A critical special election against a Jan. 6th lunatic
A critical special election against a Jan. 6th lunatic
A make-or-break race in Pennsylvania and Silicon Valley's weird grip on state governments
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
First, I’m writing this during the GOP presidential debate, so I’ll have thoughts on that for subscribers tomorrow. That said, I can only marvel at how much everyone on that stage hates Vivek Ramaswany. I almost admire it, because I appreciate a good troll, except he reminds me of the most annoying blowhards that I knew in college.
I’m working on something of a new format for the newsletter, with the aim of making it breezier while still containing just as much information (and sometimes even more) than what we generally pack into each issue.
The goals here are straightforward: I want Progress Report to be easier for you to read and easier for me to write. The more streamlined the format, the more I can focus on original reporting.
Today, I’m trying out a version of the new format, which could very well change based on your feedback and/or my obsessiveness. Note that we kick off with an election section, which I plan to make a fixture again going forward.
With all that preamble out of the way (and the new format, to be clear, won’t have long preambles!), let’s get to it. Let me know what you think in the comments!
There are only a few states with regularly scheduled legislative elections this fall, and while we’ll start covering those and some municipal races in the next week or so, this week I want to highlight a handful of upcoming special elections. I’ll have interviews with interesting candidates going forward, too.
Pennsylvania
Race: State House District 21
Date: September 19th
Candidates: Lindsay Powell (D), Erin Connolly Autenreith (R)
The Details: While it’s likely to remain a safe seat for Democrats, it’s too important for the party to take for granted.
Progressive state Rep. Sara Innamorato, stepped down from this seat earlier this year in order to run for Allegheny County Executive. She planned her resignation for the summer recess, so that while her exit eliminated Democrats’ one-seat lead in the House, the even split did not functionally matter. With the legislature starting back up this fall, however, that seat makes all the difference in the world.
Innamorato first won this district in 2018, when she ran unopposed, and scored an easy 27-point victory when she ran for re-election campaign last November. Looking to follow in her footsteps is another young progressive named Lindsay Powell, who works in economic development and has the resume of someone twice her age.
Powell has worked for Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto as an assistant chief of staff, overseeing legislative policy, and spent time working in the offices of President Obama, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Right now she works for a nonprofit in job placement, while affordable housing is her main campaign focus.
Autenreith is the chair of the Republican Party in Shaler Township (population: 27,000) and a longtime realtor. She was attended Donald Trump’s big speech in DC on January 6th, though like everybody else who attended the coup hype event and since run for office, she claims to have been on a bus home when the real action started and disappointed by the violence.
She may well have been on a bus home, but Autenreith certainly doesn’t seem like she was one of the cooler heads in the audience on January 6th. Here’s what she posted on Facebook the next day:
Yikes! Ironically, Autenreith is a big supporter of private school vouchers, which would funnel public money to church schools. And the school vouchers issue is probably the most immediate threat to Pennsylvania, as Gov. Josh Shapiro had to be pressured into line item vetoing an expansion of funds for charter and private schools in the most recent budget.
Kentucky
Race: State House District 93
Date: November 7th
Candidates: Adrielle Camuel (D), Kyle Whalen (R)
The Details: This one’s a bummer all the way around.
Gov. Andy Beshear was forced to call the election after the untimely death of State Rep. Lamin Swann, who died suddenly after a medical emergency in May. A civil rights organizer and small businessman, he was just 45 years old and in his first term in the state House.
A trans activist named Emma Curtis quickly through her hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination, raising money and generating excitement in this pretty solidly blue seat based in Lexington. At 26-years-old, she was all set to make history… until the state Democratic Party leadership instead nominated a school administrative assistant named Adrielle Camuel.
With no primary, it was up to the party to choose the nominee, but the decision is a baffling one. Instead of going with the candidate who proved that she could raise money and excite voters, they went with a little-known moderate who, it should be noted, was on the nominating committee.
The decision has earned a fair amount of blowback, and Camuel made things worse by allegedly saying that she ran because “both sides” were “too extreme” on issues like trans rights (I haven’t been able to find the video quite yet).
Whalen, the Republican, is a construction company owner who is more fiscally than socially conservative, at least according to a recent interview he gave to WKYT, the local news network. He says that he wants the GOP to move on from the “culture war” issues, though with the legislature having overridden Beshear’s veto of a tough bill banning gender-affirming care, their work there is probably done for the moment.
Minneapolis: Minnesota just started the process of redesigning its state flag, and at this rate, it might as well replace the seal with the Uber and Lyft logos.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Monday vetoed a law passed by the city council that would have required a higher minimum pay and improved working conditions for ride share service drivers. The veto came after Uber and Lyft threatened to pull out of Minneapolis altogether, the same threat that months earlier convinced Gov. Tim Walz to veto a similar bill passed by the legislature.
Frey said he instead secured a commitment from Uber (but not Lyft) to promise to pay drivers the city’s $15 minimum wage, which is rather noble of them.
The whole thing is a strange asterisk to the eight-month blitz of progressive policies passed by Democrats in Minnesota this year after winning back a trifecta in November.
In better news, Walz today announced that he’s named state Supreme Court Associate Justice Natalie Hudson as the court’s next Chief Justice. When she takes the step up in October, she’ll become the first person of color and third woman to serve as the state’s most powerful judge.
Albuquerque: Silicon Valley’s market-wrecking grip on mid-sized cities was also on display in New Mexico, where the increasingly conservative city council in Albuquerque voted down regulations on Airbnb and VRBO rentals even after they were considerably watered down.
Organized Labor: UPS workers represented by the Teamsters voted overwhelmingly to approve the major new collective bargaining agreement with the company on Tuesday, officially averting what would have been the largest strike in the United States in decades. Here’s what
I covered the negotiations and strike threat for much of the spring and summer, and here’s what I wrote about it over at More Perfect Union:
It’s not a perfect deal, because it falls short of the pay demands of many part-time workers, who make up a majority of the union’s 340,000 members at UPS. But everyone will be getting significant raises nonetheless, and it puts the union back on track for further gains after it fell behind thanks to a dud of a deal pushed through by former Teamsters president James P. Hoffa in 2018.
Medicaid Unwinding: Several families sued several state agencies in Florida for failing to properly alert Medicaid recipients to the fact that they risk being booted from the program if they don’t respond to a redetermination letter within a short window of time.
As regular readers of Progress Report will tell you, it’s about time this happened — Florida has already kicked nearly half a million working class and poor people from its already tightwad low-income health program, with Arkansas not all that far behind.
Meanwhile, Arkansas Community Organizations, which has been on the forefront of trying to help Medicaid recipients keep their coverage (we spoke to them here) are asking the federal government to put a pause on Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s mass purge.
The Crypto Prince of South Florida: It’s been a very bad week for Miami Mayor Francis Suarez — and not just because his nominal presidential campaign raised so little money that he didn’t make the cut for tonight’s GOP presidential primary freak show.
Thanks to the smart work of frequent Progress Report contributor Thomas Kennedy, Suarez was hit with an ethics complaint over his prolific luxury travel habit and tendency to wind up in the VIP sections of events like the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. And speaking of Thomas, check out the video below…
You probably don’t need any convincing that Ron DeSantis is the absolute worst person in the country, but his culture wars and often overshadow just how classically corrupt and callous he’s been as governor. As soon as he entered office in 2019, DeSantis began selling off every aspect of the state’s economy to the highest bidders, an ongoing auction that continues to fuel a decline in the quality of life for working and middle-class Floridians.
None of that is an exaggeration — check out this new investigation I produced for More Perfect Union for more details. It’s fun, I promise!
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