voting rights – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Our democracy is broken. H.R. 1 can combat voter suppression and fix it

David Posnett — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 17:00:14 +0000

Mondaire Jones

Special to the USA TODAY Network: link here.

March 9, 2021

Our democracy is badly broken. Right now, Republicans in Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere are working hard to break it even further. But last week, my Democratic colleagues and I rose to repair and reconstruct it.

The For the People Act (H.R. 1), which passed the House of Representatives last week, will be the most significant improvement to our democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. My colleagues in the Senate should act swiftly to send this bill to President Biden’s desk. It is required to save our democracy from the people who incited the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.

The For the People Act is a comprehensive bill that establishes automatic voter registration, combats voter suppression, protects our elections from foreign interference, and ends partisan gerrymandering — a process by which representatives choose their voters rather than voters choose their representatives.

But I want to focus on how H.R. 1 changes how campaigns are funded, amplifying the voices of everyday Americans.

Our current campaign finance system gives the wealthy a megaphone and silences the rest of us. In 2016, just 400 mega-donors contributed a total of $1.5 billion – more than every small donor combined. Those donors are predominantly wealthy white men, and they predominantly contribute to white candidates.

Congress isn’t just funded by wealthy people — it’s full of them. More than 50% of lawmakers in the 116th Congress have a net worth of more than $1 million, compared to just three percent of the population. This is not by accident: our campaign finance system is rigged to favor wealthy candidates. They can fund their own campaigns. They’re more likely to have nest eggs they can rely on while campaigning. And when they need extra funds, they can lean on networks of affluent family and friends.

I experienced our broken campaign finance system firsthand in my own run for Congress. When I was considering running for office, the first question insiders asked me was not what I would fight for, not whether my community was behind me, but how much money I could raise.

My leading primary competitor never had to answer that question. As the son of a pharmaceutical billionaire, he didn’t have to raise any money at all. Instead, he spent $5.4 million of his inherited wealth to blanket the airwaves with TV commercials three months out from the primary election. In the general election, I faced yet another self-funding candidate who outspent me by pumping $1.5 million into his campaign.

Against these long odds, I was elected to Congress. As an openly gay, Black, working-class candidate whose community sent him to Congress, I’m an exception. But I shouldn’t be. With the small-donor matching system in H.R. 1, candidates like me could be the norm.

Small-donor matching is simple: for every dollar a regular person donates up to $200, public financing matches that dollar with $6. A $50 donation becomes a $350 donation. As a result, small donors would matter — fixing the toxic power dynamics that threaten our democracy.

Small-donor matching has already transformed New York politics for the better. The donors in New York City elections, which have a matching program, are by far more racially and socioeconomically diverse than the donors in New York State elections, which do not. H.R. 1 would take that transformation nationwide.

The same goes for candidates. Candidates of color disproportionately rely on small donations. But because big money drowns out small donors’ voices, we typically raise less money than our opponents. Thus, we are often prevented from even making the ballot. By multiplying the power of the people candidates of color rely on most, small-donor matching empowers more people to take their seats at the table.

When we can elect people who really represent us, we get a government that really serves all of us — not just the wealthy and well-connected. If Congress had more ordinary Americans, it surely would not be so indifferent to the needs of working families. My Democratic colleagues and I in this Congress are already proving that by passing real COVID-19 relief in the American Rescue Plan. And we’re just getting started.

For at least a decade, Democrats have promised that when we had the chance, we would fix our broken campaign finance system. It’s taken over 10 years, but we’re here. It’s time. If the Senate fails to follow through — if we compromise with corruption — we risk confirming many Americans’ beliefs that billionaires and corporations have captured both parties, that our elections offer no real choices, and that our democracy is a swamp in need of a strongman to drain it.

So let’s fight for H.R. 1 and its small-dollar matching program like our democracy depends on it — because it does.

Rep. Mondaire Jones represents New York’s 17th Congressional District, which includes most of Westchester County and all of Rockland County.

Undermining the U.S. Postal Service to Rig the Election

David Posnett — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 15:03:00 +0000

Will Zeldin protect our right to vote?

From: Daily Kos <campaigns@dailykos.com>
Just in case anyone thought it was a conspiracy theory to claim that Donald Trump was undermining the postal service in order to prevent mail-in ballots from being counted, on Thursday Trump flat out said it himself:

Trump saying clearly on Fox why he won’t fund USPS. “Now they need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots…But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting…”

Trump is clearly FREAKED OUT by the prospect of mail-in voting and doing whatever he can to suppress it. Politico even reports that Trump’s aides are exploring ways that Trump can curb mail-in voting through executive orders.

The more people vote, the less likely Trump is to win. He knows it, we know it. That’s why, as I detailed in the email below this one, Trump is doing everything he can to suppress the vote, while at Daily Kos we are doing everything we can to help people vote:

Trump is using Facebook and Fox News to spread disinformation about mail-in voting, while we are using every communication channel we have to debunk those lies and tell the truth about its near-total safety and security.
Trump is filing lawsuits to keep mail-in ballots out of the hands of voters, while we are sending hundreds of thousands of constituent letters to elected officials demanding full funding for the postal service and mail-in voting.
Trump is undermining and defunding the postal service, while we are funding 28 local civic engagement organizations in five crucial swing states who are providing on-the-ground support to help frontline communities vote.
Trump is recruiting 50,000 volunteers, including veterans and off-duty law enforcement officers, to intimidate prospective voters at polling places, while we are recruiting twice that many volunteers to work on turning out the Democratic vote.

Donald Trump has a multi-pronged campaign to suppress the vote in order to win re-election. At Daily Kos, we have a multi-pronged campaign to stop him.

First, here is Trump’s plan:

First, thanks to Big Tech companies like Facebook, Trump and his right-wing allies are using social media to spread disinformation about voting, in particular about the safety and security of voting by mail.
Second, in case the disinformation doesn’t work and Americans go ahead and request mail-in ballots anyway, Republicans are spending millions of dollars on lawsuits designed to keep mail-in ballots out of the hands of prospective voters whenever possible.
Third, in the event that prospective voters are able to acquire mail-in ballots, Trump has installed a Postmaster General who has deliberately slowed down mail delivery, with an eye toward preventing as many mail-in ballots from being counted as possible.
Finally, in the event that people give up on mail voting and decide risk their health by voting in person, Trump’s campaign, via the Republican National Committee, is giving millions of dollars to Republican state parties to recruit 50,000 volunteers–including veterans and off-duty law enforcement officers–to directly intimidate prospective voters and challenge ballots at “key precincts.”

At Daily Kos, we are not going to let this campaign against democracy stand. We will fight to cancel it, every step of the way:

First, through our heavily trafficked website, and our vast email and SMS lists, we collectively generate over 100,000,000 views from an average of 9,000,000 people every month. We have used, and will continue to use, these enormous channels to combat the right-wing disinformation campaign about voting by mail, and arm millions of grassroots activists with the truth: voting by mail drives up turnout, keeps you safe from disease, and is extremely secure.
Second, while we cannot afford high-priced lawyers to combat Republican lawsuits aimed at keeping mail-in ballots out of the hands of voters, we can more than make up for that with grassroots activism. This spring and summer, we have been coordinating with dozens of progressive organizations to send millions of letters to Congress, demanding full funding for voting by mail and for election security, and we will not relent until we win that campaign In the coming weeks, we will take that campaign to the state and local level, working with allies to pressure elected officials at every level to ensure a safe, democratic and high turnout presidential election.
Third, due to reports of delayed mail delivery, we are participating in an experiment with our primary Get Out the Vote partner, Vote Forward, to determine if the millions of letters our volunteers are preparing to mail to Democratic swing state voters in late October need to be sent out earlier this year than initially planned.
Finally, we are countering Republican efforts to intimidate prospective voters at the polls by recruiting two volunteers to help people vote for every one volunteer the GOP recruits to frighten them. Further, we are providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to local civic engagement groups who are on the ground in five key swing states–Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin–making sure those organizations have the resources they need to protect the right to vote for the diverse, frontline communities who bear the brunt of Trump’s assault on the right to vote

We are fighting back against Donald Trump’s comprehensive assault on democracy with a comprehensive defense of it. However, as a grassroots funded organization we can only go as far as you take us.

Please, chip in $5 a month to Daily Kos for the three months between now and Election Day and help us cancel Republican voter suppression.

Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Executive Campaign Director, Daily Kos

Math not Myths: Democrats Win When their Voters are Inspired to Turn out!

David Posnett — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 10:28:39 +0000

Great piece in the Nation: July 18, 2017. If there are 7 million Obama-to-Trump voters, why didn’t Trump’s vote total increase by 7 million?

Democrats Are Trying to Win the 2018 Midterms in All the Wrong Ways, By Steve Phillips

It is quite possible that Democrats are going to spend nearly $1 billion trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. By buying into a myth about why they lost in 2016, they are ignoring the underlying math about what really happened—misspending huge amounts of money, while setting themselves up to lose again in the critical contests to come.

Many progressive politicians and pundits have bought into the notion that millions of people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 defected from the Democrats and voted for Donald Trump in 2016. The strategic premise flowing from this conclusion—that the Democrats can prevail in the congressional and presidential races to come by winning those voters back—is influencing how tens of millions of dollars are being spent and will continue to shape the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars in the midterm elections next year. But as my colleagues at Democracy in Color and I point out in the new report “Return of the Majority Progress Report: Another Billion Dollar Blunder?,” the premise driving this strategy is ill-founded and incorrect.

The popularity and persistence of the myth was encapsulated in a recent New York Times column by Thomas Edsall, “The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought.” Edsall devoted considerable attention to “Obama-to-Trump” voters and cited estimates based on exit polls in which voters were asked whom they’d voted for in 2012 and 2016. That polling quantified the ranks of said voters as ranging from 6.7 million to 9.2 million people. The viewpoint has been popularized to the point where it is now accepted as fact and drives major Democratic decisions such as where to hold the Senate Democratic caucus retreat (West Virginia), to whom to feature in the response to the State of the Union (white people in a Kentucky diner), to how to spend $19 million in advertising in the Georgia special election (targeting Republicans rather than rallying Democrats). The primary problem with this approach is that the math underlying the myth is perplexing, at best, and just flat wrong at worst.

The inaccurate arithmetic is most evident when looking at what happened in Wisconsin, one of the three narrowly decided states that led to Clinton’s losing the Electoral College despite prevailing handily in the national popular vote. The conclusion that large numbers of Obama voters switched their allegiance to the Republican is undercut by the fact that Trump got fewer votes in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney did four years earlier. If Trump got a big infusion of previously Democratic votes, why did the Republican vote total go down? But look even more closely, at county-level data. In the 23 counties that flipped from Democratic in 2012 to Republican in 2016, the data show that it is likely that there were just as many Obama-to-third-party voters as there were Obama-to-Trump voters (an increase of 23,117 third-party votes, as compared with 20,662 additional Republican votes in those counties). And the biggest problem in Wisconsin was the fact that 60,000 fewer people voted in heavily black Milwaukee, contributing to Clinton’s losing the state by 23,000 votes.

The myth also lacks mathematical support in a state like Florida, where there was an actual surge for Trump, with him picking up 450,000 more voters than Romney received. That increase, however, didn’t come from disaffected Democrats. Clinton got more votes in 2016 than Obama did in 2012. What happened in Florida is that large numbers of whites who sat out 2012 rallied to Trump’s racial-solidarity appeals and came out in significantly larger numbers.

While the data from Wisconsin and Florida undermine the myth about what happened in specific strategic states, the aggregate data throw the entire premise into question. The most inconvenient fact for the proponents of the Obama-to-Trump migration theory is that Clinton got very nearly the same number of votes as Obama did nationally. It’d be like being told someone has taken 10 percent of the money out of your bank account, but when you check your balance it shows you have the exact same amount of money. If 10 percent of the funds went away, where did the 10 percent come from to backfill the account?

The other problematic point for the 7 million-lost-votes figure is that Trump’s total vote number increased only by 2 million over what Romney secured in 2012. If there are 7 million Obama-to-Trump voters, why didn’t Trump’s vote total increase by 7 million? It’s conceivable that a ton of Romney voters defected from Trump and were replaced by Obama-to-Trump voters, but there has been precious little analysis of that possibility. The focus for most Democrats begins and ends with wooing the Obama-to-Trump voter.

The numbers that aren’t in dispute are the figures for black voters and Stein voters. Recently released Census data shows that African-American voter turnout dropped precipitously, falling below the rate of the 2004 election. In Pennsylvania, according to national exit-poll data, the black turnout dropped by 137,000 people, and Clinton lost by 44,000 votes. In Michigan, the problem was Obama-to-Stein voters, with Stein getting 30,000 more voters than she did in 2012, and the Democrats losing the state by just 11,000 votes.

Certainly some voters did defect from Obama to Trump, and, conversely, some Romney voters moved to either Clinton or Johnson, complicating the calculations all around. Digging into data is important, but, unfortunately, that’s not where Democratic leaders are focusing their analytical attention. Rather than accurately assess the numbers, they have let the myth take on the status of legend, and tens of millions of dollars are being allocated based on faulty data. Perhaps the most pernicious part of the myth is that it reinforces the absolutely incorrect

Perhaps the most pernicious part of the myth is that it reinforces the absolutely incorrect mind-set that progressives are in the minority in America. Democrats won the popular vote—and not by a little, with Clinton’s 3 million vote margin surpassing the largest figure ever recorded by someone who didn’t win the Electoral College. In the critical states that enabled the Electoral College loss—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida—the progressive vote splintered, allowing Trump to slip through with less than a majority of the votes in each of those states. This minority mindset leads to timid tactics and tepid politics that are no match for the audacity of the right’s racist, xenophobic assault on multiracial America that is occurring every day. Fear of alienating the unicorn of the white swing voter mutes Democratic responses when the only proper response to what is happening in America is unapologetically fighting back by every means available—pushing for impeachment, conducting sit-ins to block the buses deporting people, and issuing full-throated denunciations of a judicial system that sanctions the police murders of unarmed black people. As Obama’s successful elections showed, Democrats win only when their voters are inspired to turn out in large numbers, and a bold, courageous, hopeful platform is essential to generating voter enthusiasm. In order to carry ourselves with the confidence to act with that kind of decisiveness requires the conviction that we are in fact the majority of people in America. If we look at math and not myths, we can straighten our backs, raise our voices, and do what is necessary to bring about the return of the majority in America.

This minority mindset leads to timid tactics and tepid politics that are no match for the audacity of the right’s racist, xenophobic assault on multiracial America that is occurring every day. Fear of alienating the unicorn of the white swing voter mutes Democratic responses when the only proper response to what is happening in America is unapologetically fighting back by every means available—pushing for impeachment, conducting sit-ins to block the buses deporting people, and issuing full-throated denunciations of a judicial system that sanctions the police murders of unarmed black people. As Obama’s successful elections showed, Democrats win only when their voters are inspired to turn out in large numbers, and a bold, courageous, hopeful platform is essential to generating voter enthusiasm. In order to carry ourselves with the confidence to act with that kind of decisiveness requires the conviction that we are in fact the majority of people in America. If we look at math and not myths, we can straighten our backs, raise our voices, and do what is necessary to bring about the return of the majority in America.

Steve Phillips TwitterSteve Phillips is a national political leader, civil-rights lawyer, author, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the founder and editor in chief of Democracy in Color, a multimedia platform on race and politics. He is the author of the New York Times best seller, Brown Is the New White: How a Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority (New Press). He is a regular contributor to The Nation.