Suddenly winnable districts and a progressive triumph (Part 2)
A big win and policy victory, plus election previews
Welcome to a Wednesday evening edition of Progress Report.
Tonight’s main feature is the second half of our look at newly winnable Congressional districts. Before we jump into the races, though, I want to give a few updates about stories we’ve been following along with a few other notable headlines.
Let’s jump to it!
Rhode Island: Third time’s a charm for Jennifer Rourke, who is now headed to the state Senate.
Rourke, an activist and candidate for state Senate, found herself at the center of a brief political firestorm when she was sucker-punched in the face by a Republican rival at a post-Dobbs abortion rights rally. The assault and her subsequent victory together create something of a metaphor for Rourke’s political career and the long quest to represent her hometown of Warwick. (We interviewed Rourke the weekend of the assault.)
Rourke is the co-founder of the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, a progressive, reform-minded grassroots organization dedicated to overthrowing the archaically conservative state Democratic Party. In 2018, she challenged one of the Senate’s most powerful members, the conservative, anti-choice “Democrat” Michael McCaffrey. She took just 34% of the vote that year, then grabbed an improved 42% in a 2020 rematch.
McCaffrey, who became the Senate Majority Leader, bowed out of the 2022 race right after Rourke was slugged in the face by that Republican cop. Desperate to stop a pro-choice reformer, party bosses subbed in the head of the firefighters union in the primary at the last minute, evidently without vetting him. They couldn’t have picked a worst emergency replacement — about a month later, photos of Michael Carreiro in blackface bubbled up to the surface, and a few days after that, his wife filed for divorce and accused him of not living in the district.
The race was still somewhat tight, but Rourke came out on top.
Missouri: People in the Show Me State are finally going to receive the health care that they voted for back in 2020.
Republicans in the legislature spent most of 2021 trying to block the implementation (read our reporting on that!) of the voter-approved Medicaid expansion, and when the state Supreme Court told them to knock it off, they spent most of 2022 actively sabotaging the program by making it almost impossible to enroll. In June, it took an average of 115 days to enroll in the expanded program, which hurt working people and often discouraged them from continuing the effort.
This summer, the Biden Administration’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services stepped in and told Missouri’s Department of Social Services to get its shit together. It did the trick; the state now says the average wait time is at max 45 days. There are now 236,677 people enrolled, with 12,000 to go.
Ohio: A Hamilton County judge today temporarily blocked Ohio’s six-week abortion ban, which was passed in 2019 and triggered by the Dobbs decision’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. The law will be paused as a lawsuit over the ban’s constitutionality continues through the state court system. Until then, abortion will be banned at 20 weeks. This is what gerrymandering gets you.
Railroad Strike: The long and the short of the situation is that just as was the case during the last gilded age, America’s railways are dominated by a few gigantic monopolies run by the uber-wealthy. The few companies now in charge have systemically squeezed workers for years, reducing the workforce and piling responsibilities and hours onto the remaining workers.
Conditions for workers under this regime have become hazardous and even occasionally deadly. Union rail workers get only a few days off a year from the ultra-demanding job, and in many cases, not even doctors appointments are considered excused absences. Their bosses, including billionaire Warren Buffett, are raking in record profits, but refuse to budge on a better contract, and a substandard effort at mediation by the Biden administration has the two sides on the brink of a total shutdown.
There’s much more to the story, but you won’t read it in the New York Times or other Beltway political publications, which have sided with owners by focusing only on the impact of the economy and ignoring the subhuman conditions faced by these workers. They’re also insisting on calling it a strike, when really, the rail companies will be locking them out. Read more about it here before the contract deadline on Thursday night.
by Natalie Meltzer
And now, on to part two of our coverage of newly winnable districts and how Democrats can save the House.
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