Avast ye!
This week we observe Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 19).
You’re welcome.
Campaign Action
(Un)buried Treasure: Virginia’s state legislative elections loom (about a month and a half to go, folks), and with the quickened pace of fall campaign season comes a quickened pace of campaign finance reporting.
- The most recent reports bring more good news for Old Dominion Democrats as they work to flip the two seats needed in each chamber to take outright majorities in the Virginia House and Senate.
- In the state Senate, six out of the top 10 fundraisers for the most recent reporting period (July 1 to Aug. 31) were Democratic challengers.
- Of the four Republicans in that batch, three are incumbents and one is vying for a Republican-held open seat.
- But Senate Republicans still have a bit of a cash-on-hand advantage over Democratic candidates.
- Not a shock—the GOP currently holds the majority, after all, and that status accommodates serious war-chest building in Virginia, which has no limits on fundraising.
- On the House side, Democrats also took six of the top 10 fundraising slots for the period.
- Team blue would have taken seven of the top 10 slots but for a $500,000 donation to angry write-in Republican incumbent Del. Nick Freitas, who you may recall got booted from the ballot for failing to submit crucial paperwork to the state board of elections.
Richard who?
Fun fact! Uihlein contributed to Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore even AFTER multiple women revealed Moore had made advances when they were as young as 14.
- Though a write-in candidate, Freitas is still an incumbent running in a bright red district (60-36 Trump), and he’s already spread the love around in the form of $5,000 checks to “several Republican candidates,” including
- House challenger GayDonna Vandergriff,
- Incumbent state Sen. Bryce Reeves,
- Ousted-in-2017-but-hoping-to-take-his-seat-back challenger Rich Anderson,
- And six more GOPers across both chambers.
- Additionally, Freitas has redistributed Uihlien’s largesse in the form of $1,000 checks to 18 more Republicans running for state and local offices.
- Anyway, but for that $500,000 Uihllein check, Freitas would have come in 111th in terms of cash raised this period.
- In terms of total cash on hand among candidates running for the House of Delegates, Democrats are outpacing their GOP counterparts by almost $1 million.
- There’s still plenty of time for Uihlein-esque checks to come in for Republicans, but this is a pretty, pretty, pretty good place for Democrats to be right now.
Arrrrrrrr You Kidding Me: Last week in this space, I recounted at some length the drama surrounding North Carolina House Republicans’ ill-gotten vote to override the governor’s veto of the state budget.
- By the by, the veto override vote has not yet occurred in the state Senate, and because we know that Republicans can’t be trusted to hold votes (or not) when they say they will (or won’t), there’s no telling when the vote will actually occur.
But because North Carolina is fully of messy legislators who live for drama, there was no shortage of action in the state this week, too.
- You probably recall that, earlier this very month, a three-judge panel in North Carolina found that 21 of 50 Senate districts and 56 of 120 House districts violated the rights of Democratic voters to free and fair elections as set forth in the state constitution.
- In case you’re wondering just how bad this partisan gerrymander was, the current, GOP-drawn lines allowed Republicans to keep their majority in the House in 2018 despite winning fewer votes statewide.
- The GOP-controlled legislature passed new maps this week, but I know you’ll be shocked to learn that these new maps weren’t exactly good-faith efforts at fairness in partisan representation.
- Honestly, though, the fact that Republicans had the opportunity to redraw these maps is actually pretty mind-bending, considering that this is the third time GOP lawmakers have drawn legislative district lines this decade.
- Based on multiple analyses, the new maps still have a heavy GOP bias—meaning that, even if somewhat more than half the state votes for Democratic legislative candidates in 2020, Republicans will still probably win majorities in both chambers.
- An extra dumb wrinkle in all this is that a bunch of Democratic state senators actually voted for this new-but-still-GOP-gerrymandered Senate map and even praised the process itself, which is, what, Stockholm syndrome at this point?
- However, Senate Democrats apparently got their shit together when it came to voting against the new-but-still-GOP-gerrymandered House map, and House Democrats almost uniformly held firm against both maps.
- Still, these Republican-favoring maps passed both chambers, because trusting a gerrymandered Republican majority to fix the gerrymanders that keep them in power is, let’s say, not the best idea.
But all hope is not yet lost.
Walk The Plank, Ye Scurvy Dog: The Pennsylvania state Senate is down a Republican, but literally no one will miss him.
- Sen. Mike Folmer quickly resigned this week after his arrest on Tuesday on child pornography charges.
- Folmer’s been a member of the state Senate since 2007, and he was widely considered one of the chamber’s more conservative members.
- Hopefully this is in no way connected to the multiple felony charges against him, but last year, Folmer opposed a bill that would have extended the statute of limitations on child sex abuse, making it easier for survivors to pursue justice.
- Folmer will be replaced in a special election later this fall.
Yeah, so no way I’m ending on that.
Yo Ho Ho, Me Hearties: So how about we go out on a positive note, hm?
A whole boatload of new laws has just gone into effect in Maine, and, well, it’s amazing what a Democratic state government can accomplish.
- The Pine Tree State’s new progressive policies include:
- Banning so-called “conversion therapy”
- Expanding kids’ access to school nutrition programs and prohibiting “food shaming” for students whose parents can’t afford to pay for meals
- Allowing the importation of wholesale prescription drugs from Canada
- Promoting equal pay for women
- Eliminating many religious and philosophical vaccination exemptions
- Requiring abortions to be covered under the MaineCare program.
We’ve come a long way since Paul LePage … who, by the by, spent his summer bartending.
Welp, that’s a wrap for this week. Seeing that you’ve followed this treasure map to the X, why don’t you collect your dubloons, abandon ship, and get to carousing with ye mateys? Just print this out and show it to your captain, I’m sure she won’t mind.