Ohio’s working class shift left: mirage or momentum?

Also: Sam Alito can’t shut up and DeSantis can’t stop losing

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

We got back into New York last night after a heartbreaking week spent mostly in Pennsylvania with my wife’s extended family and friends. I’ve spent my life mostly trying to barrel through all kinds of pain and hardship, but this uniquely terrible year — which began with my gasping for air before high-risk, close-call heart surgery — is really grinding me down.

I mention this not because I’m looking for sympathy, but because I want to thank you for all the encouraging comments that have been sent my way and for sticking with me during slower email weeks. I love doing this work and hope to keep growing Progress Report as a useful and fiercely independent hub for news, ideas, and conversation, not to mention a full-time job, so your support and loyalty mean the world.

(Note: if you’re the dentist who just charged me $4200 for a root canal or have an position of influence within the dental insurance industry, this gratitude does not apply to you.)

Today’s issue will be a breezy one, catching up on some major stories that we’ve been covering and raising some noteworthy new ones. Expect a big new reported feature story to land in your inbox tomorrow.

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😮 🤔 Special surprise: Republican state Sen. Michael Rulli won a special election on Ohio’s sixth congressional district and will head to Washington to fill in for Rep. Bill Johnson, who resigned earlier this year to become president of Youngstown State University.

GOP campaign officials might want to go easy on the champagne, though, because Rulli’s nine-point victory qualifies as a close call in a district that Johnson won by 35 points in 2022 and a whopping 49 points in 2020.

While the results of a low-turnout special election should always be taken with a grain of salt, there are additional factors that suggest that this wasn’t necessarily a total fluke.

Rulli, a second-term state legislator, raised $678K for his campaigns this year and spent about $100K on this one, dwarfing the $22K raised by his Democratic opponent, Michael Kripchak. He also had the benefit of being associated with his family’s namesake local grocery chain, while Kripchak had zero name recognition, having most recently worked as a waiter after years spent in the Air Force and making little headway as an actor and entrepreneur.

The result wasn’t a rebuke of some vile far-right extremist, either, as Rulli sought to balance the GOP’s prerequisite embrace of Donald Trump with touting his bipartisan credentials. After the election was called, he sought to reframe a relatively narrow victory in a very gerrymandered district as a positive referendum on his personality.

“We knew the polls were going to be close, and the guy I ran against really worked. He's a really hard worker,” Rulli said. “But this is a blue-collar district, this is Bruce Springsteen, the forgotten man, 'Joe Bag of Donuts.' They don't trust the Democrats and Republicans, and they look at the individual. And I'm really good at retail politics."

In reality, had he not over-performed in Mahoning County, where he lives and runs his family’s supermarkets, Rulli would have lost this race.

So, what does it mean?

First, some context:

In nearly 60 special elections since Joe Biden entered the White House, Democratic special election candidates have outperformed his 2020 vote share in their district by nearly four percent. It was more than five percent during the first two years of his administration, which presaged a surprisingly strong showing in the midterm elections.

Biden’s cratering poll numbers have helped to drag down the margin since the midterms, and this year, Democratic special election candiates have overperformed by an average of just 1.7 points.

While many experts have suggested that Democrats’ overperformance in special elections has been a function of the reversal in the parties’ demographics, with more engaged and well-educated voters now leaning to the left, that doesn’t really hold up in this election. Ohio’s sixth congressional district is majority white and working class, and the area around Youngstown State University was where Rulli made up ground.

That leaves us with a few main possibilities, some of which are not mutually exclusive. This is a region that voted for Obama before swinging hard to the right when Donald Trump first ran in 2016, so it could be that it is moving back toward the center when Trump is not on the ballot. Trump won the district by nearly 29 points in 2020 and JD Vance won it by just shy of 25 points in 2022, so this does technically constitute something of a trend.

Biden isn’t going to come close to winning Ohio, but if districts like this one really are shifting to even a small degree in non-Trump races, it could prove pivotal to Sen. Sherrod Brown’s chances of winning reelection. Brown, a populist who tends to attract crossover voters, is already far outpolling the president in the Buckeye State, and further willingness among Trump voters to mix it up — or even just not fill in the rest of their ballot — will be key.

🥾 🗳️ Voter purges: One way that Ohio Republicans can avoid an unexpected swing toward Democrats in November? Purging more voters.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose, still tacking right despite a humiliating defeat in the GOP Senate primary, plans to purge as many as 150,000 voter registrations as part of what he called “routine but enhanced” election security protocol. He recently published a list of the at-risk Ohioans, assembled from lists of supposedly inactive voters provided by county election officials, and will be canceling the registrations of anybody that does not file an objection online.

There are more than 14,000 names from heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland and its suburbs. If you live in Ohio, make sure to check to see if your name is on the list, and if not, send this link to anybody you know who votes there.

🏜️ 🤪 Another angle: Having failed in their many attempts to overturn the past two elections, Arizona Republicans decided to mix it up and have spent this election cycle trying to steal elections before any ballot is cast.

Earlier this week, the state GOP, in conjunction with a dark money group called the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, filed a lawsuit demanding the deletion of at least half a million voter registrations. The suit alleges that several large counties have implausibly large voter registration numbers, an accusation that Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said was based entirely on speculation.

Arizona has high voter registration numbers at least in part because most voters there vote by mail. Republicans there have sought to make it harder to register and have a ballot counted. A federal judge struck down some of the provisions of a 2022 voter suppression law earlier this year.

🛑 🗳️ Citizen Pain: New Hampshire’s GOP-controlled legislature just passed a bill that would require residents to provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. The bill, which now awaits the signature of Gov. Chris Sununu, permits would-be voters to use a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers as evidence of their eligibility to vote.

This would be the single-most draconian voter registration law in the nation. Arizona Republicans passed a similar law, though the legal ruling mentioned above split the difference and allows voters without proof of citizenship to cast ballots in federal elections.

🪪 😔 Identity crisis: A newly released study confirms why New Hampshire Republicans (and Republicans everywhere) love strict voter ID laws: nearly 10% of Americans do not have easy access to election-approved photo ID cards, with low income people of color accounting for an outsized percentage of those who struggle to obtain valid identification.

🏳️‍⚧️ 🙌 Free State of Florida: Though there are still six months left in the year, it’s hard to imagine that 2024 will produce a bigger loser than Ronald Dion DeSantis.

The face-planting presidential candidate and Florida governor took another L on Tuesday when a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against one of his signature accomplishments, ruling that Florida’s ban on gender-affirming care for young people was unconstitutional. Even more embarrassing was the fact that the judge more or less called DeSantis and many of his fellow Republicans a bunch of assholes and retrograde bullies.

Evidently seeking even further humiliation, DeSantis just launched a new PAC that will pour money into defeating the abortion rights and marijuana legalization amendments that will be on the ballot in November. Both are leading in the polls right now.

🗽 😵‍💫 You heard it here first: For several years now, I’ve been calling New York’s Kathy Hochul the Worst Governor in the Nation, a title that she earned through malice toward her party’s base voters, lack of tangible accomplishments, and utter lack of political instincts. And finally, the political commentariat is beginning to agree with me.

In case you didn’t read it, here’s what I wrote in Progress Report last Friday, after Hochul blew up New York’s congestion pricing plan just days before it was set to go into effect:

This debacle is a perfect example of why I have long called Kathy Hochul the Worst Governor in the Nation™. No, she’s not evil in the way that Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and many other GOP governors are evil, but effectiveness isn’t a question of morality. Those ghouls deliver on the horrible things that they promise and their voters seem to demand, while Hochul has repeatedly found ways to piss off everybody and boasts zero signature achievements despite Democrats holding a supermajority in the legislature.

New York could be a national leader in leader in modeling bold new change for the rest of the country, which is part of what made so many advocates so excited about congestion pricing. But instead, New York is falling behind Midwestern states like Minnesota, where Democrats have minuscule majorities yet have passed universal childcare and a wealth tax.

Here’s what liberal columnist Will Bunch, one of the most on-point political writers today, wrote on Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

You may have noticed the asterisk in the headline describing Hochul as the nation’s worst governor. That’s because we live in a moment when red state voters have elected like-minded leaders with hatred in their veins such as Greg Abbott of Texas — who just declared open killing season on liberal protesters, and whose razor wire slashes little kids and pregnant moms — or Louisiana’s Jeff Landry, who is filling the prisons while imposing abortion policies that Margaret Atwood would have rejected as too crazy when she was writing The Handmaid’s Tale.

Men like Abbott, Landry, and Florida’s Ron DeSantis are the most evil and openly fascist governors America has seen since the segregationist 1960s, but they are doing the warped will of their citizens. Hochul, on the other hand, is blowing a chance to work with New York’s forward-thinking legislators and voters to make bold moves to improve people’s lives. The only thing missing is courage. That seems even worse.

I share this not to gloat, but because it underscores how the Democratic tendency to slink toward cynical triangulation and cowardly, poll-driven decisions generally leads to political and practical catastrophe. Kathy Hochul has been thumbing her nose at the mainstream of her party since being sworn in for her first full-term in 2023 and now it has truly blown up in her face.

🕵️‍♀️ 👨🏻‍⚖️ Courting fascism: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito really ought to stop talking shit to strangers, because it seems like half of them are mic’d up and ready to capture his Christian nationalist whining.

More audio emerged yesterday featuring Alito bemoaning the reporters at Pro Publica whose reporting on the justices’ piggish love of lavish gifts from far-right billionaires has put a harsh spotlight on his travel habits and conflicts of interests. That Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting should have been enough to trigger a real investigation and enforced subpoenas by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but because chair Dick Durbin has spent the past year doing his best Gregor Samsa impression, Democrats in the House have taken it upon themselves to keep up the pressure as best they can.

On Tuesday, Democrats in the House Oversight Committee held a roundtable conversation on what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the committee, called a “crisis of legitimacy.” It was a kind choice of words, to say the least.

Citing the egregious conflicts of interests that plague the court — since 2004, justices have accepted $3 million in free gifts, loans, travel accommodations, tickets to sporting events, and other luxuries from wealthy donors — the legislators suggested that each member be limited to accepting the equivalent of $50 in gifts per year.

Naturally, that won’t pass the current Congress, and so it once again falls to Durbin to roll off his back and take action.

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