only red state to expand voting rights” in 2021.
A Republican ad with the Democratic incumbent and the Times nameplate made tongues wag. Some observers saw it as Adams’ clear declaration of independence from the election-denying elements of his party, staking out his place as a moderate Republican; others wondered if he was going all out for Democratic votes to be the top vote-getter among all candidates in the election.
Interesting.
Dean Obeidallah writes for CNN that we should not panic about those NYT/Siena polls showing Trump defeating Biden in five battleground states.
You might be asking then: Why not panic? There are a few reasons. First, President Barack Obama faced high disapproval ratings the year before the 2012 election (although not as high as Biden’s). And a number of early national polls suggested a close race between Obama and Mitt Romney, who would go on to be the GOP’s presidential nominee. While Obama led in some surveys at the time, a CNN/ORC poll in November 2011 found Romney with a 4-point edge.
Articles at the time suggested possible doom for Obama, including The New York Times analysis “Is Obama Toast?,” PBS’ “Poll Finds Young People Skeptical of Obama’s Re-election Prospects” and the left-leaning Brookings Institution’s “One Year to Go: President Barack Obama’s Uphill Battle for Reelection in 2012.” [...]
What happened? Obama won in 2012 by nearly 5 million votes and dominated the Electoral College 332 to 206 votes. And he did so by winning many of the key battleground states that are the focus of The New York Times/Siena College surveys.
We all get that Obama and Biden are not the same candidates. But what is instructive is that Obama won in large part by way of a superior ground game in terms of ensuring that voters who supported him actually did cast a ballot. Biden — who was Obama’s vice president — is obviously well aware of this. And given Biden’s ability so far to outraise Trump in terms of campaign donations, his campaign has more resources to invest robustly in this key part of the campaign.
Joseph Zeballos-Roig of Semafor reports that Senate Republicans have demanded passage of a border security bill in exchange for assistance to Ukraine.
Senate Republicans on Monday unveiled a list of border security proposals that they’re demanding in exchange for their support to send more assistance to Ukraine, kicking off what’s likely to be grueling negotiation on a major White House priority.
The House GOP’s signature border bill — known as HR2 — forms the bedrock of their Senate counterparts’ one-page blueprint, which would amount to an enormous overhaul of the asylum system. The changes would raise the “credible fear of persecution” threshold that migrants must meet for asylum claims; codify Trump-era rules like compelling asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico; and require migrants to make claims at a designated port of entry, among other changes. [...]
The road to a bipartisan border security agreement is narrow and fraught with potential sinkholes, but there’s enough interest from key Democrats to make a deal a serious possibility, especially given that Ukraine aid appears to hang in the balance. Key Republican supporters of the war effort — most notably Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — have said their party won’t back additional support for Kyiv without a border bill.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times wonders why and how the right sees America as “collapsing.”
I always wonder, do these people ever go outside and look around? Do they have any sense, from personal memory or reading, of what America was like 30 or 50 years ago?
It’s true that U.S. society has changed immensely over the past half-century or so, and not entirely in good ways: Inequality has soared, and deaths of despair are a real phenomenon. (More about that later.) But many right-wing critiques of modern America seem rooted not just in dystopian fantasies but in dystopian fantasies that are generations out of date. There seems to be a part of the conservative mind for which it’s always 1975.
Start with those blighted cities. I’m old enough to remember the 1970s and 1980s, when Times Square was a cesspool of drugs, prostitution and crime. These days it’s a bit too Disneyland for my tastes, but the transformation has been incredible. [...]
True, some of the fall in crime was reversed during the pandemic, but it seems to be receding again. And Americans are coming back to urban centers: Working from home has reduced downtown foot traffic during the week, but weekend visitors are more or less back to prepandemic levels.
This doesn’t look like blight to me.
Julian Mark of The Washington Post sees the irony in a number of lawsuits that have been filed that seek to use the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to allege reverse discrimination and dismantle DEI programs in the workplace.
Now, 157 years later, the law has become central to the legal battle over what is fair and equal when it comes to race in the workplace. In recent years — and especially since the Supreme Court overturned race-conscious college admissions in June — the Reconstruction-era law has emerged as a critical tool for conservatives intent on dismantling race-specific programs that promote “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI.
More than a dozen lawsuits — nearly all filed within the past three years — use the law to allege reverse discrimination. The plaintiffs include former employees at major companies, small-business owners, government contractors, college undergraduates and conservative activists. All say they’re fighting for a colorblind society, and that programs intended to bolster economic participation for certain racial and ethnic groups have unfairly shut out Whites and, in some cases, Asians.
Critics call these claims a perversion of the law’s original intent. It’s ironic, they say, that legislation meant to grant former slaves basic civil rights — and make it illegal to deprive them of those rights because of their race or color — is being used to stifle advancement by Black and minority professionals and entrepreneurs in industries in which they have long been underrepresented. Moreover, affirmative action was meant to redress centuries of discrimination, not punish Whites or Asians.
Finally today, Jason Parham of Wired declares and laments the end of “a golden age of connectivity.”
Twitter is bad (sorry, I will never refer to it as X). Instagram is overrun with ads and influencers hawking face creams and fitness tips. TikTok, what originally felt like a glossier alternative to YouTube, increasingly resembles an outlet mall full of “dupes,” prizing hype over lasting influence.
That’s one attribute Twitter never lacked. I've spent an unhealthy amount of time on the platform over the last decade. It was the avenue of the Black Lives Matter movement, a megaphone for everyday users, and, through a wave of history-setting and history-unsettling US elections, transformed culture into a 24/7 participatory event. There is no #MeToo without Twitter, nor the beginnings of
racial reckoning in Hollywood. Twitter refashioned the look of communication through a vernacular of memes and GIFs, where resident collectives like
Black Twitter and NBA Twitter excelled as virtuosos of the form. [...]
In its heyday, from 2008 to 2015, before digital currencies like retweets and views reoriented how users interacted with one another, no other platform offered what Twitter did, the way it did: up-to-the-second real-time conversation and analysis. It was a blank slate, and because it was a blank slate, it was a canvas to document what was happening to us and around us. It was revolutionary, and soon what we remember of it will be gone.
No Arab Spring without Twitter, either.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!