The New Face of Power Is Taking Shape

By Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine

08 November 18

or many progressives, Tuesday’s midterm election results felt muddy, perplexing. Were they to feel relief or stabbing defeat? The Democratic Party took the House, and with it some crucial oversight over the Trump administration; it flipped seven state chambers and won gubernatorial races in Michigan, Kansas, Maine, and Wisconsin. Yet its biggest-ticket, sky-high-hope candidates — Texas’s Beto O’Rourke and Florida’s Andrew Gillum, and perhaps Georgia’s Stacey Abrams — failed to win their hotly watched races, and the defeats of Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, and Heidi Heitkamp contributed to a grievously bad showing in the Senate.

But as confusing as it may have felt for those watching Steve Kornacki frantically banging on his big screen on MSNBC, Tuesday’s results were in fact perfectly coherent, very much in line with the fight we have long been immersed in. That fight is — as it has been since this nation’s founding — a fight over two concepts central to our nation’s origins, its progress, and its future: the promises of and restrictions on political representation and political enfranchisement.

Progressives yearned for a clean wave last night, the swift correction of what many liked to imagine as a fluky clerical error two years ago. After all, there were so many factors — Comey, Russia, the Clintonness of it all, Jill Stein — that could have explained away our descent into openly bigoted authoritarianism. The harder thing to absorb has been the fact that Donald Trump, and the party that created and sticks with him, is not a fluke. He and they are the living, powerful embodiment of an old American theory about who should get to participate, who should get to have power, whose voices should be heard, whose votes count. This is not a fluke. This is the civic, legal, political, and social American argument — the one that at its core circles around the question of who among us is counted as fully human.

>When Trump won in 2016, his campaign was powered in part at fury over the historic presidency of Barack Obama and presumed inevitable presidency of Hillary Clinton. In turn, his victory provoked a wave of furious political engagement from women, thousands of whom ran for office, many of them for the first time. And it was their participation — their reaction at not having been represented, at not having been heard, and thus deciding to run and work for other women running — that powered last night’s Democratic victories.

A historic number of women on the Democratic side won their primaries in House, Senate, gubernatorial, and state legislative races. On Tuesday, more than 100 women won seats in Congress and governors’ races. A record number of them are women of color, who have long been the reliable — yet terribly underserved, under-recognized, and underrepresented — base of the party. Once again, on Tuesday, black women were the Democrats’ most reliable voting block, while white women voted in chillingly high majorities for white patriarchs and the party they represent; in Georgia, according to exit polls, 76 percent of white women — shockingly, a higher percentage than white men — voted for Stacey Abrams’s opponent Brian Kemp.

But when it comes to representation, Democratic Party leaders are finally starting to look like its voters.

Of the 29 districts flipped, so far, from Republican to Democratic control, 17 of them were flipped by women candidates, including Lauren Underwood of Illinois, a first-time candidate and African-American woman who’d beat six white men to win her primary race and defeated Randy Hultgren in the general; in Kansas, Sharice Davids, a lesbian former MMA fighter who unseated Republican Kevin Yoder, will become — along with New Mexico’s Deb Haaland — one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress. Ayanna Pressley will become the first black woman to serve in Congress from Massachusetts; Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan will become the first two Muslim women to head to the House, Veronica Escobar and Sylvia Garcia will become the first Latinas to represent Texas in Congress.

In Georgia’s Sixth District, where Jon Ossoff failed to win special election in 2017, Democrat Lucy McBath (an African-American gun-control advocate whom the political media did not treat seriously going into this election season) appears poised to pull out a victory. In Michigan, every statewide office up for grabs went to Democratic women: attorney general, secretary of State, senator, governor. It’s not just the women who are altering our models for who might run, win, and lead this country: In upstate New York, Antonio Delgado beat John Faso, becoming his district’s first nonwhite representative, after a race in which Republicans portrayed Delgado as a “big-city rapper”; and Texas Republican Pete Sessions, a long-serving member of Congress (and a key mastermind of the GOP’s 2010 takeover of the House), was defeated by former NFL player turned civil-rights attorney Colin Allred. In Colorado, home of the baker whose refusal to make cakes for gay weddings was the basis of a Supreme Court case, Jared Polis was elected the nation’s first openly gay governor.

Moreover, even though they lost their Tuesday races by tight margins, Gillum and O’Rourke — along with incoming New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Abrams, who appears poised to challenge the Georgia results for a runoff — became national stars this season; these are the candidates of the Democratic Party’s future. They are young, they are progressive, and they do not look like candidates of America’s past. This is part of the story of Tuesday: explosively successful — and in some cases, just short of successful, in districts and states that have long been inhospitable to Democrats — efforts by new kinds of candidates to forge new kinds of paths toward political power.

But all of those paths wind around the often determinative question of who gets to vote for these candidates — a question that has plagued America from its start, when the franchise was denied to all but white men. The expansion of voting rights — for African-Americans, for women — has been a project that has stretched over centuries, and happened in painful pieces, and has always been met with backlash and reversals.

And perhaps the most crucial project of a contemporary right-wing has been the push to re-restrict who can vote in this country, targeting specifically black and brown and poor populations. Over the past decade, with Republicans in power in so many state legislatures and in the Supreme Court, that project has been very successful. Gerrymandering, voter purges and suppression, all enabled by the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act, all surely contributed to — perhaps determined — the losses of Gillum in Florida, where 500,000 African Americans were ineligible to vote because of the state’s felon disenfranchisement law, and Heitkamp in North Dakota, where Native-American voters were effectively suppressed by a provision that barred those with P.O. boxes from registering. Around the country on Tuesday and during early voting came stories of Jim Crow–style suppression tactics: poll workers telling voters their registrations were void because of spelling mistakes, machines that did not work, long lines in which the elderly, infirm, and pregnant — along with those who could not afford the time away from jobs — could not stand.

There was perhaps no greater showdown than in Georgia: Abrams, who for years has worked to reach out to and register African-American voters, was running against Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a cartoon-style villain who — while presiding over the fairness of the same election he was competing in — has made it his gleeful, punitive mission to purge black voters from the rolls and to keep them from casting votes for his opponents.

And the results on Tuesday — the ones that were in the hands of the voters — fell very much on the side of expansion of the franchise. That felon disenfranchisement law was overturned with the passage of Amendment 4 in Florida, an election result that could renfranchise 1.5 million voters and effectively turn Florida from an ever-swinging purple state to solidly blue the next time round. It represents the largest single enfranchisement event since the Voting Rights Act. Kansas governor Kris Kobach, the nation’s head Vote Suppressor, was defeated by Democrat Laura Kelly in a huge upset. Redistricting reform passed in Colorado, Missouri, and Michigan, where voter registration was made automatic, as it also was in Nevada. In Maryland, same-day voter registration passed by a huge margin, which scientist Sam Wang tweeted could bring 7 percent of the state’s voting-age population onto the rolls. The next part of the left’s project is more of the arduous, ceaseless work of rebuilding, brick by brick, what was torn down with the Voting Rights Act’s rollback. This is the struggle going forward: between expansion and restriction, liberation and containment, the push and pull between the small number of those at the top to control the mechanisms, and of the masses to resist and buck against them. The right to vote — fully realized — is the most important tool in the progressive arsenal in future elections, and so the weapon that has since the start been most hotly contested.

After all, Democrats led the popular vote for the Senate by 12 million, a 57 percent majority, but lost three seats anyway, just as they won the 2016 presidential election by 3 million votes yet still are governed by a small-thumbed autocrat. And with the Senate, the party that knows how to use the courts to enact further suppression and manipulation of the electorate will retain federal judicial control. There could be no more stark example of the stakes, and the brokenness of the existing system.

But in fighting and challenging — in marshaling the energy of candidates and volunteers and protesters, the investment in left politics and new leaders and approaches — progressives not only scored big wins on Tuesday, toppling men — Kris Kobach! Pete Sessions! Scott Walker! — who’ve long lived on the wrong side of history, but they laid a path for the future. Had Democrats won bigger, or smaller, there would have been danger that that fight would ebb, either out of satisfaction or defeat. Instead the results made ever clearer what should by now be sinking in: that this will be our lives, this fight.

And so there is an aptness to the speech Stacey Abrams gave in Georgia in the early morning hours of Wednesday, which was not a victory speech, but a refusal to concede, and a call to present, daily, unflinching action.

“We still have a few more miles to go,” she said, in reference to what she was promising would be a recount, perhaps a runoff. “But that too is an opportunity to show the world who we are. Because in Georgia civil rights has always been an act of will and a battle for our souls.” Democracy, Abrams said, “only works when we work for it. When we fight for it. When we demand it. And apparently, today, when we stand in lines for hours to meet it at the ballot box.” Ayanna Pressley echoed this sense of an ongoing contest in what she insisted was not a victory speech, despite her clear victory. “When we realize equity, justice, and equality, these rights for everyone, then and only then will I deliver a victory speech.”

After all, the notion that we could have corrected course so quickly is akin to the fantasies that we could put our racism behind us with the election of a single president, our misogyny in the rearview mirror with the nomination of a single woman. Those were pernicious lies, fed to us so that we would stop being angry, stop fighting, resisting, challenging.

And so in a few days — for some, a few hours — after there has been some sleep and some tallying of wins and losses, we will be back at it, this project of will and work and demands; we will return to our efforts, more than two centuries long, to fulfill the democratic promises made at our start, not yet met in our present.

There Is Now an Institution of the American Government That Isn't Controlled by - or Afraid of - Donald Trump

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

07 November 18

For the first time in two years, there will be oversight of the Executive Branch.

ouse Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings. House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler. House Rules Chairman Jim McGovern. House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal. House Banking Committee Chairman Maxine Waters.

Imagine you're a Republican member of this administration* with skeletons in your closet. Imagine you're a president* in this administration with skeletons in your closet. Now ask yourself whether or not this was a wave election. Absent a clumsy campaign in the lame-duck session, there will be nothing done against Social Security and Medicare. There will be no serious attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act. Robert Mueller's investigation is safer now than it was on Monday. Thanks to the genius of Mr. Madison, the House of Representatives controls the money and where it goes and to whom, and how it is spent on things like healthcare and investigations.

More to the point, for the first time in two years, there is an institution of the government that is neither afraid of, nor controlled by, the president*. And the lesson of the survivors is going to be that they should be even more Trumpier than thou. Consider, for example, that the only returning Republican congresscritter from Iowa is going to be out-and-out white supremacist Steve King, and he's one of two Republican congressional candidates—the other is Seth Goodman, who was the likely winner in New Jersey's Second Congressional District—condemned by the national Republican Party for racist remarks. They both won. Ron DeSantis was elected governor of Florida on a platform of Not Being The Black Guy. Yeah, I wouldn't expect a pivot any time soon.

Here in Kansas, there was the equivalent of a Democratic torchlight parade in the Commonwealth (God save it!). Laura Kelly put out the lights on Kris Kobach's career in elective politics by getting elected governor. Sharice Davids won her congressional race easily. The legacy of Sam Brownback's ideological experiment in non-government has now been tossed into the dustbin of history. Kobach could never overcome it, and he was forced to run on it, and nobody liked him enough to give him the room he needed to pull that off.

"Across America, we are seeing more and more people, especially young people, getting involved in the political process. It is a wonderful omen to the future of our state. What happened in Kansas today was different about what happened around America. What happened in Kansas was a wave of common sense," Kelly told a whooping audience of her supporters in a Topeka hotel ballroom. "We have faced challenges here like nowhere else. We saw our schools devastated, partisanship put above all else and tore our state apart. That ended today. Kansans look out for each other. Today, voters across Kansas came together. We chose to put people above politics."

Kelly shrewdly hung Brownback around Kobach's neck like a dead raccoon, all the while telling the people of Kansas that she wasn't a wild-eyed Alf Landon liberal. She pointed to the fact that she had been central to the bipartisan effort to repair the damage done by Brownback, and she toured the state with Republican politicians, including a couple of former Republican governors, who pronounced themselves revolted by the idea of Kobach's being governor. Kansas has a Democratic governor and Massachusetts has a Republican governor and election nights are the damndest thing.

Elsewhere, overlooked by the races contested among humans, especially those contested by humans for national office, there were a number of statewide referenda that were aimed at ending the legalized ratfcking that has gone on since the Republicans won so many state legislatures in 2010 and 2014.

In Florida, a measure that would return the franchise to convicted felons who have served out their sentences passed overwhelmingly. (Yes, it is possible that convicted felons will be the constituency that returns Florida to its senses in 2020. Florida, man.) In Michigan, two ballot questions regarding election procedures, including an anti-gerrymandering measure that would establish an independent redistricting commission, both piled up nearly 70 percent of the vote. Maryland passed same-day voter registration. The organized assault on the franchise also was turned back in North Carolina, which elected a 5-2 majority on the state's Supreme Court, when the state elected Anita Earls, a Democratic civil rights attorney that led the fight against the state's grotesquely gerrymandered map—the one that a federal judge said targeted minority voters with "almost surgical precision."

For years, these issues were dismissed by the smart people as being "goo-goo" concerns, but the franchise is a different thing. Americans understand cheating and they don't like it. And, in general, the referenda around the country seemed to indicate that progressive voters, frustrated by institutional chokepoints and aggressive finagling, have taken to the tactic of putting issues that they know are popular directly on the ballot and letting the issues be judged on their merits. This is what a lot of progressives did at the turn of the last century, and for many of very much the same reasons.

In Kansas, editor William Allen White covered that story, long ago.

Youth should be radical. Youth should demand change in the world. Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on. But the old orders should not be moved easily — certainly not at the mere whim or behest of youth. There must be clash and if youth hasn't enough force or fervor to produce the clash the world grows stale and stagnant and sour in decay.

Indeed.