03 November 22
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The once and future President ekes out a win, but now has to repair the damage of the Bolsonaro years.
A couple of hours after the polls closed, Lula appeared at a São Paulo hotel, where he gave a victory speech to a packed roomful of journalists and his election team. He thanked God, his wife, Janja, who was at his side, and several of his political allies for aiding him in his triumph. In a manner that felt reminiscent of Joe Biden’s conciliatory words after beating Donald Trump, in 2020, Lula alluded to Brazil’s bitter divisions by saying that he wished to be the President of “all Brazilians,” while asserting, “There aren’t two Brazils. There’s just one.” (His supporters in the room applauded, but everyone knew that it wasn’t true.)
Afterward, Lula headed to an elevated soundstage that had been built on Avenida Paulista, the city’s main street, where hundreds of thousands of people noisily convened in a raucous celebration of Lula’s return to power. There, into the early hours of Monday morning, Lula spoke, and sometimes wept, in a voice that had turned alternately hoarse and growly with age and raw emotion. He talked about his time in prison, where he had been “buried alive” on trumped-up charges, and about his comeback, and he thanked Brazilians for giving him a chance to govern them once more. He proclaimed that “authoritarianism and fascism” in Brazil had been defeated, and that democracy had returned. Brazil’s political rhetoric, like the United States’, has become dangerously inflamed. Just as Trump began referring to Democrats as “socialists” during his time in office, Bolsonaro, his unabashed protégé, has routinely vilified Lula’s followers in the left-of-center Workers’ Party as “communists.” In the hard-fought Presidential campaign, and in the month since the first round of voting, on October 2nd—which Lula won, but without the necessary fifty-per-cent majority to declare victory outright—the two men had all but come to physical blows, with Bolsonaro calling Lula a thief and a traitor to his face, and Lula, red-faced with anger, referring to Bolsonaro as a liar and as a heartless and negligent leader, recalling his sneering dismissals of the risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reaped a grim tally of six hundred and eighty-eight thousand Brazilian lives, the second-highest mortality figure in the world, after the United States.
As Lula spoke in Monday’s predawn darkness, his supporters, their arms raised in the air, laughed and shouted, and many cried with emotion. They raised a chant over and over: “Bolsonaro, shove it up your ass!” After Lula spoke, the popular singer Daniela Mercury joined him onstage. She belted out a few of her hits, and people danced and sang along. The night acquired a Carnaval vibe; next to me in the crowd, a trio of scantily dressed trans women, one showing off large, bare breasts, shimmied, while nearby a pair of tattooed, shirtless men wheeled around in a display of acrobatic abandon. People waved red Workers’ Party flags and banners with Lula’s smiling face emblazoned on them. Others wore T-shirts that read “Pincanha, Cerveja, … Lula 2022” (“Steak, Beer, … Lula 2022”), from Lula’s folksy invocations of Brazilians’ beloved tradition of the back-yard barbecue and his promises that, notwithstanding a bad economy, he will try to rid the nation of its chronic inequality and give all Brazilians a decent standard of living. Eliminating hunger in Brazil, he had announced, would be his No. 1 priority. It’s a pledge he’ll find hard to keep, but that night his supporters—many of them still scarcely able to believe that he was back, and that Bolsonaro, despised for his routine displays of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism, among other traits, had been dislodged from power—cheered everything Lula said.
After daybreak on Monday, with the partying over, an eerie silence prevailed. Bolsonaro had said nothing, and remained out of sight, with little in the way of news emerging from meetings that he was said to have held with senior military officers and some of his cabinet officials. Speculation was rife that he might not concede, or might even attempt a January 6th-style mob putsch similar to the one Trump had instigated on Capitol Hill. And, sure enough, by late afternoon reports began spreading of truckers blocking highways around the country, calling the election rigged and demanding that the armed forces intervene on Bolsonaro’s behalf. The federal highway police, meanwhile, said to be rife with bolsonaristas, were pointedly not doing anything to clear the roads. (On Election Night, the chief of the federal highway police had broken with legal norms by personally urging people, on a social-media account, to vote for Bolsonaro.)
By Tuesday morning, more roads had been blocked, and, here and there, truckers had been joined by groups of civilians who said that they would not leave until the military took over to guarantee the continuation of Bolsonaro’s Presidency. For most of Tuesday, the same surreal situation continued, but with fervid speculation about the eventual announcement that Bolsonaro would make. (Until then, the only communication from the Bolsonaro camp had come from one of his sons, Flávio Bolsonaro, a member of the Senate, who on Monday tweeted his thanks to everyone who helped his father win the greatest number of votes ever in his political career, and declaring that the forces he had mustered would carry on, with their heads held high. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, a Pentecostalist influencer, reassured her social-media followers that she and her husband remained “united.” This came after rumors to the contrary had begun spreading, when, a few hours after Lula’s victory, her husband had “unfollowed” her on Instagram. The First Lady pointed out that the President did not control his Instagram account. It was later reported that the culprit had been the Bolsonaros’ techie son, Carlos, who is a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, and with whom she was said to have had a fight.
In the late afternoon, several hours after summoning a waiting crowd of reporters into the Presidential Palace, Bolsonaro emerged, with a tight smile, and read from a written statement for two minutes, then turned and left the room. He never mentioned Lula by name, nor did he mention the specifics of the election results, or even whether he had won or lost. With a tone of menacing ambiguity, however, he said that peaceful demonstrations will always be welcome and added that, as he had done throughout his political career, he respected the constitution.
Then one of his senior aides appeared and said that the Presidential “transition” would begin on Thursday. In other words, Bolsonaro has opted to remain in a state of public denial, but the election was over. As Marina Dias, a politically astute Brazilian journalist and a friend, told me, “He did not contest the election, which is great. He does not have the base or power for that. And he said he will follow the constitution. O.K. And his chief of staff has said the transition could begin. But he did not ask the protests to stop. So what he is basically saying is: ‘Let’s do it under chaos and see how it goes.’ ”
At the hotel where Lula had been meeting with his advisers throughout the afternoon, he appeared briefly to shake a few hands and pose for selfies. He looked perky and enthused. Then he was gone, reportedly headed with his wife to Bahia, on the coast, to try and rest up for a couple of days before the transition begins. The Presidency looms again for Lula and, with it, an enormous amount of work to fulfill the campaign pledges he made. In addition to reunifying a divided nation and solving hunger, they include rescuing the economy, eliminating homelessness, restoring Brazil’s name on the world stage—and easing global climate change by saving the Amazon rain forest. “He knows that if he doesn’t take the days off now, that’s it,” one of his closest aides told me. “After this, they’ll probably never have another chance.”
Florida governor Ron Desantis speaks during a press conference held at the Broward County courthouse on August 18, 2022, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
“The guys that I’m speaking to, simply put, are gun-shy [about registering and voting] right now,” one voting rights activist told VICE News.
“You don’t realize how important your right to vote is until it’s taken away from you. In my case, for 18 years,” Whitaker, who was in prison from 1998 to 2016 and founded the nonprofit Adversity Overcomers Outreach Ministries after his release, told VICE News. “For a lot of us, we would love nothing more than to have all our rights returned back to us, to get back into the flow of life and make a change. Part of that is voting.”
But Florida has continued to make it difficult for thousands of former felons like Whitaker to vote, and new barriers have created more confusion and post-release hurdles for reintegrating back into society. In many cases, advocates say, these barriers are enough to dissuade these Floridians from taking part in the election process altogether—particularly after state lawmakers created a specific unit within the state police to investigate election crimes and 20 people were arrested in August for alleged voter fraud, a third-degree felony.
Last month, the Tampa Bay Times obtained body camera footage from these arrests, showing confused and frustrated returning citizens being handcuffed. When 55-year-old Ramona Oliver was approached by police as she was leaving for work before 7 a.m., she responded: “Voter fraud? I voted, but I didn’t commit no fraud.” More than half of those arrested were Black, according to the Times.
In 2018, Florida voters voted by a nearly 2-to-1 margin for Amendment 4, which restored voting rights to people convicted of non-murder or sexual assault felonies who’d completed their sentences. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was elected governor the same year, had opposed what he called the “automatic restoration of voting rights.” Though those who were arrested would not have been re-enfranchised under Amendment 4, they say they were told they were eligible, allowed to register, and even sent voter registration cards, as Politico reported in August.
In 2019, the legislature significantly curtailed the law by passing legislation requiring those who wished to have their voting rights restored to pay “all fines and fees,” including restitution and legal fees,” before they could vote. Amendment 4 supporters have likened it to a poll tax.
“I think [Amendment 4] was a mistake and would not want to compound that mistake by bestowing blanket benefits on violent offenders,” DeSantis, who signed the new law, said just six months after the amendment passed. (Neither the governor’s office nor Secretary of State Cord Byrd responded to a list of questions from VICE News.)
A total of 4.6 million people in the U.S. are disenfranchised due to a prior felony conviction, according to data released by the Sentencing Project last month, and four years after Floridians voted to restore voting rights to former felons, the state still has the largest number of disenfranchised returning citizens in the country. More than 934,000 people who’ve completed their sentences are still ineligible to vote, according to the Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for the rights of the incarcerated, including their right to post-prison suffrage.
“It feels like a Dickens novel sometimes—it’s the best of times and worst of times. On one hand, we ended the lifetime ban for 1.4 million people, 216,000 returning citizens registered to vote in Florida,” Neil Volz, deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told VICE News. “At the same time, there are hundreds of thousands of returning citizens who still face barriers to the full implementation and promise of Amendment 4.”
Voting rights advocates say the state is shirking its responsibility to returning citizens by allowing them to register and then arresting them for voting. The high-profile arrests, they say, amount to a crackdown that has caused a chilling effect among people who otherwise might be eligible to vote.
“The guys that I’m speaking to, simply put, are gun-shy right now,” Whitaker said. “This is all startling to them.”
In 2020, Miami-Dade County resident Robert Lee Wood was approached outside of a Walmart to register to vote, and did so; he then received a voter registration card in the mail from the state, and voted in the 2020 general election. In August 2022, however, Wood’s house was raided by the police and he was taken into custody—for the crime of voting illegally.
“Dozens of cops surrounded his house with automatic weapons at 6 o’clock in the morning,” Wood’s lawyer, Larry Davis, told VICE News. “They wouldn’t even let him get dressed.”
But by October, the case against Wood had begun to unravel. Davis and fellow attorney (and Democratic state representative) Michael Gottlieb filed a motion that persuaded a judge to dismiss the charges against Wood by arguing that the case was not multi-jurisdictional, and thus not eligible for statewide prosecution. In his order, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch borrowed from Shakespeare’s Henry V, specifically, a line about how the titular character’s “arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings.”
“How much wider even than that does [the Office of Statewide Prosecution] seek to extend its reach?” he asked. “In the case at bar, the answer is simple: wider than the enabling statute contemplates, and therefore too wide.”
But even with the charges dropped, Gottlieb says the state’s case against the voters is “entrapment” and “outrageous government conduct.”
“They should instantly take that person’s application and say, ‘Look, you're not entitled to vote,’” Gottlieb said. “But instead, they’re allowing them to vote, they’re giving them a voter registration card, they’re giving them a polling place… and then when they vote, they’re saying, ‘What you did was a crime.’”
In April, when DeSantis signed a bill creating the Office of Election Crimes and Security within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate alleged election crimes, he claimed in a statement that while Florida ran “the most secure elections in the country” in 2020, the state would “need to do more to ensure our elections remain secure.”
Those offenses, he said, would be reviewed by the Office of Statewide Prosecution, which prosecutes charges concerning two or more of Florida’s 20 trial circuits.
Gottlieb, who is also representing Broward County resident Terry Hubbard, said he believes the people arrested in August were targeted for political reasons.
“I’ve heard from people out there [doing voter registration] that people have said, ‘I’m not going to vote because I’m afraid I’ll get prosecuted,’” Gottlieb told VICE News. “I think many share the opinion that the announcement of the 20 arrests was done in Broward County specifically to disenfranchise people from voting in the largest Democratic stronghold in the state of Florida.”
“Why hold a press conference in Broward [County] if it’s random throughout the state?” Gottlieb said. “There was no press conference held in [the heavily Republican retirement community] The Villages for the four individuals who voted there and in other states.”
Volz said that the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition has heard similar things from people who’ve called the group’s hotline for help with fines and fees. “We definitely have talked with people who are unsure, and are deciding that they are not going to be a part of the voting process,” Volz told VICE News, adding that some people who’ve expressed this fear don’t even have a felony conviction. “There’s a lot of confusion in the process.”
Even further adding to the confusion: In August, the state rolled out a new form for people on probation that places the burden on them to determine if they can vote or not, the Tampa Bay Times reported Monday.
“By signing this letter, you agree that you alone are solely responsible for determining if you are legally able to register to vote, and that you must solely determine if you are lawfully qualified to vote,” the form states. “If someone tells you that you are eligible to vote, you must rely upon your own independent knowledge (as informed by your own attorney if applicable) of your individual circumstances, and not upon the advice of any third parties who may be incorrect or unqualified to interpret your eligibility."
Gottlieb called this a “complete setup.”
“The whole purpose behind government is to vet and ensure that when giving somebody a driver’s license or vote or carry a gun, that they’re qualified to do so,” Gottlieb said. “They’re abdicating that responsibility. Number two, they’re firming up their future prosecution by potentially adding a whole new crime of perjury.”
Whitaker told VICE News that after body camera footage of Floridians being arrested for voting made the rounds among his old prison friends, many of them expressed a reluctance to vote. Whitaker said even he was initially hesitant about casting a vote this month, even though he voted just last year without any problems.
The only reason he’s still going to the polls next week is because of his close working relationship with the state’s attorney general.
“I’m banking on the fact that if I do run into any kind of issues and problems, [the attorney general is] someone I could call upon,” Whitaker said.
Julie Ebenstein, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project who sued the state over its 2019 law, said regaining access to the right to vote helps returning citizens fully become members of society again. “ It’s all around a positive thing for the individual and everybody else for people to be able to re-engage,” Ebenstein said. “It’s a point of pride for a lot of our clients and others."
“When it comes to rights restoration, in a lot of cases, we’re talking about people who are no longer serving their sentence,” Ebenstein told VICE News. “They’re waiting for a period of time after the completion of their sentences, or they’re unable to pay financial obligations.”
But advocates say that Florida’s lack of a cohesive, statewide system makes it difficult for returning citizens to even know what their fines are and how much they owe.
“You really need to work with an attorney to find out exactly what the sentence you're given costs, because interest and other costs are not included,” said Volz, who is a returning citizen himself. “So you have to work with your local clerk of courts to access the information. Sometimes you have to pay to get the information on your own situation.”
“It’s a tedious process,” he added.
Compliance with the state law has at times stumped even elections officials. In 2020, a representative from the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections’ office helped incarcerated people in the county jail register to vote, according to a ProPublica investigation. This year, Alachua County charged 10 of those people who registered with voter fraud. Four out of the 10 pleaded guilty, and one received an additional 10 months in jail. (The top elections official in the county defended her office afterwards, saying it’s “incumbent on the individual” to determine if they’re allowed to register.)
For some former felons, these barriers further reinforce the idea that there is no point in practicing one of the few rights afforded to them after serving time, and that the right to vote alone isn’t enough to make them full members of society again.
During a weekly call-in show last month on South Florida public radio station WUSF, a man identified as “Spencer in Jacksonville” called in during a discussion of the arrests and said that though he’d had his rights restored, he had no intention of voting.
“I kinda think it’s all just really crap. You get your rights restored but all you’re allowed to do is vote. You’re not allowed to carry a handgun and protect yourself, you’re not allowed to live in Section 8 housing. This is a mess created by our politicians,” Spencer said. “I still don’t vote. And I won’t. Why should I?”
Despite the uncertainty, though, many returning citizens aren’t giving up on voting entirely. For some, like Whitaker, having a voice after all these years is well worth the risk of accumulating new charges on their record.
“I’m not gonna back down from it, I’m just going to go vote. [...] Whatever occurs after that, I’m just going to have to deal with it at that point in time,” Whitaker said. “Man, I did 18 years. I’m looking forward to pushing forward and doing what I know God has called me to do. All these little hindrances that keep coming up that’s trying to distract from what I’m doing, I just can’t allow for that to happen.”
For others, the uncertainty around their vote has given them new purpose: advocating to those closest to them to practice their American right in their stead.
“We also know some of those same people are using this energy to reach out to their neighbors, to their friends, to their loved ones, and encouraging them to be their voices at the ballot box, which is not unusual for this movement,” Volz said. “That’s how we got all our petitions by and that’s how we got people to vote for Amendment 4, before any of us could even vote, those of us with past convictions, is to go to your loved ones and be like, ‘Hey, be my voice.’”
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Sen. Mark R. Warner and Rep. Abigail Spanberger, Democrats from Virginia, answer questions from reporters after a rally in Woodbridge on Sept. 24. (photo: Ron Hill/Washington Post)
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) voted for a sweeping health-care, climate and deficit-cutting law. In September, Scott Baugh, her opponent, began running digital ads saying the congresswoman voted to hire “87,000 new IRS agents to audit middle-income families and small businesses.”
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, secured the endorsement of Planned Parenthood. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee, and the Yuma County Republican Party spun that into ads dubiously claiming that Hobbs was “endorsed by radical groups that want to defund our police.” Hobbs has said the exact opposite, with calls for “boosting funding for sheriffs and local law enforcement.”
Campaign ads have always had a loose association with the nuances of governance. But as the midterm elections tighten into dozens of battlegrounds across the country, a number of GOP ads are showing a breathtaking disregard for accuracy and clarity, with Republican candidates and their allies twisting tangential elements into baseless or misleading claims.
Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency erased many of the traditional campaign guardrails in the GOP as Republicans adopted his approach of pushing fact-free arguments.
Ken Frydman, who worked on Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 campaign for New York mayor and now runs his own communications firm, said, “In a post-truth age of Trump, candidates for office may feel more comfortable in exaggerating their records and inaccurately attacking their opponents.” Frydman said he always opposed Trump’s entry into politics “because I knew all about Trump since the 1980s.”
Jason Reifler, a political science professor who taught in Georgia and Illinois before joining the faculty at the University of Exeter in Britain, said Trump introduced a whole new level of lying in politics.
After reviewing several ads at The Washington Post’s request, he said they are “the sort of kernel-of-truth pushing the boundaries of what you can get away with” that both parties have run for decades. The ads “are inaccurate and misleading but they are not anywhere in the same league” as Trump’s lies about a stolen election, former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate, or linking the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to the murder of President John F. Kennedy, he said.
Reifler added: “Thirty-second spots do not really allow for nuanced political discussions and really incentivizes saying things that are as extreme as you can get away with.”
In a statement, Helen Kalla, a spokeswoman with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Republicans “have nothing to run on but lies and disinformation” to avoid talking about their plans to restrict abortion rights and address the economy.
Republicans stood by their ads.
“Yes, the ads are 100 percent and indisputably accurate,” said Calvin Moore, communications director for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC whose ads also call Planned Parenthood one of the “radical” groups looking to defund the police and label any amount of money reallocated from any law enforcement program as part of the “defund” effort.
Here are a few recent examples:
The National Republican Congressional Committee’s attack ad on Spanberger in Virginia says she voted to send “nearly $1 billion in stimulus checks to prisoners, including domestic terrorists.” When the narrator says this last part, the ad shows an image of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
What the ad does not show is the two previous rounds of stimulus funding that Republicans supported, which also allow money to be sent to incarcerated people, according to FactCheck.org. One of the Republicans who supported those earlier, similarly designed rounds of stimulus funding is Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), head of the NRCC.
And any check to Tsarnaev would have been seized to partly satisfy court-mandated payments to victims.
A spokesman for the NRCC did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The IRS ads directed at Porter appeared not only in California, but also targeted Democrats in Florida, Texas and New York.
Brandon Williams, the Republican nominee in Upstate New York’s 22nd Congressional District, began running television ads, with the NRCC, warning about “Biden’s plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to target the middle-class.”
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.) was hit with a similar ad, from the Congressional Leadership Fund.
The ads refer to money in the Inflation Reduction Act that may pay for as many as 86,852 new IRS employees by the year 2031.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in an Aug. 10 letter to Commissioner Charles P. Rettig of the IRS that “small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.”
Instead, Yellen wrote, “enforcement resources will focus on high-end noncompliance.”
The Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote earlier that the 87,000 figure “is wildly exaggerated. These people are not all new tax agents.” And a bureau official said about 50,000 employees — more than half of its staff — are eligible to retire within five years.
The NRCC spent more than $400,000 on television ads in North Carolina, saying state Sen. Wiley Nickel, a Democratic nominee for a House seat, “voted against funding law enforcement, defunding the police.” The ad cites a single piece of legislation: the sprawling state budget.
Nickel voted against it. His campaign manager said in a statement that the vote was to protest the elimination of the state’s corporate income tax (which, if you think about it, is a way of defunding government more broadly). In a statement, Nickel said, “I’ve never voted to defund the police and I never will.”
Camille Gallo, a spokeswoman for the NRCC, said it is fair to make that claim based on Nickel’s budget vote since the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said the same thing about Republicans.
The DCCC chair, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), told The Post’s Jonathan Capehart in December that Republicans who voted against the American Rescue Plan “literally voted to defund the police.”
In Arizona, Lake and Republicans have television ads saying Hobbs is “endorsed by radical groups that want to defund our police.”
In Georgia, digital ads from the Republican State Leadership Committee say Bee Nguyen, the Democratic nominee for Georgia secretary of state is “supported by groups that want to defund our police.”
In Michigan, television ads from the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is aligned with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), said Democrat Hillary Scholten “stands with defund the police radicals.”
Hobbs’s campaign spokesperson said she “absolutely does not support defunding the police.” Nguyen’s campaign did not immediately reply to requests for comment. And Scholten told MiLive.com this month, “I have never supported defunding the police.”
The ad against Nguyen ran on Facebook for about a week before it was removed Thursday for violating its parent company’s advertising standards.The ad was restored a day later after the platform determined it did not violate any of its policies, according to Rachel Holland, a spokeswoman for Facebook’s parent company Meta. Holland also said the ad was incorrectly taken down by automation.
Text at the bottom of the ads refers to Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the Sierra Club, groups known for defending abortion rights and the environment.
In 2020, each of these groups said on their respective websites that they support calls to “defund” the police.
Melanie Newman, a spokeswoman for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement recently that the group’s “patients and providers rely on police officers to keep them safe from harm” and that the GOP “wants us to talk about a slogan that came from a community in pain instead of how they are consolidating power to control our bodies.”
Adam Bingman, spokesperson for the Sierra Club, said the group still supports defunding the police and that Republicans are “bending and distorting the real issue at hand: Black and Brown people are dying at the hands of the police at an astronomical rate.”
Angela Vasquez-Giroux, a spokeswoman for NARAL Pro-Choice America, did not address the organization’s stance on defunding the police, but said in a statement: “This is political theater — a clumsy, embarrassing attempt at changing the subject from a conversation Republicans have been pushing for 50 years.”
In California, a television ad from House Republican nominee Kevin Kiley says the Democrat in the race, Kermit Jones, will “join” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to “defund the police.” That claim is false.
Pelosi said in February that defunding the police is “not the position of the Democratic Party.” And Jones’s campaign manager told CNN the candidate “absolutely does not want to defund the police.”
Kiley’s campaign did not reply to an email seeking comment.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans spent more than $800,000 on television ads saying Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate, “stands with the far left who want to defund our police.”
The attack ads against Fetterman cite a Jan. 31, 2016, debate and Aug. 22, 2016, interview with Pitt-News.
In two articles from that time, Fetterman expressed support for Black Lives Matter, but there was no mention of “defund.” In fact, Fetterman told Pitt-News back then that he supported “a Black Lives Matter kind of worldview, but also a community policing.” He also told Pitt-News, “I never positioned myself as anti-establishment.”
This month Fetterman went further, telling Semafor, “It was always absurd to defund the police.”
Katie Sanders, managing editor of PolitiFact, which routinely examines campaigns ads, said the main inaccuracy it sees from Democrats this year is too broadly describing some Republicans’ opposition to abortion rights.
Republicans have pointed to Connecticut’s closely watched 5th Congressional District. Their nominee, George Logan, received a 100 percent rating from NARAL in 2018 when he was a state senator and is now described in ads from the DCCC as vowing “to vote to further restrict abortion.” An image of Logan appears next to the words “Restrict Abortion Nationwide.”
Logan said in a recent debate, “I will do everything in my power to make sure that a woman’s right to choose is in no way infringed from what we have here in Connecticut state law,” Connecticut Public Radio reported. Kalla, the DCCC spokeswoman, defended the claim, citing Logan’s support for parental notification laws, which the state does not have and which advocates warn is a step toward further restrictions.
People walk along the main drag in the county seat of Nye County on July 18, 2022, in Tonopah, Nevada. (photo: John Locker/AP)
The ACLU said a hand-count volunteer openly carrying a firearm removed an ACLU observer from a hand-count tally room, which the organization said it recently discovered was Nye County GOP Central Committee Vice Chair Laura Larsen.
The ACLU said the situation “poses questions” surrounding Nye County interim clerk Mark Kampf’s delegation of authority to partisan officials to remove observers from hand-count rooms, particularly during a hand-count process that deals with tabulation of ballots.
“A partisan official from the Nye County GOP Central Committee given free range to roam the halls and remove those engaging in observation violates the core principles underlying free and safe elections and makes an even greater mockery of our democracy,” ACLU of Nevada’s executive director Athar Haseebullah said in a statement.
It’s the latest development in a conflict between the rural county’s election administration and the ACLU that has spawned lawsuits, infighting and a Nevada Supreme Court ruling late on Oct. 27 that prompted Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, to shut down the hand-counting until after polls close on Election Day.
Several ACLU members showed up on the first day of hand-counting Wednesday in Pahrump, an hour outside Las Vegas.
Kampf said last week that the ACLU observer at issue was suspected of tallying votes, something that is prohibited when observing the hand-count. Volunteers locked the door to the entry room that led to the hand-counting rooms due to the incident with the ACLU, several volunteers said at the time. A volunteer was in charge of opening the door for all observers or volunteers that walked in.
A spokesperson for Nye County did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on Wednesday evening. Neither did Larsen nor Nye County GOP’s central committee chair.
Nye County stopped their hand-count process on Friday due to orders from the secretary of state’s office over the early release of results after two days of hand-counting. It came in response to a new opinion from the Nevada Supreme Court in favor of the ACLU’s Nevada Chapter, which argued, among other things, that the reading out of ballots risked the release of early election counts.
Despite the delay, Kampf said at a Nye County board of commissioners meeting on Tuesday that he submitted a new hand-count plan to the secretary of state’s office that he hoped to get approved this week. The Supreme Court ruling that took issue with the reading of the ballots out loud said it was up to the secretary of state and the county to ensure the legality of the hand-count.
Larsen was present both days of the hand-count, acting in what appeared to be an assistant role to Kampf, who had vowed months ago to bring hand-counting to the rural county at the request of the county commission.
She would often go into different hand-counting rooms to make sure the hand-count teams — composed of a reader, a verifier and three talliers — had materials and were counting correctly.
On the first day, when one reader was struggling with the pace at which to announce the candidates, Larsen walked in the hand-count room, sat in the reader chair and read the names herself to demonstrate the correct pace to announce names.
The reader apologized, and Larsen said “It’s better to get it right than not get it right at all. Don’t say you’re sorry.”
In an interview after the first day of hand-counting, Larsen said her role was “making sure things are going the way Mark (Kampf) has set everything up. So, just looking out for the election integrity.”
Kampf has described the county’s Dominion tabulator machines as a potential temporary measure while it decides how to handle tallies for future elections. But the machines will remain the primary recording mechanism for this election, despite the hand counting.
Nye County, home to about 50,000 residents, including about 33,000 registered voters, is the most prominent county in the U.S. to change its vote-counting process in reaction to the conspiracy theories — even though there has been no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of machines in the 2020 election.
Nye County commissioners voted to hand-count all ballots after complaints by residents echoing nearly two years of conspiracy theories related to voting machines and false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. That came as the Republican nominee for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, had repeated unsubstantiated election claims to commissioners which convinced them to request hand-counting.
The most populous county in the continental U.S. to rely exclusively on hand-counting is Owyhee County, Idaho, which has one-fifth of the registered voters as Nye County.
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A patient talks with a physician during a consultation at the Herbert Humphreys Medical Center in Los Angeles. (photo: Wally Skalij/Getty)
Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski is the single greatest threat to America’s social safety net since Paul Ryan.
Should the defendants prevail, these tens of millions of patients could effectively be stripped of legal safeguards intended to guarantee them a certain quality of care. In some cases, individual patients may lose their health coverage altogether due to Talevski.
Medicaid is a “conditional grant” program. The federal government offers a truly enormous amount of money to each state — in 2020, total federal Medicaid spending was more than $670 billion — but only if the state agrees to use this money to provide health care to eligible recipients, and to comply with certain other conditions.
These conditions range from broad requirements that state Medicaid programs must cover certain individuals, such as low-income pregnant patients and children, to granular rules governing how Medicaid-funded facilities must operate. The plaintiffs in Talevski, for example, accuse the defendants (an Indiana health system operated by local government officials, and a private company that manages nursing homes) of violating several provisions of federal law governing nursing homes, including one that prohibits those facilities from using psychotropic drugs “for purposes of discipline or convenience and not required to treat the resident’s medical symptoms.”
Currently, at least some of these legal requirements can be enforced through private lawsuits — meaning that a patient who believes their rights under federal Medicaid law have been violated can sue the alleged violator. Rather than litigating whether they did or didn’t violate the laws protecting nursing home patients, the defendant is asking the Supreme Court to strip Medicaid patients of their ability to bring such lawsuits entirely.
As a practical matter, that could render much of federal Medicaid law almost entirely unenforceable — including, potentially, the legal requirement that certain patients must receive coverage.
If private Medicaid suits are forbidden, the federal government would still technically have some tools at its disposal that it could use to discipline noncompliant states and providers, but these tools are unlikely to be effective. For one thing, the federal government has limited resources to investigate Medicaid violations.
Even when it discovers a violation, the primary remedy the federal government may use against a noncompliant state is to cut off some or all of its Medicaid funds. That means that if a state refuses to meet its legal obligation to low-income patients, the consequence will be that the state will receive less money to provide health care to those very same individuals — essentially punishing the patients for the state’s misconduct.
And that’s assuming that the federal government even wants to enforce Medicaid laws. In a post-Talevski world, a Republican administration could potentially stop enforcing Medicaid law and there would be no recourse.
The defendants’ legal arguments are weak, and would require the Court to overrule a half-century of precedents. But the Court’s Republican-appointed majority often decides cases in ways that are out of step with existing law and longstanding legal principles, so there is at least some possibility that the defendants’ most aggressive claims will prevail.
And if they do prevail, by next summer, tens of millions of the most vulnerable Americans could be essentially powerless against abuse from health providers or their state’s health officials.
The Talevski defendants’ legal arguments are very bad
Arguably the most important civil rights law in American history is a statute lawyers refer to as “Section 1983.” This is the law that permits state officials — and, in certain circumstances, private individuals implementing state programs — to be sued in federal court if they deprive someone of “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.”
The Supreme Court has long held that Section 1983 permits private lawsuits seeking to enforce Medicaid law. As the Court said in Edelman v. Jordan (1974), “suits in federal court under § 1983 are proper to secure compliance with the provisions of the Social Security Act on the part of participating States.” (Nearly a decade earlier, the Social Security Amendments of 1965 had expanded the Social Security Act to include two federal health care programs: Medicare and Medicaid.)
The argument that Section 1983 permits private lawsuits to enforce Medicaid law is extraordinarily straightforward. Section 1983 permits lawsuits against certain individuals who violate rights “secured by the Constitution and laws.” Medicaid laws are laws, even if they only apply to people who take federal Medicaid funding.
As the Supreme Court held in Maine v. Thiboutot (1980), “given that Congress attached no modifiers to the phrase [“and laws”], the plain language of the statute undoubtedly embraces respondents’ claim that petitioners violated the Social Security Act.”
Nevertheless, the Talevski defendants claim that they have uncovered a secret history of Section 1983 that the Court somehow ignored in a long line of precedents stretching back to before Edelman. And they ask the justices to rewrite the bargain Congress established in 1965 when it created the Medicaid program.
Much of these defendants’ arguments rests on a single line in the Supreme Court’s opinion in Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman (1981), which described conditional grant programs as “much in the nature of a contract” because states agree to comply with certain conditions in return for federal money.
The Talevski defendants argue that, at the time Section 1983 was enacted — it was originally part of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era law that, as the name implies, was intended to halt vigilantism and other attacks on civil rights — contract law strictly limited who was allowed to sue in order to enforce a contract. Specifically, they claim that 19th-century contract law did not allow third parties who were not signatories to the original contract to bring such a lawsuit.
In support of this argument, they cite a hodgepodge of 19th-century legal sources, including an 1881 speech by future Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a list of contract cases decided by state courts in the 1800s, and an 1880 book by Harvard Law School dean Christopher Columbus Langdell, which says that “a person for whose benefit a promise was made, if not related to the promisee, could not sue upon the promise.”
In response to this historical evidence, both the Talevski plaintiffs and the Justice Department cite their own list of sources indicating that third parties were, in fact, allowed to sue to enforce contracts around the time when Section 1983 became law. They quote their own mix of 19th-century legal treatises. And they argue that many of the historical quotes that the defendants rely upon were taken out of context.
The plaintiffs and the Justice Department also cite one particularly devastating piece of evidence: an 1876 Supreme Court decision that disagrees with the defendants’ historical claims. In Hendrick v. Lindsay (1876), the Supreme Court said that “the right of a party to maintain assumpsit,” an antiquated term for breach of contract lawsuits, “on a promise not under seal, made to another for his benefit, although much controverted, is now the prevailing rule in this country.“
At most, in other words, the historical record shows that some 19th-century legal authorities believed that third-party suits were not allowed, while other authorities — including the Supreme Court of the United States — believed that permitting third-party suits was the “prevailing rule in this country.” That sort of record hardly justifies overruling a half-century of precedent and rendering federal Medicaid law largely unenforceable.
There are numerous other problems with the Talevski defendants’ arguments — so many that it would be tedious to list them all here.
But suffice it to say the Talevski defendants’ legal arguments are a mess. They mangle the text of Section 1983. They rely on dubious historical evidence that the plaintiffs and the Justice Department easily rebut. They place a simply astounding amount of weight on a metaphorical statement in Pennhurst, demanding that the Court read that metaphor hyperliterally. They insist that the Court must overrule a long line of precedents stretching back to shortly after Medicaid was enacted. And they seek an outcome that could destroy much of Medicaid’s ability to function.
No reasonable judge could possibly take these arguments seriously.
Some members of the Supreme Court have already endorsed the Talevski defendants’ arguments
The one Supreme Court opinion that should keep every Medicaid beneficiary up at night is the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurring opinion in Blessing v. Freestone (1997). There, Scalia suggested that Section 1983 cannot be used to enforce conditions imposed on federal grants because “until relatively recent times, the third-party beneficiary was generally regarded as a stranger to the contract, and could not sue upon it.” He based this argument largely on a citation to one of the 19th-century treatises that the Talevski plaintiffs rely upon.
Ominously, this opinion was joined by now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, a relatively moderate conservative who is well to the left of every single one of the current Supreme Court’s six Republican appointees.
Even more alarmingly for Medicaid beneficiaries, three current justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — joined Scalia’s opinion in Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center (2015), which argued that “the modern jurisprudence permitting [Medicaid] beneficiaries to sue does not generally apply to contracts between a private party and the government.”
There are reasons to believe, after reading the well-argued briefs filed by the Talevski plaintiffs and the Justice Department, that at least some members of the Court’s conservative bloc will have second thoughts about dropping a bomb on Medicaid. Scalia’s Blessing opinion is only three paragraphs long, and it is possible he reached the conclusion he did because he was unaware of the historical evidence that rebuts his argument. Armstrong, meanwhile, was not a Section 1983 case. So it’s unclear if the justices who joined Scalia’s opinion in Armstrong intended to cut off suits filed under the Reconstruction-era law.
Should five justices ultimately embrace Scalia’s approach in Blessing, however, the result would be catastrophic for Medicaid and for millions of Americans who depend on the program.
Here’s an example of how bad things could get: Imagine that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announces that Florida’s Medicaid program will no longer provide coverage to transgender people, and that any Medicaid beneficiary who openly identifies as transgender will immediately lose their health benefits. Such a policy would violate federal law, which mandates that state Medicaid programs must cover a long list of groups who qualify based on their income, age, disability, or family circumstances.
But if no one who loses benefits because of DeSantis’s new policy can sue to reinstate their benefits, then it is far from clear that they will have any recourse. As a group of former high-level federal health officials explain in an amicus brief, the federal government “lacks the statutory authority to pursue tailored judicial remedies.” To the contrary, its authority “is largely limited ... to ‘wield[ing] only the blunt and politically dangerous club of withholding federal funding.’”
Of course, the Biden administration could threaten to cut off some or all Medicaid funding to Florida, but that approach is likely to make the situation even worse. If Florida has less Medicaid funding, it will most likely have to kick even more people off of its Medicaid rolls or diminish the services it provides to beneficiaries. And if President Joe Biden is succeeded by a Republican, the new administration could simply announce that it will do nothing to sanction Florida for its actions.
It’s worth noting that there is an off-ramp that the Supreme Court could take that would effectively shut down this particular lawsuit, but without doing extensive violence to Medicaid as a whole.
The plaintiffs allege that Gorgi Talevski, a dementia patient, was abused by a nursing home in violation of Medicaid law. This includes allegations that his caregivers unlawfully kept him docile using psychotropic drugs. The Justice Department’s brief argues, however, that federal Medicaid law sets up an alternative dispute resolution process — including a process for filing grievances and a process for filing complaints with their state government— that nursing home patients must rely on in lieu of a Section 1983 suit.
If the Justice Department’s argument prevails, that would result in a narrow loss for the Talevski plaintiffs, but it would also allow the Court to stay away from the broader questions of whether Section 1983 suits may ever be filed to enforce Medicaid law.
For the sake of everyone who depends on Medicaid, here’s hoping the Court’s current majority, which has shown little interest in judicial restraint, chooses to exercise some here.
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In November 2011, Egyptian protesters gathered in Cairo near graffiti calling for the post-revolutionary military council to free Alaa Abd El Fattah, an iconic blogger and activist. (photo: Benedicte Desrus/Sipa)
Nobel winners have urged world leaders to use their remarks at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt to press for the release of political prisoners, including Alaa Abd El Fattah.
In a letter sent on Wednesday to heads of state and climate envoys due to speak at the climate conference, the Nobel laureates urged them “to bring the voices of the unjustly imprisoned into the room,” by speaking their names and reading from Abd El Fattah’s writing.
Abd El Fattah, a jailed writer and activist whose calls for democratic change in Egypt have frightened four successive authoritarian governments into prosecuting him for just attending protests or posting critical comments online, has been on a “Gandhi-style” hunger strike since April, consuming only 100 calories a day. His activist sisters, Sanaa Seif and Mona Seif, revealed this week that he plans to stop drinking water on Sunday, when COP27 begins.
Abd El Fattah, known to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers as @alaa, rose to international prominence as one of the most compelling voices to emerge from Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Although he has spent much of the past decade in jail, a collection of his writing, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated,” which includes reflections smuggled out of prison, was published last year.
“Alaa Abd El Fattah’s powerful voice for democracy is close to being extinguished, we ask you to breathe life into it by reading his words,” the Nobel laureates wrote to leaders, including President Joe Biden, who plan to attend the conference.
In response to a request from Abd El Fattah’s publishers, the letter was signed by Svetlana Alexievich, J. M. Coetzee, Annie Ernaux, Louise Gluck, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elfriede Jelinek, Mario Vargas Llosa, Patrick Modiano, Herta Muller, Orhan Pamuk, Roger Penrose, George Smith, Wole Soyinka, and Olga Tokarczuk.
When Abd El Fattah, who comes from a family of Cairene rights activists, was first jailed in 2006, a campaign to demand the release of the activist blogger was launched online, including on a blog called, simply, “Free Alaa!”
That slogan, and an image of the young writer’s curly hair, was revived as a social media hashtag in 2011, when the military council that took power after Mubarak was toppled by the Tahrir Square uprising detained him for reporting on a subsequent massacre of Coptic Christian protesters by the army.
In the years since, Abd El Fattah’s family and supporters have been forced to defend him again and again from unjust prosecution and imprisonment by the authorities: first during the brief rule of the freely elected Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi, and then after Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Morsi’s defense minister, seized power in a coup in 2013.
Abd El Fattah has been held in harsh conditions in Egyptian prisons for most of the past decade, after Sisi banned street protests and criminalized online dissent. Since he revealed plans to begin a full hunger strike, his family has intensified efforts to save his life by calling for supporters to press the British government to intervene. Because Abd El Fattah’s mother was born in London, he was able to obtain British citizenship last year.
In the buildup to COP27 in Egypt, climate activists have pointed out that their counterparts in the host country are still not free to even protest for change.
“The reality most of those participating in #Cop27 are choosing to ignore,” Abd El Fattah’s sister Mona Seif observed on Twitter last month, “is not just that Human Rights and Climate justice are interlinked, but in countries like #Egypt your true allies, the ones who actually give a damn about the planet’s future are those languishing in prisons.”
Swedish youth climate activists Greta Thunberg and Andreas Magnusson joined Abd El Fattah’s sisters at a protest outside the Foreign Office in London this week.
During the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged that he would condition $1.3 billion in U.S. security aid to Egypt on respect for human rights from Sisi, who had been coddled by President Donald Trump. “Arresting, torturing, and exiling activists … or threatening their families is unacceptable,” Biden tweeted that year. “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator.’”
But last year, Biden administration officials reportedly told Sisi’s government that just $130 million of aid would be withheld until Egypt ended the prosecutions of a few nongovernmental organizations and dropped charges against or released just 16 of the estimated 60,000 political prisoners in Egyptian jails. (A report released this year showed that nearly 6,000 Egyptians were jailed for political activities during Biden’s first year in office.)
In the days before the climate conference, Egypt’s government has made it quite clear that protesters are not welcome anywhere outside the strictly controlled “Climate Demonstrations Designated Zone,” in the conference’s “Green Zone.” According to Hossam Bahgat, the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, permission to access that zone appears to be impossible for activists to obtain.
At least 67 people were reportedly arrested this week in Egypt for speaking out about the inadequate response to climate change, including an Indian activist who set off on a protest march from Cairo and Egyptians who were detained on charges of “spreading false news” for sharing calls on Facebook for demonstrations.
“This type of awareness raising used to be celebrated in Egypt,” Bahgat noted. “Not in today’s carceral Egypt.”
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Protesters visit homes of senators they consider most responsible for a reduction in climate change regulations, on 30 June 2022, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Bonnie Cash/Getty)
From senate and governor races to industry-regulating board contests, outcomes could influence policy for years to come
“Several months ago I was very concerned about the apathy we were seeing in young climate voters because of Democrats’ failure to even talk about the successes they have had,” Rania Batrice, political strategist and founder of Batrice … Associates, says. “But I do feel like there’s been a little bit of a renewed sense of urgency. In Georgia, for example, early voting just started and it’s already breaking all kinds of records.”
Batrice says the fallout from the supreme court decision in Dobbs, which overturned the Roe v Wade precedent on abortion, is a big part of that urgency, but that the Biden administration’s increased action on climate this year plays a role too.
For the campaigns she’s working on this midterm cycle – Beto O’Rourke for governor of Texas, John Fetterman for Senate in Pennsylvania, Charles Booker for Senate in Kentucky and Mandela Barnes for Senate in Wisconsin – Batrice says her advice on climate is simple: “Meet people where they’re at, and talk about climate in ways that relate to people’s daily lives.”
Jamie Henn, co-founder of 350.org and founder of the non-profit climate communications organization Fossil Free Media, echoes that advice. He says progressive candidates have been telling the right story on high gas prices – “They’re set by oil and gas companies, period, not by Congress” – but that many in the Democratic party have ceded the narrative to their Republican opponents, who push a simple, false message that the price at the pump is caused by pro-environmental policies.
“Big oil has just pulled off one of the biggest heists in American history and no one is talking about it,” Henn says, referring to the $70bn in profits that just six oil companies booked in the past 90 days. “Those profits just came out of the pockets of average people. It’s a major transfer of wealth, and people should be just as pissed at Exxon as they were at Wall Street during the financial crisis.”
Henn points to candidates like Fetterman, who has been leaning into the idea of accountability for fossil fuel executives, rather than a fracking ban in Pennsylvania, as striking the right note. “Even in the general election two years ago the conventional wisdom was you can’t say anything about fracking in Pennsylvania and get elected,” Henn says. Now you have both Fetterman and the attorney general, Josh Shapiro, who is running for governor in the state, talking about holding fracking companies accountable for poisoning water and land. “In both cases they’re saying we won’t shut it down immediately but we will hold these guys accountable for poisoning your water. That’s a really interesting turn in Pennsylvania,” Henn added.
Attorneys general races could also affect, and in many cases impede, climate policy. The high-profile West Virginia v EPA case earlier this year, which curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, for example, was brought by the attorney general of West Virginia with the support of the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga). Missouri’s attorney general is spearheading an investigation of banks that have adopted net-zero policies, with 14 other Raga members signed on as part of a new but swiftly increasing push against environmental, social and corporate governance investment guidelines. There are races in 31 of the 43 states with elected attorneys general this year, with tight races in many of the battleground states for climate action, including Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin.
In Minnesota, the Democratic attorney general Keith Ellison’s challenger is using climate as a campaign talking point, referring to the climate fraud case Ellison launched against ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and Koch Industries in 2020 as a “frivolous” ploy to “please one side of the political aisle”. The Texas attorney general’s office has also long been a staunch defender of the oil and gas industry, and the state’s current attorney general, Ken Paxton, is no exception, regularly intervening on behalf of ExxonMobil in climate litigation and suing the Biden administration in 2021 to stop the government’s use of “social cost of carbon” as a metric to calculate potential climate damages. That makes Paxton’s tight race against Democratic challenger Rochelle Garza one to watch.
Thirty-six states will elect governors in the midterms, and those elections could have major climate consequences within and beyond state borders. In Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers has made climate policy a focus of his administration since his election in 2018, after which he declared: “Science is back.” To keep science in the governor’s mansion in Wisconsin, Evers will need to beat Republican challenger Tim Michels, who denies the validity of climate science and blames Democrats for high gas prices. Oregon, a longtime climate leader, could see some of its recent policies rolled back if either Republican candidate Christine Drazan or independent Betsy Johnson is elected governor. Drazan and Johnson will face longtime speaker of the house Tina Kotek, who would continue Governor Kate Brown’s policies. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke is challenging the Republican incumbent, Greg Abbott, who, in addition to regularly going to bat for ExxonMobil, has overseen the passage of oil-friendly legislation like SB13, which bars the state from doing business with any firm that “boycotts energy companies”, a list that includes 10 companies and 348 investment funds.
Lesser-known positions on utility commissions could also bring some interesting changes this election cycle. Two seats are open on the Arizona corporate commission, for example, and if the Democratic candidates win, clean energy advocates would hold majority power on the commission and have said they would expand the state’s renewable energy industry. The Louisiana public utilities commission also has two seats open, and if two clean energy advocates win the trajectory of the commission would change in a state that has enormous influence over the oil and gas industry as a whole.
A seat on the Texas railroad commission (RRC) is up for grabs, too, and Democrat Luke Warford is hoping to unseat Republican incumbent Wayne Christian to become the first non-Republican on the commission, which regulates oil and gas in the state, in 25 years. Warford’s campaign focuses almost entirely on the commission’s role in the state’s 2021 electrical grid failure. Although tasked with monitoring and regulating oil and gas in Texas, since the 1970s the commission has been seen as more of an extension of the industry than a regulator, often declining to enforce regulations on things like methane leaks and oil spills. “By their own admission the RRC doesn’t track the vast majority of flaring in the state,” Sharon Wilson, a local environmental advocate with the non-profit Earthworks, wrote about the commission last year.
The most important midterm outcome for climate may well be control of the US House of Representatives, but Batrice says climate voters shouldn’t give up hope there just yet, while Henn says those who are worried about it should focus both on down-ballot races and on the wins that progressives have delivered.
“If the worst case comes to pass and the GOP does get the House, what should the strategy be? It should not be to cower and cling to the middle, it should be to go after corruption,” he says. “Eighty-seven per cent of voters want the government to crack down on big oil, and 80% of voters support the windfall tax on fossil fuel companies – I don’t know why more candidates aren’t running on accountability.”
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