The easiest job in politics
The kids are not alright... but it's not hard to figure out why
Welcome to a Monday evening edition of Progress Report!
Lots to talk about tonight, from a stupefying new report out of the White House to the nitty-gritty of a big voting rights trial and marijuana legalization in a red state that might surprise you!
I didn’t include this in Sunday’s newsletter, so I just wanted to flag a piece I published over at More Perfect Union on Saturday that has blown up over the past few days. I’m not quoting the piece here, but I like the blockquote function and it’s helpful in introductions, so here goes!
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had a shambolic first week back in charge, revealing himself to be a outmoded titan of corporate neoliberalism now bitter about the growing revolution in labor and ill-equipped to deal with a generation that he and his fellow plutocrats unwittingly radicalized.
Schultz bookended his week with own goals. The first happened on Tuesday during a bizarre and sometimes unhinged “town hall” speech that he delivered to a live stream of Starbucks employees all over the world. I covered the news I broke about that speech on Tuesday, but in short, Schultz seethed at his company “being assaulted by the threat of unionization” and promised to make things better with… NFTs, somehow.
On Friday, he made it even worse during a meeting with 20 store workers in a building near the Long Beach Airport. One of those workers, Madison Hall, is the lead union organizer for their store, and challenged Schultz over the company’s union-busting campaign and the NLRB penalty it’s racking up.
As Hall told me later that night, Schultz repeatedly cut them off and admonished them, at one point telling them to leave Starbucks altogether instead of unionizing. After we published our report, the company was so alarmed that it put out a disgusting and lie-ridden statement that I’ll hopefully be able to fully expose in the next week or so. If that happens, it’ll be another own goal for Schultz.
Alright, now to the newsletter!
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Some personal news for you: I’ve decided that I should become a consultant for the most powerful people in the free world.
Sure, I’ve always viewed the Democrats’ revolving door of pollsters, lobbyists, and strategists with deep skepticism, but that was before I realized just how easy the job must be. It seems that the party’s top leaders are so cloistered in Washington that they are willing to pay people fat stacks of cash to consultants to tell them the obvious.
Case in point: The White House seems absolutely mystified as to why President Biden’s poll numbers have completely collapsed with young voters, to the point that the demographic most crucial to his victory in 2020 not turning out to vote in the midterm elections at all could wind up being a best-case scenario for Democrats. To help them figure out what voters aged 18-34 want, the White House has turned to a… 58-year-old guy from Harvard.
It starts with communication, [John] Della Volpe said, suggesting regular “check-ins” to update them on policy progress and citing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) disciplined cadence of Instagram posts as one example of this in practice.
Then, “empower them,” Della Volpe said. He noted that Democrats can sometimes stand in their own way in reaching young people because “they’re intimidated” and they “get weighed down in the transactional nature of politics.”
To be fair, Della Volpe is the director of Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics and regularly polls young voters. And from what I can tell, the top lines of his non-platitudinal advice, which gets about two lines in this Politico story that treats public opinion like weather conditions to be forecast and voters like animals to be trained, seem solid enough. But it really should not require regular consultation with a tenured Harvard dean with three decades in academia for the White House to figure out why its record-breaking support from young people is dissipating at a record rate.
The data is right there…
Democrats have done nothing to deliver on the issues that voters ages 18-34 consider their most important priorities.
Let’s start first with student debt. Joe Biden has extended the payment moratorium several times now, but in each instance, he’s left it to the last moment to quietly announce the new repayment date. All the while, he’s refused to entertain the notion of using his executive authority to cancel any of the $1.9 trillion in debt held by 50 million Americans.
Yesterday, his outgoing press secretary, Jen Psaki, went on Fox News and cut the knees out from under any excitement over the latest extension by telling a bunch of old conservatives that it’s likely that people will have to start paying back those exploitative loans again. It was a desperate pander to a right-wing audience that will never support Democrats — and a bad one at that, because even a majority of seniors believe that at least some student debt should be erased.
This data, taken from a poll in February, underlines just how popular student debt erasure would be with young people (and how little it would hurt Democrats with people over the age of 45.
It’s not just student debt, either. Young people care about an array of other issues that have hardly been addressed over the past year or so.
Here’s some toppling data from one of the most recent editions of the Harvard Youth Poll, which Della Volpe leads himself.
Abortion, climate change, and rising prices all register high up on the list of priorities shared by the young voters surveyed, and Democrats have proven utterly powerless to do anything about any of them. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema make for easy scapegoats, and there’s no doubt that they are unconscionably self-absorbed caitiffs that will be remembered as some of the great villains of this moment, but they have no control over Biden’s use of executive actions or policies that can be pursued by the various agencies within the executive branch.
With Roe v. Wade on the chopping block, Democrats should be declaring war on the illegitimate Supreme Court, especially now that Clarence Thomas has been revealed to be at the center of a coup attempt against the US government. Demand his resignation or impeachment. Scare the hell out of the justices. Make every single lawmaker talk about the consequences nonstop.
On climate change, the EPA should be going all out to set new regulations with record speed, not celebrating half-measures. Instead of promoting more oil and natural gas, pressure use incentives and threats to spur more investment in solar and other clean energy forms. And have the DOJ pursue both price gougers in the oil sector and the consumer market altogether.
Biden could also decriminalize marijuana, but on that issue, he’s acting more like a cop than most of the police he’s been showering with excess funding.
Even if the White House is limited in what it can substantially reform, taking action and relentlessly advertising it with aggressive rhetoric is better than making more empty promises or delivering warnings about threats they seem incapable of actually deterring.
If Democrats want people to vote for them, they need to give them reasons to do so. And for anyone that considers such a stance myopic or selfish at a time of such existential danger for so many vulnerable Americans and perhaps the fate of the planet altogether, ask yourself this: Have Democrats done anything to stop the Republican onslaught against women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, or working families?
All of this points to the same ongoing problem: Too many Democrats expect and demand the loyalty of many different demographics while constantly chasing the one they’re unlikely to ever win back.
That will be $100,000, please.
Voting Rights
Florida: Exhausted by his charmless persistence and probably afraid that he’s going to start calling them pedophiles, Republican legislators have finally given in and agreed to allow Gov. Ron DeSantis to draw his own horrifically racially gerrymandered congressional map:
For two months during the legislative session, the governor tried and failed to get lawmakers to agree to his legal approach to redistricting, which is that the protections afforded to Black voters in Jacksonville and Orlando were an “illegal gerrymander” because he says the courts have since determined that race should not take precedence over the 14th Amendment provisions of equal protection.
But, also for months, the legal teams advising the House and Senate told legislators that they are legally required to draw districts in Jacksonville and South Florida that give Black voters the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, although they agreed to dismantle a Black-majority district in Orlando.
Remember when Republicans argued that state legislatures should have full power over state election laws? Yeah, that was last month. Floridians passed a constitutional amendment to outlaw gerrymandering, but I’m less than optimistic about the prospect of a state Supreme Court filled with DeSantis appointees will actually toss out his map.
Georgia: What’s left of a lawsuit filed by Stacey Abrams shortly after Georgia’s racist voting laws robbed her of the state’s gubernatorial election has finally gone to trial.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones threw out much of the case last year, ruling against challenges of long lines, inadequate poll worker training, ballot rejections and the state’s “use it or lose it” policy of canceling outdated registrations.
But substantial parts of the case remain to be decided, especially those contesting “exact match” procedures that disproportionately affected Black voters.
Under “exact match,” potential voters are required to verify their ID if there’s a mismatch with a name spelling, sometimes because of a transposed letter, missing hyphen or apostrophe. Before the 2018 election, about 70% of nearly 47,000 voter registrations flagged by “exact match” were from Black residents.
Several other elements of state election law also made the cut and will be adjudicated during this trial: Citizenship verification for voter registration, a lack of training for local election officials, and flawed voter registration purges.
It was always clear that Abrams was going to run again in 2022, but the timing of the trial couldn’t be more dramatic. As the case unfolds in court, Abrams is squaring off in a rematch with Gov. Brian Kemp under even tighter and more racist voting laws.
Ballot Initiatives
Massachusetts: After spending ungodly sums to get Prop 22 passed in California in 2020, Uber and Lyft have their eyes on turning drivers in Massachusetts into second-class citizens.
The tech giants filed the ballot question after Attorney General Maura Healey last year filed a lawsuit against them asserting that they were misclassifying as contractors drivers who worked in excess of the 30-hour-a-week threshold for full-time employment.
The tech companies’ ballot initiative, A law Defining the Contract-Based Relationship Between Network Companies and App-Based Drivers, would create a separate set of labor standards for their drivers and ensure that the drivers are not classified as full-time employees, which would require benefits such as paid sick time, health insurance and Workers’ Compensation.
A scrappy coalition of activists kicked off an opposition campaign last week with events across the state. They’ve raised just about $1 million to power their efforts to pierce through the misleading language in the initiative, which is designed to make voters think they’re helping drivers with new benefits but actually traps them in a system that pays as little as $4.82 an hour. Unfortunately, Uber and Lyft have already invested $17 million in the campaign and are unlikely to stop there.
Portland: Republicans’ worst nightmare may be about to come true in the city they’re most afraid of: Non-citizens voting in elections.
A commission appointed by the city government is weighing a number of changes to Portland’s charter, one of which would permit non-citizen immigrant residents to vote in local elections.
The commission still needs to take a final vote on the proposal. And all the proposals the commission puts forward will need to be approved by Portland voters to be enacted.
The exact number of Portland residents without U.S. citizenship is unknown, but the proposal could have significant meaning for the city’s immigrant population.
Commissioners are still grappling, however, with concerns about unintended consequences such as noncitizens accidentally voting in state or federal elections, which are open only to citizens.
This policy was recently approved here in New York City, where it will go into effect in 2023. Hopefully, 800,000 new eligible voters will help boot out Eric Adams when he runs for re-election in 2025.
San Francisco: After being defeated by the city’s Board of Supervisors on multiple occasions, San Francisco Mayor London Breed is taking her case for streamlining construction permits for affordable housing straight to the people!
The “Affordable Homes Now” measure is an amendment to the city charter. If approved, it would streamline affordable housing projects by reducing approval time, from what can often be several years, to just six to nine months.
It’s sort of a technocratic change, but it could help incentivize the construction of affordable housing. Opponents say it risks rolling over communities that would be left with little say in the building process. A lot of community organizations seem to be in favor of the effort, though, which is a good sign.
Legal Weed
Missouri: Republicans in the state legislature advanced a bill out of committee that would legalize and regulate marijuana as well as expunge some criminal records and ban police from using the odor as a pretense for search and arrest. It’s an exciting development… but one tarnished by a transphobic amendment inserted simply to score points with bigots.
As part of the licensing amendment that was adopted in committee, language was added to create a loan program to support women- and minority-owned businesses participate in the market. However, a GOP member got a change attached that could undermine Democratic support because it controversially revised the equity provisions to specify that only women who are “biologically” female would be eligible for the benefit.
Activists are going to push to remove that element, so we’ll see just how dedicated these people are to being terrible for no reason at all. There’s also a proposed ballot initiative to legalize marijuana without those transphobic elements, though Missouri Republicans have shown a great willingness to change or even block the implementation of successful amendments that they don’t like.
Virginia: New Gov. Glenn Youngkin sure is determined to ruin every good policy passed under two terms of Democratic governance (and one full session of a trifecta). His next target: Legal marijuana, obviously.
Democrats legalized up to one ounce last year in a bill that also instituted just a $25 penalty for any amount between one ounce and a full pound (that’s a ton of weed). Now Youngkin wants to introduce misdemeanor charges for people caught with more than two ounces. Must be nice to be a criminally rich white man and never have to worry about cops ever harassing you.
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