Right-wing fascism polls very poorly, but there's a catch
Right-wing fascism polls very poorly, but there's a catch
Here's what JFK actually got wrong...
Welcome to a Sunday morning edition of Progress Report.
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Alright, now that’s off my chest, tonight we’ll discuss some illuminating polling numbers, the unraveling of a political mystery, and some good news from around the country.
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Ron DeSantis continued history’s least subtle “book tour” Iowa on Friday, while back at home in Florida, people continued to absolutely hate every single thing that he’s doing to them.
And not just people in our woke lib bubble, either. A new poll conducted by the University of North Florida finds that vast majorities of registered voters in the state are opposed to DeSantis’s most high-profile priorities in the new legislative session, including the coming GOP ban on abortion, destruction of public colleges, and dismantling of what remains of Florida’s gun control laws.
Take a look at the numbers on each of those issues:
Abortion
Q: Do you support or oppose a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy in Florida, with no exceptions for rape or incest?
A full 75% of Floridians oppose a six-week ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, including 62% that strongly oppose such a ban. Those are remarkable figures, but not all that surprising; abortion has been protected by the state constitution since the 1980s, and it’s only in recent years that Floridians’ reproductive rights have come under attack.
Congenitally uninterested in public opinion, legislative Republicans introduced a bill on Tuesday that would ban abortion after six weeks anyway. The only difference between the poll’s hypothetical and the bill filed by Republicans is that the latter has an exception for rape or incest — if a woman can produce legal evidence that she was raped or a victim of incest. copy of a restraining order, police report, medical record, or other court order or documentation.
Given how many rapes go unreported every year, and how nervous people will be about submitting to government scrutiny of one of the worst moments of their lives, the exceptions are all but meaningless. In essence, the proposed ban is exactly the same dangerous violation of reproductive rights that three quarters of Floridians do not want to see enacted.
The hostile far-right takeover of higher education
Q: Recently, legislation was proposed that would prohibit Florida public colleges and universities from supporting campus activities or programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory, among other changes to the state university system.
DeSantis and his new team of pseudo-intellectual white nationalist paranoids have launched a full-scale invasion of Florida’s public colleges, which they insist have become hives of “woke indoctrination” and *gasp* diversity. Chris Rufo, the babbling racist lightweight and fake Harvard grad, has been at the forefront of this campaign, antagonizing students at the queer-friendly New College of Florida and attempting to paint them as both fringe freaks (they’re not) and the stereotypical college student (if only).
Boasting the combined charisma of a diaper rash, DeSantis and Rufo have thus far proven unable to otherize the nearly 750,000 students spread across the campuses of 40 public colleges. Polling shows that 61% of Floridians oppose a series of new proposals that together represent the most drastic state attack on academic freedom in any of our lifetimes, including just about 50% that strongly oppose it, with only 35% of respondents in favor. It’s not even that popular with Republicans, as only 56% of GOP voters are in favor of the higher education takeover.
When DeSantis is portrayed as flexing his political muscle by picking on college kids and trying to turn well-regarded universities into Prager University’s new brick-and-mortar campuses, remember that he’s actually just acting out his right-wing bully fantasies.
Gun violence
Q: A bill has been introduced in the Florida House of Representatives that would allow Floridians to carry a concealed weapon without a license, as long as they meet certain criteria. The new law would not require safety training courses or certificates to carry a concealed weapon.
Least popular of all is the so-called “constitutional carry” bill that would allow just about anybody to carry a gun without any oversight. An overwhelming 77% of voters oppose that proposal, including 67% of Floridians who strongly oppose inviting more gun violence to a state that has suffered through some of the most high-profile mass shootings over the past decade. Even a large majority of Republicans, at 62%, oppose this surrender to gun nuts.
Every day is fraught in Florida. DeSantis, using the same playbook as nearly every Republican since Richard Nixon, has harped over and over about the crime in blue states, while overseeing a state that is by nearly every measure far more crime-infested than New York, one of the right’s big bad bogeymen.
The poll also asked Floridians about the issues that most concerned them. At the top of the list was the cost of housing, with a full 25% of the voters naming it as their top issue. Last year, just 2% named housing as the most pressing concern.
This should come as no surprise to longtime Progress Report readers, as we were covering housing in Florida in early 2022, when I predicted that it would become a major issue in the state. I also produced a major piece on the issue at More Perfect Union.
(Side note: Not only did Democrats in Florida fail to make housing a big part of their 2022 election platform, but every Democratic senator on the Community Affairs Committee also voted to move forward with a new GOP bill that outright bans local rent control ordinances and gives even more money to developers. Maybe they’ll be better on yet another new bill that preempts all tenant protections?)
All of this data leads to the same question: If his most prominent policy goals are so broadly unpopular, how and why did DeSantis win re-election by a record-setting 19% just this past November?
There is no one answer, though the aforementioned failure of the Florida Democratic Party in last year’s elections is certainly part of it. They ran a has-been candidate in Charlie Crist, who was short on money, new ideas, and energy. There’s reason to believe that it wouldn’t have been such a blowout against a better opponent and party operation.
The UNF survey also tested potential presidential election matchups, including one that had DeSantis leading Biden by a 51-42 margin, which would fall even further with the scrutiny and pressure that a competent Democratic campaign would have applied on sweaty, whiny bully of a state drowning inequality.
The reality is that, as we’ve covered time and again, the FDP is in a state of absolute disrepair, and has been for many years now. The GOP has run Florida for more than two decades, bludgeoning Democrats with the financial advantage that comes with power and abject corruption. They control the message, the airwaves, and the political prerogative.
Make Government Work Again
All that being said, electoral politics is ultimately downstream from political culture and what people think is actually possible. Florida Republicans have worked fastidiously to dismantle state government services and paralyze local governments’ ability to regulate business; another new bill allows corporations to sue towns and counties if they make decisions that cost them money.
The state’s unemployment system collapsed during the first tidal wave of the Covid crisis, when mass layoffs put unemployment at levels unseen since the Great Depression, and despite making several promises, it hasn’t really improved. And that’s by design. DeSantis is taking the same approach to starving Florida’s public education system, which he hopes will fail as new voucher schemes siphon money to private and religious schools. Even if a vast majority of Floridians want strong public schools.
If Republicans only cared about rewarding their rich patrons, they could probably do so without punishing everybody else; there’s plenty of money to go around. But the party’s financiers aren’t simply looking to pad their bank accounts; they’re also fiercely ideological. People like the Kochs have sought to destroy government and turn its functions over to the for-profit sector, and 40 years of doing just that have led to the degradation of public services, a morass of new expenses, and a deepening cynicism about the value of self-governance.
Democrats deserve plenty of the blame for this age of austerity, privatization, and degradation, and only over the past few years has that begun to change.
With government trifecta for the first time in 40 years, Democrats in Michigan have moved quickly to repeal pernicious Republican laws and push through some of their own most popular policy promises.
This week, the House majority passed bills to expand background checks on gun purchases, enshrine LGBTQ+ rights into law, and repeal the so-called “Right to Work” law that was slowly choking out organized labor and leading to stagnating pay and reducing the number of union members.
For an idea of just how important it is — politically, historically, and economically — for Democrats in the state Senate to finish off the “Right to Work” repeal, check out this report that I produced at More Perfect Union:
Democrats really hit the ground running in Michigan. By the end of January, they’d already passed a vastly expanded earned income tax credit for working families. That new law also repealed a tax that Republicans placed on retirement plan income a decade ago, which has been especially harmful to older families after they worked for decades and often sacrificed raises to guarantee a better retirement plan.
Inherent in all of this is the reassertion of the government’s power to tangibly improve people’s lives. This essentially retires that old JFK line imploring people to ask not what their country can do for them but instead what they can do for their country; the government needs to be investing in people for people to feel invested in the government.
That’s something that newly minted North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Clayton Anderson really emphasized in our discussion last week about her plans to rebuild the party from the bottom up; getting people focused on the local level and racking up tangible wins that improve their day-to-day lives is both an essential mission in its own right as well as an important step on the path to fostering a citizenry that stays engaged in self-government and holds bad politicians accountable.
While inevitably burdened with ideological shortcomings and miserable members at every level, Democratic majorities have slowly but surely begun to embrace progressive policies, if not politics.
Colorado, even with its libertarian-leaning governor, is moving forward with addressing the scourge of gun violence, the extreme affordable housing crisis, and a rise in fentanyl-related deaths.
Republicans this week put their hearts and souls into triggering culture wars with an all-night filibuster, but were unable to block bills that extend waiting periods on gun purchases and open life-saving drug overdose centers. Further gun control legislation, included expanded red flag laws, is expected this coming week.
Colorado Dems also just announced bills to expand abortion access and protect people who come to the state seeking both reproductive and gender-affirming care.
In Washington state, the state House just gave its approval to a bill that bans single family home zoning laws, which should go a long way, down the line, to ending the racist blockade on adding housing density in cities and suburbs alike.
Even New York’s real estate shill Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed major zoning reforms, pointing to a willingness to defy outdated political conventional wisdom about suburban voters, not to mention the astroturf groups trying to protect the status quo.
How she receives the Good Csuse eviction prevention legislation that’s coming is another matter entirely. I’m told that at least one chamber of the legislature will this coming week introduce a minimum wage increase that actually offers an immediate wage increase, which also defies her agenda. Her refusal to use the power of government to make significant improvements in people’s lives goes a long way toward explaining her nearly face-planting in what was supposed to be a waltz to re-election in November.
When cynicism is allowed to replace faith in the government’s interest or ability to at least eliminate hardships, you wind up with noxious leaders who wind up in office on the strength of their ability to channel rage and cling on to it by quietly finding ways to exacerbate the problems that produce it.
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A few weeks back I decided to subscribe to your Progress Report, and I an not at all disappointed. I keep a tight watch on DeSantis and his puppets. Living in the RED ZONE of Florida, Pensacola, people k me why I refer to DeSantis and the Republicans as FASCIST. My response is: because they are. As for the Democratic Party; I spent twenty years as a lobbyist for the UNIONS, both in Tallahassee and D.C. a we had a very active party who got things done. I am sick to death seeing how the party went to crap. Enough of that. Let me say I am 77 years old and will continue to fight until they close my casket. Everyone needs to get in the game.
I’m pleased to see the polling out of Florida. I was wondering how Floridians are perceiving all of this and it’s comforting to see data showing majorities opposed. Given the moribund Democratic Party there, do you see any cause for optimism? Are there any emerging leaders among the dems who might be able to leverage the discontent into votes for progressive candidates?