Category Archives: 2018 Elections

by Ben Spielberg | February 28, 2020 · 10:21 am

Progressive Democrats Beat Electoral Expectations in Competitive House Races in 2018

At the Democratic debate in South Carolina on February 25, Pete Buttigieg asserted that “the people who actually turned the House blue, 40 Democrats, …are running away from [Bernie Sanders’s] platform as fast as they possibly can.” He wasn’t wrong – the vast majority of Democrats elected in swing districts in the Democratic wave of 2018, like Buttigieg, oppose Medicare for All, free college for all, and other social justice policies that Sanders supports. Along with anti-Sanders pundits and Republican strategists, they contend that the Sanders agenda is an electoral death sentence, that candidates who embrace social justice policy cannot win in contested House races.

Their argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, however, and not just because corporate Democrats got thrashed by Republicans all over the country in the decade prior to 2018. The evidence from the 2018 elections in the House also fails to support Buttigieg’s electoral thesis, as progressive Democrats in swing districts performed about as well relative to expectations as corporate Democrats did.

Beginning a year-and-a-half in advance of every congressional election, The Cook Political Report publishes a running list of “competitive races” in the House of Representatives. These races may “likely” be won by a Democrat or a Republican, “lean” towards one party or the other, or look like a “toss up.” They change over the course of an election as new information becomes available. Combining the 58 competitive races that The Cook Political Report originally identified in May of 2017 and the 116 they thought were in play on the day before voters finally went to the polls, a total of 124 districts can be considered to have been “swing” districts at some point leading up to the 2018 election.

Under the assumption that endorsements from Justice Democrats and Our Revolution indicate some degree of alignment with Sanders’s social justice agenda, a progressive candidate ran in the Democratic primary in 37 of these districts. Due in no small part to opposition from the Democratic Establishment, which often bankrolled corporate alternatives, only 9 of these progressive candidates advanced to the general election. Every single one of these remaining 9 candidates ran in a district that was projected to be a Republican win. Only 2 of the districts, Nebraska’s 2^nd and New York’s 24^th, were even considered in play in The Cook Political Report’s original judgment back in May of 2017; the others were all thought to be solidly Republican.

None of these 9 progressive Democrats won the general election. But using the spread between the Republican and Democrat in the district’s 2016 House election and the spread between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election as comparison points, 7 of them outperformed expectations. 2 of them – Ammar Campa-Najjar in California’s 50^th district and JD Scholten in Iowa’s 4^th district – came extremely close to knocking out incumbent Republicans in overwhelmingly Republican districts (see below). On average, these progressive Democrats outperformed Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points and the previous Democratic House candidate in their district by 12 percentage points.

The respective numbers for the more corporate Democrats who ran in the remaining swing districts* were slightly higher but statistically indistinguishable: they outperformed Clinton by 7 percentage points and the previous House candidates in their districts by 14 percentage points on average. The subset of corporate Democrats who beat progressive challengers in their primaries fared about the same in the general election, beating Clinton by an average of 5 percentage points and the previous House candidates in their districts by an average of 15 percentage points.

In other words, corporate Democrats didn’t outperform progressive Democrats in the November 2018 elections – there were just way more of them running in more winnable races! If there had been 115 progressive Democrats and 9 corporate Democrats squaring off against Republicans in swing districts rather than 115 corporate Democrats and 9 progressive Democrats, the Democratic Party could very easily have picked up the exact same number of seats.

What makes a district competitive and what makes a candidate progressive are up for debate, of course. Should Richard Ojeda, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and outperformed historical expectations more than any other Democrat running in a swing district, be considered one of the progressives? How about Katie Porter, who supported Medicare for All and is a co-chair of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign? Is it appropriate to use a more narrow definition of a swing district that excludes areas in which Medicare for All supporters significantly outperformed expectations? Should major gains from the likes of Campa-Najjar be discounted because the Republican incumbent he was running against (Duncan Hunter) was indicted? Should special elections like the one in Montana in 2017 replace 2016 elections as reference points when they’ve occurred? Given that he literally re-registered as a Republican after he flipped New Jersey’s 2^nd district blue, can Jeff Van Drew’s big win really be considered a victory for the Democratic Party? These are all reasonable questions to ask and underscore the inherent subjectivity of electability analyses.

At the end of the day, as I wrote back in 2017:

A candidate’s general election viability is ultimately unknowable. It may depend on her or her opponent’s platform, debating skill, fundraising prowess, personality, or field operation. It may hinge on the quirks of the community she’s running for office in or how much the media likes her. It may come down to random chance. Electability is also often a self-fulfilling prophecy; people commenting on electability and making decisions based on their perceptions of it can actually influence it and do so all the time.

The only thing we can be certain of in the electability space is political strategists’ and pundits’ poor track records. Many of the people who claim to know what is and isn’t possible in future elections thought Bernie Sanders would barely get 15 percent of the vote in the [2016] Democratic primary. Many of them were sure that Republicans would never nominate Donald Trump, and once that prediction turned out to be wrong, were still absolutely positive that Trump would never become president. It’s long past time we viewed their claims with skepticism, especially when there’s evidence that points the other way.

Good policy can sell. Voters can be persuaded. Political reality is not something that gets handed to us, but something we help create. Candidates with economic and social justice platforms can win in purple districts, and they’ll be even more likely to do so if Democratic pundits stop assuming they can’t and start getting behind them.

*Pennsylvania districts had to be excluded from these calculations because the congressional map was redrawn before 2018, making the historical comparison impossible. Texas’s 32^nd district, Arizona’s 8^th district, and Wisconsin’s 3^rd district also had to be excluded from the comparison to the 2016 House election because Democrats did not run a candidate in those districts in 2016 (these three districts were included in the calculated comparison to the 2016 presidential election).

How to Vote in California

With election day almost upon us and a large number of items on the California ballot, I thought I’d share my voting recommendations. If you’re interested in more background information than what I’ve summarized below, I recommend checking out the voting guides from the Democratic Socialists of America – Los Angeles (DSA-LA) and the San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters (The League SF).

My Statewide Recommendations, Summarized

Lieutenant Governor: Ed Hernandez
Insurance Commissioner: Ricardo Lara
Senate: Kevin De León
Superintendent of Public Instruction: Tony Thurmond
Proposition 3: No
Proposition 5: No
Proposition 6: No
Proposition 8: Yes
Proposition 10: Yes
Proposition 11: No

My Statewide Candidate Recommendations, Explained

Ed Hernandez for Lieutenant Governor: The best candidate who ran for this position, Gayle McLaughlin, “didn’t make it past the primary, so we’re now faced with the choice between two much-less-exciting Democrats,” as DSA-LA describes (California has what’s called a “jungle primary,” which means that, regardless of party affiliation, the top two vote-getters in June move on to the general election). Eleni Kounalakis is posturing as the progressive, recently saying she supports single-payer health care and free community college, but don’t be fooled – she’s the Establishment candidate who has actively opposed such progressive priorities in the past. She’s also rolling in millions of dollars of real estate money, a real concern when one of the Lieutenant Governor’s few major responsibilities is sitting on the State Lands Commission.

Hernandez, a state senator, isn’t an amazing candidate – The League SF describes him as having “a long record of votes and legislative scorecards that show him landing somewhere between the progressive and squishy-middle camps in Sacramento” – but he’s endorsed by labor for a reason and is the right choice in this race if you’re at all concerned about the influence of money in politics.

Ricardo Lara for Insurance Commissioner: Lara, the first openly gay person of color to serve in the California Senate, has a solid voting record – he co-authored a state single-payer health care bill and has fought hard to expand Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid program) coverage to immigrants who lack legal documentation.

Lara’s opponent, Steve Poizner, held this post from 2007-2011. While Poizner has technically withdrawn from the Republican Party to run as an independent in this race, he ran for governor in 2010 as a hardline Republican on a racist, anti-immigrant platform that included calls for big tax cuts and anti-union legislation.

Poizner is unfortunately up in the polls and the Chamber of Commerce believes he presents their “best opportunity on the November ballot to elect a center-right candidate to statewide office.” It’s up to us to deliver the Chamber a disappointment and vote in somebody who will hold big health insurance companies accountable: Ricardo Lara.

Kevin De León for Senate: The incumbent De León is running against, Dianne Feinstein, has held this seat since 1992. As DSA-LA details, “she supported the Iraq war, co-sponsored an extension of the PATRIOT Act, voted for Medicare means-testing, and has been a major power in pushing the war on drugs. After being elected proudly touting centrist cred, Feinstein’s shifted her official positions to be more liberal over the years, but she still considers marijuana a gateway drug, opposes single-payer healthcare, and only recently changed her position on the death penalty. In short, Dianne Feinstein represents the worst of the insider-influence pushing, centrist Democratic party that precipitated Trump and should be removed from power.”

De León is more than just the anti-Feinstein: in addition to his staunch advocacy for Lara’s single-payer bill, he’s led on renewable energy and issues affecting immigrants. He faces an uphill battle in toppling Feinstein due to her superior name recognition, but he’s received the endorsements of some major unions and the California state Democratic Party and, with your help, has a chance to at the very least give Feinstein a serious scare.

Tony Thurmond for Superintendent of Public Instruction: Thurmond, who overcame considerable adversity growing up, is a social worker who understands firsthand the challenges many students face. His long history of supporting high-needs youth includes running mentoring and housing programs and managing services for children with disabilities. As a member of the California legislature since 2014, he’s authored legislation to, among other things, expand access to free and reduced-price meals, bolster restorative justice programs, and ban for-profit charter schools in the state. His endorsers include the state Democratic Party, organized labor, California’s top teachers, and school counselors.

Thurmond’s opponent, Marshall Tuck, is a former charter school network president who ran for this post in 2014 and lost. He’s also been the CEO for the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit which manages a portfolio of Los Angeles public schools and uses philanthropic donations to supplement the public funding those schools receive. And he’s on the board of Parent Revolution, a group which purports to empower parents but has often misled them. While Tuck says he supports charter school accountability and a ban on for-profit charter schools, he opposes efforts to curb charter expansion.

Tuck’s campaign is once again receiving millions upon millions of dollars from individuals and organizations who promote aggressive charter school expansion and hope to weaken unions (in 2014, Tuck lobbied hard for a misleading lawsuit that would have weakened teacher due process protections). His overwhelming monetary advantage and strong support from Republicans have given him an edge in polling, so it’s imperative that Democrats get to the polls on Tuesday and vote for Thurmond en masse.

My Statewide Proposition Recommendations, Explained

No on Prop 3: Bond money for water infrastructure projects sounds like a good idea, but as DSA-LA explains, “California already passed a very similar bond measure just this past June, [a measure] that included provisions to ensure that money allocation went to democratically overseen projects [and focused] on projects that are truly public properties.

By contrast, this measure was directly written by a group of private interests with devious language to ensure that it sounds like the money enriching them is going to the public.” That’s why the Sierra Club and other environmental groups are also opposing Prop 3.

No on Prop 5: This deceptively worded proposition would allow all people age 55 and older to avoid paying the appropriate property tax rate if they move from a less-expensive property to a more-expensive property. It could eventually cost the state an estimated $1 billion per year in property taxes with no legitimate justification. It is opposed by a broad coalition of community and progressive organizations.

No on Prop 6: A supermajority of California legislators just passed a desperately needed gas and vehicle tax increase to fund road repairs and mass transit that have long been ignored. Prop 6 would undo that vote, stopping work on projects already underway (it would also prevent future legislatures from enacting gas and vehicle tax increases, forcing any such proposal to be enacted via the proposition system). We can choose poorly maintained roads and inadequate public transportation infrastructure or we can reject Prop 6.

Yes on Prop 8: The easiest way to see why Prop 8 is a good idea is to follow the money. Two big dialysis corporations, DaVita and Fresenius, have spent a combined $100 million trying to defeat the initiative. With that kind of cash to throw around (DaVita raked in $1.8 billion in profits in 2017) you’d think they wouldn’t need to gouge dialysis patients – and you’d be right! – but that’s exactly what they do. Prop 8, which would limit their revenue to 115% of the costs of providing care, deserves your support.

Yes on Prop 10: Back in 1995, California legislators blocked local governments from passing rent control laws with the Costa-Hawkins Act. Prop 10 would repeal Costa-Hawkins, allowing city and county governments to consider enacting rent control if they so chose. Affordable housing advocates thus support Prop 10 as a means of reviving the rent control option. Real estate developers and landlords who would prefer to rip off their tenants oppose it, spending tens of millions of dollars to lie to voters about Prop 10’s impact. Don’t get sucked in by their misinformation campaign.

No on Prop 11: A for-profit ambulance corporation, American Medical Response, is hoping that they can use Prop 11 to avoid complying with labor law. They’ve invested $22 million in this attempt to deny rest and meal breaks to ambulance workers and shield themselves from pending lawsuits. Even beyond my support for worker rights, I’d prefer that these companies hire enough employees to ensure that emergency responders are well-rested and well-fed – if you agree, the only choice is to vote no on 11.

Why isn’t every statewide race and proposition on your list?

For the propositions, I wanted to highlight those that are most important and/or controversial. I’m torn on Prop 12, which is why I decided not to include it in my list – I’m voting no because it has some problems but think the arguments for voting yes are reasonable and understand why most animal rights groups support it. I’d recommend voting Yes on Prop 1, Yes on Prop 2, Yes on Prop 4, and Yes on Prop 7, but I haven’t seen a ton of misinformation out there on them and didn’t want to take attention away from the others.

When it comes to the individual races, especially since there are no third-party or write-in candidates, many folks will reasonably choose the better of two candidates even in races without a particularly great option. For races that aren’t particularly close, however, others may choose to abstain, sending a message to the Democrat likely to win that they can’t take progressive support for granted. I only listed the individual races for which I believe the merits of a proactive vote are clear.

As an example, I didn’t endorse in the gubernatorial race. DSA-LA recommends voting for Gavin Newsom because his opponent, John Cox, “is endorsed by Donald Trump, and running on an anti-immigrant platform with strong overtones of fascism.” DSA-LA also notes that Newsom’s platform, catering to a “Bernie-Sanders-inspired revolt within the California Democratic party,” is “very, very good, including sanctuary state policies, ending private prisons, [a] state bank, single-payer healthcare, [and] universal preschool.” But they still say “you shouldn’t trust Newsom” for the same reasons The League SF didn’t endorse the Democratic favorite: while he’s been good on certain social issues (like gay marriage) throughout his career, his alignment with big business interests has long been a cause for concern. Since the race also isn’t close – Newsom has a greater-than-99% chance of winning – I think reasonable people can disagree on whether proactively voting for him makes sense. Either way, once he’s elected, as DSA-LA notes, we can’t “expect him to deliver any of his promises unless we fight for them.”

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Filed under 2018 Elections

Tagged as 2018 election, California ballot, Dianne Feinstein, Ed Hernandez, Eleni Kounalakis, Kevin De Leon, Marshall Tuck, Prop 10, Prop 11, Prop 3, Prop 5, Prop 6, Prop 8, Ricardo Lara, Steve Poizner, Tony Thurmond

by Guest Authors | October 18, 2018 · 1:27 pm

How Accusations of “Negativity” and “Divisiveness” Stifle Debate

by Yvonne Slosarski and Nathan Luecking

To all the leftist organizers out there: How many times have you been called “negative”? How often have those in power accused you of being “divisive”?

If your organizing experience is anything like ours, you may be nodding your head in agreement. It’s mid-October of an election year, which means that left-leaning candidates all over the country are facing accusations of “negativity.” In DC, our city, Elissa Silverman – one of the most left-leaning representatives in DC government – was called “the most divisive politician in the city” by her developer-backed opponents.

As volunteers for Emily Gasoi’s campaign for DC State Board of Education in Ward 1, we are often accused of “going negative” by Gasoi’s opponents. Given our research, professional, and organizing experiences, we recognize this tactic for what it is – an attempt to squash legitimate disagreement.

The accusation of “negativity” or “divisiveness” tends to function in three main ways.

1) It minimizes legitimate dissent to the status quo.

The call for “civility” has historically tended to silence people who dissent from the status quo. What counts as “civil” tends to support the existing power structure and celebrate what our political morality demands that we condemn.

In DC’s Ward 1, the call for “positivity” is similarly being used to shut down challengers to corporate education reform.

Gasoi’s opponent, Jason Andrean, is a Capital One Executive for Government Contracting. He also was a board member of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a market-based education reform organization started by hedge-fund managers. DFER advocates against teachers’ unions and for high-stakes testing and charter schools as the primary ways forward in education. Gasoi’s opponent also chairs the board of Achievement Prep, a high-stakes-testing charter school in DC that has been cited for excessive punitive measures, poor educational outcomes, and high teacher turnover.

Gasoi is running for the Ward 1 seat, in part, to challenge the corporate education reform model of DFER. She knows that the finance industry has too much power in education policy and that market approaches have re-segregated schools, lessened “deep learning” for minoritized students, and denied power to the people closest to classrooms – teachers, families, and students.

But corporate education reform is the status quo in DC, so pointing out Andrean’s connections to DFER and the banking industry – and his lack of education experience – is considered an “attack” by his campaign, which wrote the following in a recent email:

Throughout this race, one of my opponents has attacked my motives and has suggested that only someone with a doctorate deserves to represent the families of Ward One. She’s even gone so far as to attack my supporters and those who believe that ALL voices have value as we work to fix what’s broken in our public education system.

Aside from inaccurately portraying Gasoi’s claims, this email suggests that there is no room for criticizing corporate education reform. But how can we be “positive” about it when the stakes are so high for our students?

2) It obscures meaningful differences.

Organizations and candidates have meaningful differences in priorities and experiences. In a neoliberal environment, “positivity” rhetoric draws on an empty notion of individual equality to suggest that all experiences are somehow the same.

Returning to Ward 1, Andrean wrote the following in a Medium piece about his candidacy:

Since embarking on this journey my opponent, Ms. Gasoi, has made it her mission to lambast my character and discredit my education experience — which she deems inferior to her own. I don’t come to this race with an Ed.D. in education policy or having spent time as a classroom teacher, but like the majority of families that look like mine, I want my lived experience to be valued and represented on the State Board of Education. My opponent often tells others that I’m a ‘banker with no education experience’ when out on the campaign trail. The reality is that we all have an ‘education experience’ and that’s why I’m running for the SBOE… [O]ur leaders should reject the notion that there’s only one type of representative we should be electing to serve our kids and families.

When Andrean writes, “we all have an ‘education experience,’” he minimizes a very important difference between him and Gasoi. Unlike him, Gasoi has devoted her entire professional life to public education. That’s part of why her priorities, unlike his, are aligned with what’s best for students in DC.

3) It takes the conflict out of politics, to ensure that the powerful win.

Civility rhetoric presumes a shared interest between groups that—structurally—are in conflict. Where one group is up because another is down, we must bring conflict into the forefront, and those in power may label such disruption “negative.”

In the Ward 1 School Board race, Andrean and his supporters have consistently shied away from his policy priorities, instead uplifting their “positivity.” For example, his campaign tweeted:

I’m proud to have a campaign team that’s committed to running a positive race, one reflective of the ideals we’d hope our school system embraces. Whatever the outcome of this race, I’m committed to supporting our SBOE rep and those that come up short. It’s what our kids deserve. pic.twitter.com/iGRSdlIxnC

— Jason Andrean for DC State Board of Education (@JasonAndrean) October 12, 2018

Instead of debating policy priorities, he hails himself as the “positive” candidate, thus shutting down debate over consequential policies. As Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau argued, the status quo is always just one version of the world and conflict is an inherent part of “the political.” Forced positivity cuts off debate over decisions that matter. And with no real conflict, the powerful—who often benefit from inertia—win.

Of course, quashing legitimate and consequential debate is a serious problem for people trying to choose a candidate between options. Are you supposed to choose a representative based on how abstractly positive they are? What if they gut public services with a smile on their face?

This rhetoric of “positivity” seriously obscures the real-life consequences of policies that should legitimately be challenged.

Andrean, who has been the Chairman of the Board at Achievement Prep Public Charter School in Ward 8 of Washington, DC since 2016, has a troubling track record. Under his leadership, Achievement Prep has fostered a culture of punitive discipline, favored behavior management over classroom instruction, and responded inadequately to teacher concerns. DC voters who care about student outcomes and emotional well-being need to know this history.

In a 2018 Qualitative Site Review of Achievement Prep’s Elementary Campus, the DC Public Charter School Board observers noted that “Academic expectations and rigor were low across the campus. Class time was mostly devoted to managing behavior to keep students safe and compliant.” As the rest of DC moves towards a trauma-informed approach to discipline focused on restorative practices, Achievement Prep continues to embrace an archaic, punitive, zero-tolerance approach to behavior management. This is evidenced by Achievement Prep’s suspension rate, which is twice that of the city average. In addition, student consequences are imposed with little consistency and vary between students. The site survey reported:

Students screamed and called one another hurtful names and hit each other without consequence, while other students engaged in the same behavior received consequences inconsistently…In one observation an adult dragged a student by the hand out of the classroom when he went into crisis.

There was also a highly publicized incident in which a six-year-old girl suffered a concussion after a substitute from a privately contracted company dragged her across the floor.

In another incident in the spring of 2018, an Achievement Prep teacher was sexually assaulted by a visitor on school property. In response, school leadership put the teacher on involuntary unpaid leave for the remainder of the year. The teacher effectively lost nearly $3,000 in wages. While Achievement Prep staff organized, demanding safer working conditions, Achievement Prep leadership has not responded to this call for increased safety requirements. The lack of concern Achievement Prep leadership has shown may reflect why, of the 51 reviews posted by former employees on glassdoor.com, only 6% recommend working at the school. (Note that teacher working conditions and student success are linked, as evidenced by this study in the American Journal of Education.)

glassdoor.com reviews of Achievement Prep

Given these issues at Achievement Prep, it’s not surprising that concerns about student discipline, teacher recruitment, and management led to the rejection of Andrean’s 2015 application for a different charter school. Similar concerns drive our opposition to his candidacy and to corporate education reform more generally, and it would be irresponsible not to the tell the truth about his record. When we know the potential consequences of his winning the election, “keeping it positive” would be the lowest of lows.

Yvonne Slosarski has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Political Culture. She is an organizer and researcher on movements for economic justice, a Humanities professor, and the associate director of an honors program at the University of Maryland.

Nathan Luecking is a School Social Worker in the District of Columbia. He is a school mental health advocate and sits on a city-wide Coordinating Council for school mental health.

The Washington Post’s Lurch Toward Developers

According to The Washington Post’s editorial board, “balance…has eluded” Marc Elrich, the Democratic nominee for county executive in Montgomery County, Maryland whose campaign I managed during the primary. This allegation is based largely on Elrich’s written commitment, if elected, to “invite the [president of the county’s major labor union] to the interview and selection processes for all of [the county’s] department heads,” which the Post calls “an extraordinary promise, even for a pro-labor politician — and one without precedent in any area jurisdiction, as far as we can ascertain.”

It is true that local officials do not typically give labor a voice in government decision-making. But it is strange to say the promise to do so is less “balanced” than the more common practice of giving employees no input whatsoever on the managers who will be overseeing their work. In fact, giving workers substantially more control over private companies’ operations by allowing them to elect a portion of a company’s board of directors may be “among the most broadly popular ideas in American politics” right now. That practice, called co-determination, is already widespread in Germany and Western Europe. Elrich’s proposal, like co-determination, would help ensure that employees are assigned productive work that advances the mission that both managers and workers share.

Perhaps the Post’s confusion about the meaning of the word “balance” stems from the complete absence of it in their coverage of the Montgomery County executive race. “Marc Elrich’s lurch toward labor” was not the first, not the second, not the third, but the fourth explicitly anti-Elrich piece the editorial board published. They even wrote a fifth piece about ranked-choice voting (a policy that Elrich strongly supports) that subtly attempted to delegitimize Elrich’s primary victory before the votes were officially counted. While the Post’s editorial board is of course welcome to support or oppose whomever they please, the sheer volume of negative copy they’ve devoted to Elrich appears to be without precedent in their commentary on previous Montgomery County executive candidates (not to mention executive candidates in other area jurisdictions) – at least, as far as I can ascertain. The editorial board also violated some basic journalistic principles in their anti-Elrich advocacy.

Even more concerning, the Post’s anti-Elrich bias and journalistic malpractice weren’t confined to the editorial pages. The paper’s news coverage also suffered from a serious slant, casting a misleading narrative pushed by a few powerful developers and their allies as objective reporting.

Between when I started as Elrich’s campaign manager in October of 2017 and early February of 2018, the Post reported on pretty much every major event in the executive race and did so more or less neutrally. They covered county executive forums in October, November, and December, the decisions of former Rockville mayor Rose Krasnow and Potomac businessman David Blair to enter the field, the first major campaign finance filing in January, and the organizational endorsements of CASA in Action (Elrich), SEIU Local 32BJ (Elrich), the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO (Elrich), the Montgomery County Sierra Club (Roger Berliner), and Progressive Maryland (Elrich). In stories about important county issues like the government’s budget shortfall, the minimum wage bill Elrich co-sponsored, and the departure of one of the county’s major businesses, the Post also quoted Elrich and the other sitting members of the county council who were running for county executive while mentioning their candidacies.

In February, a new reporter took over the Post’s Montgomery County beat. And as major endorsements for Elrich continued to roll in, the Post stopped covering them. They did report on a racial justice forum on February 25, their piece on the crowded field in the county council race a few days later mentioned the county executive candidates in passing, and their article about whether to prioritize funding for the school system’s proposed capital budget or for road projects noted the candidacies of Elrich and Berliner, who were on opposite sides of that debate. But the Post mostly went silent on the executive race for a while, not carrying another news story about it until April 19.

That story, entitled “In Maryland’s largest jurisdiction, contest for county executive seen as anybody’s race,” quoted two “experts,” both of whom – Keith Haller and Steve Silverman – sat on the four-person candidate interview committee for a group called Empower Montgomery. Purporting to “effectively represent all Montgomery County residents – and avoid having political decisions influenced by narrow special interests,” Empower Montgomery actually represents the county’s most powerful special interest group: wealthy developers. Blair has been listed among the organization’s co-founders (Silverman has, too, though neither man currently appears on the Empower Montgomery website) and Elrich was the only county executive candidate who refused to take developers’ campaign contributions, insisting he would hold them accountable for paying for the school construction and transportation infrastructure necessary to support new development. So it wasn’t too surprising when Empower Montgomery launched a series of attack mailers against Elrich right before the election.

While calling Haller and Silverman election experts, the Post’s April 19 article did not mention either of their affiliations with Empower Montgomery or the county’s developers. The article did, however, give Silverman space to downplay the significance of Elrich’s endorsements and characterize his candidacy as occupying “the far-left, pro-union, anti-development lane.”

Then, on April 27, for the first time in two months, the Post finally covered another candidate forum. This forum – the last the paper would cover before the primary election on June 26 – was co-hosted by none other than Empower Montgomery. Referencing the report Empower Montgomery commissioned to be unveiled and discussed at the forum, the Post’s title warned that the “Montgomery Co. economy is stagnant, and leaders are ignoring job creation.” Among the solutions Empower Montgomery recommended to this ostensibly dire situation? As the Post summarized: attracting Amazon’s second headquarters (that “would help to solve pretty much every many [sic] of the economic problems the county faces,” the Post gushed); “reduce energy taxes and impact fees on new development; and increase economic development resources” (emphasis mine). The article referred to Empower Montgomery as a “nonprofit advocacy formed by business leaders,” making no mention of Blair being listed as a co-founder or the very narrow business interests – developers – that the organization actually represents.

When the Post’s editorial board endorsed Blair on May 12, they linked to this April 27 news article as justification, calling the Empower Montgomery-commissioned report “the unsettling backdrop for the June 26 Democratic primary…The central question is which of the candidates for county executive is most capable of juicing a sluggish commercial environment — the only way to broaden the local tax base so it can sustain the county’s excellent schools and progressive services.” In addition to endorsing Blair, the editorial board made sure to note that four of the other candidates would be acceptable. The only exception was Elrich, “whose popularity owes much to his reflexive opposition to innumerable local projects — including the Fillmore, a beloved live music venue in Silver Spring. Mr. Elrich would be the wrong person to broaden the county’s tax base and revive its prospects.”

This editorial prompted a flurry of angry letters to the editor from Montgomery County residents, one of whom reminded the editorial board of something they should have already known: “Mr. Elrich was not opposed to the ‘beloved’ Fillmore music venue but to the $11 million in public funds given to Ticketmaster.”

In an apparent attempt to justify their pro-Blair, anti-Elrich position, the Post’s editorial board doubled down with a follow-up piece on June 5. This second editorial inaccurately accused Elrich of “declar[ing] he’d rather divert jobs to neighboring Frederick County than attract them to Montgomery,” relying on a dishonest claim from a developer-funded blog that proudly asserts: “[d]evelopers are part of the solution and we welcome their support.” Elrich wrote a letter to the editor to correct the record, and the Post published it on June 10. But less than a week later, the Post highlighted the allegation again in a feature on Elrich that they published as part of a series on all six of the Democratic candidates. The feature linked the inaccurate blog post and – until I emailed the author and the piece was edited post-publication – failed to include a link to Elrich’s response.

Unlike the features on the other candidates, which focused on why those candidates were running and what they wanted to accomplish, the Elrich feature centered around criticisms and Elrich’s responses to those criticisms. “Marc Elrich is tired of being called a socialist,” it began, following up with “rumors about a Che Guevara poster on his office wall” and claiming that “business leaders” felt “unease” at the prospect of an Elrich-led county government. Whereas other candidates’ endorsements were all described positively, Elrich’s much more extensive and diverse endorsements list was mentioned briefly and then qualified with a less overt version of the critique in the Post’s most recent anti-Elrich editorial (see below). Prior to my email to the author, the feature didn’t even mention that Elrich would appear on the teachers union’s “apple ballot,” which is quite possibly the county’s most coveted endorsement prize.

Though it’s hard to fully appreciate how much of an outlier the Elrich feature was without reading them all (those interested can do so here), the graph below provides a quick illustration. Each bar represents the percentage of paragraphs in the feature that paint the candidate in a positive light minus the percentage of paragraphs that portray the candidate negatively. As the image shows, Elrich is the only candidate who received a net negative portrayal. (The categorization scheme is somewhat subjective, of course, but I tried to categorize conservatively; anybody interested can download and play with the categorizations here).

To be fair to the Post, they did cover the teachers union’s endorsement on June 6. They also covered candidates’ and progressive groups’ attacks on Blair for trying “to buy the election” in two separate pieces. Yet even there, the paper was less credulous about attacks on Blair than it was when evaluating attacks on Elrich. For example, the paper asserted that the Progressive Maryland Liberation Alliance super PAC “does not offer any proof that its accusations [about Blair’s business record] are true.” Not once did a Post news article put a similar note after “business leaders’” unfounded critiques of Elrich.

The combination of the bias in the Post’s main feature, their elevation of developers’ narrative without proper citation, and the editorial board’s blatant mischaracterization of Elrich’s positions surely influenced the primary vote. While Elrich won anyway and we’ll never be able to quantify the impact the Post’s misinformation had, it’s hard to imagine Elrich wouldn’t have won by a larger margin if residents had received more accurate information.

Moving forward, Montgomery County residents can feel confident that they’ll continue to get balance from Elrich. It would be nice if they could also expect balance from the paper of record.

6 Comments

Filed under 2018 Elections, Media

Tagged as developers, editorial board, Marc Elrich, media bias, Montgomery County, The Washington Post

by Ben Spielberg | December 31, 2017 · 12:40 pm

Written in 2017, Relevant in 2018 and Beyond

With the year drawing to a close, and because I like lists, I wanted to highlight the ten pieces I wrote in 2017 that I believe remain most relevant for 2018 and beyond.

#10: The Trump administration’s ongoing attack on workers (The Washington Post, August 30)
Donald Trump pledged during his campaign, that, with him in office, “the American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them.” In this piece, Jared Bernstein and I tick off a multitude of ways in which this promise has turned out, predictably, to be false. The list has gotten longer in the time since we went to press (check out Jared’s recent interview of Heidi Shierholz on how the Trump Labor Department is trying to help employers steal workers’ tips), and it will be important to continue to shine a light on team Trump’s anti-worker actions in 2018.

#9: The Paul Ryan Guide to Pretending You Care About the Poor (Talk Poverty, November 20)
Speaking of the disconnect between Republican politicians’ rhetoric and their actual actions, this satirical piece outlined the way in which Paul Ryan sells his help-the-rich-and-punish-the-poor agenda as the opposite of what it actually is. With the Republican tax cut for rich people signed into law, Ryan has already trained his sights on eviscerating programs that help the poor. Don’t let anyone you know fall for how he’ll spin it.

#8: Why Medicaid Work Requirements Won’t Work (The New York Times, March 22)
Elected officials who share Ryan’s disdain for poor people will likely try to add work requirements to their states’ Medicaid programs in 2018. Here, Jared and I explain why that policy’s main effect is just to deprive people of needed health care.

#7: Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working just fine (The Washington Post, June 27)
The Fight for $15 has been incredibly successful over the past few years; 29 states (plus DC) and 40 localities now have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum. Yet the not-so-brave quest some economists and politicians have undertaken to hold down wages for low-wage workers continues unabated, and they jumped all over a June study of Seattle’s minimum wage increase to proclaim that workers are actually better off when we allow businesses to underpay them. A closer look at the study, of course, reveals that it proves nothing of the sort, so keep this rebuttal handy for the next raise-the-wage fight you find yourself engaged in.

#6: Below the Minimum No More (The American Prospect, May 30)
Abolishing sub-minimum wages is the next front in the minimum wage wars; while many jurisdictions have raised the headline minimum wage, most have failed to satisfactorily address the exemptions in minimum wage law that allow businesses to exploit tipped workers, workers with disabilities, and teenagers. It’s about time we had one fair minimum wage for all workers, as this piece explains.

#5: Protect the Dreamers (The American Prospect, September 28)
Republican Senator Jeff Flake claims that he voted for the Republican tax bill after “securing…commitment from the [Trump] administration & #Senate leadership to advance [a] growth-oriented legislative solution to enact fair and permanent protections for #DACA recipients.” In this piece, Jared and I note how a clean Dream Act is the only approach that politicians who truly care about helping immigrants would find acceptable; Flake must be held accountable for supporting it. State lawmakers should also be pressured to take the steps we outline to combat the xenophobia emanating from the White House.

#4: U.S. Intelligence Agencies Scoff at Criticism of Police Brutality, Fracking, and “Alleged Wall Street Greed” (34justice, January 9)
To date, there is at best remarkably weak evidence behind many prominent politicians’ and pundits’ claims about Russian interference in the US election. I read the report that is the basis for many of these claims when it came out in January and, as I noted at the time, it’s almost comically propagandistic. Some Democrats’ disregard for actual facts when it comes to allegations of Russian hacking and “collusion” is troubling, as is the McCarthyite climate in which people who challenge the Democratic Party Establishment are accused of being secret agents of Vladimir Putin. Those who would prefer a more reality-based Russia discussion in 2018 would do well to take a half hour to watch Aaron Maté interview Luke Harding about this topic.

#3: Amen for Alternative Media (34justice, May 2)
An obsession with Russia conspiracy theories is far from the mainstream media’s sole problem. The problem also isn’t a paucity of Republican journalists, as the May/June issue of Politico posited. Instead, as my response to Politico discusses, the mainstream media’s problem is one of subservience to power. Independent media are doing the public a great service by exposing us to information and viewpoints often absent from corporate cable and major newspapers, and it is essential that we fight to protect and promote independent media in the years ahead.

#2: The Progressive Agenda Now: Jobs and Medicare for All (The American Prospect, April 3)
Given Republican control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress, one would be forgiven for urging social justice advocates to focus their energies on policy defense. But that would be a mistake, as Jared and I note in this column, both because the best defense is sometimes a good offense and because, if we want to enact the policy millions of people need, we must lay the groundwork for that policy as soon as possible. There is much more beyond a federal job guarantee and Medicare for All that we have to flesh out and advocate for, but those two big policy ideas wouldn’t be too shabby a start.

#1: We Don’t Need No “Moderates” (34justice, July 29)
Putting the right politicians in power is the prerequisite for enacting most of the policy changes we need to see. Those who tell you that “moderate” or “centrist” politicians are more “electable” than social-justice-oriented politicians are wrong, and there is never a good reason – never – to advocate for the less social-justice-oriented candidate in a Democratic primary. The results of the 2017 elections only underscore this point. It’s time we got to work electing true social justice advocates to positions of power.

Happy reading and happy new year!

1 Comment

Filed under 2018 Elections, Labor, Poverty and the Justice System, US Political System

Tagged as 2017, DACA, Donald Trump, health care, jobs, Labor Department, mainstream media, minimum wage, New Year's Eve, Paul Ryan, Russian hacking, year in review

by Ben Spielberg | July 29, 2017 · 11:08 am

We Don’t Need No “Moderates”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has apparently decided that embracing the “Blue Dog Democrats” – a group of politicians who proudly tout their commitment “to pursuing fiscally-responsible policies, ensuring a strong national defense, and transcending party lines” – is the prudent electoral strategy for the Democratic Party in 2018. Daily Beast contributor Michael Tomasky agrees, writing that the “reality, which many liberals refuse to accept[, is that to win a majority in the House of Representatives], Democrats have to win in 20 to 25 purple districts. And that means electing some moderates.”

If you’re in favor of Democrats joining with Republicans to enact tax cuts that go mostly to the rich, reductions in government spending on support for low- and middle-income people, and more legislation authorizing perpetual war, this strategy isn’t totally crazy. But if you’re in favor of “single-payer health care, a much higher minimum wage, a massive infrastructure program, a top marginal…tax rate around 50 percent, a much higher payroll tax cap, and more,” which Tomasky says he is, this strategy couldn’t be more wrong. Even if it led to a Democratic House, it would stymie your agenda. In New York, for example, while the Blue-Dog-esque Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) gives Democrats a nominal majority in the state Senate, the IDC consistently partners with Republicans to undermine economic and social justice. A Democratic majority doesn’t help you very much if the Democrats who get you there don’t share your values.

Importantly, there’s also no reason to believe Tomasky’s assertion that “moderate” candidates will improve Democrats’ electoral prospects. In fact, evidence suggests an alternate strategy holds more promise in contested (or even heavily Republican) districts in 2018.

Consider recent special elections to replace Trump appointees Mick Mulvaney (South Carolina’s 5^th District), Mike Pompeo (Kansas’ 4^th District), Tom Price (Georgia’s 6^th District), and Ryan Zinke (Montana’s At-Large seat) in the House. Democrats pursued the Tomasky strategy (or, as former Hillary Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon seems to call it, the “Panera Breads of America” strategy) in Georgia, spending a historical record $30 million on a candidate, Jon Ossoff, who stressed deficit reduction and actively opposed both single-payer health care and taxing the rich. The national party apparatus mostly stayed out of the other three races, but the Democratic candidates in Kansas (James Thompson) and Montana (Rob Quist) secured progressive endorsements with a platform closer to the one Tomasky theoretically supports. Nobody paid much attention to Archie Parnell, the Democratic candidate in South Carolina, who, like Ossoff, would fit in pretty well with the Blue Dogs.

The Democrats lost all four races. But based on how Democrats had fared in each of those districts historically, they also significantly outperformed expectations. All of them except for Ossoff, that is, who did far better than the practically nonexistent candidate Democrats ran in the prior congressional election in Georgia’s 6^th District but worse than Hillary Clinton performed there against Donald Trump. Note also that Georgia’s 6^th District is more affluent than most and thus, according to Tomasky, a place in which “the Democrat should definitely talk more about growth than fairness but can probably get away with somewhat more liberal social positions,” which basically describes how Ossoff ran his campaign. In other words, the Democratic Party invested the most resources and got the least return on one of the “moderate” special election candidates in a district tailor-made for the Tomasky strategy.

Advocacy for single-payer health care didn’t put Thompson and Quist over the top in their races, of course, and Parnell, a “moderate” who both the party and grassroots organizers more or less ignored, came the closest to victory. These special elections certainly don’t prove that endorsing economic justice more will win. But they do show it can play better than a Republican-lite economic platform in heavily Republican areas, a fact also underscored by the recent results of state special elections. In New York’s 9^th Assembly District, for instance, which Trump won with 60 percent of the vote, bold progressive Christine Pellegrino just trounced her Republican challenger en route to a seat on the state assembly.

Then there’s the recent international evidence. Jeremy Corbyn just helped the United Kingdom’s Labour Party pull off its biggest electoral swing in seventy years, defying pundit predictions of Labour’s imminent trampling from a few months before. Some of Labour’s surge was likely due to the Conservative Party’s mistakes, but some of it was also likely due to a bold set of economic ideas Labour outlined in a new manifesto, ideas that couldn’t be more different from those the Blue Dog Democrats embrace. Labour’s showing underscored what evidence had indicated since at least February of 2016, when I first pointed it out: Bernie Sanders was much more likely than Hillary Clinton to win a head-to-head matchup against a Republican presidential candidate that November. That evidence only got stronger as the primary season continued; many Democrats likely wish they had taken it more seriously. Today, Sanders – a politician about as far from the Blue Dogs as you can get in the Senate – remains the most popular politician in America. The claim that Sanders-style economic and social justice advocacy is unworkable in the critical purple districts Tomasky references doesn’t square with the absence of moderate Democrats more popular than Sanders in those districts.

And let’s not forget that the Democratic Party has been decimated in recent years. Not only have they lost control of the executive branch of the federal government and both chambers of Congress, they now also hold only 18 state houses, 15* governorships, and 13 state senates. They’ve been running moderate candidates in purple districts, and that strategy doesn’t seem to be working very well.

That doesn’t mean we can be certain about what will get Democrats elected. A candidate’s general election viability is ultimately unknowable. It may depend on her or her opponent’s platform, debating skill, fundraising prowess, personality, or field operation. It may hinge on the quirks of the community she’s running for office in or how much the media likes her. It may come down to random chance. Electability is also often a self-fulfilling prophecy; people commenting on electability and making decisions based on their perceptions of it can actually influence it and do so all the time.

The only thing we can be certain of in the electability space is political strategists’ and pundits’ poor track records. Many of the people who claim to know what is and isn’t possible in future elections thought Bernie Sanders would barely get 15 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Many of them were sure that Republicans would never nominate Donald Trump, and once that prediction turned out to be wrong, were still absolutely positive that Trump would never become president. It’s long past time we viewed their claims with skepticism, especially when there’s evidence that points the other way.

Good policy can sell. Voters can be persuaded. Political reality is not something that gets handed to us, but something we help create. Candidates with economic and social justice platforms can win in purple districts, and they’ll be even more likely to do so if Democratic pundits stop assuming they can’t and start getting behind them.

*Updated from 16 to 15 on August 5, 2017, after West Virginia Governor Jim Justice announced he would switch his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Thanks to Michael Sainato for the heads up!

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Filed under 2016 Election, 2018 Elections, US Political System

Tagged as Blue Dogs, Democratic party, Democrats, economic justice, elections, House of Representatives, moderates, purple districts, social justice, strategy, Tomasky