Obama’s first legislative endorsements, explained
Obama’s first legislative endorsements, explained
Good stuff inside
Welcome to a special edition of Progressives Everywhere!
I usually send out free subscriber emails on Sunday and Wednesday, but we got some great news today that I just had to share:
President Obama released his first round of endorsements today and he must be a Progressives Everywhere reader because he had quite a lot of our candidates on his list!
OK, maybe he doesn’t read the newsletter, but it does go to show you that we are bringing you the inside word on the smartest and most capable candidates worth supporting very early on! Here are the candidates that he endorsed and we have interviewed:
Sharon Hirsch (featured in yesterday’s edition!)
You can donate to all of them by CLICKING HERE!
We’ve also raised a lot of money for a number of his other chosen candidates, especially the ones in Texas and North Carolina. All told, we’ve raised money for 17 of his candidates this year; 15 other candidates are running for re-election after we raised lots of money for them in 2018. Not bad!
Below, you can find my interview with Sharon Hirsch, an amazing candidate in Texas who is essential to finally flipping the Lone Star State blue.
This Texas District Is Ready to Flip
Politics can be complicated, issues can be nuanced, and choices in elections can be unclear… but none of those things are true about this uber-close Texas House race between incumbent Republican Matt Shaheen and his Democratic challenger Sharon Hirsch.
He: A devout member of the fringe-right Republican Freedom Caucus who takes gobs of corporate special interest money, posts endless “Blue Lives Matter” memes, trolls the libs on Facebook, votes against public schools and special needs children, and once said “I will die on this issue politically” about passing a grossly bigoted anti-LGBTQ bathroom bill.
She: A long-time Democratic Party activist and Executive Committee member and public school employee who relies on small-dollar donations, is focused on funding schools and expanding healthcare access, and lost to Shaheen by an excruciatingly small 391 vote margin in 2018.
The two candidates for State House District 66 are a microcosm of the kind of politicians who have dominated Texas for 25+ years and the new wave of activists and lawmakers who are entirely remaking the state’s political culture. Democrats are now just nine seats from flipping the State House and Hirsch can claim a fair amount of credit for this ongoing transformation — she’s been involved in both the Plano and state Democratic Party since 2007 and co-founded an organization called Women Organizing Women Democrats. For a while, it was an uphill struggle — then Trump came along and changed everything.
To illustrate the contrast, Hirsch notes that before late 2016, the volunteer intake system was “a process of sticky notes and notes that said, ‘Call John at this number’ and ‘Called Mary at this number’ and it was a mess,” Hirsch tells Progressives Everywhere. “And then Trump won and it was the most remarkable thing that ever happened. All of a sudden, it was standing room only in the office and people just coming in droves wanting to do something. Some ran for office, some became super-volunteers who knocked on thousands of doors. There was a rallying cry.”
Hirsch decided to run again almost immediately after her razor-thin loss in 2018, knowing that momentum was on her and Democrats’ side. Texas’s GOP leadership didn’t really get the hint, introducing divisive (and crappy) legislation like the anti-abortion “heartbeat” bill and still refusing to expand Medicaid in the state with the highest uninsured rate in the country. There was plenty on the line by this March’s primary election — Hirsch easily won the Democratic nomination — and then COVID-19 happened, which pushed seemingly everything else off the table.
Not that you’d know it from the way Shaheen or other Texas Republicans have been acting. Shaheen has actually been worse than Gov. Greg Abbott — he signed a letter asking that the state to reopen almost as soon as it shut down; fought in June to end the state’s attempt at contact tracing; and then in July, as the virus began spiking in Texas, he was one of several lawmakers who demanded Abbott end the state of emergency and any lockdown measures.
Hirsch, on the other hand, suggests that Abbott should have declared a state of emergency and mandated masks far earlier while also developing a clear plan to contain and eradicate the virus. Instead, they chanced it let nearly 450,00 people get infected and nearly 8,000 people die.
She’s now mostly focused on the matter of reopening schools; her husband worked for decades as a teacher, she worked in public schools for decades (unable to afford it out of high school, she graduated college at age 55), and her daughter-in-law is a teacher in her district. Discussing the issue with Hirsch is enlightening because she has a clear understanding of how the school systems are operated and the many factors that must be considered — a far more nuanced approach than Abbott’s demand for in-person instruction.
“We have 53,000 kids in the Plano school district, teachers are vulnerable, and then half the staff is support staff, and custodians are frequently contracted services,” Hirsch explains. “They're not even district employees, so you don't know what kind of reporting and protocols their employers have going on. And then there’s trying to keep the kids distanced on the bus. As an assistant principal friend told me, you can’t stop kids from touching each other.”
This is largely how she operates — collect the information, consider all the angles possible, and make an informed decision. That hasn’t been the case in Texas for a long time, but 2020 can change all that. Democrats have a great chance to flip the State House and even turn the state blue in the presidential election. Helping candidates on this level is a huge part of making that happen — their voters tend to vote blue up and down the ballot.
Hirsch’s race is incredibly flippable and any and all donations help!
Big News You Need to Know
Here are some of the big headlines you may have missed over the long weekend and today.
If you’re overwhelmed with work and life and just want someone to send you the most crucial election news directly to your inbox each and every night, you can subscribe to the premium edition of the newsletter! It’s dirt cheap!
Elections (and Future Elections) and Voting Rights
On Tuesday, voters in Missouri will vote on whether to finally expand Medicaid. It’s been a long slog to get to this point, but hopefully Missourians will continue the trend of voting for progressive ballot initiatives — in 2018 they voted to repeal the anti-union right to work law, legalize medical marijuana, limit lobbying, end gerrymandering, and raise the minimum wage. They’re still voting for Republicans, but at least the policy outcomes are starting to go the right way. If it passes, 230,000 working Missourians would qualify for government healthcare.
As I’ve been documenting here at Progressives Everywhere, Trump’s relentless and lie-filled attacks on mail-in voting has discouraged his supports from requesting ballots and put the GOP at a serious disadvantage (see North Carolina and Florida). It’s gotten to the point that state Republican Parties are just straight-up doctoring Trump’s tweets about it.
The Washington Post has this story about the panic that Republicans are experiencing right now — they generally do quite well with mail ballots and with COVID-19 likely to continue into the fall (and perhaps get worse by November), Trump’s tweets may finish them off. They speak with officials in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Alabama, all of which have competitive elections this fall.
A whopping two million voters requested absentee ballots for the Michigan primary election, which takes place tomorrow. Though state officials have been encouraging people who haven’t sent in their ballots to deposit them at drop boxes since late last week, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is warning that it may be a little while before the results are clear. Unless states can start counting them before election day, we probably won’t know the results in November on election night, either.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar announced that every absentee ballot sent for the general election will come with return postage already paid, thereby making it easier for people to turn around their vote as quickly as possible. Nearly 1.5 million people voted via absentee ballot during the primary election in June, which marked a 17x increase from the 2016 primary.
South Carolina also agreed to pay the return postage on absentee ballots as part of a legal settlement this week. There are 17 other states that automatically pay the return postage, but it really should be a nationwide policy.
Boockvar is also hoping that the state legislature passes a law that allows county boards of election to start counting ballots before election day; right now, they can only begin the canvassing at 7 am on election day. Waiting for days to hear the results in such a crucial swing state (which also has important legislative elections) would not be optimal — especially now that Trump is throwing a fit about potential wait times for results.
Iowa is one of three states to permanently disenfranchise former felons — Florida is still the subject of a legal battle — and after the legislature failed to pass an amendment in June, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said that she would sign an executive order that restored their voting rights.
More than a month and a half later, she still hasn’t done so or even announced when it might happen. Now, nonpartisan county auditors are asking her to hurry it up because they need to get everything in order for an election that will likely be the messiest in decades (even more so than this year’s Iowa Caucus — remember that?!). The sooner the better, because activists have to reach out to these new potential voters and get them registered, which will be even more difficult in the current conditions.
In Idaho, it looked as if activists trying to get signatures for an initiative that would raise taxes on corporations and the rich to fund public education would be able to collect e-petitions. A federal court ordered the state to either just put the initiative on the ballot or permit the group Reclaim Idaho to collect them online. Republican Gov. Brad Little’s administration fought that ruling tooth and nail, appealing all the way to the Supreme Court. Surprise surprise, the Roberts Court sided with the state, blocking the order.
Roberts wrote that “reasonable, nondiscretionary restrictions are almost certainly justified by the important regulatory interests in combating fraud and ensuring that ballots are not cluttered with initiatives that have not demonstrated sufficient grassroots support.”
That’s not untrue, but it is a bit misleading here. First, online petitions would not be some Change.org petition — they’re much more secure. And Reclaim Idaho is no fringe organization — it led the initiative that successfully expanded Medicaid in Idaho in 2018. It’s a damn shame… and not the last of the bad ballot initiative news today.
In Arizona, a similar initiative that would raise taxes on the wealthy to fund public education, was thrown off the ballot by a Maricopa County Superior Court judge. Why? He called the description of the initiative too “vague” because it didn’t specifically note that some of the money would go to raising teachers’ salaries or that lawmakers wouldn’t be able to overrule it and cut education spending again. Never mind the fact that teacher pay has been a huge issue in Arizona over the last few years (remember the 2018 strikes?) and that groups like the Arizona Education Association, the state’s big teacher’s union, turned in 435,000 signatures, far more than necessary.
Just because:
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