Tag Archives: Democrats

Oregon governor resigns in widening ethics scandal

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In the interest of fairness (since I write about Republican governor scandals regularly), and because Federal subpoenas have been issued, I should acknowledge that Oregon’s Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber has resigned from office in a fairly bizarre ethics scandal that has been growing since just before he was elected last November to a fourth four-year term (his second and third terms were non-consecutive).

In early October 2014, the initial revelation was that his fiancée — whom he had been dating for about a decade before getting engaged — had once had an illegal Green-Card Marriage to an immigrant in the 1990s, which he claimed not to know about. The crime was past its statute of limitations by the time she was forced to admit it. At first I wondered why this fact was relevant enough for a journalist to investigate, because as violations of the law go, it’s not an egregious or dangerous one, so it just seemed sort of trashy (there was a lot of troubling emphasis on how many marriages she had had and when they had begun dating). But the hints of the bigger problem were starting to emerge, and they seem to have been what motivated reporters to look into her background in the first place.

That problem, which is now at the center of the state and Federal investigations, is that Kitzhaber’s fiancée had been drawing a lot of attention to herself and her romantic relationship, not just by claiming State First Lady status (with a desk in the governor’s offices) but by using that for influence-peddling. In other words, they probably only found the illegal sham marriage because she was making a lot of noise about being the First Lady (before marrying him) and having “access” to the governor, which she (allegedly) has been using to win consulting contracts. That’s a clear ethics law violation.

At the moment, it tentatively looks like Kitzhaber himself might have just shown extremely poor judgment (or turned a blind eye) on multiple fronts, but it’s starting to look pretty hard to see how these actions weren’t on some level visible and acceptable to him. In all likelihood, he was aware of some or all of the transgressions by his partner and failed to stop them or do anything.

After waffling back and forth for several days over the past week, Gov. Kitzhaber resigned on Friday, just a month into his fourth term, handing over the governorship to second-in-line Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown, a Democrat, who will serve at least until a November 2016 Special Election is held, whether or not she runs for the job in her own right. She is relatively well known in some select national circles, particularly national LGBT political organizations, (and was probably already slated to seek higher office at some point) because she is openly bisexual, and there are very few out bi politicians in American offices. She is now the nation’s first out bi governor.

Final 2014 Senate Outlook

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Assuming no unexpected party switching, the Republicans will win the Senate if they win at least six Senate seats (net). Here’s how things look the night before…

Likely Democratic seat losses (ordered by approximate likelihood, most to least, of flipping): West Virginia, Montana, Louisiana, South Dakota, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa (8, based on consistent polling)
Possible Republican seat losses: only Kansas (1; independent may caucus with Republicans anyway)
Possible extra Dem seat losses: North Carolina, New Hampshire (2)
Likely key Republican seat holds: Georgia, Kentucky
Likely key Democratic seat holds: only Michigan (1)

N.B. Georgia and Louisiana are both expected to go to runoff or second-round elections after November. These will probably still be Republican wins, but will likely be highly contested if they are the determining factor for chamber control.

Background stats recap
  • Going into the November 2014 elections, Democrats and their supporting independents control 55 seats out of 100.
  • 36 seats in total, including 4 special elections, are up for election this year. (Most were last elected in 2008.)
  • 21 Democratic seats are up for election this year.
  • Only 15 Republican seats are up for election.
Key states with retirements

Democrats

  • West Virginia
  • Montana
  • South Dakota
  • Iowa
  • Michigan

Republicans

  • Georgia
Light blue = Heavily contested Democratic-held seat. Light red = Heavily contested Republican-held seat. (Credit: Wikimedia)

Light blue = Heavily contested Democratic-held seat. Light red = Heavily contested Republican-held seat. Michigan is generally now deemed, by both parties, out of contention to flip. (Credit: Wikimedia)

The Susan Collins Dilemma

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A new Buzzfeed article asks why no national resources were invested in trying to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine this year. Various people offer defenses or condemnations of the decision. But I think it raises bigger philosophical questions in strategic voting and campaigning that apply beyond Maine.

On the one hand, it makes complete sense to ignore this race. It wasn’t particularly close to begin with, she’s one of the more liberal Republicans left in Washington, and she’s very well liked by both Maine voters in general and many of the traditionally Democratic pressure/activist groups.

On the other hand, all those groups (and the national Democratic organizations) should have considered that no matter how much she has supported certain liberal positions, her Republican affiliation means she’ll be making a Republican Senate majority more likely (possibly even becoming the deciding factor), and that in turn means at least 50 far more conservative Senators voting against those issues and controlling the agenda. No matter how many votes she casts for Planned Parenthood, her vote for majority leader automatically outweighs that by a lot. I feel like they haven’t done that obvious math.

This is a good example why I have a problem when left-leaning independents (and some Democrats) say they want to keep an open mind and consider voting for moderate Republicans, even if they would never consider voting for a regular or right-wing Republican candidate. If I accept the premise that she’s moderate or even liberal — and I actually think there’s a lot in her voting record to dispute even that — her re-election alone makes it vastly more likely that a whole battery of extremist policies will be put forward and possibly even pass the Senate, even if she votes against them all. If you don’t support the overall Republican agenda, you can’t vote for their maverick/liberal backbenchers even if a specific candidate has voted or will vote the way you want on your issues, because as long as they support their party’s legislative majority, the mainstream position of the party is what will carry through.

I’m sure someone will now make the “but voting for moderate Republicans will make the party more moderate!” argument here, but I haven’t really seen evidence that it actually works like that in practice. Plus, the so-called moderates like Collins (and a few others) really tend to end up voting for the extreme agenda the vast majority of the time when the heat is on.

If they weren’t supportive of the bulk of the Republican agenda, the candidates wouldn’t be registered as Republicans in the first place — or they would have left the party like Lincoln Chafee or Jim Jeffords or Arlen Specter all did.

And in the end, don’t we want a clear choice between parties, agendas, and directions anyway?

susan-collins

Wendy Davis team attacks opponent’s wheelchair

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There have been a lot of things to criticize the campaign team of Texas Democratic governor nominee Wendy Davis for. It hasn’t been well run. But perhaps the most egregious so far was the recent decision to run an attack ad against her Republican opponent that focuses on his disability (wheelchair-bound partial paralysis from an accident).

Don’t get me wrong: Attorney General Greg Abbott is awful. And he is indeed probably justifiably labeled a hypocrite (see below). But calling politicians hypocrites isn’t that effective in general, because most people kind of assume it anyway, and this is bound to make her look far worse than it does him.

The ad argues that Abbott successfully sued for his 1984 injury, but later as a Texas Supreme Court justice and state attorney general opposed similar efforts from other people suing hospitals and corporations.

“Abbott argued a woman whose leg was amputated was not disabled because she had an artificial limb,” the narrator says. “He ruled against a rape victim who sued a corporation for failing to do a background check on a sexual predator. He sided with a hospital that failed to stop a dangerous surgeon who paralyzed patients.”

 
Here’s the the thing: Those actions are terrible, but emphasizing his own disability and criticizing him explicitly for being a heartless hypocrite wasn’t necessary to make that point. He’s been campaigning all year with ads talking about and featuring his disability. Given that many of Abbott’s own ads mentioned or showed his wheelchair, she could just have pointed out his shameful positions without also explicitly bringing up the wheelchair and suggesting he’s a hypocrite. People could figure that out on their own because they already know the other half, without it being brought up explicitly, and without empty wheelchair images.

Therefore, this seems like a really bad move, even if the criticisms raised are warranted. Instead of the focus being on how horrible his record is, the focus is on how nasty the Davis campaign’s TV ads are. Already, most of the past long weekend was taken up debating whether or not it was out of bounds, and she keeps defending it. I don’t really see the point.

Have Dems finally resolved their internal social issues split?

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“Turning Tables, Democrats Use Cultural Issues as a Cudgel,” blares the New York Times today. Amid all the gloomy news for Democrats across the country in 2014, this may be the single article that has brought the most joy to me, featuring one race after another where the Democrat is running strongly on — not away from — social issues, on the progressive side.

This is a clear sign to me that, although we’re still facing huge challenges on these issues, the tide has finally turned — not just among voters but among Democratic candidates. For example, in just a few years we’ve gone from Democratic senators being terrified to endorse repealing DOMA to them gleefully beating their opponents over the head with that. It’s a similar story for reproductive freedom issues. While the policy tide on the latter is still running hard in the wrong direction in dozens of states, the campaign trail story is encouraging. And best of all, there’s been no sudden uprising by Christian conservative voters in response.

When I flash back to the dark days of November 2009, as the anti-choice Stupak Amendment suddenly appeared on the U.S. House version of the health insurance reform bill and looked like it might be mirrored in the Senate bill, despite a Democratic majority in both chambers, and I recall my angst over whether socially progressive Democrats should be doing more to purge socially conservative Democrats like Bart Stupak from the party so they would stop hurting the Democratic base (women, gays, et al), I feel a lot better today.

In no small part, that’s probably because the 2010 midterm voters did most of the heavy lifting on purging many of those rotten Democrats out of office. In the short run, it meant that even more hardline socially conservative Republicans often took their seats, unfortunately. But the broader result was that those hardcore socially conservative Democrats were no longer in an authoritative place inside the party over the past three and a half years to shout down the lefty Democrats as they persuaded the moderates to switch positions or take stronger positions, in line with the rapidly shifting electoral landscape. Extremist Republicans in winnable districts will be easier to replace in the general elections of coming years (with socially progressive Democrats) than anti-gay, anti-choice Democratic incumbents would have been in primaries. Meanwhile, moderate Democrats in competitive districts will be better able to rally the Democratic base on progressive social values, to remain in office.

This internal transformation has allowed the Democratic Party to define itself much more clearly, which helps motivate activism and turnout among ordinary Democrats. As to the socially conservative voters who will vote exclusively or heavily on these issue, they’ve already become confirmed Republicans at this point and are now out of reach to even the most conservative Democratic candidates.

Beyond gerrymandering: Other geographic challenges for Democrats nationally

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I received some criticism for my suggestion earlier this year that Democrats’ top medium-term priority should be recapturing state legislatures before the next redistricting after the 2020 Census to prevent gerrymandering, on the basis that other factors were causing bigger problems for Democrats’ abilities to win legislative and Congressional districts. I still think gerrymandering plays a large role in current electoral hurdles facing Democrats across the country — and one that is being downplayed by some analyses — but I accept that there are other factors.

To that end, I wanted to pull together some extended passages from two recent articles that I think effectively discuss those political demographic challenges.

The first looks, mathematically, at how Democratic vote share and turnout can be increasing (which helps in presidential and Senate races) but Republicans can hold so many Congressional districts. This focuses on urban versus rural districts. Nate Cohn, NYT/The Upshot, “Why Democrats Can’t Win the House:”

The gap between staggering Democratic margins in cities and the somewhat smaller Republican margins in the rest of the country allows Democrats to win key states in presidential and Senate elections, like Florida and Michigan. But the expanded Democratic margins in metropolitan areas are all but wasted in the House, since most of these urban districts already voted for Democrats. The result is that Democrats have built national and statewide majorities by making Democratic-leaning congressional districts even more Democratic, not by winning new areas that might turn congressional districts from red to blue.
[…]
The role of partisan gerrymandering in all of this is hotly debated. It has indeed allowed Republicans to squeeze extra districts out of states like Michigan and Virginia, and strategically reinforce vulnerable incumbents. Those additional districts might make the difference between an insurmountable Republican advantage or a merely significant one. But gerrymandering is not responsible for the entire Republican edge in the House.

The political scientists Jowei Chen, of the University of Michigan, and Jonathan Rodden, of Stanford University, estimate that gerrymandering costs Democrats about six to eight seats in the House. Even so, “by far the most important factor contributing to the Republican advantage,” Mr. Chen says, “is the natural geographic factor of Democrats’ being overwhelmingly concentrated in these urban districts, especially in states like Michigan and Florida.”

To retake the House, Democrats would not just need another great election year, like 2006 or 2008; they would need to build a much broader coalition than the one they currently focus on in presidential elections. They would need to attract the voters that some liberals thought they could abandon: the conservative Democrats of the South and Appalachia, where the vanquished Blue Dogs once reigned.
[…]
If Democratic losses in that part of the country are irreversible, Democrats might be forced to wait for demographic and generational change to spread beyond urban centers and suburbs, giving the party a chance to build a more decisive majority. Until that happens, the long-anticipated Democratic majority has little chance of enacting the most ambitious elements of its agenda.

 
One puzzle not answered there: If districts are being drawn reasonably fairly and reasonably numerically evenly, why are urban voters (a group gaining strongly in size relative to rural voters) not getting more districts drawn in their areas? Are those districts simply voting more heavily than before, without actually gaining more residents? Seems unlikely.

On another note, Cohn repeatedly emphasizes that the Democratic Party focus on presidential politics and urban interests — and the unusual antipathy against President Obama specifically — has hurt downballot conservative Democrats in non-statewide-level races in rural areas.

On the one hand, I’m highly sympathetic to the criticism that the Democratic Party (and to a lesser extent the Republican Party) has become increasingly obsessed over the past half century with short-term, single-candidate-personality-centered presidential campaigns at the expense of strategic, broad-based, long-term party-building activities. (Read James MacGregor Burns’ book Running Alone: Presidential Leadership from JFK to Bush II for a history of how and why this came to be.) This has also made it more complicated than ever to define the party and what it stands for since any candidate can take the label and then run on his or her own personalized platform.

On the other hand, I also think that conservative Democrats have gotten more conservative in recent years, which is making it difficult for Democrats from those urban areas and more liberal-leaning states to get excited about helping them with volunteer effort or contributions. One could debate whether they have become more conservative out of sincere belief or to try to catch up to a general frame shift in what center-right voters consider acceptably conservative (much like Republican primaries endlessly drifting more and more toward the extreme right), but I don’t think those conservative Democrats have simply been left behind by the rest of the party liberalizing. Support for moderate healthcare reform and protection of Social Security and other government programs popular among older voters and Appalachian White voters used to be core planks even among more conservative Democrats. Some still support those positions/policies, but a lot of the remaining or new rural Southern Democrats have been running away from those old touchstones.

Again, the reasons are probably debatable, but as the overall Democratic Party trends more socially liberal and economically liberal and then watches these non-urban candidates not only not catch up but actively move backward on some of these issues, it becomes very difficult to explain how they are even members of the same party or whether they will even vote for the (liberal) rest of the party’s priorities if elected to be part of a majority together.

Obviously there are a lot more advantages to being in the majority than not, especially in the House where the minority gets almost no power even when the margin of seats is very close, but it’s frustrating to expend energy and money electing people who may not just vote against but actively block key priorities for the majority of the majority. And it’s true that’s not entirely a new problem either, given that rural Democrats famously blocked things like civil rights legislation for decades. But the country is also significantly more urban now than previously … yet the rural districts and rural members, who are increasingly out of step and falling behind the party’s internal majority, continue to wield a substantial veto.

The second article examines whether a hypothetical evolution/catching-up of non-urban voting patterns and issue beliefs — cited at the end of that Cohn article passage above — is actually likely to occur and thereby make Democrats nationally a stable majority. This focuses on the role of migration between red and blue states. Harry Enten and Nate Silver, Fivethirtyeight.com, “Migration Isn’t Turning Red States Blue:” Read more

Missouri Republicans keep making the case for Missouri Democrats

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Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments during the 2012 U.S. Senate election may be the most famous example of Missouri Republicans being so effortlessly terrible that voters are forced to pick the Democratic nominee regardless of that candidate’s merit, but he’s far from the only one.

Recently, of course, I blogged about the Missouri state legislator who said he would rather let everyone overdose on prescription drugs than have Missouri implement a database to track misuse of prescriptions for medications, just as every other U.S. state has done.

Today we were treated to three-term Republican Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder’s views on the crisis in Ferguson, which were either the loudest dog whistle of the decade or the most tone-deaf political remark uttered in the Show Me State since Congressman Akin’s non-scientific beliefs on rape “shut that whole thing down,” in terms of his career.

Here’s the quote from Kinder via RawStory:

“We do not do justice in America in the streets though,” he argued. “We have legal processes that are set in motion, that are designed after centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence tradition, they’re designed to protect the rights and liberties of everyone involved.”

“That includes the Brown family, for justice for them and for the community. It also includes the officer who has not yet been charged,” he added. “Our constitutional and our Bill of Rights protections have to be followed here, and we do not do justice in the streets.”

“That’s one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization, is that that we do not have politicized trials. We let the justice system work it out.”

 
Anglo-American civilization and jurisprudence? We do not do justice in the streets?

For someone commenting on a racially charged crisis, resulting from a White police officer unilaterally gunning down an unarmed Black teen he did not suspect of any crime, in a state (and country) with a long and ugly history of White lynch mobs enacting “justice in the streets,” this is about the worst possible thing he could have said short of actually just dropping n-bombs and death threats all over the broadcast.

Democratic Governor Jay Nixon’s policy response to Ferguson has been pretty terrible, and his rhetoric has been pretty misguided, but this line by the Lieutenant Governor is a pretty good demonstration of why Nixon ended up as the only credible option for reasonable voters, Democrats or otherwise… Complete awfulness as an alternative makes a great case for living with mediocrity.