MAGA at work

Isaac Arnsdorf's Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy is a fascinating piece of election journalism, perhaps most especially to a practitioner of campaign mobilization like me. But it's also a book for anyone who, confronted by the spread and endurance of the MAGA movement, finds themselves asking, "what's wrong with these people?"

Arnsdorf is billed as "a national political reporter' for The Washington Post, but in this volume he goes local, looking at the on-the-ground antics of MAGA in Arizona and Georgia.

He explains his project: 

... The movement now called MAGA has long existed in the American political bloodstream ...this movement's ideology was and is loosely defined by nationalism and tradition social values, fierce opposition to liberalism as a slippery slope to communism, and a tendency toward paranoia and conspiratorial thinking....

... In the story of the mass radicalization of the Republican Party, Trump is a singular, indispensable actor. But his perspective is not where the drama and tension unfold. This book turns the camera around from its usual focus on politicians and operatives, focussing instead on the faces in the crowd: what makes them believe, what motivates them, what stirs them to action. ...

Arnsdorf's story has two main protagonists;

• in Cobb County, Georgia, Salleigh Grubb, previously a casual suburban Republican, was so thrown off center by the convergence in 2020 of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and Trump's loss in November, that she became a vehement "Stop the Steal" activist.

On Facebook she posted an upside-down flag, widely recognized in right-wing circles as a distress signal.

Her energy was unabated despite repeated Georgia setbacks.  Eventually she was elected county chair and even met her orange-coiffed cult leader in person.

• in Maricopa County, Arizona, Kathy Petsas had served as a district chair for the Republican Party for decades, laboriously turning out voters for GOP nominees whether she thrilled to them or not. A post-2020 influx of new MAGA militants found her leadership too accommodating and practical for their virulent politics. They voted her out and overwhelmed party old-timers.

Behind both these stories in Arnsdorf's telling lurks Steve Bannon, the podcast proponent of burning the whole country down and MAGA's evil wizard. Bannon is clearly a bad dude, but I am not sure I would ascribe quite as much agency to him as Arnsdorf does. He is, after all, a mercenary con man who grabs onto whatever looks like a good thing with showy pomposity. A very American type. Plenty of MAGAs thrill to his style.

Bannon discovered one Dan Shultz, another familiar sort of rightwing crackpot, who had found his obsession in what he called the Precinct Strategy. If he could just convince MAGA true believers that political parties needed thousands of local precinct activists to turn out their neighbors and that these precinct chairs would then participate in intra-party elections for party office, MAGA could take over the Republican apparatus and elect its candidates to public office. Shultz, through Bannon, enjoyed good timing for his nostrum; Biden had won in 2020, Trump refused to concede, and MAGAs needed something to do. Riding Bannon's cred, pretty soon the Precinct Strategy was all the rage among MAGAs.

What Dan was offering was so pure, so simple -- seventh-grade civics. Bannon knew there was a hunger out there for that. ... The Precinct Strategy could help restore that missing [social] connective tissue. ... There was already a structure, an organization, a hierarchy. ...

For Kathy Petsas in Arizona, this new crop of enthusiasts (and fantasists) engulfed her district leadership.

.. she started getting deluged with applications to become precinct committee members ... It was an obscure role and Kathy was used to getting two or three people a month who might express interest in become a PC. ... she invited the applicants to meet for coffee. ... if these strangers were asking to represent her party in her district, and she was going to exercise her discretion as chair to appoint them, then Kathy wanted to get to know them a little first. She had 132 coffees. ...

.. It was clear to Kathy from the start that Donald Trump was many things, but he was not a conservative. ... It wasn't just the Trump was rude, he brought out the rudeness in his followers; they were not winning anybody over by standing on street corners with Trump signs and guns. Kathy believed that elected officials were supposed to represent everyone, not only the people who voted for them. But everything Trump did was for his base. ... He didn't stand for anything but himself.

But she wasn't the sort of Republican to become a Never-Trumper (unfortunately). She been around long enough to suspect she might have to reconstruct the party if the fever passed. Still ...

... she wasn't going to go door to door for candidates she couldn't defend. .. [the new PCs etc] were like living, breathing manifestations of all the conspiracy theories and misinformation that had been swirling and spreading for two years now.

Neither of these two state parties -- not Georgia nor Arizona -- came out of the 2022 cycle successful. In Georgia, Trump-promoted Senate candidate Herschel Walker proved too crazy for the electorate. The Arizona party seems still fully MAGA-fied having nominated the batshit loony Kari Lake for the Senate in 2024. Trump is running again.. This story is not finished. Isaac Arnsdorf does a useful job of introducing some grassroots combatants.

• • •

I do have a major to bone to pick with this journalist however. He would have written a better book if he'd done some research into how precinct level party organization of all variants of U.S. parties have worked for decades -- perhaps even back to William  L. Marcy in New York in the mid-1840s. Smart party leaders have long known that neighbors engaging neighbors was the gold standard of electoral organizing. Dan Schultz' idea was no novelty.

My mother was Republican precinct leader in Buffalo, NY, in the 1950s and '60s; she kept a card file on every voter, recording whether she'd gotten them to vote yet! Such people were then and always the backbone of civic engagement. And she was a Nelson Rockefeller-Republican, not any kind of insurgent!

This is how functional elements of political parties have long organized themselves and their voters. Such organization is the strongest form of civic engagement this democracy knows; door-to-door canvasses from strangers, phone and text contact, and mass media don't hold a candle to year round persuasion by your neighbors. Where it exists, deep precinct organization is the way to go. Parties can seldom achieve it or maintain it over time. People get exhausted. The tone deaf MAGA antics Arnsdorf describes don't seem likely to age well ... but prediction is still foolish.

And if your door-to-door outreach is by an offensive MAGA nut ... perhaps not an attractive strategy as people like Kathy Petsas understand.

Yet another excellent election

Lots of commentary everywhere. Big wins for the good side in Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. With only a few local exceptions, voters -- when push comes to shove -- don't want any more MAGA Republicans. 

If recent national polls of the coming 2024 apocalyptic presidential contest are getting you down, you can breathe. The people are doing it for democracy.

Michele Cottle lays out the contradictions of this moment well: 

... despite his own raging unpopularity, Mr. Trump is positioned to serve as the repository for protest votes, nostalgia votes and change votes, a weird but potentially potent mash-up of support that could make up for a multitude of weaknesses. He could wind up beating Mr. Biden almost by default. ... Plenty of protest voters may not be looking to punish Mr. Biden for a particular action, or inaction, so much as for their inchoate disenchantment with the way things are. The economy should be better. Life should be better. The people in charge should be doing better.

But what happens next year is something we can influence. Polls are not destiny, but snap shots that don't catch all of what is going on under the surface. 

AFL-CIO political strategist Michael Podhorzer reminds that there's more to elections than polls and pundit wailing.

And as long as we have more confidence in the media’s ability to see the outcome than in our own ability to affect it, we surrender before the battle for our freedoms begins.

A lot of engaged citizens just proved him right on Tuesday.

Good news that's been crowded out ....

Almost two weeks ago, voters in Poland unexpectedly used democratic means to stymie, at least temporarily, an illiberal populist turn in that European Union country. For at least a minute, democracy won.

Since this was an election, I'll outsource the story to DailyKos:

Opposition parties won a stunning victory amid record turnout in parliamentary elections on Sunday, ending eight years of authoritarian rule by the radical-right Law and Justice Party and its allies.

Law and Justice, known by the Polish acronym PiS, has for years undermined democracy, media freedom, and judicial independence in the European Union's fifth-largest member state. But despite its efforts to entrench itself in power, PiS lost to an alliance led by the centrist Civic Coalition that also includes two smaller blocs of parties—one to its left and another on the center-right.

Final results for the all-important lower chamber released on Tuesday showed this opposition alliance winning a 54-43 majority of votes over PiS and the far-right Confederation alliance, which could have kept PiS in power had the two won the most seats, but the opposition instead secured a 248-212 majority.

While Sunday's historic result pulls Poland's democracy back from the brink, there's still a long way to go before the winners can fully reverse the damage PiS has inflicted. President Andrzej Duda, who was elected as a PiS ally, still has two years left in his final term, and the incoming government will lack the three-fifths supermajority needed to override his vetoes. It will also have to contend with courts packed by the right.

However, the new government will have the chance to dismantle PiS' control over the media, prosecute political corruption, and strengthen Poland's support for its embattled neighbor, Ukraine.

People who actually know anything about Polish politics were more than a little thrilled. Anne Applebaum, the Atlantic journalist who is married to a democratic (small "d") Polish politician, has happily surprised. 

After democratic coalitions failed to defeat nationalist-conservative ruling parties in Hungary last year and in Turkey last May, and after elections in Israel brought a coalition of extremists to power, plenty of people feared that democratic change in Poland, too, was impossible. Against the odds, yesterday’s election has proved them wrong. Even if you don’t live in Poland, don’t care about Poland, and can’t find Poland on a map, take note: The victory of the Polish opposition proves that autocratic populism can be defeated, even after an unfair election. Nothing is inevitable about the rise of autocracy or the decline of democracy. Invest your time in political and civic organization if you want to create change, because sometimes it works.

That cheerleader for Central Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, also drew happy conclusions.

It seems young Poles finally understood that their future was at stake. Whatever happens next, this was a great democratic moment. The people spoke and said they wanted a different government.

Click to enlarge.

An insightful analysis of how this Polish turn came about comes from Anna Piela in Religion News Service: 

... Law and Justice’s tenure dovetails neatly with rapidly falling support for the Catholic Church, described in “Church in Poland 2023,” a report recently published by the Catholic Information Agency. The strong relationship between Law and Justice and the Catholic hierarchy is reflected by enormous financial support that the Polish state has given to the church, including $48 million to the Church Fund that pays for clergy’s social security contributions, in 2022 alone. The recent tightening of abortion restrictions instituted by Law and Justice was received with satisfaction by the Catholic clergy who had campaigned for it for years.

The party’s leadership openly embraced most of the church’s agenda in its public comments. “Christianity is a part of our national identity,” said Law and Justice’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, in 2019, conflating as usual Christianity and Catholicism. “The church wields the only system of values commonly known in Poland.”

... But Law and Justice’s identification with the church, which for years locked in rural and elderly urban voters, looks to have backfired. In recent polls, two groups — young adults and those living in larger cities — appear to have turned away from the church in overwhelming numbers. In 1992, 52% of those living in the large cities regularly practiced the Roman Catholic faith; in 2022 this share fell to 28%. Those who called themselves nonpracticing constituted 19% of the inhabitants of large cities 30 years ago; in 2022, they represent 38%.

It’s not hard to see the reason for these findings: Young Poles have abandoned the church in huge numbers. Adults aged 18-24 who participate regularly in religious services dropped from 43% to 22% in the eight years Law and Justice was in power, while the share of those who told pollsters they do not participate doubled from 18% to 41%.

Young adults said they dislike organized religion, citing pedophilia and sex scandals among the Catholic clergy. Said Lidia, 33, from Poznan in central Poland: “I voted for Civic Coalition. I am disgusted about everything about the Catholic Church. It is morally repugnant. Recently, a group of priests organized a party and hired a male sex worker. He passed out because they abused him so much. And then they refused to let the paramedics in after someone called the ambulance. … This kind of stuff. And then of course, the new ban on abortion.”

The right wing alliance with a corrupted church served it well -- until it proved a mill stone around its neck.

What the neighbors are up to ...

Mexico's power class is not all men any longer.

Or so women aspiring to run for president hope.

The Los Angeles Times has shared a fascinating glimpse of two women from very different political parties with sharp differences who are trying to get into the ring to compete in the coming presidential election.

MEXICO CITY — The two presidential front-runners grew up exposed to sharply different visions of what a woman in Mexico could aspire to be.

In her impoverished home in the state of Hidalgo, Xóchitl Gálvez faced beatings from her alcoholic father, who once threatened to kill her mother. She’d hear the men in her family quip, “Women are only good for the petate (a bed) and the metate (a stone to grind grains).”

Claudia Sheinbaum grew up hearing her parents, both scientists and former student activists, talk politics in their home in the state of Mexico [City]. She saw firsthand what a woman could accomplish, spending a night at age 15 at a hunger strike with Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, the pioneering crusader for the disappeared whose work helped build Mexico’s human rights movement. ...

Contrary to what a casual US news consumer might expect, Gálvez, a sitting senator, seeks to lead the more rightward leaning party coalition, while Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor, comes out of the current president's left-populist party.

Both speak loudly about the role of gender in the election:

“Mexico is no longer written with the M of machismo ... but M of mother, M of mujer” or woman, Sheinbaum declared to thousands of supporters just before leaving her post as mayor to enter the presidential race.

Gálvez has called Mexico’s president a “machista” and told reporters, “You need many ovaries like the ones I have to confront such a powerful man.” 

Though the two major parties may put forward women candidates, Mexican political scientists caution this election will likely turn on voters' evaluation of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). 

“People vote for women without a problem. What matters is the political party, and you have to understand that Mexico is not a feminist country,” said Karolina Gilas, a political scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM. “Mexican society continues to be very conservative.”

While the presidential hopefuls can’t ignore feminist issues in a country where an average of 10 women a day were slain last year, the movement doesn’t have the weight to tip a national election either, Gilas said.

The election will be held June 2, 2024.

• • •

Two comments from me: 

1) Around the world, women seem able to make more incursions into the highest elective offices than we see here in the USofA. Latin America has elected women leaders in Argentina, Chile, even Nicaragua and Honduras. Way back in the mid-1960s, I remember marveling that Mrs. Bandaranaike could become the first premier of post-colonial Sri Lanka. A wise professor who had lived in the country explained to me when a government/system of government was in the process of finding it's feet, there might be more room for women. 

Perhaps if we get through the current trauma with US democracy intact, we'll be in a season in this country when unprecedented space opens ... we'll see.

2) Thanks to the Los Angeles Times for the best mainstream coverage of Mexico available to me. We are not alone on this continent and the neighbors matter.

It wasn't even close

Ohio voters resoundingly rejected a Republican attempt to reduce their power to pass state constitutional amendment by majority vote on Tuesday. And in doing so, the majority ensured they'll be able to enshrine a right to abortion in the state's basic law through an initiative in November.

Click to enlarge. The red is the NO position; all the larger cities.

It took only an hour and a half after polls closed for the AP to call the election for the NO increase to the threshold position. Republicans had hoped by calling a summer vote and making it harder to pass an initiative, they could fend off the state's majority. But now abortion rights will be on the ballot in Ohio in November and chances of more than 50 percent voting for reproductive health care have to look good.

When they can't win at the ballot box, Republicans try to change the rules. Not this time.

• • •

Expect Ohio Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown who will be up for re-election in 2024 to run strongly for abortion rights. The more interesting question is whether Montana Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester, who is also up, will be singing a similar song. He should be. Polls show that Montanans 

... reflect a libertarian mindset across the political spectrum.

“That’s basically ‘leave me alone’ and leave my rights alone,” Banville said. “I like the right to abortion. I like my guns and want the government out of my business.”

... “If the system is not profoundly broken, which it is not, then they don’t generally support coming in with wholesale changes,” Banville said.

Abortion as a vital concern is not going away. People get pregnant when they shouldn't/can't have babies. GOPer guys don't get it, but they are threatening women's lives and we fight back.

The people push back

Amid the din of Trump spewing lies, DeSantis endorsing hate, and most GOPers enjoying the ride to strongman rule, it's worth noting more muted developments which signal majorities of us aren't ready to give up on a more equitable, more inclusive country. 

Ohio: Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom this week dropped off 422 boxes of signature petitions with the Republican Secretary of State, aiming to qualify an initiative on the November ballot to protect abortion rights through the state constitution. They claim these contain about 700,000 names, far more the 414,000 needed.

Campaigners must first contend with an August vote by which abortion opponents aim to increase the winning margin required to amend the Ohio constitution from 50 percent plus 1 to 60 percent. So right now abortion rights advocates are campaigning to keep the current rules. This will be a tough fight, requiring intense organization to prevail in a very low turnout environment. But polls show that if they can prevail, well over 50 percent of Ohioans want to keep abortion legal in the November election. 

We can help #ProtectChoiceOhio climb these tough hills by donating here.

National: If you are like me, your email at the end of June was flooded with appeals from Democratic candidates for cash they could report at a fundraising deadline. (And if you are like me, you try to be strategic about these urgent messages, using trash liberally.)

But a summary in The Hill reports small donors on the Democratic side of politics are punching above our numbers.

Democrats are more likely to have donated to a political campaign within the past two years than Republicans, according to a new poll. 

The NBC News poll of 1,000 registered votes found that, in total, 30 percent of registered voters made campaign contributions within that period.  

Out of those voters, 37 percent were Democrats, 26 percent were Republicans and 22 percent were independents, according to the outlet. 

“It speaks to the new era we’re in where the small-money Democrats are just swamping the small-money Republicans,” Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster with Public Opinion Strategies, told NBC.  

As a practitioner of retail politics, I try to remember that I can become mesmerized by visible signs of political enthusiasm, like candidates' lawn and window signs, and usually don't know whether such manifestations mean anything. But small donor contributions at this scale make for a meaningful measure, much as number of doors knocked and voter conversations do. One hopes the campaigns figure out how to use the money well, but simply collecting it from so many donors increases democratic (small-d) engagement.

A mixed hope, but what we've got

From a contemporary perspective, the history of the Democratic Party in the United States is too often the story of a political organization that was on the wrong side of inclusive human freedom and also, though perhaps not so morally culpably, on the "wrong side" of history. Michael Kazin has done the job in What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. I found the book interesting, sometimes a little off-kilter, and informative.

Here's my slightly idiosyncratic take on this history: before and during the Civil War, the Dems were the slavery-affirming empire builders who invaded Mexico to expand potential unfree territory. Their governing philosophy of "states rights" was the mantra of the enslavers. By comparison, the emerging Republican Party stood against slavery, if not broadly for the equal rights of Black people. But Republicans did produce Abraham Lincoln, probably the best president we ever had, who navigated the contradictions of his own coalition to military victory over the secessionist traitors, understood that slaves must be freed, and was assassinated for his pains.

For the next 80 years or so, both parties look pretty awful. The Dems were the party of white rule in the South and of anachronistic rural populism elsewhere. The Republicans were the party of kleptocratic railroad barons and industrialists. The GOP was "on the side of history" but that era looks simply corrupt and cruel in modern perspective. Early 20th century Progressivism, a sometimes bipartisan current, reined in some abuses of human dignity and of "free" white labor in an emerging capitalist world superpower.

It took the Great Depression of the 1930s for Democrats to become the party that decisively turned to using the power of the state to increase the well-being of the majority of the people. And yet, in order to keep a legislative majority in the national government, Democrats remained dependent on the white supremacists of the old Confederacy. Contradictions abounded.

These contradictions were heightened and partially resolved after the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement made straddling opposites impossible. The ensuing Democratic collapse in the 1970s led to Ronald Reagan and to thirty or maybe more years, mostly Republican-dominated, when Dems were dimly scrabbling toward a majority vision which includes all of us -- people of color, women, newcomers, queers, and young people staring down climate catastrophe. (Jesse Jackson knew by 1988, but that's another story.) 

Is the Party there yet? I'd say closer. In this regard I think I agree with Democratic pundit and organizer Simon Rosenberg in the Hopium Chronicles:

Republicans have given us a big opportunity. We need to seize it, together. Friends this is a good time to be a Democrat.

• • •

The skeletal, less-than-celebratory, survey of the Democratic Party trajectory I've just written above is not Michael Kazin's fault or his story. His book covers the same ground in the mode of respectable history. Most of it is solid stuff, though I could argue with some emphases. I found it a useful survey, absolutely worth reading.

Given all the campaigns I've worked, I especially appreciated Kazin's attention to the mechanics of campaigns in different eras. Here's how the New York State Democratic Central Committee in 1842 laid out its midterm strategy:

William L. Marcy and his fellow leaders instructed town and district committees to correct their voter lists, "procure speakers to address the people," and check off the names of good Democrats "as they arrive and vote." Activists were urged to bring such voters "to the polls in the early part of the day," knowing the Whigs were doing the same. The committee emphasized that, while the prospects for victory were "cheering," vigilance was mandatory. "Let us not, we beseech you, in a contest on which so much depends, be caught napping," it concluded.

By the 1890s, Democratic urban bosses had developed a formula for delivering the vote. They had won a competition for mass loyalty with both the political idealists who adhered to Henry George's single tax notion and fledgling labor unions which exacerbated rather than managed class conflict. New York City's Tammany Hall ran a system of clubhouses which "mixed politics with wholesome pleasure" and served to tie families to the machine.

... Tammany commanded a white working class army of modest size that helped itself to the spoils of the city and passed some along to the civilians who harbored them. The machine operated as a welfare state in embryo, albeit one dependent on the protean political calculations of its leaders and the men they lifted into office and limited to efforts that aided individuals one by one instead of a class in need. ...

It was only in the mid-1930s that a Democratic Party, based in a fighting labor movement, turned toward mass social improvement.

Under Samuel Gompers the old AFL ... had donated little money to ... campaigns and never undertook a major effort to convince unionists to vote Democratic.

In contrast, the [CIO unions, through the confusingly named Non-Partisan League] embarked on an ambitious campaign of publicity and fundraising. The league produced dozens of radio speeches that framed the election in starkly class-conscious terms. ... The League held thousands of rallies -- including 344 in Ohio alone -- and contributed 10 percent of the funds the Democrats collected during the entire campaign.

Kazin concludes with a rapturous description of the Democratic victory in Nevada in 2018 being celebrated by members of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas chanting, "We Vote! We Win!" In his telling, organized labor is still central to Democratic Party successes -- and I agree (naturally, having been part of that one.)

Can Democrats extend their trajectory toward solidifying a majority in 2024? Once again, it's hard not to feel we must -- or too many hopes perish.

It's Election Day!

Here in Chilmark, Mass. the town voters are choosing a new member of the Select Board (roughly the Town Council in New Englandese). I suspect it may be a thankless position.

 

The two candidates have each put up a goodly quantity of lawn signs along the roads.

 

Folks who work in elections know better than to try to predict outcomes based on the quantity of signs ... but there sure aren't a lot of ways to get your name out to the voters around here. I did meet this guy at the town dump one day, looking to meet voters. Couldn't help him. So it goes.

Have to say, this might be one of the more unusual election announcements I've ever seen. Perhaps the Commonwealth of Massachusetts requires this typeface?

Update: Ms. Larsen won, roughly 2 to 1. May her tenure be peaceful and positive.