Progressives Every Day: The Hellmouth Opens (but there's *some* good news, too)
Progressives Every Day: The Hellmouth Opens (but there's *some* good news, too)
Welcome to the Monday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
We’ve got just over one week until Election Day and I haven’t been this nervous since… eh, probably like a week ago, about something I’ve forgotten about at this point. It’s exhausting being me!
Alright, now to the news!
Important News You Need to Know
Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett is being sworn in as the newest member of the Supreme Court tonight. Clarence Thomas will be administering the oath, which will be the first time anyone’s heard him speak since his own swearing-in ceremony.
Having Thomas do the honors feels like a deliberate thumb in the eye of Democrats and humanity generally. Math isn’t my thing, I’d say there’s about a 30% chance that as Barrett recites her chosen passage from the Book of Revelation, a giant Hellmouth will open up to reveal a cackling and sweating Jerry Falwell, looking more evil and bloated than ever. Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, will finish his disintegration and the gunk that remains of his rotting body will slip down into the netherworld.
By the way, Lisa Murkowski wound up voting to confirm Barrett, offering the most laughably horseshit reasoning I’ve seen in quite a while. I mean, look at this!
Speaking of SCOTUS, read this great new op-ed by our friend Mondaire Jones, who argues that expanding the Supreme Court is the next necessary step in a battle for Civil Rights that never really ended.
Congressional Candidates: And on the topic of future progressive members of Congress, I just got off the phone with Julie Oliver, a remarkable candidate running for the House in Texas’s 25th Congressional District. We supported her in 2018 when she ran an underdog race and came within nine points of unseating a scummy Republican in a ridiculously gerrymandered district; now she’s back, running a more advanced, data-driven, and truly progressive campaign in an effort to finish the job.
I’ll have the interview up tomorrow — while I usually send a wide newsletter on Wednesday, I’m doing it on Tuesday instead this week given the dwindling time left in the campaign.
Ah, one more: Tom Nelson, a progressive county executive in a very purple area of Wisconsin, jumped into the race for Ron Johnson’s Senate seat today. We’ll wait until after the election, but I plan on speaking to him once we begin the next cycle!
Donald Trump and Jared Kushner: Okay, I’m gonna do an awful Twitter meme on this one, because I really don’t think I have to spend a lot of words telling you what smug, racist, con artists they are.
How it’s started:
How it’s going:
Early Voting: While most states didn’t provide access to the racial demographics of early voters for the newsletter last night (or, to be clear, anyone), new analytics (and lots of less-helpful anecdotal evidence) published today suggests that Black voters are already turning out en masse, even before the customary “Souls to the Polls” events in southern states.
By Tuesday, more than 601,000 Black Americans had voted early in Georgia compared with about 286,240 two weeks before the 2016 election. In Maryland, about 192,775 had voted compared with 18,430. And California had over 303,145 -- up from more than 106,360 two weeks before the election four years ago. That's according to Catalist, a data company that provides analytics to Democrats, academics and progressive advocacy organizations.
Even if the early 2020 numbers are accurate, they don’t necessarily mean that more Black voters will cast ballots overall in those states; they could very well be cannibalizing votes that would have otherwise been made on Election Day. But enthusiasm seems to be up in surveys (and again, in anecdotal evidence), so here’s hoping that despite voter suppression, Black voters are able to easily cast their votes in unprecedented numbers.
Prop 22: A new poll has California’s Proposition 22, which would undo state law and turn gig economy workers into indentured servants and create a massive underclass of contract workers, right now falling just shy of the 50% +1 margin it needs to pass.
The poll finds 46% of voters in favor of the law, probably because they’ve been inundated with advertising and shady app manipulation for the last six months.
On the other hand, 42% of voters oppose the law, which shows that the labor and progressive groups fighting back have done a pretty impressive job of public education despite being massively outspent.
This recent story in The American Prospect about how 100 million Americans lack paid sick leave highlights Uber drivers and shows how everyone would be harmed by the passage of Prop 22.
If you want to toss No on 22 some last-minute help, you can do so right here:
Voting Rights: Good news and bad news on the judicial front.
On the positive, a judge in Arizona ruled that ballot initiatives can’t be tossed out just because the short summary doesn’t exactly match what’s in the (much, much longer!) initiative — instead, it must only not make “objectively false or misleading information” or not include information about key components. This is good for progressives (for the most part). More here.
On the other hand, the Supreme Court just sided with the GOP and refused to extend Wisconsin’s absentee ballot deadline. Shocker.
Justice Kagan, for one, is sick of her colleagues’ radical right-wing voter suppression. I’d imagine she wouldn’t hate having a few more new colleagues on the bench next year…
Quibis
Hey, we outlasted actual Quibi! (Not gloating, I hate to see so many talented people lose their jobs. What a crappy business.)
Another grim worker protection story, this one about the increase in workplace safety whistleblowers being fired. Many of them were canned for reporting workplaces that weren’t taking proper precautions against COVID-19. As you might expect, OSHA doesn’t seem to care.
Here’s a great piece on criminal justice reform, Kamala Harris, and complicated truths.
Reddit > Facebook. For society.
Wait, before you go!
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