It’s a joyous week in Wisconsin, where Janet Protasiewicz’s swearing-in means that the state Supreme Court now has its first liberal majority in 15 years. We’re talking about that monumental transition on this week’s episode of “The Downballot,” including a brand-new suit that voting rights advocates filed on Protasiewicz’s first full day on the job that asks the court to strike down the GOP’s legislative maps as illegal partisan gerrymanders. Could that lead to (dare we say it) a Democratic trifecta next year? Maybe!
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also discuss why reports that a Democratic congresswoman might not seek reelection to her swingy House seat might actually be good news; the absolutely bonkers candidate Republicans just nominated in a pivotal New Hampshire special election; how North Dakota conservatives are trying to pave the way for congressional term limits by passing age limits; why Brett Favre is at the center of Democratic attacks against Mississippi’s Republican governor; and why a new poll of Ohio’s Issue 1 differs so dramatically from some other recent data.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
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. Please subscribe to "The Downballot" on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: Well, it may be the beginning of August, but we've still got a lot of political news to cover.
Nir: We certainly do. We have amazing news in Wisconsin, where Judge Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in as a member of the state Supreme Court this week, giving it its first liberal majority in 15 years. Then there's a race in Virginia where Democrats might actually be pleased that an incumbent in a swingy house district will not seek reelection next year. We also have that big special election coming up in New Hampshire we've been telling you about, where Republicans just managed to nominate a total raving lunatic.
There is an effort by conservatives in North Dakota to put a measure on the ballot that would ban anyone over the age of 80 from running for Congress, with potentially much bigger impacts than just that issue. In the race for Mississippi governor, Democrat Brandon Presley is going on the offensive with negative ads for the first time. And finally, we wrap up our discussion of Ohio's Issue 1, which will go before voters on Tuesday. We have another big episode coming up, so let's get rolling.
Beard: Well, this week, we got the final culmination of some good news that we got earlier in the year where we finally see a liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Nir: Oh, my God, Tuesday was just freaking amazing. Like you said, Beard, Judge Janet Protasiewicz won her race for the state Supreme Court back in April, but she was sworn into the court on Tuesday, August 1, giving liberals their first majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court since 2008. This was a long, long, long time coming. And you have to give a lot of people a lot of credit for not giving up hope during that whole time and for never wavering and for staying on the ball and for playing the long game. I think the long game is something that a lot of folks in politics don't appreciate as much as they should.
We especially saw this after Barack Obama got elected in 2008. A lot of folks thought, "Oh, okay, problem solved. We've turned the page on the Bush years." And then turnout among Democrats just absolutely cratered in 2010 and we got completely flattened. Whereas, with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, there were times when conservatives had a 5-2 majority on the court, not just the 4-3 majority, but folks stayed invested and they stayed involved for the long haul. And that's exactly how conservatives view politics in this country. They see it as the work of a lifetime, and that's something we have to do, too. And because we did in Wisconsin, now things are going to change.
Beard: Yes, it's very easy to get wrapped up in whatever's going on that week in politics or even that year, but it really is slow progress over a very, very long period of time. But it is really, really great to have these periods when all of that work pays off and you finally get to celebrate something that's really, over the long term, going to make people's lives better in Wisconsin.
Nir: And it really was celebratory. There were amazing photos of Protasiewicz swearing in on Tuesday. Just huge, huge crowds at the state Capitol and so much enthusiasm and excitement. And already, on Wednesday, just a day after she was sworn in, voting rights advocates filed a suit that they had promised to file. They said, "We are going to file this day one challenging the state's legislative maps." Now, these districts were drawn by Republicans. They are extremely gerrymandered. Even though Wisconsin is a swing state, Republicans have a supermajority in the state Senate. They almost have a supermajority in the Assembly. And what advocates are saying is that these maps violate multiple provisions of the state constitution because they are extreme partisan gerrymanders.
Now, this sort of argument has not previously been accepted in Wisconsin because, of course, the Supreme Court had been so conservative for so many years. But it is an argument that was accepted by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and, at least for a time, by the North Carolina Supreme Court before Republicans won it back last year. So, there is a lot of precedent in other states for finding similar provisions of the state constitution that ban partisan gerrymandering.
But the suit actually goes on in a few other ways that I think are also quite interesting. For instance, the Wisconsin Constitution also prohibits districts that are not contiguous. And yet, using some sleight of hand, these maps have tons of districts that aren't contiguous. The petition that was filed includes a map of one in the Madison area, AD 47 in the Assembly, and there are just these little dots and pieces of the districts scattered throughout these other districts. Like, you don't even know where this district begins and ends. It just does not seem like a recipe for good governance.
On top of that, there's an argument that I thought was really fascinating. The current maps were imposed by the previous conservative majority on the Supreme Court last year, except they were identical to the maps that Republicans in the legislature passed that were then vetoed by Democratic Governor Tony Evers. So, what the challengers are saying in this lawsuit is that the Supreme Court itself essentially violated the Constitution because it had engaged in a judicial override — that's their term for Evers' veto — and that that amounted to a violation of the separation of powers. That's a very interesting notion to me. I'll be very curious to see how the new liberal majority views that argument.
And then one other thing is that they also ask that the entire state Senate go up for election in 2024. Normally, only half of the Senate goes before voters every two years, but because the senators elected in 2022 were elected on what they're saying is unconstitutional maps, therefore, all senators should have to go up again in 2024. That would mean that all 132 seats in the Wisconsin Legislature would be up at once on new maps in a presidential year. I mean, man, is it too much to think... I don't even want to say it out loud, Beard, but I think you know what I want to say. All right, I'm going to say it. Is it too much to think that Democrats could win a majority in both chambers of the Wisconsin Legislature in 2024? Okay.
Beard: Wow. Well, it's out there now. You've-
Nir: Oh, man.
Beard:... taken the genie out of the bottle. So we'll see where that leads.
I think first, to talk about the lawsuit, I'm going to pull out my not-a-lawyer card and be like... Some of that stuff about the judicial override, I'm like, "I don't know. I'll wait for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to tell me what they think about that." What I do know about is that if the 2024 election involves the entire Wisconsin State Senate, you don't know what's going to happen. And that's the beauty of elections, particularly in a competitive state, is that the people of Wisconsin would get to decide who should be in the state House and who should be in the state Senate. And if a majority of them want it to be Democrats, then it just might be a Democratic state house and a Democratic state Senate.
We'll have to see. I do think, obviously, a big caveat here is Republicans will have a ton of incumbency power. Even with redistricted maps, they'll have a lot of incumbents that have a lot of money, and there's a lot of pent-up establishment support for Republicans in Wisconsin because they've held this majority for so long. So, it's going to be a very, very tough road. But it would be great to have a chance.
Nir: We used to publish a newsletter that, Beard, you were instrumental in helping to create: the International Digest, and we would talk about elections in countries around the world, and we would have this debate with ourselves about which countries to include. Did they really have free and fair elections? And there's no perfect definition of that. But one definition that we did fall back on a lot was whether the outcome of an election was foreordained. Was there a chance that the party in power could lose power? And, man, with the Wisconsin Legislature, they have not had free and fair elections for a long time. And if they get new maps, fair, nonpartisan maps imposed by the state Supreme Court, wow, we could finally put Wisconsin in a bucket of free and fair elections as opposed to, oh, I don't know, elections in Hong Kong or some other place that goes through the—I'm going to say, that pretends to go through the motions of democracy, but where you know who's still going to be in charge at the end. Just the fact that this door is even open is a remarkable, remarkable change.
Beard: Yeah. And, of course, just to reiterate, as I think folks here know, the issue with the Wisconsin gerrymander is that it was so extreme that the percentage of the vote that Democrats would have to win a majority under those gerrymandered maps was essentially impossible. It was a huge majority that they would've had to win statewide to be able to take a majority. And that's why these were, in a lot of ways, not actually free and fair because it was an unrealistically high number you would need to reach to win the election.
And so now going forward, with a bunch of districts, it might not be 50% plus one. Democrats might win 50% plus one of the vote and not get a majority, but it gets pretty close. If you win 51%, 52%, it becomes increasingly likely that you'll also then win the majority, and that's the whole point of a democracy. That's the whole point of the election, and I look forward to seeing one hopefully take place in Wisconsin in 2024.
Nir: One last thing I should add is that this new suit does not challenge the state's congressional map, which is also a GOP gerrymander, but I am sure that we will see another lawsuit brought against that map very soon.
Beard: In a very different area, we got some interesting news in Virginia, which is having state legislative elections this year for both their state Senate, and General Assembly, but it wasn't about that election. It was about both the 2024 and 2025 elections that'll be happening in Virginia. So Politico unexpectedly reported on Friday that Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat in a very competitive seat in Virginia, has been telling fellow Democrats that she's going to run to succeed Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin as Governor in 2025. Of course, Virginia has single-term limits, so Youngkin cannot run for reelection, so it'll be an open seat in 2025. So not only is Spanberger going to run for that seat as a Democrat in 2025, she's not going to seek reelection in 2024 to her House seat so that she can focus entirely on that gubernatorial bid.
Now, this was a report. None of this was confirmed or denied by Spanberger or any of her representatives. She said that they're focused on the 2023 elections, which is what you would expect to hear, but this would certainly be a pretty big deal both for her Congressional district, which is a very swingy seat, and, of course, for the Governor's race in 2025. To start with the congressional district, which would be up and potentially open in 2024, it's the 7th District. It stretches from northern Virginia's Prince William County into more rural communities to the south. Biden would've won it 53 to 46 in 2020, but Youngkin would've won over Democrat Terry McAuliffe 52-47. So this is very, very much a swingy seat. You could definitely see a Republican win it, even in a neutral year.
Now, in 2022 when this district was used, Spanberger very narrowly won 52-48 over Prince William County Supervisor Yesli Vega. That was an early sign on election night 2022, if you all remember, that the red wave that had been so talked about might not be showing up because of course, Virginia closes pretty early. They count their votes pretty early. So we knew relatively early compared to a lot of congressional districts that Spanberger was going to hold on, and she had been a huge target for the Republicans that whole cycle.
Now, if this district does open up, there's a number of Democrats who very potentially could run here. There's state Senator Jeremy McPike. There's former Delegate and soon-to-be state Senator Jennifer Carroll Foy, who won a primary for a safely blue seat, as well as former Delegate Hala Ayala. She's the person who Carroll Foy beat for that safely blue seat. So we know she's still interested in elective office. Any of those candidates could run. They'll definitely be Republicans as well. We certainly expect the GOP to heavily contest the seat, particularly if it's an open seat.
Nir: And what's so interesting about this is that ordinarily when a Democrat says they're not going to run for reelection in a swingy seat or there's reports that they might not, other Democrats start to panic and freak out. But that didn't happen this time because what a lot of folks said, and I think this is quite right, is that if Spanberger was going to run for Governor, she would be giving us a strong candidate for Governor, though she certainly doesn't have that nomination sewn up. But if she ran for Governor and then won, then you'd have a special election sometime in 2026 in the middle of her term with very unpredictable turnout.
Instead, if she does decide not to run for reelection next year to focus on her race for Governor, then you have an open seat in a presidential year in a blue state that Biden is almost certainly going to win again with much higher turnout at the top of the ticket, and also just a much more predictable electorate. So yeah, I think Democrats actually would much, much rather defend this seat now than at some unspecified time in the future, and it's a chance to get someone new in while also letting Spanberger prepare for that next race.
Beard: Yeah, and speaking of that Governor's race, she definitely will not have the Democratic field to herself. A couple of other names have also already been bandied about, potentially Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who is term-limited, as well as former state House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn. Both those candidates would be strong. They have a lot of connections within the Virginia Democratic Party. I think they could both argue to the left of Spanberger. I think Spanberger has taken a lot of moderate positions if we're thinking about this Democratic primary, as she's been of course in a very competitive, very tough swingy House district, but I don't know how well that might translate for her to a statewide Democratic primary. So that's definitely one thing to watch for and think about as we start moving towards... I know it's still a couple of years away, but as we start moving towards that 2025 likely primary, I think Spanberger is going to have some work to do to shore up that left flank of the Party if she's going to be a real contender there.
Nir: Well, also not running for reelection means that for the rest of the current Congress, she can vote in a much more progressive manner than she might otherwise have wanted to do with her eye on the next election. So that'll give her a chance to shore up her progressive credentials. And I always hate talking about elections that are more than two years away, but when you have a report like this about a major potential candidate, you can't just ignore it. And we should mention that we just have no idea who Republicans might nominate. And they got super, super lucky with Youngkin last time in that they managed to put forward a candidate who was just very media-friendly and capable of looking like a normal sane Republican, even though he is extremely conservative.
But remember that Republicans usually prefer to award their nominations at conventions rather than primaries. And conventions always increase the chance that you are going to wind up with some lunatic. So every time one of those GOP conventions rolls around in whatever state or whatever district we're talking about, they are really rolling the dice in an even bigger way than with a typical primary. So yeah, I can't say who they might nominate, but there's a really good chance it's going to be someone unacceptable.
Beard: Yeah, I will give Youngkin credit for this one thing, which he was very, very good at being able to wink at the more establishment side of the Republican Party who isn't a big fan of Trump, to be like, "I'm with you guys." I got this like, "I don't really like Trump either, but we just got to weather him. You know how it is." While at the same time, winking at Trump and all the Trumpists in the Virginia Republican Party and be like, "You know what? I'm with you guys. We got to work with these establishment guys, but I'm with you. I'm friends with Trump. Trump likes me. Don't worry. I got your backs." And just ride that balance, which we've seen a lot of Republicans try and fail to do that.
So I guess to his credit, he's very good at that one specific thing which did lead him to becoming Governor in what was a bad year for Democrats in 2021, but I don't know how many more Republicans they're going to have to be able to do that in 2025.
Nir: Well, Beard, I want to talk about a Republican who I guarantee you cannot pull off that tightrope act. Man, the GOP really just fucked this one up in New Hampshire. So on Tuesday night for this pivotal special election for a state House seat that could determine whether or not the GOP keeps the majority in the New Hampshire House, Republicans managed to nominate an absolute nutter named Jim Guzofski, who beat the establishment choice, Jessica Sternberg, 56 to 44. A number of Republicans who are well-connected to the Party establishment made it very clear that they wanted Sternberg, they tweeted nice things about her. She was definitely the preferred choice, but Guzofski already holds elective office. He's a member of the Board of Selectmen in the town of Northwood. That's the governing body in most New Hampshire towns, the select board, except he is also a pastor, and we just have to play a clip of a sermon he delivered on Halloween in 2021.
Jim Guzofski: Why do you think they fight so hard to keep abortion? To a lunatic frenzy because they know blood sacrifices to their god Molech.
Nir: You do any sacrifices to Molech lately?
Beard: I'm actually behind. I am way behind on my Molech sacrifices. I recently got a knock on the door. They're asking questions, so I've got to catch up.
Nir: Wow. Well, I actually worship Baal, so I don't have anything to do with this Molech stuff. I really don't know what Guzofski is talking about. Anyhow, there is so much more like this from this dude. He is, man, as extreme and crazy a Republican candidate you are ever likely to see.
Meanwhile, Democrats did not have a primary. Instead, they nominated Hal Rafter, who was one of their candidates for one of these seats last year. Rafter is a very mainstream Democrat, big supporter of the outdoors, of education, of abortion rights, and he lost by only 25 votes in this super-swingy district last year. And now here is the overall math right now in the New Hampshire House. At this moment, that could change at any moment in this 400-member chamber, there are 199 Republicans, 196 Democrats, two Independents — one is a former Democrat, one is a former Republican — and three vacant seats. Now, two of those vacant seats are safely blue. Democrats should have no trouble holding both of them. But this seat, which includes the towns of Northwood and Nottingham, is the critical one. And if Democrats run the table on all three specials, which with Guzofski's nomination is looking increasingly likely, then the chamber would be tied, exactly tied, 199 to 199.
Beard: Just truly a wild setup for such a large body. The odds of getting a perfect tie in a 400 seat Chamber seem pretty low. We've seen ties before, but it's often 20 to 20 in a state Senate Chamber or something like that. So that would be wild to see. As we've talked about, the New Hampshire House is so crazy in its setup because people aren't there every day, there's a lot of part-time legislators. So it can be who has control of the floor is who has more people show up that day? It'll be interesting to see how, if at all, this changes how the New Hampshire House actually functions, if this were to happen. But, of course, either way, it's a cool thing to happen and it's great to hopefully elect another Democrat if we're able to get Rafter into the House.
Nir: That special election, mark your calendars, September 19. And also, if Democrats win, that will just be even more wind in their sails to take back the chamber in greater force. There will be more specials. There's a chance that Democrats could take an outright majority before 2024, but even if they don't, they could definitely win the chamber outright next year, especially with Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. And also an open race for governor where Democrats will be competing very, very hard.
Beard: And this is a state I think that should be good for Democrats. Obviously, the Dobbs decision is not popular at all in New Hampshire. Despite what this guy wants to start preaching about, it's a low-religiosity state. It's very pro-choice. It's pretty well-educated. I think Democrats could do well here and now with an open governor seat, as you said, they could even, like we talked about in Wisconsin, maybe a trifecta could even be in the offing in 2024.
Nir: Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're speaking it into existence, Beard. We're getting very out there on this episode. I like it.
Beard: Now, you'd think Republicans might want to ban some people from running for Congress and Senate, like crazy people talking about the god Molech, but that's not who they want to ban. Instead, in North Dakota, there's a group that's trying to ban anyone from running for Congress or Senate who would be over the age of 80. Now, North Dakota officials on Friday gave them the green light to start collecting signatures for a proposed amendment to the State Constitution doing such a thing. Now, the problem here is that, in 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court in a ruling called U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton struck down an Arkansas ballot initiative that tried to impose term limits on members of the state's congressional delegation.
Now, of course, that's a slightly different issue, term limits versus this age limitation, but the baseline is about the same ruling, and the court ruled that states could not impose more restrictions on candidates than was already spelled out in the Constitution. So the restrictions that are spelled out in the Constitution is that there's a minimum age for these federal offices, a minimum period of U.S. citizenship, and residency in the state that they're seeking to represent at the time of the election. So states can only require those things. Obviously, they have ballot requirements. You might have to petition onto the ballot or pay a certain amount of money, but you can't just blanketly bar someone for their age or the number of terms they've served in office.
That's what the court decided, but it was a 5-4 decision with swing Justice Anthony Kennedy siding with the then-more liberal Justices. Clarence Thomas, we all know him, wrote a dissent that three fellow conservatives joined back in the '90s saying that he would've allowed the term limits law to stand. So it's very possible that the current Supreme Court thinks that these kinds of things are constitutionally allowed. We don't know, obviously, what they might think. If this North [Dakota] law passes, we might find out. Now, this effort is being spearheaded by Jared Hendrix. He's a GOP Party official in North Dakota. Not a great guy. He's played a key role in electing and defending members of this far-right Bastiat Caucus in the legislature. That is, he has very super right-wing orthodox economic views. He's way out there on the right. That's part of why he's, I guess, pushing this stuff.
It's a little strange that this is happening in North Dakota because they don't actually have particularly elderly representation in Congress. Senators John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer are 66 and 62, respectively. Hoeven is 14 years from this even starting to be an issue and, of course, it would be whenever that six-year term came up, while Representative Kelly Armstrong, in the at-large seat, is 46. It's not even an amendment that would actually apply to any North Dakota officials right now. It's not clear when it would, but they're believing strongly in it. It would be interesting to see if the Supreme Court has a different view about this ability to add restrictions to federal officials and who can be elected. I think that would be probably a net negative given Republican chicanery.
Nir: My guess maybe is that it's cheaper to put a measure on the ballot in North Dakota simply because you need fewer signatures. Maybe it's a good testbed for them, but I'm very worried by this because, if the Supreme Court does overturn the term limits case, then you'll probably see a lot of states enact term limits, and I think legislative term limits are just a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. A lot of state legislatures have them and what invariably winds up happening is that you do not allow people to build up sufficient amounts of institutional knowledge. People are there for six, eight years and then they're forced to leave office. And so you don't have experienced lawmakers who know what they're doing. I think it's very bad for good governance.
That said, I do wonder if term limits would be more likely to be imposed in red states and therefore more likely to affect Republican members of Congress. And so you could wind up with a situation where you have Democrats building up strong institutional knowledge and experienced leaders in the House and Senate, whereas Republicans would have these super junior members with four years under their belt. Who the hell knows? I don't even like thinking about this, but, yeah, there's every chance that this super far-right Supreme Court now takes Thomas's side.
Beard: It's unfortunate I think that they're tied together because I actually think, if you were to just take the very specific idea that maybe people who are over 80 years old shouldn't run for office, I'm sympathetic to that. I'm like, "You know what? Whatever you've done in the rest of your life, that's great. Go. Maybe don't be a Senator in your 80s." That seems fine. But, unfortunately, it seems totally tied to this whole term limits idea because it's based in the same facts around the Constitution. And so opening up this would open up the term limits issue, which as you said, it doesn't work well. You also see a ton of seat-hopping where folks go to the state Senate and then to the state House and then they become a county commissioner, and then sometimes they can jump back to the state Senate.
I don't really think that's helping anybody, either the elected officials or the voters who keep seeing all these folks jump around. I think it's probably for the best that this doesn't happen, but, obviously, as they continue to collect sign signatures, we will keep an eye on it. Now, one other race I wanted to talk about, one that we haven't covered too much here, but is going to be competitive in 2023, is the Mississippi Governor's race where Public Service Commissioner and Democratic candidate for Governor, Brandon Presley, is using his first negative TV ad to tie Republican Governor Tate Reeves to the very, very dramatic $77 million welfare scandal involving none other than former NFL quarterback Brett Favre.
Now, to go back and give you a little context here, an audit found that the Mississippi Department of Human Services had a significant chunk of questionable spending money that was supposed to be used as part of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, but instead, it was being funneled through two nonprofits, the Mississippi Community Education Center and the Family Resource Center of Northern Mississippi, to various things that were definitely not needy families. So, from there, I'll let the ad speak for itself.
The ad says, "Under Tate Reeves, millions were steered from education and jobs programs to help his rich friends; a horse ranch, a volleyball stadium, even a million dollars to his personal trainer." Now, the volleyball stadium is of course where Brett Favre comes in. Brett Favre was trying to secure this money because his daughter goes to a university in Mississippi, plays volleyball, and so he wanted this million-dollar volleyball arena to be built. This is where that money was looking to come from. You'd think, of course, Brett Favre could probably just build this volleyball arena for himself. I assume he's rich. He was a famous quarterback, but that's neither here nor there. Presley is using this to go after Reeves. Obviously, it's one of the most notable, most covered corruption scandals in recent Mississippi history, hitting Reeves very hard on it, and it comes at a time when Reeves maintains a huge financial edge.
So Presley really needs these types of hits to break through and hopefully get him some earned media as well. The Democratic Governors Association has helped him some. They donated $750,000 to Presley's campaign last month, but even including that, Presley brought in $1.1 million last month, more than Reeves' $300,000. But when you look at cash on hand, because Reeves has been stockpiling money for years, Reeves has $9.3 million in his war chest to spend over the next few months, while Presley just has $1.5 million to spend right now. So Presley is going to need to keep out raising him. He's probably still going to be at a big financial disadvantage. So he's really going to need to be able to press these sorts of hits like this welfare scandal and tie it to Reeves and make that be what people think about to be able to break through the avalanche of money that Reeves is going to dump on him.
Nir: One thought I've had about this raise is that normally candidates for public office prefer to run for open seats, but I feel in a situation like this, Reeves is so corrupt, and this is by no means the only hit that Presley has against him, that he's no longer generic Republican and generic Republican is basically always going to win in a state like Mississippi. We had a strong Democratic candidate four years ago in former AG Jim Hood, and he ran a competitive race, but he lost by about five or six points when he was running against Reeves, who at the time was not the incumbent. And so now that he is, I feel like Presley has a chance to expose him, and corruption is such a nonpartisan issue.
I mean, of course with Donald Trump, we've seen the GOP try to excuse all his corruption away, but there's still a large number of voters, including Republican voters who just find it disgusting, particularly when public officials are accused of misappropriating public funds, taxpayer funds. People do not like that. I do not like that. And so I think that if Presley is going to have a chance, it's because Reeves sucks so hard.
Beard: Yeah. And I think we saw that, to take you to a different state back in 2019, where Andy Beshear was obviously a really, really good Democratic candidate, but I think it also helped him that Matt Bevin, the incumbent Kentucky governor, was a bad candidate that people really hated at that point. And so I think that helped him get over the top when maybe if he had been running against a candidate and had been in an open seat and there wasn't as much known about some generic other Republican, he wouldn't have won that race. So I do think that an incumbent can be unpopular enough if he's dragged down enough to maybe help the Democratic candidate in the state of Mississippi.
Nir: One last race that we want to talk about, it's coming up next week. We have talked about it a ton: Ohio Issue 1. This is the ballot measure that would make it harder for progressives to pass future ballot measures by increasing the vote needed for passage from a simple majority to a 60% supermajority. One last thing that I wanted to mention before the election is you might've seen a poll that came out recently from Ohio Northern University, and it found 42% agreeing with this effort to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution and just 41% disagreeing. And this was very, very different from a recent poll from Suffolk University that showed issue one failing by a gigantic 59 to 26 margin.
And I can't say for certain what accounts for this difference, but the two pollsters did two things very, very differently. First off, Suffolk presented information to respondents on its poll that was a lot closer to the actual text they'll see when they go into the ballot box.
Ohio Northern gave a very short summary of Issue 1 that only focused on the 60% threshold, but Suffolk included information on other provisions of Issue 1 that haven't gotten as much attention, but these would also make it harder to amend the Constitution, and one in particular that would affect progressives and really not affect conservatives is that organizers would need to gather signatures from all 88 counties in the state of Ohio. Right now, the current requirement is 44 counties, so that means progressives would have to go into every last single tiny rural super-red Ohio county. And this, like I said, was on the Suffolk description, but Ohio Northern didn't mention it at all.
And there was another big difference as well, which is that Ohio Northern didn't actually ask how people would vote on Issue 1. They simply asked whether they would agree or disagree with this idea of changing the threshold for passage. Suffolk straight out asked, "Are you going to vote yes or are you going to vote no?" Now, it's very difficult to poll ballot measures. We don't know which approach is preferable in this instance.
I will say though, that I do think if you have an actual election, you want to ask voters how they're actually going to vote as opposed to asking what is essentially a favorability question. You wouldn't do that if you were talking about a Senate race. You wouldn't try to predict the outcome just by asking what people think of the two candidates. You ask them, who would you vote for, the Democrat or the Republican? The other tell here is that in response to the Suffolk poll, Republicans did not release any contradictory numbers. And if you're getting absolutely body slammed by more than 30 points on this signature ballot measure that you totally rigged in an August special election to try to save your ass from a future abortion rights ballot measure, you got to put some numbers out there to give your side hope and to keep your donors interested in the fight, and they never did. And you can't just sit there and hope and pray that some other independent poster is going to come along with better numbers, even though Ohio Northern did actually do that. So to me, the body language reads all wrong from the Republicans.
Beard: Yeah. And the one thing I'll add is that we've seen often in ballot measures that the no side tends to soak up the undecideds at the end, where if people are not sure whether or not they want to vote for something that would change the constitution, they tend to be like, "Well, better not. If I'm not sure, let's just not. Let's just leave it how it is." So the idea, even if you take it completely at face value that this 42-41 poll is accurate, I don't think that would be a great sign for the yes anyway. If yes is at 42, I would expect the majority, if not a great majority, of the undecideds to go towards the no vote. So I don't actually even think that's a good sign. Obviously, it's a lot better than the Suffolk poll that's like a landslide. But I do think that you would definitely still by far rather be the no vote, but of course we will see on Tuesday.
Nir: Yeah. Political scientists like to call that the status quo bias. But I definitely do not want you, our listeners, to have a status quo bias. On Tuesday, we are going to be live blogging the results at Daily Kos Elections. Go to elections.dailykos.com. We will also be on Twitter. No, we refuse to call it by any other name. You can find us at @DKElections; we'll be offering blow-by-blow coverage there as well. And Beard, like you were saying, this is why they play the games. This is why we have elections and not just polls. And we have an interesting election in the middle of summer, so we of course are going to cover the hell out of it.
Beard: Yes, we'll be there.
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