The American Prospect

Refugee Kids in Cages

Manuel Madrid

Science Under Siege

Robert Bazell

American Socialism Redux Harold Meyerson

Trade Wars

Jeff Faux Kevin P. Gallagher

liberal intelligence

Fa l l 2 0 1 8

Can a Blue Wave Save America?

What a Democratic House Could Do Robert Kuttner

The Stakes and the Risks Paul Starr

Mobilization Versus Suppression Miles Rapoport and Cecily Hines

Untilting Republican Gerrymanders sam Wang, Ben Williams, and Rick Ober

Reports from the States Rachel M. Cohen • Gabrielle Gurley Kirk Ross • Harlan Spector

contents

volume 29, number 4 Fall 2018

Columns 4 prospects Can a Blue Wave Save America? by Paul Starr

notebook 7 Locking Up the Children by Manuel Madrid 11 How to Regulate Tech Platforms by Ganesh Sitaraman 13 Who Gets to Tell Stories about Poverty? by Kalena Thomhave

Features 16 Cover Package The Resistance Goes to the Polls 17 A Very, Very, Very Fine House by Robert Kuttner 22 The Good News from the Voting Wars by Miles Rapoport and Cecily Hines 27 How Gerrymandering Reform Can Win in the States

by Sam Wang, Ben Williams, and Rick Ober 29 The Return of American Socialism by Harold Meyerson 33 Taking Back North Carolina by Kirk Ross 37 Can a Blue Wave in a Blue State Make Ben Jealous Maryland’s First African American Governor? by Rachel M. Cohen 42 Fighting the Republicans’ Voter Purges in Ohio by Harlan Spector 45 Making American Democracy Representative by Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens 49 Florida Wrestles with Election Cybersecurity by Gabrielle Gurley 51 Mass Transit in the Sun belt by Joan Fitzgerald 56 Private Equity Pillage: Grocery Stores and Workers at Risk

by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt 62 Puffins: Harbingers of Climate Change by Derrick Z. Jackson 68 The Trade Strategy We Need by Kevin P. Gallagher 72 Mexico’s Hopeful New President by Jeff faux 76 Science Under Siege by Robert Bazell

culture 79 What Would Jesus Do? by James Carroll 81 Walmartism and Its Discontents by Ruth Milkman 84 Tax Evasion Exposed by David cay Johnston 86 The 2016 Election was Ultimately About One Big Thing by Justin Gest Cover photo by Helivideo / Fotolia

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from the Editors

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Starr

Rapoport

Gurley

Cohen

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Spector

e always seem to feel as if the next election is the most consequential of our lifetime. But the 2018 midterm election really is. As several pieces in this issue demonstrate, if the Democrats take back at least one house, the process of redeeming both American democracy and the role of the Democratic Party as a government-in-waiting for 2020 can begin. If Republicans hold both houses, however, Trump’s assault on democracy deepens, perhaps with irrevocable damage.

In this issue, Prospect co-editors Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr report on what Democrats could achieve if they take back the House— and what could happen if they don’t.

What are the odds that Democrats will take back at least the House?

As someone said—the remark has been attributed to sages as varied as Niels Bohr, Mark Twain, and Yogi Berra—it’s risky to make predictions, especially about the future. The Democrats need 23 seats. The norm in the first midterm of a new presidency is upwards of 30 seats, and Trump is less popular than most.

In the big blowout midterm elections of recent years, Democrats gained 48 seats in the post-Watergate election of 1974. Republicans picked up 54 seats at Bill Clinton’s expense in 1994. Democrats took back the House with a 30-seat gain in 2006. Republicans came roaring back after Obama’s first two years in 2010, taking 63 seats from Democrats.

This year, the always-cautious Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has 73 seats on its Red to Blue target list.

These are Republican-held seats considered sufficiently contestable to be worth funding. There is an unmistakable blue wave of energized grassroots activism and exciting young candidates. Other things being equal, it seems very likely that Democrats will take back the House.

But of course, other things are not equal. As Miles Rapoport and Cecily Hines write in “The Good News from the Voting Wars,” the election is likely to come down to mobilization versus suppression. It will also come down to Republican mobilization versus Democratic mobilization. We know that Democratic turnout was depressed in 2016. Can it come roaring back in a midterm election? Complementing Rapoport and Hines’s piece are reports from four states, by Gabrielle Gurley, Rachel Cohen , Kirk Ross , and Harlan Spector .

It’s an article of faith among political scientists who study off-year elections that turnout is invariably well below that of presidential years, and that turnout bounces around in a fairly narrow range of 38 percent to 40 percent. But, as the story of the big-pickup years clearly shows, sometimes there is a genuine wave.

Though converting swing voters is part of the story, the main challenge in generating a wave is to motivate and mobilize your own base.

The statistics from special elections to date suggest an increase in Democratic turnout and a decrease in Republican turnout. We hope this issue of the Prospect will be helpful background for a nail-biting election.

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co-editors Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr co-founder Robert B. Reich Executive editor Harold Meyerson Deputy Editor Gabrielle Gurley art director Mary Parsons managing editor Amanda Teuscher associate Editor Sam Ross-Brown Writing Fellows Manuel Madrid, Kalena Thomhave proofreader susanna Beiser editorial interns Regan Jameson, Miho Watabe, Emily Erdos, Fiona Redmond contributing editors Marcia Angell, Gabriel Arana, David Bacon, Jamelle Bouie, Heather Boushey, Alan Brinkley, Jonathan Cohn, Ann Crittenden, David Dayen, Garrett Epps, Jeff Faux, Michelle Goldberg, Gershom Gorenberg, E.J. Graff, Bob Herbert, Arlie Hochschild, Christopher Jencks, John B. Judis, Randall Kennedy, Bob Moser, Karen Paget, Sarah Posner, Jedediah Purdy, Robert D. Putnam, Richard Rothstein, Adele M. Stan, Deborah A. Stone, Michael Tomasky, Paul Waldman, Sam Wang, William Julius Wilson, Matthew Yglesias, Julian Zelizer Comptroller Anne Beech Development Manager Justin Spees Publishing assistant Stephen Whiteside board of directors Michael Stern (Chair), Chuck Collins, Shanti Fry, Stanley B. Greenberg, Jacob s. Hacker, Robert Kuttner, Ronald B. Mincy, Miles Rapoport, Janet Shenk, Adele Simmons, Ganesh Sitaraman, William Spriggs, Paul Starr Fulfillment Palm Coast Data subscription customer service 1-888-MUST-READ (1-888-687-8732) subscription rates $19.95 (U.S.), $29.95 (Canada), and $34.95 (other International) reprints permissions@prospect.org

Prospects

Can a Blue Wave Save America?

by Paul Starr

E

lections are a democracy’s error-correction system, and the United States has never needed an errorcorrecting midterm election more than it does this fall.

The midterms come at an hour of exceptional danger to the republic from unfit and unstable presidential leadership. They come at a time when the party in control of all branches of the federal government has reinforced long-term trends toward economic inequality and reversed steps the government had taken to slow global warming. They come amid the incitement of racial division and hatred of immigrants, the weakening of the nation’s alliances, the demonization of the press, and flagrant lies and corruption at the highest levels of government.

In short, the midterms could not come a moment too soon.

If America is to pull back from the course it is now on, that change has to start with the voters. But this fall’s election will not be a simple and straightforward referendum. As a result of the structural disadvantages that Democrats face in the battle for Congress, they may not get a majority of seats even if they win a majority of votes. And if they fall short of gaining control, Donald Trump will take it not just as a victory but as a vindication.

Trump’s famous line during the 2016 campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” has had a practical correlate during his presidency.

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He has openly abused the powers and privileges of office, yet the Republican Congress has not held him accountable in any respect.

Some restraint on Trump has come from within the administration, or so we have been reassured.

The anonymous “senior official” who wrote the notorious op-ed published on September 5 in The New York Times claims that “many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” Like the sources for Bob Woodward’s book Fear, the op-ed writer describes an amoral, impulsive president, uninterested in facts, making “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions” that his subordinates “walk back.” But this internal sabotage is both wholly undemocratic and wholly unreliable; it will hold back Trump only until he ferrets out the “resistance” within his administration and no longer feels restrained by circumstances.

That is another potential effect of the midterm election: It may unleash Trump. Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley have suggested the president wait until the midterms are over to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he has been badgering for months for acting disloyally and recusing himself from the Russia investigation. One of Trump’s most astonishing tweets was his attack on Sessions on September 3 for allowing the Justice

Department to prosecute two Republican congressmen for corruption, thereby putting “two easy wins” in doubt. The plain implication was that a loyal attorney general would have put partisanship above the law, and that is exactly what Trump will want of a successor to Sessions.

The period right after the election, with a lame-duck Congress, may be the moment of greatest danger, when Trump feels least under restraint in using the powers available to him, such as executive pardons. The big question will be how Robert Mueller’s investigation comes to an end and whether Trump tries after the election to put the Justice Department under his thumb and bend law enforcement to his corrupt purposes. Even a Mueller report with clear findings of obstruction of justice and other crimes will not necessarily lead to any move to hold Trump accountable as long as Congress remains in Republican hands. And that is where it may remain—even with a blue wave, unless it is an unusually big one.

As children in school, we learned that in a democracy, the majority wins. If only that were true in America today. After the midterm election, the federal government could have a perfect trifecta of minority rule: a Republican majority of the House of Representatives, a Republican Senate majority, and a Republican president—all elected with a minority of the popular vote.

Forecasts of the race for the

House agree that winning a simple majority of the popular vote nationally will not be enough for the Democrats. The clustering of Democratic votes in metropolitan areas and Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 census have put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. According to FiveThirtyEight’s model, Democrats need a 5.5 percentage edge over the Republicans in the popular vote to be favored to win the House.

According to an estimate by Sam Wang, Ben Williams, and Rick Ober in this issue, Republicans could lose the popular vote for the House by as much as six percentage points and still have an equal chance of retaining control. Under normal circumstances, that kind of margin would probably result in a wave election. Republicans picked up 54 seats and gained control in 1994 when they won the popular vote for the House by seven points; they picked up 63 seats and won control again in 2010 with a seven-point margin. But in 2018, a seven-point margin for Democrats might still leave them short of the 23 seats they need. If they do win control, their margin in seats is likely to be smaller than it would be in a typical wave election.

The Senate poses an even steeper challenge for Democrats.

While Republicans are defending only nine seats in November, the Democrats are defending 26, and ten of those are in states that Trump won two years ago. The source of the problem for Democrats is not only this year’s Senate

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legislation benefiting corporations and the rich regardless of its popular support—minority rule redoubled.

map. With its overrepresentation of rural, low-population states, the Senate is necessarily a challenge for a party whose voters are now even more disproportionately urban than they used to be. Paul Waldman, a senior writer for the Prospect and a Washington Post columnist, has calculated that the current Democratic members of the Senate collectively received 15 million more votes than the Republican members. In the new Senate, Republicans may well retain their majority despite winning fewer votes overall.

The net result of all these trends, as congressional analyst David Wasserman has written, is that “the pro- GOP biases in both chambers are at historic highs.” That does not mean Republicans are certain to retain control (as of mid-September, the forecasts indicate Democrats are favored for the House, though not the Senate). The point is that because of the formidable advantages Republicans enjoy, they could lose the popular vote by a significant margin yet still keep control, protecting Trump from accountability and enabling him to fire Sessions, end the Mueller probe, and more deeply politicize Justice and other departments.

The danger is also that the election may leave the Republican Party even more Trumpified than it is now. Before the primaries, a number of Republicans critical of

Those are the stakes and the risks in November. But, as grim as those possibilities are, there are also encouraging developments for Democrats that ought to boost their chances and their spirits as they look not just to 2018 but to 2020 and beyond.

The Democratic Party is more unified than is generally appreciated. At the grassroots level, the resistance groups have brought together liberals, progressives, and many people with lessdefined positions who are appalled

by Trump. Although the primaries this year saw some hard-fought contests, they haven’t left behind the bitterness of the 2016 ClintonSanders fight. Progressive insurgents won a few notable victories mainly in urban districts long represented by liberals, but this

not been the source of debilitating feuds. Trump, it turns out, has been a uniter—of Democrats.

In addition, the early election surveys indicate that Democrats are at least as likely as Republicans to turn out to vote in November.

In midterm elections, Democrats have tended to suffer from a gap in turnout because of their dependence on young, minority, and lowincome voters who show up more irregularly at the polls. Two developments, however, may erase that gap this year. One is the shift of better-educated suburban voters to the Democrats, while Republicans are becoming more dependent on less-educated, working-class votes.

The other is the greater intensity of conviction and grassroots activism among Democrats.

Increased Democratic turnout in 2018 could have repercussions extending into the next decade. It was a sharp decline in Democratic turnout in 2010 that enabled Republicans to win control of

Republicans enjoy such formidable advantages that they could lose the popular vote by a significant margin yet still keep control.

Trump, most prominently Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, decided not to run for re-election.

Trump then flexed his power in primary contests, successfully backing candidates to his liking.

So, unless they lose election, congressional Republicans seem even less likely to oppose him in 2019 than before. They may also conclude that the policies they have enacted are a success. Although the public has never approved of the tax legislation they passed last year, Republican donors have rewarded the party by returning a portion of their gains in the form of millions of dollars in campaign money. If Republicans survive the midterms, they will have every political incentive to continue along the same path, enacting

was not the pattern overall. The candidates who emerged from the statewide primaries for the U.S. Senate and governor are overwhelmingly mainstream liberals who have moved a step to the left compared with where their counterparts were a decade or two ago (for example, in their support of a $15 minimum wage). The party is fielding more socially conservative candidates in more conservative states, but it is a testimony to Democrats’ increased unity that instead of running away from the Affordable Care Act, even these moderates like Joe Manchin of West Virginia are campaigning on health-care reform. To be sure, there are real differences of both substance and strategy in the party, yet those differences have

statehouses across the country that year and then gerrymander congressional and state legislative districts. As Sam Wang and his co-authors argue, voters this fall have the opportunity to “untilt” each one of the eight states with the most egregious partisan gerrymanders. Democrats are lucky that Trump has energized their voters at so crucial a moment.

No midterm election can undo all the damage that Trump has done and is likely to do as president. A change in Congress and the states, however, could at least restore some of the checks on the misuse of power that our constitutional system expects and Republicans have failed to provide. It’s a hard road that Democrats face, and it’s the only one there is.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 5

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Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas, is the largest child immigrant detention center in the U.S., housing youths aged 10 to 17.

Locking Up the Children The Trump administration’s treatment of migrant children as potential criminals has meant lengthy incarcerations for thousands—and an unwelcome shift in mission for the government’s child welfare specialists.

u . s . d e pa r t m e n t o f h e a lt h a n d h u m a n s e r v i c e s

by Ma n u e l Madrid

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child in detention tries to keep from dreaming of the outside world.

Afuera. Outside. That place where kids his age are busy jumping in pools under the summer sun or laughing in air-conditioned movie theaters; the kinds of things he used to do with his mother and his sisters before they were separated, and that he hopes to do again once he’s released.

But for the moment, afuera feels far off to Martín, who is still a teenager. And while dreaming of freedom provides a temporary escape from the loneliness of confinement,

it can also be painful. Just as the shelter monitors circumscribe his actions, so too must Martín police his own thoughts.

“In the shelter, it doesn’t feel good thinking about being outside,” says Martín. “It’s frustrating.”

Martín, whose name has been changed for protective purposes due to his ongoing case, is one of more than 12,300 migrant children currently held in government-contracted shelter facilities while they wait for their immigration cases to be resolved, according to an internal report of the government’s Office of Refugee

Resettlement obtained by The American Prospect.

The Trump administration’s separation of immigrant families at the border catapulted the matter of migrant children into the public eye, fomenting outrage and condemnation. But that “zero tolerance” effort, which was eventually walked back by the president, is just one of many callous policies dictating the lives of unaccompanied minors. And while most of the estimated 3,000 children separated from their parents at the border are now back with their families, thousands who arrived there alone

are still waiting to be reunited.

Trump’s lock-’em-up policies have brought a crisis of a different kind to the civil servants—many of them child welfare specialists—at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a division of the Health and Human Services Department tasked with (among other things) the care of unaccompanied minors. Employees have seen their agency’s mission redefined from one of assisting the assimilation and resettlement process to one of aiding federal policing forces in targeting undocumented immigrants.

Critiques of lack of transparency and due process for migrant children date back across various administrations but have swelled since Donald Trump took office.

The National Center for Youth Law, the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, and the Legal Aid Justice Center are

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just some of the groups representing migrant children that have sued his administration.

All the lawsuits charge that the administration has run afoul of the Flores agreement, a 1997 legal settlement that sets the floor for permissible treatment of unaccompanied minors, and limits how long the government can hold them.

Under Trump, child releases have slowed to a trickle, causing longer stays for detained children. In 2015, the average length of stay in a shelter was 34 days. In 2017, that number went up to 41 days and, as of the end of April, it’s shot up to 57 days. Recent indicators from the internal ORR report suggest the number is far higher now.

In Martín’s case, there always seemed to be one more piece of paperwork that his sisters needed to fill out. Or an unexpected holdup when processing his case by ORR .

Suddenly, what should have been as short a stay as possible turned into

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nearly six months of detention.

“The truth is, I am losing hope,” Martín says. “I don’t think I will ever leave.”

And leaving doesn’t always mean being reunited with one’s family.

Children like Martín can be moved to more restrictive, jail-like “secure” and “staff-secure” facilities on the barest of allegations that they may be dangerous or represent a flight risk. Attorneys say they’ve worked with children who have been transferred to these more secure facilities for simply saying that they “don’t want to be there anymore” or that they wish they could go home.

Nor are migrant youth usually afforded an opportunity to challenge facility placement or incidents of abuse. Nor do they have the right to an attorney afforded people in the criminal justice system.

Undocumented immigrants, including children, are permitted legal counsel but not guaranteed it by the government.

Government-funded representation programs do exist, but have seen significant cuts by the Department of Justice.

Tornillo detention center for immigrant children near El Paso, Texas.

Opposite page: Temporary shelter for unaccompanied children, in Homestead, Florida.

Even for those fortunate enough to secure representation, relief is limited. Lawyers report being dissuaded from representing children on any issues outside of their case in immigration court for fear of losing ORR funding. ORR itself has been accused of outright barring government-funded service providers from challenging it on issues about facility placement, abuse from staff, or having sponsors arbitrarily declared unfit.

For would-be sponsors who hope to free a child from detention, the exit door appears harder and harder to pry open.

What was already a fairly complicated application process for immigrants has become even more difficult thanks to recent changes at ORR. Now, every adult in a potential sponsor’s household must subject themselves to fingerprinting and immigration-status checks. Under an April agreement, fingerprints submitted to the office, along with any identifying information or biographical documents, are to

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be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Because most sponsors are undocumented themselves, they and others in their home might fear submitting identifying information knowing that it will be shared with the agency responsible for rounding up immigrants for deportation. Enforcement officials at all levels, including former ICE Director Thomas Homan and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have publicly voiced that no undocumented immigrant should feel safe from prosecution.

The number of children being released to their parents had declined before the fingerprinting policy was implemented, dropping from 60 percent in 2015 to 42 percent at the end of April. It’s not clear how much of that was caused by a perception of the administration’s get-tough rhetoric or by new difficulties in making their way through the process.

What is clear, however, is that this new fingerprinting policy is likely to have a chilling effect on sponsorship applications, according to Becky Wolozin, an immigration attorney with the Legal Aid Justice Center, one of the groups suing ORR .

“They’re using kids as a dragnet to sweep the immigrant community,” says Wolozin.

Consider Ramón Sandoval, whose granddaughter Janeth was recently apprehended crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and transferred to a shelter facility in New York.

Ramón is willing to risk deportation to get Janeth back, but that might not be enough.

Ramón, who lacks legal status himself, lives with Maria (a housemate) and her two boys. Maria is also undocumented. She came to the United States more than a decade ago and, after working for years to save up enough to bring them over, her children eventually joined her.

Maria says she felt crushed by the weight of the decision of whether to send her fingerprints in with Ramón’s application, knowing that they could make her a future target for immigration enforcement. “[Janeth] is not my family, and that doesn’t matter. I want to help her,”

Maria says. “But I’m scared for my kids.”

After painful consideration and a discussion with an attorney, Maria ultimately decided to withhold her fingerprints. (Ramón, Janeth, and Maria have all had their names changed in this article to protect their identities.)

The only recourse available to Ramón is to submit just his own fingerprints and hope for the best. He has already been forced to move once because his former roommates were not willing to undergo the process, and time is running out for Janeth, who will age out of ORR custody soon when she turns 18.

Immigration agents have begun targeting migrant youth in ORR custody and transferring them to adult jails shortly after, or even on, their 18th birthday.

“If I don’t do something, they’ll deport my granddaughter,” says Ramón, who fears his application won’t be processed in time. “I have to try.”

ICE has defended the practice of whisking away 18-year-olds, saying that they make arrests and custody

Children can be moved to more restrictive, jail-like “secure” and “staff-secure” facilities on the barest of allegations that they may be dangerous.

determinations “on an individual basis based on the totality of the circumstances,” and do so “in compliance with federal law and agency policy.”

For ICE , which deported record numbers of undocumented immigrants during President Obama’s first term but was largely more restrained by his orders during his second term, Trump’s war on immigrants has effectively set the agency loose. But for ORR , the new policies have amounted to a perverse transformation. An office designed to be primarily concerned with the welfare of children is now tasked with balancing those priorities against the interests of law enforcement in a racist and xenophobic administration.

Trump’s magnification of the threats posed by members of the street gang MS-13 sneaking into the country in the guise of unaccompanied minors has transformed the work of ORR’s child welfare specialists into that of law enforcement agents. Children’s advocates have become partners to children’s jailers.

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There has been no kind of observable surge in gang affiliation among children crossing the border—only the one in Trump’s head. Of the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the U.S. border since 2012, fewer than 60 were suspected or confirmed of being affiliated with MS-13. Looking at criminal activity among children in government care more broadly, ORR found that only 1.6 percent of all children in its custody last year could be described as affiliated with gangs.

Even those estimates of gang affiliation should be viewed cautiously.

There’s no clear definition for gang affiliation under immigration law. Agencies like ICE routinely weaponize spurious accusations of gang involvement in order to detain and deport undocumented immigrants, who can be labeled a gang member for as little as wearing the wrong type of hat in a Facebook photo or being seen in the company of other youth suspected of membership.

Since Trump took office, ORR has formally expanded the criteria for secure facility placement to include any past gang affiliation among unaccompanied minors and announced plans last year to obtain additional secure beds to house a seemingly expected increase.

This new fixation with alleged gang activity has immigrant advocates worried. If ORR starts mistaking shadows for substance, as ICE and other enforcement agencies do, migrant youth will suffer, particularly vulnerable children who fled to the United States after being forced to join a gang in their country of origin.

This change of mission has taken a toll on ORR career employees. “People within [ORR] are absolutely demoralized,” says a former HHS official.

“There’s been an overall shift in how the administration sees immigrants.

Kids and family members are viewed as criminals now.”

ORR staff describe a top-down environment in the office, according to the official, where ideology supersedes effective policy and subject experts are excluded from major policy decisions.

Such a dynamic was on full display last year when ORR Director Scott

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Tornillo detention center for immigrant children

There has been no kind of observable surge in gang affiliation among children crossing the border—only the one in Trump’s head.

Lloyd, by way of email, instituted a rule dictating that pregnant youth in ORR shelters were to be prohibited from obtaining abortions. The rule was struck down by a federal judge in March.

A policy change like that in Lloyd’s email, according to the official, typically would require a drafting period within the office and then be published as part of the procedures manual, while allowing for training opportunities and conference calls to allow for questions and input from shelters.

Within hours of becoming ORR director, Lloyd also instituted a policy requiring his personal approval of any and all release decisions of children in secure facilities. The result was a bottleneck that delayed the release of hundreds of children in these jail-like facilities, in some cases for months.

In a deposition for a class-action lawsuit challenging the directorreview policy, which a federal judge struck down with a preliminary injunction in June, Lloyd admitted to adopting the practice without conducting any kind of agency review.

The only information he had considered before making the decision were news reports of migrant youth accused of alleged gang-related crime.

Lloyd’s imperious behavior at the helm of ORR has brought to light a familiar phenomenon noted across the Trump administration. Namely, career employees grappling with whether to try to improve things from the inside and risk being complicit, or quit altogether and allow things to collapse.

In the case of ORR , staffers have opted to stay and try to limit the damage.

“People [at ORR] are struggling with whether or not to stay,” says the former official. “On the one hand, they don’t feel that the administration is using the best practices for caring for kids. But on the other hand, they know how hard it is to backfill these positions and the strain it would put on the entire network if a lot of people were to leave.”

Additional strain could plunge the office into crisis. The number of children in ORR custody has increased by more than 400 percent from June 2017, putting bed space beyond maximum operational capacity, while the discharge rate continues to plummet.

The Administration for Children and Families, which oversees ORR, did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.

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How to Regulate Tech Platforms Their sheer market power destroys rivals and abuses data of users.

by G a n e s h S i ta r a m a n

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n recent years, a new consensus has emerged that something has to be done about tech platforms. The market power of giant platform companies such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google puts them in a position to undercut businesses that rely on the platform, to dominate and rig markets, and to vacuum up user data. It also means they have an outsized ability to influence government, particularly by hiring legions of lobbyists.

In response, some critics have suggested they should be broken up; others that they should be regulated as if they are public utilities. But as even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged, the debate on whether to regulate is now over. The question is “How do you do it?”

Commentators and experts have outlined a variety of proposals for regulating tech—ranging from a data tax to privacy rules—but there seem to be fewer ideas on how to address the problems that arise from the basic structure of tech platforms.

The answer to Zuckerberg’s question, however, is less complicated than one might imagine. As innovative as tech companies are, traditional principles of antitrust and regulation provide a roadmap for action.

Think of platforms as having two elements: First is the platform itself.

A platform can serve as a marketplace or exchange (like Amazon’s Marketplace) or as basic infrastructure for third parties to customize (like a developer platform), and it usually exhibits network effects—it becomes more valuable the more that people use it (like Google Search). Tech platforms with large networks also capture huge quantities of data, which makes them extremely valuable. As a result, tech platform mergers have become common. Facebook, for example, owns Instagram and WhatsApp. Google has a variety of tentacles in the online advertising space, including DoubleClick (recently retired).

The second feature of tech platforms is that the platform is distinct from the users who are on the platform, even as many platforms also have business lines or products that operate on the platform. To put it another way, the platform owns some of the users—which in turn compete with outside users. For example, Amazon Basics produces and sells goods on Amazon’s marketplace— alongside other companies’ goods.

Google gathers reviews of restaurants and it shows that data on Search— alongside companies like Yelp, which do the same thing.

Both of these aspects of tech platforms are problematic. When one tech platform buys another, it doesn’t just mean a larger entity.

Tech mergers mean that a single company gets data from multiple different platforms—and that a rising platform in one sector can’t compete with a platform in another. For example, Instagram might have emerged as a competitor social network to Facebook—but Facebook bought it.

This preserves Facebook’s dominance in the social network arena and gives Facebook even more data. When platforms buy up-and-comers before they really gain traction, the result is less competition in the marketplace.

The answer here is antitrust enforcement. The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have considerable powers to block these mergers or unwind them. But they have not exercised their authorities. Part of the reason is ideology. Since the 1970s, antitrust scholars, policymakers, and regulators have been enthralled by a neoliberal approach to antitrust that focuses on consumer prices, and is deliberately blind to the broader harms of concentrated markets.

Part of the reason is institutional.

The courts have been captured by this ideology as well, and they frequently narrow the scope of antitrust

Longestablished antitrust principles should require platform companies not to discriminate in favor of their own products.

enforcement. But the final reason is a matter of political will. The antitrust agencies have been far too timid for far too long. Legislators and the public should hold them accountable—and if the agencies won’t act, Congress should pass new legislation to guarantee a more vigorous enforcement regime.

A second set of problems—conflicts of interest—emerges when a company both owns the platform and has business lines that operate on the platform. Google does better when its review product is used more than Yelp’s. Amazon does better when Amazon Basics sells more product than John Q. Public’s small business. The platforms, therefore, have a motive to favor their products over their competitors’. They also have the means. The platforms collect data on everything taking place on the platform, which means they know what products are doing well and which ones aren’t. The platforms also control placement on the platform, which means they control whether or not consumers see different products.

This means that Amazon will know if John Q. Public’s winter scarves are selling like hotcakes. If it wants, it can have Basics make scarves that are featured as a top search result— while simultaneously demoting John Q. Public’s scarves to page 10 of the search results. This problem isn’t theoretical. Some companies have complained that Amazon and Google have done exactly this to them. And in 2007, the European Union fined Google $2.7 billion because it gave special preference to its shopping comparison product over similar competitors.

Other problems emerge from this structure as well. A platform that owns a business can engage in predatory pricing, cutting the price of its own product in order to run a competitor into the ground. The company can then keep prices low or jack up their own prices, but the key is that the competitor is out of business. Platforms can also engage in “tying”—linking their products together. This is a competition problem for two reasons. First, products

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aren’t on a level playing field when the platform, for example, can include native apps on its platform preinstalled and ready for use. In addition, competitors will have to offer every single product in order to compete. Imagine trying to compete with the integrated Google ecosystem— you’d have to offer search, mail, documents, maps, and everything else Google offers. This is partly why our tech behemoths keep getting bigger: To compete with one another, they each have to offer everything.

More than a century ago, policy-

makers confronted similar problems when dealing with the railroads, telephone, and telegraph, and other early network industries. Over time and across industries, three simple principles emerged for how to address this kind of challenge: quarantine, nondiscrimination, and regulation of rates.

For example, consider the law of innkeepers and common carriers, which is sometimes called the law of public accommodations. The idea is that some businesses are essential for society and commercial activity to function properly. As a result, they have a duty to accept any customers in a nondiscriminatory fashion.

Innkeepers, as an example, were not allowed to discriminate against customers. If you think back to the early republic, this makes sense. Travel between cities was grueling and took weeks. Without a place to stay along the way, commerce and travel would come to a standstill. Innkeepers therefore had a chokehold on commerce—they could charge high rates and there was little travelers could do about it. The rule of nondiscriminatory access addressed both the power innkeepers had over consumers and the importance of their services.

As another example, think about the telephone industry more than a century ago. Phones are only useful if they are part of a network; multiple people need to have them. But putting in phone lines is expensive, so competition doesn’t make much sense—at least it didn’t when there were only landlines. If there were different proprietary networks, you wouldn’t be able to call everyone, and each company would face huge

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Platform monopolies are like common carriers, and public utility regulation can provide a rough model for keeping them honest.

costs in building phone lines to individual homes. The answer is to allow one telephone company to become a monopoly—to link everyone in one network. But monopolies are problematic because consumers are captive, and the monopolist can raise rates and lower the quality of service.

Public utilities regulation provided an answer. Instead of government provision of telephone service, the government would regulate. It would quarantine the monopoly, separating it from owning any other business lines. This is important because it prevents the monopolist from using its power to exploit businesses or individuals. In addition, the government would regulate the terms and rates of service to ensure they were fair and nondiscriminatory. This prevents the monopolist from exploiting its consumers. In the telephone industry, there was a third element: protection for the monopoly. The utility was given an explicit monopoly, so competitors couldn’t steal the most valuable consumers.

In return, the utility had to provide access to everyone.

Of course, this system didn’t work perfectly. In the early 20th century, federal policy gradually required the Bell telephone system to divest nontelephone properties, required that it not discriminate against independent systems, and then recognized it as a monopoly subject to regulation of rates and terms of service. But technological advances and policy decisions eventually undermined this system. Still, the enduring principles of public utility regulation can still be applied to protect both consumers and competitors if the political will is there.

These basic principles — quarantine, nondiscrimination, and rate regulation—can be readily applied to tech platforms. Platforms should be separated completely from all of their subsidiary business lines that operate on the platform. This is a form of “breaking up” the platforms. Amazon shouldn’t be able to run both the marketplace and the Basics brand that sells on the marketplace. Mergers like Amazon-Whole Foods should

have been blocked and should now be unwound. This would ensure that platforms can’t preference their own product lines, and it would improve free and fair competition.

Platforms should also be required to treat all users with fair, neutral, and nondiscriminatory terms. This would guard against platforms cutting special deals with some entities over others. Rate regulation might not be necessary at first (or at all). But if platforms, over time, adopt a business model that is premised on charging rates and if competitor platforms don’t enter the fray, their monopoly status might ultimately require rate regulation to prevent them from exploiting captive users.

The Federal Trade Commission could act to implement this agenda. It can both act on a case-by-case basis with these principles in mind, and it has significant power to make rules to prevent unfair competitive practices.

If the FTC is unwilling or unable to act, Congress could also pass a statute enacting these principles into law.

A statute regulating tech companies could require the FTC to designate certain companies as “platforms” based on a multifactor test. The FTC would have to consider whether the platform is an exchange or marketplace, the extent to which third parties use it and offer custom services or products, whether the platform benefits from network effects, and if it could deny access or discriminate against users. Designated platforms would then be required to divest all their other business lines and would be subject to a nondiscrimination duty. In addition, Congress should empower state attorneys general to designate platforms, given the limited resources of the FTC. Tech platforms might seem like entirely new creatures that defy regulation. But in reality, there are a longstanding set of principles designed for firms with this structure. All that is needed now is action.

Ganesh Sitaraman is a professor of law at Vanderbilt, co-founder of the Great Democracy Initiative, and author, most recently, of The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution.

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Who Gets to Tell Stories About Poverty?

The Economic Hardship Reporting Project is redefining how we cover inequality.

by K a l e n a T h o mh av e

I

t should not be all that difficult to report on economic inequality.

It’s a fixture, after all, of modern American life. And yet, the journalism industry, charged with analyzing and conveying news of wage stagnation, persistent poverty, and downward mobility, has itself crumbled alongside much of the middle class. Over the past several decades, more and more journalists have been laid off, while the rates paid freelancers have fallen, too.

As the chasm of inequality has only continued to grow, the very journalists who cover it have not always been able to escape it.

In 2012, when the country was still reeling from the economic recession and when reporting about inequality was needed perhaps more than ever, author Barbara Ehrenreich started the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP). The idea was to change the media landscape, and support reporters—by then, many low-income and working-class themselves—writing about poverty and inequality.

“Most mainstream editors and gatekeepers are not people of very vast and diverse social experience,” says Ehrenreich. “They don’t know people different from themselves—they don’t know working-class people and poor people.” Stories about inequality and poverty that convey a deep familiarity with the people affected by it are few and far between.

As tabloid journalism—often written by and for the working class— began to disappear by the mid-20th century, mainstream journalism tended to skew upper-middle-class, white, and male. Today, people who grow up poor can find it difficult to break into journalism, particularly as the industry tends to offer unpaid or low-paid internships to those just starting out. People of color face particularly significant obstacles to entering journalism, especially those from

the working class. And these trends have only been exacerbated as journalism jobs have come to pay less and less, or totally dry up.

EHRP is modeling a different path: supporting quality journalism about inequality while paying its writers what amounts to a living wage. Since its founding, EHRP has published more stories each year, in an increasingly diverse range of outlets. In 2017 alone, it published 118 stories, up from 101 in 2016.

At least a quarter of the pieces that EHRP publishes come from writers who’ve been no strangers to poverty.

Darryl Wellington, a freelancer who works with EHRP, once sold his blood plasma to get by, and then wrote about how the plasma industry exploits the poor. Other EHRP contributors have experienced homelessness or could write from personal knowledge about the experience of being on public assistance. Some, like Donnell Alexander, could detail what it was like to be hungry, and the stark difference between the empty-calorie food available in low-income food deserts and what’s found in health-food stores.

“We felt like these were stories that had to get out, told in the voice of these people,” says Alissa Quart, who has been the executive editor of EHRP since 2014. “But they were also reporters ... [and] they had the skills and professional experience to report.”

One of those writers was Stephanie Land. After working her way through college as a single mother, and leaving with an English degree and a boatload of debt, Land dove into freelance writing to make a living. She had experienced homelessness, and had tried to find stability through government assistance. Land quickly discovered that by writing about her own experiences of poverty, she found “a niche that people were really craving. A lot of the times when people are writing

The idea was to change the media landscape and support reporters— many lowincome and working-class themselves— writng about poverty and inequality.

about poverty,” she says, “they’re writing about a family that they’ve hung out with a few hours and their take on what their lives are like. Whereas I [was] able to come out and say, ‘This is what my life is like.’”

Then Land read a Guardian article

by Ehrenreich called “In America, Only the Rich Can Afford to Write About Poverty,” which introduced her to EHRP for the first time. For Land, “It was one of those things that you read and it’s a wallop on your head— I thought, ‘Oh my god, I need to get involved in this.’”

She pitched her first piece to EHRP, and it was accepted. EHRP co-publishes pieces with traditional outlets, meaning that editors at EHRP edit and prepare a work for publication before they pitch it to a newspaper or magazine to print. EHRP works with numerous media outlets, among them The Guardian and The New York Times, as well as the Prospect.

Writers are paid the regular going rate at the outlet, as well as an additional rate from EHRP—which is meant to come to what journalists used to be paid. Though Land’s first piece was published in an outlet that doesn’t always pay, EHRP paid Land a dollar per word. (Non-journalists please note: That’s substantial.) That price, she says, “made me feel way more professional as a journalist—and it made me feel like I could hold my own in that world.”

The room is packed at Politics and

Prose, a bookstore in Washington, D.C. Both Quart and Ehrenreich are here to promote Quart’s new book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. Ehrenreich says that much of Quart’s new book on economic insecurity came out of a discussion at EHRP. If Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed changed the conversation about poverty-wage jobs nearly 20 years ago, Squeezed, which Library Journal described as “reminiscent” of Ehrenreich’s book, explains the financial insecurities not only of the poor, but also of a middle class precariously balanced on the edge.

Seated next to each other at the bookshop, divided by a generation, Ehrenreich and Quart clearly have

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“We always have to be fresh, surprising, challenging,” says Ehrenreich. Or people just won’t care is the thought she leaves unsaid.

It’s not just words.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Alissa Quart talk inequality at a bookstore event in Washington, D.C.

their rent.” In this way, the continuum that Quart writes about in Squeezed is often personified by the writers who work with EHRP. When they write about economic lives on the margin, it’s almost like the Droste effect, a photo within a photo.

EHRP makes sure that the pieces it sponsors convey, says Quart, the “complexity and politics” outside of the gripping story. But that gripping story is the indispensable starting point.

“You have to tell stories that are a little more dynamic,” says Quart. “In a weird way, it kind of starts to hook in people’s hunger for stories about dystopia … but you’re giving them real dystopia.”

After all, poverty itself is somewhat apocalyptic—limited food, limited health care, and limited everything describes both being poor and the end times. Writer Melissa Chadburn, a contributing editor at EHRP and editor-at-large for DAME magazine, recently wrote about hunger for EHRP, in a piece published in The New York Review of Books. A sampling of lines from the article: “When the lights went out in our apartment and so did the electric stove, we lived on saltines with peanut butter and beans from a can.”

“We lived as people without money do, with a sense of impending doom that everything as we knew it could end at any time.”

It’s The Road, or it’s somebody’s every day in America.

EHRP also supports photography, film, and even cartoons.

A recent multimedia piece supported by EHRP and published

by Longreads, written by Erynn Brook and illustrated by Emily Flake, explains “the difference between being broke and being poor.” Brook’s words are accompanied by Flake’s watercolor illustrations, including those of a woman at the grocery store trying to do math in her head, and a small figure on a tightrope stretched between two dollar signs.

The nonprofit has an impressive— and long—list of publications that it’s worked with, but they’re not all news, politics, and policy publications. EHRP has also supported pieces published by the likes of Cosmopolitan, Everyday Health, and National Geographic— outlets that might not typically see reporting on economic instability.

Quart calls this “culture jamming,” a way to “change the bloodstream in mainstream media.” A recent example was a piece by journalist Joseph Williams describing his own eviction that ran in Curbed, a real-estate news site.

Land has published in Refinery29, a women’s lifestyle website.

Getting writing about inequality in front of as many people as possible— culture jamming—could help lead to Quart’s idea of a more connected “continuum” of the exploited working and middle classes. The challenge EHRP tries to address, says Quart, is “How do we reach these readers who might not be reading The American Prospect and The Nation?”

Class hasn’t been ignored by the

mainstream media, and particularly not during the past few years,

politics and prose

an easy rapport, with jokes peppered into their conversation. “I can read if people want me to read,” Quart says.

“I think you can talk as well as you can read—I think you talk pretty well,” Ehrenreich replies.

“Thanks, Mom,” Quart says.

A major theme of Quart’s book is that the poorer working class and the unstable middle class, groups that she refers to as the “lower precariat” and the “middle precariat,” exist on the same continuum of class disparity.

Squeezed tells the story of the nanny, but it also tells the story of the middleclass parents who can barely afford child care. It describes the schoolteacher who moonlights as an Uber driver, as well as the adjunct professor who is on food stamps.

Bridging the divide between these two groups is the very point—the political point—of her book, Quart says. “If you can name it as a class problem rather than your problem, then you’ll recognize the similarity that you might have to others.”

This is evident in a piece that Ehrenreich and Quart co-authored for The New York Review of Books about the #MeToo movement. #MeToo, they wrote, could be an opportunity for wealthier women—like wealthy actresses in the entertainment industry—to ally themselves with working-class women. “Affluent women,” they wrote, “can use their privilege to help strengthen the movement among working-class women ... but only if they manage to put their resources to good use.”

One can see much of this same thinking—the possibility of cross-class solidarity—embedded in the operation of EHRP. The organization works not only with working-class journalists, but also with journalists who may have limited means because of the frequently underpaid nature of the work that they do. Journalism may be a white-collar profession, but it doesn’t always pay like one (though increasingly, as documented in Squeezed, more and more white-collar jobs no longer cover the cost of living).

As Quart explains, EHRP works with “a gradient of journalists who need to get a grant in order to write a really good story—and journalists who need to get a grant in order to pay

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as wages have remained stubbornly stagnant and the media have sought to explain the rise of Trump. Those explanations have usually centered on the politics of the white working class (which became the shorthand for “white, mostly rural, poor people”).

Reporters traveled to Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the South to talk to the locals chiefly about Trump, and less about other issues affecting their lives.

Ehrenreich says that after the election, she herself “had a mini-boom in media attention.” Reporters called her—a journalist who writes about class, not a working-class person— asking: “Who are these people, Barbara? You know about them! Tell us about them!”

The typical parachute reporting “horribly exposed the class fissures in America and the ignorance about class,” says Ehrenreich. She adds that “the mainstream media tends to represent upper-class views and the views of the educated middle class, which often has a great deal of contempt for the white working class— more so for people of color in the working class.”

Reporters who work with EHRP documented this phenomenon. Journalist Sarah Smarsh has written about how working-class people were a scapegoat who could be safely blamed for the election of Trump, while the media ignored the middle-class white people in affluent suburbs who voted for him. In a piece co-published with EHRP and The Guardian shortly after the election, Smarsh wrote about how there is “historic wealth inequality in America, and the journalism industry reflects it like any other.”

But the very success of EHRP may signal that mainstream media’s coverage of inequality is shifting, and has been shifting over the past several years. Indeed, the Occupy movement, which occurred one year before EHRP ’s inception, introduced the language of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, a framing that is still commonly used today. And the Great Recession and its after-effects, plus ever-widening income inequality, are now impossible for newsrooms to ignore. It’s not as if the “inequality beat” is necessarily widespread—but EHRP ’s

The project’s success may signal that mainstream media’s coverage is shifting: the Great Recession and its aftereffects, plus ever-widening income inequality, are now impossible for newsrooms to ignore.

growing influence is a positive sign.

EHRP works to expand not only the class diversity among journalists, says Quart, but geographical diversity as well.

An overwhelming 73 percent of journalism jobs are now located on either coast, meaning barely more than a quarter of reporting jobs are located in the rest of the country. Part of the reason for this is that many local newspapers have been shuttered since the turn of the century. In order to help correct the imbalance, EHRP has created the On the Ground reporting project in partnership with The Guardian, devoted to covering underreported parts of the United States. Its reporters write about their own communities. A recent article by Michael Graff, reporting from Belhaven, North Carolina, profiles the reaction of this rural town when the local hospital up and closed—something that keeps happening in rural, often poor areas, leaving residents without nearby or emergency health care.

There are other ways, too, that

EHRP is tackling the intersection of inequality and journalism. After The Denver Post’s New York-based private equity owners laid off much of the newsroom, and when DNA info and Gothamist were closed down by billionaire owner Joe Ricketts right after employees voted to unionize, EHRP started funds for the affected journalists, taking pitches from and providing grant money to those journalists for their projects. So far, they’ve given out about $4,000 to former Denver Post reporters and about $8,000 to those who worked with DNA info.

EHRP did the same this summer, when Tronc, the Chicago-based media company, announced it was cutting half of the editorial staff at the New York Daily News. The organization has established a $10,000 fund to enable laid-off Daily News reporters and photographers to cover stories about inequality.

EHRP would like to expand these funds, says Quart, creating something like an “emergency fund” for journalists to use if their laptop crashes or if they need a last-minute flight or hotel for a reporting project.

In a time when employees at digital media outlets and such historically non-union publications as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are joining unions and winning contracts, Quart says that she sees EHRP as a sort of “alt-labor”—an alternative labor organization, for journalists who don’t have access to traditional unions since they are not always employees. EHRP can partially step into that breach by ensuring that they will be fairly paid when they publish EHRP-sponsored articles.

Quart says she can hear “echoes of [the EHRP] project in other nonprofits.” More organizations now publish writers who provide firstperson accounts of living in poverty and stories that center on economic inequality, among them the Center for Community Change’s Safety Net Communications Fellows and the writers with TalkPoverty.org. In addition, the California-based media nonprofit Capital & Main, like EHRP, co-publishes work on poverty and inequality, and has supported some of EHRP ’s journalists as well.

The backing that EHRP provides

the journalists it works with can help them move forward with their individual careers. Land, now a contributing editor at EHRP, recently framed her 2016 New York Times essay on the class politics of decluttering, and hung it in her hallway. The folks at EHRP “helped immensely,” she says, with securing her book deal—EHRP staff helped her polish her book proposal.

Land’s forthcoming memoir, MAID, tells the story of how Land worked as a housekeeper through college to take care of herself and her family.

Ehrenreich wrote the foreword to the book, a portion of which Land read out loud to me.

“I met [Land] years ago when she was in the early stages of her writing career,” Ehrenreich writes. “[She] sent us a query, and we snatched her up, working with her to develop pitches, polish drafts, and place them in the best outlets we could find. “[Land] is exactly the kind of person we exist for—an unknown working-class writer who needed just a nudge to launch her career.”

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The 2018 Midterms:

The Resistance Goes to the Polls Will the blue wave be sufficient to overcome the red undertow?

And will it be mostly a progressive wave that repositions what Democrats stand for?

If Democrats do take back the House, this could be America’s last, best chance for reclaiming democracy.

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The 2018 Midterms

A Very, Very, Very Fine House If the Democrats do take back the House in November, how should they pursue strategic goals looking forward to 2020?

by Ro be r t K u t t ne r

“Politics Ain’t Beanbag” —Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne), 1895

magnilion / istock by get t y

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or much of the past three decades, Republicans have been playing serious hardball while Democrats have often played beanbag. When Republicans took over the House in 2011 and then the Senate in 2015, they began violating normal legislative procedure with increasing recklessness. Bills were enacted without hearings and little notice, often being finalized in House-Senate conferences with only Republican legislators participating. Members were literally asked to vote on final passage with no text available. Venerable norms and courtesies were shamelessly manipulated. The Senate’s blue slip rule, allowing a home-state senator to put a hold on a judicial nomination, was interpreted to require two holds to block action when Republicans were rushing through confirmations, but just one hold when Democrats were trying to confirm judges and Republicans were in blocking mode.

Barack Obama kept hoping against hope that if he reached out to Republicans, they might reciprocate. But they took it as a sign of weakness, and doubled down on their strategy of obstruction. Republicans in Congress threatened to take the economy over a fiscal cliff in 2011, when all of the 2001 Bush tax cuts expired. Democrats, as the self-appointed grownups in the room, met the Republicans 80 percent of the way to keep the government functioning. They extended most of the Bush upper-income cuts, even agreeing to a sequester to cut spending for good measure.

Democrats, in that episode, held most of the cards. If they had hung tough and insisted on fairer terms, Republicans would have risked being blamed for massive tax hikes in a reces-

sion, and would have had to compromise. I vividly recall being on a radio talk show with GOP arch–tax cut strategist Grover Norquist, and Norquist in the green room before the show asking me in genuine bewilderment why the Democrats had caved. Why, indeed?

Donald Trump has violated every norm of comity and decency. But he has had willing accomplices in Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.

Now, however, the odds look good that Democrats will take back the House, for the first time since 2010. Taking the majority in the House of Representatives would give Democrats the ability to revise the House rules, control the floor agenda, elect committee chairs, dramatically increase the size of their staff, conduct hearings, subpoena witnesses and documents, and initiate investigations—including impeachment.

During their years in opposition, as victims of every manner of abuse, House Democrats have belatedly acquired some toughness.

Except for the 2017 Tax Act, they have managed to block every major Trump initiative.

Democrats have also achieved impressive unity. On previous Republican tax cuts, about a third of Democrats defected and voted aye, on the premise that cutting taxes was popular legislation; if it were going to pass anyway, they might as well share in the credit. This time, not a single Democrat supported Trump’s tax bill.

An article such as this one has to begin with the obligatory disclaimer. There is surely a blue wave, but also multiple sources of undertow. That said, it’s not too soon to give serious thought to how Democrats should proceed if they do take back the House, even better if they take back both houses.

In America, taking back Congress has often prefigured the next presidential reversal. The Democrats’ capture of the House in 1930 anticipated Roosevelt’s 1932 landslide. Likewise the

huge Democratic gains in 1958, which brought to Congress a generation of superb progressive legislators and laid the groundwork for the New Frontier and Great Society legislation.

Same story in 2006, when Democrats took back the House and helped prepare the ground for Obama’s victory in 2008. These congressional wins are not just harbingers; what Democrats do with their leadership of one or both Houses helps make the next presidential win happen.

One school of thought holds that the

Democrats need to turn the other cheek in order to model good behavior and restore respect for norms. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their influential book How Democracies Die, decry “extreme partisan polarization” and urge the Democrats to resist the temptation to fight fire with fire. “Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic.” Instead, they argue, Democrats should “work to restore norms of mutual toleration and forbearance.”

That strikes me as stunningly naïve. But given the recent history of what legal scholars Joseph Fishkin and David Pozen call “asymmetric constitutional hardball,” just how should Democrats proceed? Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet, who first coined the term “constitutional hardball” more than a decade ago, calls on Democrats to play even harder hardball, including the dubious tactic of packing the Supreme Court, which they indeed could do by statute. The question, it seems to me, is not whether the Democrats should play hardball—they should—but what smart and strategically successful hardball looks like.

If Democrats do take back the House, there are multiple goals and means. One is to contain and ultimately bring down Donald Trump.

Another is to build an affirmative agenda looking forward to 2020. The two are related. The more that Democrats can demonstrate their commitment to a program that truly serves working families, the more they can call out Trump’s entirely bogus populism, and the more that sets the stage for a big democratic win in 2020. A Democratic House can serve as government in exile.

Given that Trump still controls the veto pen, enacting laws is not a possibility until 2020 at

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the earliest. But with even one house, Democrats can blunt bad legislation. One good strategy is to propose and advance emblematic bills, bring them to the House floor, and force Republicans to take awkward votes that show the voters whose side they are really on. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has said that an early priority would be a massive infrastructure bill. Another good candidate for the designation H.R. 1 would be a national $15 minimum wage. This simple legislation would usefully jam Republicans.

Either they vote for a priority Democratic bill that enjoys broad public support, or they explain to voters why they oppose it.

Legislation to raise wages has powerful symbolic resonance, and a $15 national minimum would help millions of working Americans. In 2004, the community group ACORN, working with unions, qualified a ballot initiative in Florida to raise that state’s minimum wage by a dollar an hour. The direct impact stood to benefit only about 6 percent of Flo-

A related idea is a bill of rights for the young.

More than any generation since the young adults who came of age in the Great Depression, young Americans today are the stunted generation. Between the high cost of housing, the burden of student loans, and the paucity of real payroll jobs, there has been a serious decline in the standard of living of millennials not lucky enough to benefit from a family welfare state of affluent parents. By packaging student debt relief with special financing for starter homes and legislation to make it harder for employers to disguise regular jobs as contract work, the Democrats would signal concern, offer practical help, and once again force Republicans to take awkward votes.

Democrats could also propose legislation aimed at cracking down on corruption and corporate abuses. Two model bills were introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren in August.

One, the Accountable Capitalism Act, would require the federal chartering of corporations

As majority party, Democrats could pass legislation that conveys a governing agenda— and forces Republicans to take awkward votes showing which side they are on. ridians, but the measure sent a potent signal.

John Kerry, the Democratic candidate that year, was asked to support the measure. He declined. On Election Day 2004, the minimum-wage initiative carried every single Florida county, including deeply Republican ones. It got two million votes more than Kerry did, and a million more than George W. Bush.

Had Kerry been on Florida street corners with ACORN championing the minimum wage, he might have been elected president.

There are other strong, simple proposals that can signal practical help for working Americans who sometimes defect to Republicans. The portions of the Republican Tax Act that benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations could be repealed and the savings directed to strengthening Medicare and Medicaid. Introducing that legislation and bringing it to a floor vote would smoke out Republicans. Likewise legislation to provide significant relief for student debt.

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with revenues over a billion dollars, with provisions such as worker seats on corporate boards, disincentives for exorbitant executive pay, requirements that the corporation serve all stakeholders and not just shareholders, and higher hurdles for corporate campaign contributions. The other, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, would include a lifetime ban on lobbying by all former officeholders, prohibit officeholders from directly owning stocks, and expressly require the disclosure of tax returns by candidates for president. Hearings on legislation like this can bring abuses to light, and educate the public.

Yet another subject of key legislation concerns efforts to reclaim American democracy.

Measures could include bills to restore the full power of the Voting Rights Act, curtail multiple abuses of executive power, and revive the effective right to unionize under the Wagner Act. Polls also show that drug pricing is a huge issue for voters. Democrats could propose leg-

islation curbing excessive drug pricing in any number of ways, by changing the terms of patent protection, permitting greater promotion of generics, applying tougher antitrust standards to drug companies, or giving Medicare and Medicaid the same right to negotiate bulk pricing discounts enjoyed by the Department of Veterans Affairs. This would be another terrific bill to dare Republicans to vote against.

It’s harder for Democrats to put forth an affirmative vision for the country when they are in the minority, notes Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, a veteran progressive, because most of the fights are defensive. But as majority party, “We will be able to create a vision of what we could do if we had the presidency and both houses—to protect and expand Social Security and Medicare—that creates good jobs and puts people to work.”

The House majority party also has the power of the purse. If Democrats take the House, Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut will chair the powerful Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. DeLauro points out that Republicans have done a great deal of legislating via appropriations, denying funding for women’s health, child-protection measures, and a whole lot more. With Democrats in charge, appropriations could be conditioned on policy reversals and reinstatements. “We can roll back a lot of the stealth privatizations,” DeLauro says.

A key question is whether Democrats in the House have the self-discipline and strategic coherence to offer a core platform. As always, individual House members will introduce bills on a welter of topics, and the risk is that the signal gets lost for the noise. Still, that should not stop the House Democratic Caucus from agreeing to support a core package. Some candidates running for Republican-held seats are social moderates, reflecting their districts. But nearly all are economic progressives and that theme should be the glue that holds together a potentially fractious caucus.

One of the most potent powers of Con-

gress is the power to hold hearings and conduct investigations. This doesn’t just mean investigating abuses of executive power. It means abuses of American capitalism. In the glory days when economic progressives led the House

The 2018 Midterms

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Ferdinand Pecora was counsel to the House Banking Committee, which held hearings in the 1930s that exposed abuses on Wall Street and laid the groundwork for much of the financial reforms of the New Deal.

and the Senate, superb chairs of committees and subcommittees laid bare abuses that cried out for public exposure and legislative remedy.

Investigative hearings date back well over a century to the original hearings of the 1880s on abuses of economic concentration that led to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the hearings on filthy food and bogus drugs that led to the Food and Drug Act. The famous Pujo Committee of 1912 and 1913, chaired by Representative Arsène Pujo of Louisiana, unearthed details of the money trust, and led directly to several Progressive Era reform measures, including the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the 16th Amendment authorizing a progressive income tax.

Again in the 1930s, the famous Pecora hearings, named for House Banking Committee Counsel Ferdinand Pecora, exposed abuses on Wall Street and laid the groundwork for much of the financial reforms of the New Deal.

During World War II, Harry Truman’s committee on war profiteering saved taxpayers many billions of dollars and made corporate corruption a public issue. After the war, great progressives such as Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, the giant of antitrust, continued the tradition of investigating economic concentration and drafting remedial legislation.

In the 1960s, Congress’s attention turned to the environment, as well as consumer abuses.

Often, these committees worked hand in glove with investigative reporters and publicinterest advocates. The Pujo Committee did a tandem act with the muckraking journalists of that era and social critic and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. When Ralph Nader exposed the fact that General Motors had used private detectives to try to smear him after publication of his book, Unsafe at Any Speed, and GM executives were made to apologize, that drama played out before Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s hearings on auto safety.

For 28 years, from the mid-1950s through 1982, an otherwise obscure and not especially liberal North Carolina congressman named L.H. Fountain used his subcommittee to shed light on myriad abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, and to keep the Food and Drug Administration tolerably honest. Fountain worked closely with the legendary Mort Mintz of The Washington Post and Dr. Sidney Wolfe of the Public Citizen Health Research Group to investigate abuses, identify whistle-blowers, and inform the public.

More recently, great progressives like Henry Waxman of California, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, used Congress’s investigative powers to shed light on environmental and health abuses and move reform legislation on multiple fronts. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan (see page 84) used the

Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (which was once chaired and abused by Senator Joe McCarthy) to expose corporate tax evasion techniques. Like their predecessors, Waxman and Levin worked closely with progressive organizers and investigative journalists.

Often the results of these hearings led directly to reform legislation. A parallel oversight process made sure that federal agencies were operating in the public interest. But when Republicans took over the House, first in 1994 and again in 2010, this process was thrown into reverse. When Representative Joe Barton of Texas took over oversight of the FDA , his committee used its influence to pressure the agency to expedite drug approvals. When Republican Jake Garn of Utah took the gavel from progressive Democrat William Proxmire in 1981, one result was the Garn–St. Germain Act, which allowed savings and loan associations to engage in all manner of speculative bets that resulted in the first of two S&L collapses.

Republicans have also relied heavily on corporate witnesses and spoon-fed corporate story lines. Under Obama, the committee hearing process was used both to harass regulatory agencies and to promote an agenda of deregulation and privatization. Oversight in the public interest dried up.

Democrats have not held the House since 2010 and the Senate since 2014. It’s up to the next Democratic committee chairs to revive the great tradition of investigation of the abuses of capitalism and of the enablers of those abuses in government—and to connect those abuses both to their Republican enablers and to the pocketbook frustrations of people’s lives. What has been going on in the school voucher business since Democrats last had the capacity to investigate? How have the science agencies been captured by climate change deniers? What conflicts of interest on the part of half of Trump’s cabinet haven’t we even heard about yet? How have fossil fuel industries taken over government regulatory agencies? What new antitrust concepts and enforcement techniques are needed to deal with new abuses of such platform monopolies as Google, Amazon, and Facebook?

“A big overarching issue is corruption,” says Rob Weissman, the president of Public Citizen.

“In almost every area where the administration

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 19

What about the House leadership? There is a movement to oust Nancy Pelosi, both on grounds of age and because she is a lightning rod for shabby Republican attacks. For the most part, these attacks have gained little traction. In some districts, Democratic House candidates such as Conor Lamb, who won a special Pennsylvania House election this past March, took the Pelosi issue off the table by pledging not to vote for her.

The fact is that Republicans demonize Pelosi mainly because she is one of the most effective Democratic House leaders ever, as well as being a resolute progressive. Most incumbent House Democrats are very loyal to her. When Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan mounted a challenge to Pelosi for the leader-

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Republicans demonize Nancy Pelosi because she is a formidable Democratic House leader as well as a resolute progressive.

ship in 2016, advertising himself as a young, socially moderate white male from the Midwest, Pelosi defeated Ryan, 134 to 63. Support within the caucus for dumping Pelosi has not increased since then. Some 40 Democratic contenders have taken the pledge to oppose Pelosi. But if you do the arithmetic, 40 plus 63 is still far less than 134, and many newly elected Democrats will support her.

A related problem for Pelosi’s challengers is that there is no obvious candidate to succeed her. If the point is to feature youth, the other ranking members of the House leadership are of Pelosi’s generation. Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip, is, at 79, older than Pelosi. Jim Clyburn, the assistant Democratic leader and senior African American in the leadership, is 78. Others have signaled their interest in possibly running to succeed Pelosi, but it is hard to imagine a consensus candidate emerging.

As more and more women take House seats, there will be also be reluctance to dump the top female Democrat. So Pelosi likely has the votes to be elected speaker—a good outcome since the Democrats need to hit the ground running.

There is also the question of impeachment. A lot of commentary in the press has held that Democrats would be wise to steer clear of impeachment. CNN and Quinnipiac

have found support for impeachment at around 40 percent. Trip Gabriel, in a feature piece in The New York Times in late August, warned: A chasm has opened in recent days between Democratic voters, who want to see Mr. Trump impeached or held to some political accounting, and Democratic candidates and strategists nationally, who view the “I word” as a red cape that will inflame the Republican base and possibly hurt their chances of taking control of the House.

The advice to damp down impeachment fever makes sense on the campaign trail where there is risk of bringing out Trump voters. But if Dems do indeed take back the House, sooner or later they will find that an impeachment inquiry is unavoidable. But it’s all in the timing.

Impeachment should not come first. It should be the end game.

Sometime this fall or winter, Robert Mueller will tender some kind of report. What’s already on the public record includes enough evidence of obstruction of justice and sufficient violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause to impeach Trump. We don’t yet know how much more Mueller will reveal about Trump involvement with the Russians to steal the

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is doing something bad, there is a corruption story that needs deeper investigation. In every case where the administration is deregulating or failing to enforce regulation—EPA rollbacks, for- profit schools, gutting the clean car initiative—the person inside the administration used to work for the industry.”

In 1998, Weissman wrote a classic piece for the Prospect on the importance of congressional investigation and oversight, titled “Hearings Loss.” “Even 20 years ago, it was a dying art,” he says. “We’ve lost a lot of institutional memory.”

Another area specific to the Trump administration that is crying out for investigation is the nexus of foreign government and stateaffiliated businesses helping Trump’s family in return for the administration’s shifting foreign policy. “The thing they are most afraid of,” says Schakowsky, “is our subpoena power.”

We need the next generation of great progressive investigators in the footsteps of Estes Kefauver, Arsène Pujo, and Ferdinand Pecora.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee could bring Henry Waxman out of retirement and hire him as chief counsel. Hearings like these set agendas, and move public sentiment.

They can make it harder politically for Republicans to block overdue reform and help redeem the good name of Congress. If the political economy of American capitalism were kept tolerably honest and socially bearable for much of the middle and late 20th century, substantial credit goes to congressional hearings and their capacity to move public opinion to support reform.

The 2018 Midterms 2016 election, or the connection to longstanding Russian bailouts of failing Trump family business, but there is good reason to believe that further details will be telling.

Trump doesn’t even bother to conceal his attempts to obstruct justice. It’s Trump who has been brandishing the red cape. His repeated demonization of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, including his startling complaint about Sessions having allowed criminal investigations of two Republican congressmen that will damage their re-elections, is a pure call to subordinate the administration of justice to partisan needs.

Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, nobody’s idea of a liberal, spoke for senators of both parties when he said: The United States is not some banana republic with a two-tiered system of justice—one for the majority party and one for the minority party. These two men have been charged with crimes because of evidence, not because of who the President was when the investigations began.

Instead of commenting on ongoing investigations and prosecutions, the job of the President of the United States is to defend the Constitution and protect the impartial administration of justice.

Trump’s violations of his oath of office already exceed those of Richard Nixon. Other investigations by congressional committees are likely to reveal even more damning information. As evidence accumulates, public sentiment shifts. Given Trump’s extreme abuses of his office and the fact that impeachment is the prime constitutional remedy for ousting a lawless president, it would be a dereliction of duty for the House to fail to pursue impeachment—but only when impeachment is ripe.

The strategic mistake would be to open a formal impeachment inquiry early in the new session. It makes far more sense, substantively and tactically, to allow other congressional investigations to proceed first, let the damning evidence pile up, and only then begin a formal impeachment process. In Watergate, the process took two full years. The break-in at DNC headquarters occurred in June 1972.

Woodward and Bernstein began unearthing

details in September of that year. The Senate Watergate Committee under Sam Ervin was created in May 1973. Judge John Sirica turned over sealed indictments of top Nixon aides to the House Judiciary Committee in March 1974, and the official impeachment process began only in May. The House voted articles of impeachment in July, and Nixon resigned in August.

But wouldn’t it be a fool’s errand if the House voted impeachment but Republicans kept control of the Senate? I don’t think so. The impeachment process itself would produce more and more damaging detail. Even more than Nixon, Trump is likely to commit further abuses of office in his attempts to cover up what has already occurred or to block efforts to ferret out the facts. As this process unfolds, Trump is likely to become more and more radioactive, and the damage to him will be cumulative. A sizable number of Republican senators, not just those up for re-election in

health care. The complex public/private nature of the Affordable Care Act gave the Court an opening to claim that it violated the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. But no court has come remotely close to challenging Medicare.

A straightforward expansion of Medicare would be both good politics and fairly immune to Court reversal.

The Prospect has run several articles on how tortured court interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act has permitted corporations to require employees to sign away rights guaranteed under myriad other laws as a condition of their employment. But this is not a constitutional issue. A straightforward revision of the act would make clear that this use is not Congress’s intent, and would explicitly bar corporations from using mandatory, rigged arbitration to override other statutory protections.

Similarly, a string of high court cases since the 1980s has neutered antitrust enforcement by adopting the Chicago-economics view that

As in Watergate, impeachment should not come first—but after other investigations have produced overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing and garnered public support. swing states in 2020 or 2022, would seriously consider voting to convict. Others, in safe seats, like Ben Sasse, would consider voting to convict Trump either out of sheer disgust or tactically, to allow the Republican Party to regroup under a new president and nominee for 2020.

The most important contribution a Demo-

cratic House could make would be to help lay the groundwork for a governing agenda in 2021.

The conventional assumption has been that conservative control of the courts will drastically limit what a Democratic administration could do, even if a Democratic president has control of the Senate as well as the House. But my conversations with several legal scholars suggest that this assumption is too pessimistic.

Despite the penchant of the Roberts Court for inventing wholly new constitutional doctrines to serve conservative ideological ends and then claiming original intent, many avenues of legislation are still available. Consider

if price increases cannot be demonstrated, concentration and even extreme market power—as in the cases of Google, Amazon, and Facebook—do not raise antitrust issues. But there is nothing to prevent Congress from redefining the nature of an antitrust abuse. This is also statutory, not constitutional. Once again, the value of this legislation is not just to anticipate an agenda for a Democratic win in 2020, but to help bring that about by exposing connections among Republican dogma, Republican corruption, and corporate corruption, and to move public opinion.

“If we do our jobs correctly,” says Robert Creamer, a longtime Democratic strategist, “Donald Trump will not be remembered as the most misogynist, bigoted, unqualified, dangerous, and corrupt president ever. He will be remembered as the president who caused a backlash of such ferocity that it ushered in the greatest era of progressive reform in modern American history.”

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 21

The Good News from the Voting Wars

How hard-won expansion of voting possibilities could raise turnout, boost the wave—and help our democracy

by M i l e s R a p o p o r t a nd C e c i ly H i ne s

T

he 2018 midterm election is often depicted as a contest between crude voter suppression by Republican state governments and a national blue-wave mobilization of grassroots Democrats.

But the story is actually more complicated and even more hopeful. In addition to the party organizing this year, a two-decade nonpartisan movement to expand access to the ballot is also bearing fruit across the country. The result could be a dramatic expansion of voting participation that swamps suppression efforts, enhances voter-mobilization efforts, and shatters the usual low expectations of off-year voting turnout.

The attempt at voter suppression, of course, is real. It is a dark part of the playbook that some— though by no means all—states under Republican control have promoted to retain their power.

After the Tea Party wave of 2010, the most recent chapter in longstanding efforts to restrict the vote moved forward in earnest. Particularly in states with conservative Republican “trifectas” (both houses of the legislature plus the governor), restrictive initiatives got real traction beginning in the 2011 legislative sessions.

These efforts got a huge boost when the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in 2013, allowing states previously covered by Justice Department preclearance provisions to proceed as they wished.

They have recently gained another enabler in the 180-degree reversal of the stance of the Justice Department, which was a powerful defender of voting rights under President Obama, but in the Trump-Sessions reign is siding with restrictive measures in numerous cases. According to the Brennan Center in its recent report “The State of Voting 2018,” 23 states have enacted one or more restrictive laws since 2011.

Extreme Gerrymandering. Partisan ger-

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rymandering was implemented in a number of states, most egregiously in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, as well as in Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Texas.

It is important to note that in Maryland and Illinois, Democrats used the redistricting process for partisan advantage as well.

Voter-ID Laws. Versions of ID laws can vary widely, and some can actually be reasonably drawn. But in the most egregious examples, strict photo-ID requirements without alternatives clearly have a severe chilling effect on poor voters, communities of color, and students. In all, 34 states have adopted varying forms of the policy, and of those, ten have what is described as “strict” voter-ID. The states to watch on how this may impact voting are Wisconsin, Iowa, Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and Kris Kobach’s Kansas. In Alabama, a challenge to the new photo-ID law by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund was thrown out on summary judgment and is now on expedited appeal, with a decision expected soon.

Restricted Registration and Access. Several states rescinded same-day registration, put restrictions on voter registration drives, and limited the periods or places for early voting. North Carolina has been ground zero for these efforts, “surgically” (to quote a federal judge there) targeting African American voters, including by eliminating Sunday early voting, when African American churches traditionally sponsor “souls to the polls.” Texas, Iowa, and Alabama have made regressive changes in voting options as well.

Purges of the Rolls. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is the ideological leader of this effort. He has championed a Kansas-based Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck system, a highly error-prone and aggressive system

of cross-state purging. In addition, the Presidential Advisory Commission on ElectionIntegrity, for which Kobach served as vice chair for a brief period in early 2017 before it collapsed of its own incompetence, clearly had “cleansing” the rolls as its primary intent. (To be clear: Having clean lists and maintaining their integrity is an important and proper thing for election officials to do.

But it is an area where the devil is really in the details.) States where voters may discover they have been wrongfully purged when they show up to vote in November could include Ohio, Georgia, Kansas (of course), Alabama, and others.

There are a number of states where an important, closely contested race or races could bring voter-suppression efforts into major focus.

Here are a few: Georgia. The race for governor between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, who is the current secretary of state and a major devotee of purging African American voters, could definitely see multiple efforts to keep suspected Democrats out of the polling booth. Some schemes are both clumsy and transparent. In Randolph County, the county election board tried to close seven of nine polling places in heavily African American precincts, ostensibly because they were not ADA-compliant. This was immediately challenged from multiple directions, leading to the proposal being withdrawn in a board meeting that lasted less than one minute.

Texas. The Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke, coupled with several competitive House races, is an obvious place where undermining of the vote could take place. In addition to gerrymandered districts, Texas has a strict voter-ID law that was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, then slightly changed by the state legislature, and then approved by the court in one of the cases where the Justice Department switched sides.

North Carolina. The North Carolina legislature has enacted the whole range of voter-suppressive measures, including extreme gerrymandering, strict voter-ID laws, eliminating same-day registration, shortening early voting periods, politicizing the election administration offices, and changing voting procedures for court races, among others. Many of these have been blocked, and in August, a three-judge panel of the U.S. district court

The 2018 Midterms issued an order to redraw gerrymandered lines before the 2018 election, but then reversed that expedited requirement when the impossibility of the timeline became clear. The fight will continue after the election, as the legislature has put numerous amendments on the November ballot to cement these restrictions in the state constitution. Erin Dale Byrd, executive director of Blueprint North Carolina and a leader in the fight against the measures, says, “North Carolina has a long history of resistance, and so we will continue to fight against efforts to enshrine injustice in our laws and in our constitution.”

Wisconsin. Republican Governor Scott Walker is in a desperate battle to keep his job, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin is defending her seat, and retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan’s seat is up for grabs, so we should expect to see continuing Republican efforts to keep the vote down. Wisconsin was long known as a good-government state. It has had same-day registration for 40 years, and had first-rate nonpartisan election administration. In recent years, fair voting has been undermined by severe gerrymandering, a strict voter-ID law, and the dismantling and politicization of state election administration.

At the same time, there is a dramatic set of counter-trends whose combined effect is likely to overwhelm the barriers that some have worked so hard to erect.

Three major dynamics may shape a turnout that far exceeds expectations and challenges the conventional wisdom about midterm elections: surprisingly effective resistance to voter suppression; a major surge of energetic votermobilization efforts; and an impressive roster of policies expanding voter access and opportunity adopted by states across the country. The result: an engaged and highly motivated electorate with expanded opportunities to participate.

Resistance to Voter Suppression

The modern version of the voting rights movement began in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These successes were rooted in both local and national organizing efforts led by such on-the-ground groups as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as well as legal challenges, most notably by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and its director,

Thurgood Marshall. After the debacle of the 2000 election, new organizations enlarged this universe and adopted a proactive reform agenda as well. This infrastructure has been far more effective than most people understand both at pushing back against attempts at voter suppression and at expanding ballot access.

There have been legislative fights, ballot initiatives, fights over implementation of new laws, and hundreds of court battles in response to the various assaults on the right to vote. In a number of states, legal actions challenged extreme voter-ID laws. Some of these have been blocked by courts, while others were rewritten to be less onerous.

In Texas, court battles have resulted in a less burdensome version of the ID law. In Kansas in June, a federal district court struck down the state’s documentary proof of citizenship law, which had blocked the registrations of more than 35,000 applicants. The state has appealed the decision. And in Alabama, when the state attempted to close DMV offices after passage of a strict voter-ID law, public pressure forced them to abandon the effort.

There has also been strong pushback against excessive voter purging. In Ohio, the effort to block the state’s purging regime in Husted v.

A. Philip Randolph Institute did not succeed at the Supreme Court. But the high court’s decision came less than 90 days before the Ohio special election. That meant blanket purging would be expressly illegal under the National Voter Registration Act. Secretary of State Jon Husted has already instructed boards not to cancel any registrations before November’s election. In addition, eight states have withdrawn from the Interstate Crosscheck program since 2013 as the result of opposition and challenges to the states for unfairly purging perfectly eligible voters.

Opposition to partisan gerrymandering has had real impact as well. The most important victory came in Pennsylvania, where the state Supreme Court, based on the Pennsylvania Constitution, redrew congressional districts in a much fairer way. This success created three or four additional competitive seats.

Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center observed that “voter suppression works best when it comes as a surprise, or when people aren’t paying attention. People are paying attention now, and when interest is high, and

mobilization is taking place, the impact of vote suppression can be dramatically reduced.”

The Fight to Expand Voter Access

In addition to resisting efforts at voter suppression, and with less fanfare, there have been major successes over the last ten years that have opened up access to the vote in many states, and in important ways.

“There are two somewhat contradictory things going on simultaneously,” says Rick Hasen, who publishes the highly regarded Election Law Blog. “On the one hand, in some red states (think North Carolina), Republican legislatures are passing laws making it harder to register and vote. But on the other hand, some red states and blue states have made real progress in improving the voting process and access to the ballot, progress that often flies under the radar.”

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who led election efforts at the Pew Charitable Trusts for many years, adds, “On balance, taking into account real restrictions that some voters face in a relatively small number of states, there are more options for almost all voters in the United States to register and vote than there have ever been before.”

Some largely underreported examples: Same-Day and Election Day Registration.

This allows voters to register, update their registrations, or fix any problems on the day they vote. Studies consistently show that this policy lifts turnout by 3 percent to 7 percent. In 2000, there were six states that had Election Day registration. In 2018, it will be offered in 17 states plus the District of Columbia.

Online Registration. In 2008, there were two states that offered voters the option of online registration; in 2018, there are 38 plus D.C. This is a remarkable number, way beyond “blue” states, and is a major aid to participation, particularly for young people and for the digital platforms that are encouraging registration.

Automatic Voter Registration ( AVR ). In just a few short years, 13 states and D.C. have adopted AVR . In Oregon, more than 200,000 voters were added in 2016. In California, Secretary of State Alex Padilla recently announced that almost 260,000 Californians newly registered at the DMV just between April 1 and June 30 (AVR went into effect April 23). An

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 23

additional 120,000 updated their addresses.

Mail-In Voting. Oregon, Washington, Colorado, California, and almost all counties in Utah have adopted major expansions of mailin voting (now referred to as “vote at home” by advocates like the National Vote at Home Coalition). In Oregon, “vote at home” combined with AVR to get ballots into the hands of 300,000 new voters, and in Colorado, it is combined with same-day registration and other reforms and has boosted Colorado’s turnout substantially. In addition, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington send ballots to everyone who has changed their address through the National Change of Address system.

Early Voting. In 37 states and D.C., there are significant options for voting during one- to four-week periods prior to Election Day, which have helped to substantially lessen the long lines and other Election Day problems in those states. According to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, in 2016, more than 47 million votes were cast in advance of voting day, either by mail or in person, and this figure is projected to grow significantly this year.

Voting Rights Restoration. According to Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, “In the last 20 years, two dozen states have taken steps to scale back disenfranchisement, enhance voter registration, and ease rights restoration.” Virginia, under Governors Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, has dramatically increased the number of people with felony convictions whose rights have been restored. Most recently, Louisiana and New York have expanded their restoration provisions, and Alabama significantly limited the number of crimes to which disenfranchisement applies. In Florida, Amendment 4 on the ballot is a constitutional amendment that would restore voting rights to 1.4 million people.

Opening Access to Young People. In 17 states, it is now possible to pre-register 17-yearolds, and 16-year-olds as well in 13 of them, so they are automatically added to the voting rolls when they turn 18. And in Florida, a federal district court blocked the secretary of state’s decision to ban siting early-voting locations on state college campuses.

Reforming Redistricting. Several states have created variants of citizen redistricting

The Special Election in Ohio’s 12th A Microcosm of Changing Trends

O

n August 7, the special election for Congress in Ohio’s 12th District was about as closely watched as an election can be. The main questions were whether, in a gerrymandered district designed to safely return Republicans to the House, the Democratic candidate Danny O’Connor could produce a localized blue wave to win the election, and how the motivation of Democratic voters would compare to that of Republicans.

O’Connor fell short by fewer than 2,000 votes.

In this district, which has

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two registered Republicans for every one Democrat, the swing from the 2014 midterm was massive. In 2014, the Republican won by a margin of 68 percent to 28 percent. In August 2018, the election was nearly a tie. The progressive harbinger-watchers smiled, especially looking at the statistic, reported in Cleveland.com, that in the 57 districts that Republican Troy Balderson won by 70 percent or above (solid Republican precincts), the turnout was 4,000 votes below the 2014 November midterm vote. And in the 61 precincts that O’Connor

won by 70 percent or more, the turnout was 1,500 votes higher than in 2014. The Republican turnout was up 50 percent from the turnout of the May primaries; Democratic turnout was up 130 percent. And this was true in an election in late August, peak vacation time, and at a time when the three colleges that are in or adjoining the district—Denison, Ohio Wesleyan, and Ohio State—were emptied of students.

This all is indeed significant in a partisan way. But there is another way that the 12th District election was significant, and that is as a

commissions, including California and Arizona, where commissions drew the lines in the 2011 cycle. More recently, Ohio, in two steps, created commissions and adopted safeguards against partisan drawing of congressional and legislative seats. Ballot initiatives to reform redistricting will be on the ballot in Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, and Utah.

Electronic Registration Information Center ( ERIC ). This is voting list maintenance,

done right. As Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck is losing states, ERIC is gaining them. There are now 25 states that use ERIC. This system, originally created by the Pew Charitable Trusts, cleans state lists through interstate matching, but does so using safeguards to prevent erroneous purging, and requires states who join to reach out to unregistered voters, as well.

All tallied, this is a pretty impressive list. The positive changes in election procedures are of major importance because they set the playing field on which the races are fought. And the sheer number of states that have adopted varying combinations of these reforms shows that they are gaining popularity well beyond blue states alone.

microcosm of several underlying trends about the election process itself that will be relevant come November.

The accompanying article discusses four important trends, whose interplay will have major consequences for the elections in November. They are 1) efforts to restrict and suppress the vote; 2) efforts by voting rights and election protection organizations to fight back and derail those policies, 3) successes by the voting-rights movement to open up new opportunities for registration and voting, and 4) efforts by campaigns and organizations to mobilize voters. The 12th District race had every one of those features, and they all con-

tributed to the outcome.

First, a core question of the race focused on an egregious act of partisan structural manipulation.

The gerrymander done in the 2011 redistricting sought to create a tall enough seawall to protect Republican control of the district. Tall enough to survive a major wave? (It is worth noting that after the 2020 election, this district will never look the same.

Ohio voters passed a referendum in 2017 that created a bipartisan redistricting commission to draw the state’s congressional districts. No fair body would ever draw this district.) In addition, Secretary of State Jon Husted, now a candidate for lieutenant gover-

The 2018 Midterms How does this overlay with races that are competitive in 2018? This is a difficult and inexact thing to measure. By one rough calculation, taking the 25 states that have either same-day registration or automatic voter registration, or both, there are three Senate races, 30 House seats, and eight governor’s races that are considered competitive in the Cook Political Report.

SDR/AVR states with multiple competitive races are Illinois (four House seats and the governorship), Minnesota (four House seats, a Senate race, and the governorship), and California (with seven competitive House seats). And of course, there are many state legislative races and statewide down-ballot races that will have major importance for legislation and redistricting efforts over the next few years.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which raises money for House races considered competitive, is famous for targeting funds only to campaigns where the DCCC believes the Democrat has a serious shot at winning. This year, the DCCC ’s Red to Blue project lists more than 70 competitive races, many of which are in states

nor, has used an aggressive voter-purging procedure.

The second trend is strongly illustrated by the flip side of the purging process in Ohio. The A. Philip Randolph Institute, represented by the Ohio ACLU and Dēmos, sued the state of Ohio, stating that Husted’s procedure was a violation of the National Voter Registration Act. The NVRA prohibits using the act of not voting, by itself, to trigger the process of removing a voter from the rolls. In a case that reached the Supreme Court, Husted v. APRI, the Supreme Court validated Ohio’s procedures, a loss for voting-rights advocates. However—and this is the crucial point—the purging process

that do not engage in ballot suppression.

So these voting expansion measures are widespread now and continuing to grow. It has been a staple of political science research that turnout in midterm elections doesn’t vary much. But it can and does vary in wave years. In the primaries to date, Republican participation was generally down and Democratic participation way up. The combination of under-reported process reforms and vigorous mobilization efforts under way could make 2018 an exceptional year both in partisan terms and civic terms.

Mobilize, Mobilize, Mobilize

The opening up of voter access provides a platform, an infrastructure that invites people into the process. But the fulfillment of the promise comes when voters are motivated to make use of the tools available. What drives this motivation?

Obviously, one impetus is when people are drawn into the process by important issues, new and exciting candidates, or antipathy to the behavior of people in public office. But more dramatically, when the new access opportunities are combined with serious organizing and mobi-

was stayed and suspended while the matter was in the courts, and as a result there have been no wholesale purges of the lists in Ohio over the last two years.

The third element is the success of the voting-rights and democracy movement in winning procedures that make it easier and more accessible for eligible citizens to register and vote.

Though Ohio is far from a leader on these issues, three really important policies are now in place. First, Ohio is one of 40 states that allow online registration. Second, vote-by-mail

procedures are liberal. And third, Ohio has a substantial earlyvoting period, one of the longer ones in the country; this year, it’s 21 days. These policies create major opportunities for citizens to get into the process without going to city hall to register. And they significantly reduce the problems of the long-lined, Tuesday-only vote-casting.

By themselves, these relatively new options are helpful but not necessarily significant. However, when they are utilized by sophisticated campaigns and organizations, they become powerfully influential. And they were. David Pepper, the chair of the Ohio Dem-

lizing efforts, people are more likely to register, and to vote. The results of this synergy may soon be on display in a powerfully affirmative way.

Deepak Pateriya of the Center for Community Change Action notes that while the great majority of election-related funding still goes to radio and TV advertising, there is substantially increased support going to organizing efforts, and tremendous energy from established and new groups, some of them localized and some statewide, with significant coordination efforts under way. “Waves never happen by themselves; they are always the result of organizing.”

Matt Brix, the managing director of State Voices, which coordinates nonpartisan voter registration and voter engagement through 23 state “tables,” says this year seems different in several ways. More donors, at an increasing pace, are coming into the field; far more groups are making use of the new tools available to them; and new apps are being developed by groups that work in tandem with online registration offered by states.

Greg Speed is the president of America Votes, which coordinates voter-mobilization

ocratic Party, was deeply involved in the 12th District race. He said that Ohio Democrats plan around and take full advantage of early voting. “If you are well organized as a campaign or a party, early voting provides a really good opportunity to get your vote out, especially people who would not necessarily vote automatically. Weeks before the election, there was a non-stop line of voters at the county offices.”

Heather Taylor-Miesle, executive director of the Ohio Environmental Council, and Annie Ellison, O’Connor’s campaign manager, said they were amazed at the level of volunteers and organizations that came into the district,

knocking on doors and turning out voters, working in conjunction with the campaign, in seemingly endless waves. Utilizing early voting was an important part of their efforts.

O’Connor and Balderson will have another go in November. It’s still an uphill climb for O’Connor in this district. But a combination of demonstrable and continuing voter enthusiasm, savvy organizing, and a policy and procedural terrain far more favorable than in prior midterms, which allows good campaigns and good organizing to utilize many roads to the ballot box, could all come together to bring Danny O’Connor in—and lots more like him.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 25

efforts by progressive organizations outside of the party structures and separate from campaigns, also organized by state-based tables.

He says that the work is already at least 50 percent more robustly funded than in 2014, and he expects it to grow dramatically. The number of new groups out there fired up to register people and make sure they vote is astounding to him.

Both Brix and Speed also say the entire way the state organizations are able to operate this year is different because of the expanded voting opportunities. Says Speed: “Online registration, same-day registration, and early voting have dramatically increased the ways that local organizations can communicate with voters during the campaign, and how they can do GOTV [get-out-the-vote] work.”

Voter-mobilization efforts on the progressive and Democratic side, in addition to direct efforts by candidates and party operations, fall into several categories. Some of them have been operating for a long time. The labor

voting efforts like FIRM and New American Leaders are joining the fray as well.

Complementing those efforts are organizations that have been created in the last ten years as part of the “progressive infrastructure,” including America Votes, MoveOn, and State Voices. Then there are the major networks in the community organizing movement, like the Center for Community Change, the Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, Faith in Action (formerly PICO), and others, which have made civic engagement and voter participation an increasingly core part of their work. Finally, there are a number of coalition efforts in different states made up of multiple groups coordinating their efforts.

Looking at younger voters, there is also major new energy and effort on college campuses. University challenges have come on the scene, where schools are now competing to have the highest registration rates. The Harvard Kennedy School and others have committed to have 90 percent

These mobilization efforts could produce an increase in turnout, and they are tapping a level of voter enthusiasm that will make the task that much easier. unions, which have been the core of mobilization efforts historically, along with women’s and environmental organizations, will be in the field in newly energized ways.

So, too, will be the infrastructure of racial justice voter-engagement efforts that have been developed over decades. In the African American community, the NAACP, the NAACP National Voter Fund, and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation have now been joined by newer efforts including Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, Black Voters Matter, and Black Youth Project 100. The Latinx civic engagement universe includes longstanding efforts like UnidosUS, Voto Latino, and Mi Familia Vota, and has been joined by the Latino Victory Project as well as localized efforts like Make the Road, Casa de Maryland, and Promise Arizona. The Asian American community efforts are also growing in organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and APIA Vote. Immigrant

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registration levels for this fall’s elections. The related ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge has participation from more than 400 institutions. A report just out from Tisch College at Tufts, which has been a leader in college civic engagement efforts, gives university leaders ten steps they can take to boost registration and participation on campus. And NextGen America, Tom Steyer’s well-funded creation, is working on campuses in 11 swing states.

Finally, a new and vibrant addition to the field is the plethora of organizations, some national, some local, loosely known as “the Resistance,” that have sprung up in response to the Trump presidency and the searing issues that have arisen in the wake of the 2016 election. These include the student movement around guns led by the Parkland students; the women-led groups formed after the Women’s March the day after the inauguration; and the newly electorally focused resistance, like Indivisible, Swing Left, Flippable, the Arena, Emerge America, the

Sister District Project (focused on state legislatures), and others. The number of new groups since November 2016 is staggering.

Put together, these mobilization efforts have the capacity to result in a major increase in turnout, and they are tapping a level of enthusiasm on the part of voters themselves that will make the task that much easier.

On the Democratic side, these mobilization efforts have already had powerful impact. In the Georgia primary, where Stacey Abrams excited voters, turnout surged 69 percent from the 2014 off-year primary for governor—from 328,000 to 550,000—while Republican turnout was basically flat. And in the Texas primaries, where Senate contender Beto O’Rourke excited voters, Democratic turnout doubled from the 2014 cycle. In deep-red Idaho, turnout more than doubled in the primary to select a Democratic candidate for governor who has almost no chance of winning. And in the special election in Ohio’s 12th District (see sidebar), Democratic turnout from the May primaries increased by about 130 percent, while Republican turnout increased by 50 percent.

If there is a blue wave substantially driven by larger voter turnout, there will be many contributors to it. Democrats will obviously be helped by voter energy driven by antipathy to Donald Trump and the policies the administration has implemented that have hurt so many. Many good candidates and the large-scale mobilization efforts will be justly credited as well.

But an important and largely overlooked factor will be the long-term, consistent, and hard work of organizations in the voting-rights and election-reform movement that have pushed back against efforts at voter suppression and have created a more open and more accessible set of rules that allow all voters far fuller access to the process. The challenges they have worked through, and the victories they have won, will be good for the Democrats indeed. For the long term, those victories will be a major gain for American democracy.

Miles Rapoport is Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School and served as Connecticut’s secretary of state and president of Dēmos and Common Cause. Cecily Hines is senior program coordinator of the fellowship.

The 2018 Midterms

How Gerrymandering Reform Can Win in the States

the 2010 redistricting cycle: Florida, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Somewhat surprisingly, every one of these “Egregious Eight” has a realistic path to avoiding or undoing a future partisan gerrymander after the 2020 census— without any help from the Supreme Court.

Here are four ways to attack gerrymandering at a state-by-state level:

by S a m Wa ng , Ben W i l l i a ms, a nd R i ck O be r

The Gubernatorial Route

Through local action, Democrats this November have a chance to untilt the playing field in every state that now has an extreme partisan gerrymander.

b o b b r o w n / r i c h m o n d t i m e s - d i s pat c h v i a a p i m a g e s

D

espite severe gerrymandering, Democrats stand a strong chance this November of regaining power in statehouses across America. If they realize those gains nationwide, they can use the resulting pro-reform climate to level the playing field for the next decade.

Increasingly, voters live near politically likeminded neighbors, a geographic pattern of population clustering that serves as the raw material for constructing gerrymanders. In 2010, Republicans used this raw material to create the most gerrymanders in modern history and consequently, a large political advantage. Even if Republicans lose the national popular vote by as much as 6 percentage points, we estimate that they still have an even-odds chance of retaining control of the House of Representatives. A good half of that advantage comes from creative districting in a handful of states. As a result, several dozen House seats in those states are nearly guaranteed to be occupied by Republicans in nearly any political climate. This advantage is like a levee, built to withstand waves of public opinion that favor the other side.

As of early September, polling trends suggest that a Democratic wave may overtop this levee by flipping districts in less-gerrymandered states. In special elections since 2016, Democrats have outperformed Hillary Clinton’s performance against Donald Trump by an average of 11 percentage points. She won the popular vote by 2 percentage points, so if this pattern were applied to the whole nation, it would translate to a 13-point popular margin, the biggest margin for either party since the depths of the Watergate scandal in 1974. Even a margin half

This is the most straightforward political solution. In most states, the governor has a critical role in drawing new districts. And even as large would still be enough to switch dozens though partisans can vitiate the power of the of seats from Republican to Democratic and vote by drawing lines to encircle or split commake Democratic control likelier than not. munities, they can’t put in the fix in a stateIt shouldn’t take a massive wave election wide vote for governor. to turn bums out of power, of either party.

Voters this November elect the great majorUnfortunately, the Supreme Court is unlike- ity of the nation’s governors to four-year terms, ly to act to limit partisan gerrymandering. which will get to the next wave of redistrictThis year’s landmark case Gill v. Whitford ing, beginning in 2021. Governors will have to eschewed easy and clear mathematical tests sign off on new redistricting plans in Florida, in favor of a district-by-district analysis, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In which raises the bar dramatically on what it all of these states, the candidate running in will take to prove gerrymandering. opposition to the legislature is, at a minimum, running competitively in polls. In the only state with a clear Democratic gerrymander, Republican Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland is a strong favorite for re-election. That likely will prevent the Democratic legislature from gerrymandering districts as it did in 2011.

In neighboring Virginia, both parties are already likely to have a say over redistricting. Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat electAs a result of the 2017 election, Democrats will have more say in Virginia’s redistricting. ed in 2017, will have to sign With prospects for federal action on gerry- off on legislative district maps produced by mandering fading, it’s time to pursue reform the Republican-controlled General Assembly. through individual states. Such a federalist Virginia is notoriously gerrymandered: A 9.6 approach lacks the sweeping breadth of consti- percentage point win in the popular vote by tutional doctrine. But metaphorically speaking, Democrats was not enough to give them control if a damaged roof can’t be replaced entirely, it of the House of Delegates. Democratic districts can still help to patch individual holes. were so packed that the median winning candiEmploying easy-to-use statistical tests, one of date did not even have an opponent. A bipartisan us previously identified eight states where major legislative map has the opportunity to untilt partisan gerrymandering offenses occurred in the playing field and give Virginia a fresh start.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 27

State Constitution–Based Lawsuits

In the one bright spot in gerrymandering lawsuits this year, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ordered the congressional map to be redrawn. This was a big win in a state that typically splits its popular vote fairly evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Nevertheless, in the last three elections the Keystone State has sent 13 Republicans and only five Democrats to Congress. The map for this November, which does not cut up cities in creative ways, looks to have as many as nine competitive districts.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the Pennsylvania case on the grounds that decisions based on state constitutions are largely beyond its reach to overrule. In this way, reform in Pennsylvania was able to avoid running afoul of an indecisive or hostile Supreme Court.

By our count, 29 state constitutions—more than half—have a clause calling for free and

stitutionally penalizes a whole political party for expressing its views. Under such circumstances, she wrote, a state political party can assert that it has suffered viewpoint discrimination, a violation of the First Amendment.

These statewide claims can take advantage of the flowering of statewide mathematical standards developed in the last few years to identify gerrymanders. And while the unanimous opinion in Gill shied away from embracing such statewide measures, it also acknowledged a point one of us made in an amicus brief: Such measures are so simple that they can be calculated by pencil and paper or a hand calculator.

The Initiative Route

Even in the best case, court rulings can only stem the worst gerrymanders because courts tend to defer to a state’s own legislative processes. Nothing, however, stops a state from reforming its own process—nothing, that is,

Voter initiatives, like the one on the ballot in Michigan this year, can create independent commissions to take redistricting out of the legislature’s hands. fair elections. Some go further: Florida’s Fair Districts amendments provide detailed protections against partisan gerrymandering, and were used to successfully prosecute a court case that led to a redrawing of multiple congressional districts and a re-do of the entire state Senate map. State court intervention is also possible in cases of racial gerrymandering. As the Roberts Supreme Court has steadily chipped away at Voting Rights Act protections, both the need and the opportunity have arisen for state courts to address racially based offenses under versions of the Equal Protection Clause found in state constitutions.

Many constitutions also have language that echoes the free-speech protections of the federal Constitution. Such phrasing exists, as well as a potentially sympathetic state Supreme Court, in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A free-speech clause is important because Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has outlined a theory that gerrymandering uncon-

28 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

lishes a California-style commission, in which three groups of commissioners—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—must separately sign off on a plan. The initiative is on the ballot alongside other popular ideas such as a $12 minimum wage and marijuana legalization.

This route is not without its risks. Chief Justice John Roberts has been vocal in his opposition to citizen initiatives that take districting power away from legislatures. Opposing him was Anthony Kennedy, so Kennedy’s retirement puts independent commissions newly at risk. Even if Michigan voters approve reform, a sensible next step might be to find a way to get the legislature to pass its own law approving of the new process.

except the tendency of legislators to preserve their own seats.

The way around that barrier is to go directly to the voters. Twenty-one of the 50 states allow voters to mount an initiative for direct popular vote. Such a route opens the possibility of creating a commission that takes redistricting power out of the legislature’s hands. Commissions established in Arizona and California have realized the hopes of reformers by creating competitive districts and enhancing representational fairness.

In May, Ohio passed a ballot measure establishing a congressional redistricting commission. The legislature can still intervene if the commission deadlocks, but the resulting lawmaker-created map would only be used for four years.

A stronger measure is on the ballot in Michigan this November. There, the citizen group Voters Not Politicians gathered several hundred thousand signatures for a measure that estab-

The Legislative Route

Every one of the Egregious Eight is covered by one of the three options above. In some states, however, a gerrymander can be struck down by a court only after it is passed. To avoid such a protracted dispute, one last possibility exists: Legislatures will clean up their own acts.

This is less unlikely than it sounds. In 1980, the Iowa legislature overwhelmingly passed a law to establish a nonpartisan redistricting process. The motive that inspired this change was not necessarily idealistic: Both Republicans and Democrats feared being locked out of power in the next redistricting cycle. Still, passing a reform out of fear for one’s own skin is better than no reform at all.

Also, don’t underestimate the power of public opinion. This year has seen an unusually high wave of enthusiasm for redistricting reform. Previously a somewhat obscure subject, gerrymandering has drawn attention from grassroots organizations in multiple states. These activists can help pressure legislators into doing the right thing.

These four routes to reform are examples of the new role that federalism can play in democracy reform. States’ rights have long been used to justify anti-democratic actions, but state-level actions may also help repair one of American democracy’s longstanding problems.

Sam Wang is a professor at Princeton University and founder of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. Ben Williams and Rick Ober are legal analysts at the project.

The 2018 Midterms

The Return of American Socialism

A largely millennial movement, with a surprisingly broad base of support, has staked its claim on the nation’s political discourse and direction.

by H a ro l d Me y e rs o n

I

n 1960, the young socialist Michael Harrington traveled to Ann Arbor to provide what help he could to the fledgling radical movement at the University of Michigan, and to see if he could recruit some students to the Young People’s Socialist League. He had particularly long talks with the 20-year-old editor of The Michigan Daily (the student newspaper), Tom Hayden. Though the two hit it off, Harrington couldn’t make the sale. “He accepted much of my analysis,” Harrington later was to write, “yet he balked at the socialist idea itself.”

Harrington was no slouch at converting progressives to socialism; an unusually high percentage of the members of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (which he founded in 1973) and its successor organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (which he co-founded in 1982) signed up after having been intellectually and emotionally persuaded by one or more Harrington speeches. Nonetheless, DSA’s membership never grew to more than 8,000 during Harrington’s lifetime (he died in 1989). Hayden was just one of many progressives who either balked at the socialist idea or saw no future for it in real American politics.

Fast-forward to 2010. Not to today, not 2018, but to 2010. Actually existing American socialism isn’t doing very much. DSA has been reduced to around 5,000 largely inactive members (including me, having been a member of DSOC and then DSA since 1975). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazar are in college. Most Americans couldn’t pick Bernie Sanders out of a police lineup. Wall Street and Zuccotti Park have yet to be Occupied; hardly anyone on this side of the Atlantic has

heard of, much less read, Thomas Piketty. Yet, likely because of the 2008 crash and ensuing recession, Gallup has decided to poll on the popularity of economic systems. It finds that while 53 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of capitalism, an equal 53 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism.

The following year, Pew finds that 49 percent of Americans (not just Democrats) under 30 have a favorable view of socialism—three percentage points higher than the share that has a favorable view of capitalism.

Let’s move now to the present day. Gallup continues to poll on economic systems, and this year finds that the share of Democrats with a favorable view of socialism has grown to 57 percent, while those with a favorable view of capitalism has dwindled to 47 percent. A YouGov poll of millennials (not just millennial Democrats) from last year showed that 44 percent would prefer to live in a socialist nation, 42 percent in a capitalist nation, with the remaining 14 percent evenly split between nations that are either communist (oy) or fascist (oy again).

So: Tom Hayden, who perhaps more than anyone personified the New Left radicalism of 1960s America, consistently refused to identify as a socialist, while today, millions of Americans with nothing resembling Hayden’s deep radicalism say that socialism is their preferred economic system. Many thousands of their compatriots—most of them not much older than Hayden was when he turned Harrington down—have now joined DSA (over Labor Day weekend, the group’s membership moved past 50,000). What had changed?

In a word: capitalism.

In the half-century between Harrington and Hayden’s discussion and Gallup’s discovery of American socialists, most of the political constraints placed on capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s were lifted, at capital’s insistence.

The broadly shared prosperity of the New Deal order—in which unions were strong, taxes progressive, wages rising in tandem with productivity, domestic investment (both public and private) high, and production eclipsing finance—all but vanished. By 2010, when the polls began to pick up the great, though still quiet, shift leftward, the toll taken by the Great Recession was still mounting. Eight million families were to lose their homes. Millennials were entering a job market in which nearly all the new jobs were temp, part-time, independent contractor, or—a new wrinkle in sub-par employment—gig. Their rate of family formation and home-buying lagged their older siblings’, their parents’, their grandparents’.

The economic data confirmed what Americans knew experientially: Income had shifted from labor to capital. As the University of Chicago economist Simcha Barkai has documented, the share of GDP going to profits rose by 13.5 percent between 1984 and 2014, while the share going to both worker compensation and corporate investment declined by a corresponding 13.9 percent. Even as unemployment fell below 4 percent, the gap between profits and wages continued to widen. Comparing the second quarter of this year to the second quarter of 2017, profits of the S&P 500 rose by 23.5 percent, while wages, when the increased cost of living was factored in, didn’t rise at all.

In Piketty parlance, “r” (the rate of return on investment) was indeed a hell of a lot greater than “g” (the rate of economic growth). All the more so, since corporations, under pressure from Wall Street, were lavishing their profits on shareholders through record levels of share buybacks and dividend payments. In the more elemental language of socialism, capital was crushing labor, and using its political power to protect and expand its economic power.

No nation can undergo so fundamental an economic transformation without experiencing comparable political change. Once Bernie Sanders declared he was running for president in the Democratic primaries as a self-described democratic socialist, on a platform featuring

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 29

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second, right after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated longtime U.S. Representative Joe Crowley in New York’s Democratic primary.

The appeal of DSA to millennials wasn’t merely economic. In both ideology and activism, it was the real deal. At a time when left activism of all kinds—electoral, feminist, African American, pro-immigrant, worker, teacher, tenant, police accountability, anti–money in politics—was exploding, DSA’s new members involved themselves in all of these. For those who sought a group that was the sum of all lefts, DSA fit that bill.

The Los Angeles local, for instance, which currently boasts not quite 2,000 members, is heavily involved in precinct walking for a November ballot measure that would repeal a California law restricting cities’ ability to enact rent controls, and another ballot measure that would establish a city of Los Angeles public bank. Members also canvass for Medicare for All, monitor police sweeps of the homeless, and hold free fix-your-brakelight clinics for motorists who could be apprehended for driving while black or driving while immigrant.

The Washington, D.C., local, which is roughly the same Following the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DSA membership surged to 50,000. size as L.A.’s, has taken on a comfort zone of left sectarians—would never similar range of projects, including one that probuild a significant American left. Paradoxi- vides counsel and support to tenants facing eviccally and somewhat bewilderingly, Sanders has tion in the city’s way-too-costly housing market. always insisted he’s not a Democrat, but all the Its most notable foray was completely spontanecandidates for whom he’s campaigned have ous: the gathering of a handful of members who been Democrats, and it’s his supporters, at his verbally shamed Homeland Security Secretary direction, who have successfully pushed the Kirstjen Nielsen in a Mexican restaurant at a Democratic Party to reform its rules. time when her department’s agents were taking migrant children from their parents.

It’s on the issue of candidate endorsements Almost immediately after he declared his that a number of locals have experienced divicandidacy in mid-2015, Sanders began drawing sions.

Some more sectarian members have huge crowds, disproportionately of the young.

It was at that moment that DSA’s membership opposed backing candidates running as Dembegan to grow from roughly 5,000 to its cur- ocrats, though since a plurality or majority of rent 50,000. The growth has been steady, but DSA members came to the organization through with two subsequent surges: the first, right the Democratic primary campaigns of Sanders, after Donald Trump was elected president; the Ocasio-Cortez, and like candidates, that posiSanders went beyond Harrington by enabling socialists to avoid the spoiler role that those who’d voted for Ralph Nader’s third-party candidacy in 2000 had played. By running in the Democratic primaries, and by proclaiming in a 2015 speech at Georgetown University that his socialism was a lineal descendent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Sanders created a path for those who not only wanted to repudiate the Third Way/Wall Street Democrats who had dominated the party under Bill Clinton (and still had a sizable foothold under Barack Obama), but also understood that working within a third party or shunning electoral politics altogether—the

andrew lichtenstein / corbis via get t y images

universal Medicare and tuition-free college, sizable numbers of Democrats not only flocked to his banner, but told pollsters that, come to think of it, they were socialists, too. Fortythree percent of likely caucus-goers in Iowa, 31 percent of New Hampshire Democrats on the eve of that state’s primary, even 39 percent of likely primary voters in South Carolina averred that they were socialists.

Did this mean they no longer thought of themselves as liberals, too? To the contrary: In the same poll in which 39 percent of South Carolina Democrats said they were socialists, 68 percent said they were liberal and 74 percent said they were progressive. Like the great sociologist Daniel Bell, who described himself as a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture, they opted not to choose.

Two socialists—Harrington and Sanders— enabled them to avoid having to enter a political isolation booth by declaring themselves socialists. The singular achievements of the old Socialist Party, Harrington concluded—its advocating for universal old-age and medical insurance avant la lettre as well as for public housing and racial equality, its support for industrial unionism and the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and its opposition to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II— could just as easily have come without compelling its members to cut themselves off from the unions, civil rights groups, and other organizations of the mass left that had to function within the Democratic Party. “Even though there were profound limitations to the Roosevelt reforms,” Harrington said in a 1984 New York Times article, “the New Deal drew upon and reinforced a mass movement for social change in the United States. The Socialists made a terrible mistake in counterposing themselves to it.”

Besides, you could be openly socialist and a Democrat, Harrington said, and several notable elected Democrats who were Harrington contemporaries—among them Berkeley Congressman Ron Dellums and Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger—did just that.

Following Harrington’s lead, DSOC and then DSA preached socialism and at the same time backed “the left wing of the possible,” in Harrington’s phrase—those Democrats committed to greater economic democracy and the expansion of the welfare state.

The 2018 Midterms tion hasn’t prevailed. At both the national and local level, however, DSA offers official endorsements only to declared socialists. Hence, the New York local endorsed Cynthia Nixon’s gubernatorial bid after she declared herself a socialist, though it’s in no way apparent that Nixon’s genuine leftism is any more distinctly socialist than, say, Andrew Gillum’s, the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida, who supports Medicare for All and abolishing ICE , but has not declared himself a socialist.

What this means is that DSA’s official endorsements are likely to be concentrated in terrains like New York City, where leftist candidates believe it politically safe, or even advantageous, to embrace the socialist label.

Gillum, whatever his personal beliefs, likely counts it as a blessing that he doesn’t have DSA’s formal endorsement, which would surely be an albatross in his campaign to carry Florida.

That said, a stance of socialist-only endorsements can be glaringly short-sighted in those instances when progressive Democrats are facing off against neo-fascist Republicans.

Indeed, other progressive groups may likely view such standoffishness as a betrayal. In early September, the Atlanta local of DSA sought to deal with this self-inflicted conundrum by effectively recommending that its members work for the election of Democrat Stacey Abrams as governor while not itself formally endorsing her. “For many reasons,” the local stated, “we cannot endorse Abrams ourselves, but neither can we stand aside while our friends and allies fight for something they know will make their lives better. We voted to encourage our members, if they feel so moved, to stand up and fight in this election cycle.”

As with Gillum’s campaign, Abrams’s probably welcomes this halfway house position, which will swell its corps of volunteers without saddling it with the backing of godless Marxists. Still, the position of the Atlanta local refracts a fundamental tension in today’s DSA , which is between sectarians who shun the Democratic Party in favor of “pure socialist” movement building, and those who seek to work more closely with the broad progressive community and view the Democrats as offering a plausible arena for struggle. Such tensions were evident in the New York local’s deliberations on endorsing Nixon, which more

sectarian activists opposed, but which the rank and file overwhelmingly supported in an online survey (of the 1,500 members who voted, more than 70 percent favored the endorsement).

Over the past two years, as DSA’s membership has swelled, a number of veteran sectarians, including long-beleaguered Trotskyists, also signed up, with the apparent hope of creating a mass sectarian organization. At the organization’s 2017 national convention, where the vast majority of delegates were brandnew members, some small sectarian groups constituted the only organized factions, and managed to elect a disproportionate number of their adherents to leadership bodies. But such long-timers have sometimes been able to make common cause with the far larger number of younger members who see in DSA an opportunity to make a clean break with what they view as their sell-out liberal elders.

At their most otherworldly, these members have authored such documents as a petition

and the Communists dismantling such previous sectarian institutions as their own trade unions, while making common cause with progressive Democrats. Indeed, by the mid-1930s, it was the younger members of the Socialist Party (the selfdescribed “Militants”) who accused the New Dealers of milquetoast reformism, while the Communists (under orders from Stalin, who sought an alliance against fascism) had no discouraging words for the Roosevelt coalition.

The heirs to that Militant strain in today’s DSA offer kindred critiques of the Democrats— critiques that are perfectly valid when condemning the rightward movement of the party under Bill Clinton and the financial policies of Barack Obama’s Treasury Department, but fail to register the broad leftward movement of Democrats in recent years. Thus, the prominent militant Corey Robin can describe the party as “massively dependent in its [presidential] nomination process on super-delegates,” only to have the party, at the insistence of its

Historically, American socialists have helped build a more humane capitalism, which puts them out of business until capital erodes their reforms, crashes, and brings the socialists back. (which went nowhere) to condemn the two DSA members who won Democratic congressional primaries this year, Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, for supporting a twostate solution for Israel/Palestine, rather than just one Palestinian state. (Tlaib, of course, is herself Palestinian American.)

Some of the intensity behind this drive for a distinct brand of socialism that few liberals will embrace is doubtless due to a perennial conundrum of the American socialist left: that it flourishes at a time when the mainstream is moving left, too. The high point of Debsian socialism in 1912—when presidential candidate Eugene Debs won 6 percent of the vote and the party boasted 118,000 members and a thousand elected local officials—came at the apogee of progressivism. The upsurge in both Socialist and Communist party memberships of the early 1930s coincided with the coming of the New Deal, which then saw the defection of many longtime socialists to Roosevelt’s column

Sanders wing, vote to strip its superdelegates of that power a one month later.

For those DSA militants who would make a clean break with the Democrats, the facts that polls show rank-and-file Democrats more favorably inclined to socialism than capitalism, that 60 House Democrats now belong to a Medicare for All caucus, and that even such centrist Democratic senators as Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker have endorsed Medicare for All and planned full employment—all this and more has created an intolerably porous border between liberalism and socialism, between the Democrats and DSA. The electoral successes of a Sanders or a Tlaib make that border more porous still.

There’s still plenty of room for differentiation— consider those Senate Democrats who voted to weaken bank regulations earlier this year—but it grows harder to argue that today’s Democratic Party isn’t a viable arena for promoting social democratic or even socialist policies.

Sociologically, DSA today resembles in many

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 31

ways the major student left organization of the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society. As SDS saw its small initial membership expand exponentially as the Vietnam War escalated, so DSA has seen its membership swell, almost entirely among millennials, with such breakthrough campaigns as Sanders’s and OcasioCortez’s. SDS, of course, came to a bad end, its membership shrinking and splitting into a hard core of Maoists (its Progressive Labor wing) or a hard core of violence apostles (the Weather Underground), even as the broad antiwar movement continued to expand.

I don’t foresee a similar bad end—which would mean not violence, but a retreat into sectarianism—for today’s young DSA activists. The time during which SDS descended into madness was one in which the urgent and immediate demand of the left and liberals—ending the Vietnam War—had completely failed; when antiwar mobilizations and the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy

of both social democratic and socialist policy ideas, but these have largely not become the objects of dispute. No internal disputes at all have arisen around the expansion of social rights embodied by such policies as Medicare for All, free public college educations, or the creation of more public housing—projects often embraced by mainstream Democrats no less than socialists.

The past few years have also seen a range of proposals to create public institutions that could compete with and set a yardstick for private ones. Often as not, such proposals have not come from explicitly socialist ranks. The Los Angeles ballot measure to create a public bank, for instance, emerged from organizations that criticized the well-publicized abuses of Wells Fargo, with whom the city had done much of its banking. A recent article on the Prospect website by the leaders of two progressive organizations proposed establishing a public company to develop and market afford-

Between them, Michael Harrington and Bernie Sanders made a revived American socialism possible by steering it away from the cul-de-sac of third-party politics. and Robert Kennedy had ended in defeat and tragedy; when every existing strategy had failed to stop the war and prevent the election of Richard Nixon. DSA’s growth, by contrast, has been fueled not by defeat but by stunning victories of millennial socialist women of color, by the tectonic-shifting campaign of an avowed socialist presidential candidate, and by a pronounced move leftward of the Democratic Party—driven in many instances by its socialist or social democratic members.

These are conditions more likely to produce an increasing intervention of socialist candidates and an interjection of socialist policies into the mainstream political arena—not a withdrawal into a hothouse where sectarians can cultivate their distinctive purity.

To date, the divisions within DSA are more strategic than doctrinal. The re-surfacing of an American socialist movement has been accompanied by a kindred re-emergence

32 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

able prescription drugs—which, after all, are frequently the end product of taxpayer-funded research. And it was none other than the leftward-moving centrist Senator Gillibrand who has introduced legislation calling for a renewal of postal banking.

In the past few months, proposals have begun to come forward that address more fundamentally the immense gap in both income and power between capital and labor. Citing the experience of both Norway and Finland, and of Alaska’s fossil-fuel fund, writer Matt Bruenig has recommended the establishment of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, using increased tax dollars and other governmental resources to establish a governmental stake or outright ownership of current private-sector corporations, and directing the proceeds from that ownership to every American citizen. (Economist Dean Baker has long suggested that corporations be made to pay their taxes not in dollars but in shares to the gov-

ernment.) Two Democratic senators—Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin—have each proposed bills that would require corporations to divide their boards between representatives of shareholders and representatives of their employees (the employees would get one-third of the seats under Baldwin’s bill and 40 percent under Warren’s). In Britain, the shadow chancellor of the Labour Party has proposed that companies with at least 250 employees provide their workers with ownership funds, so they can share in the profits.

Unless the current generation of Amer-

ican socialists takes a power dive into the sectarian abyss—a choice I consider improbable—it’s likely to grow in size and influence for some time. The gap in power and income between capital and labor has become so vast that public support for a more equitable and democratic economy may well continue to grow, while the Harrington-Sanders strategy of centering electoral work within the Democratic Party won’t condemn DSA to the historic role of spoiler, an obstacle to progressive advance. In such left-leaning terrains as the nation’s major cities, openly socialist candidates will win an increasing number of elections; the future of urban America may well be one of municipal socialism, public banks, green public power, and more worker co-operatives.

By championing social rights, and by organizing workers into powerful unions, American socialists have historically played a deeply ironic role: helping build a more humane and sustainable capitalism, which puts them out of business until capital erodes the advances they helped create, crashes, and calls them back into existence. We don’t know whether that’s the task, and fate, of this new generation of socialists. We do know that our nation needs them, and that our capitalism richly deserves them.

Executive Editor Harold Meyerson has been a member of DSOC, and then DSA, since 1975. He served on the organization’s national political committee from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, and was an honorary vice-chair of the organization for much of the current century.

The 2018 Midterms

Taking Back North Carolina In control of the gerrymandered legislature, Republicans are trying to strip power from the courts and the governor.

The Democrats are fighting them at the polls.

by K i r k Ro s s

robert willet t / the news & observer via ap images

B

y Labor Day, the traditional start of campaign season, Marcus Bass had already logged thousands of miles crisscrossing the state working on turnout in the 2018 election.

Bass is Deputy Director of the North Carolina Black Alliance, and like thousands of his fellow organizers and activists, he’s driven this year by the sense that there’s a lot more on the line in the ninth-largest state than voters may realize.

It’s frustrating, he says, that deeply purple North Carolina is too often cast as another Deep South story. The lurch right by the legislature over the past decade cloaks a long history of social justice organizing that has given progressives the means to push back against the right’s agenda.

“We’re not an Alabama,” he says. “North Carolina has consistently given the national audience an understanding of what the threats are and what the fight back is.”

This is the year Democrats, led by Governor Roy Cooper, hope the fight back means ending the Republican supermajorities in the state House and Senate, which have been in place since 2012.

Cooper’s narrow win in 2016 was one of the rare victories in a state that Donald Trump carried by more than 3.5 percent. There had been hope that breaking the legislative visegrip would happen in 2016, but heavily gerrymandered districts and Trump’s draw kept those veto-proof majorities in place, setting off a non-stop power struggle between the new governor and the General Assembly.

The power imbalance between the two has always been skewed toward the legislature, a legacy dating back to North Carolina’s rebellious ways against colonial governors. With a rock-solid majority and party-first discipline,

GOP leaders in the legislature have been able

on what’s on the ballot and what it means has become just as important as a voter-registration form. “It takes an extra push,” Bass says, “to connect the dots between what’s in these amendments and the battles with the General Assembly for the past eight years.”

One proposed amendment would require the governor to choose between two candidates submitted by a legislature-appointed panel for any judicial vacancies. Another would remove the ninth member of the state elections board, who is picked by the governor from names the board submits. The remodeled eight-member board would have four members from each major party, a move that critics said would result in tie votes and deadlocks on key issues.

Both amendments are opposed by the state’s five living former governors—two Republicans and three Democrats.

to do what they want.

This year, court rulings in redistricting cases and new maps have increased confidence among Democrats of finally taking at least the additional four seats in the state House that would give Cooper a place at the negotiating table. But no one is taking any chances.

Bass travels the state, concentrating on student organizing at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and working with grassroots groups in rural eastern counties, where African Americans sometimes make up 40 percent of the electorate. Participation among voters in both of these constituencies tends to drop off in the midterm cycle, a fact Bass has set out to change.

His task is voter education.

There’s a thirst for it, he says, especially among younger voters who are registering at a rate far higher than expect- In 2016, Democrat Roy Cooper narrowly won the governorship in North Carolina, ed. Voter education is partic- a state Trump carried by more than 3.5 percent. ularly important this year, he says, because in a state where constitutional Bass first got involved in elections in 2008 as amendments rarely appear on the ballot, vot- a student at North Carolina A&T. He watched ers will see six of them, proposed in what Bass as turnout in the black community dipped in and others describe as another “power grab” by the 2010 and 2014 midterms. Now, he believes, the General Assembly. the wake-up call that followed the 2016 elecSome of the six, such as one establishing tion could change that. This year, community a constitutional right to hunt and fish, seem groups in small, heavily African American eastinnocuous and are aimed chiefly at driving ern towns have already started canvassing and turnout. Others, however, are clearly designed holding forums and town halls. On HBCU and to shift even more power to the legislature. community college campuses, criminal justice This year, Bass says, getting voters information reform has become a major issue and has raised

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 33

Now working out of a sparse office at the Durham County Democratic headquarters, Earls says she’s getting used to the grind of campaigning.

“I’m in a different city almost every day,” she says.

Some things have not been easy to get used to.

“Have you seen the mailing?” she asks, unfolding a large, glaring yellow and black mailer, the early edge of the coming wave of negative ads. The headline in it dubs her “Dangerous Anita Earls.”

In case you don’t get what that means, there’s a skull and crossbones. She points out how it distorts her features as well as her record, linking an amicus brief on sentencing guidelines to 18 blurry Anita Earls is challenging Justice Barbara Jackson for a state Supreme Court seat. mugshots, some emblazoned “murderer” or “rapist” in all caps. the profile of what he calls “justice races” for “It’s like Willie Horton times 18,” Earls says. sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges.

At the top of the ticket in the justice category “It’s not only that it’s fear-mongering and very is a Supreme Court race that is a distillation of racialized, but it’s designed to discourage people the state’s political struggles. from participating in democracy. You see some-

Earls, a civil rights attorney who, as founder and executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), led most of the state and federal lawsuits against gerrymandering and voter-suppression legislation, stood in front of Democratic headquarters in Raleigh and announced she would challenge incumbent Republican Justice Barbara Jackson for a seat on the state Supreme Court.

In the face of state Republicans’ continual attacks on the independence of the courts and voting rights, Earls said she decided to step away from the SCSJ and devote herself full-time to run. “It was clear to me that I have to not just talk the talk, but must have the courage to walk the walk,” she said at the announcement.

The news came as a surprise to many and set off alarms down the street at GOP headquarters, where the party’s executive director immediately began firing off tweets denouncing her.

34 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

One ballot measure requires the (Democratic) governor to choose between two candidates submitted by a (Republican) legislatureappointed panel for any judicial vacancies. thing like that and you think, ‘The whole thing is just a dirty, ugly game, why should I bother?’”

She says she got into the race in part over frustration with how the courts have handled redistricting cases. “It was the frustration of seeing districts drawn by Democrats thrown out because they are not geographically compact enough and then districts drawn by Republicans that are the least compact as any in the history of the state being upheld by a court saying, ‘We just can’t measure compactness,’” she says. “The court should be applying the law equally.” When she’s out canvassing, she hears repeatedly that the courts are becoming too politicized.

seem to value the label,” she says of having a D next to her name on the ballot. They also tend to vote more in partisan races. In the last election, there were close to 500,000 more votes cast in races for state Court of Appeals, which were partisan, than were cast in the nonpartisan Supreme Court race.

The legislature’s move to eliminate this year’s primary, which was criticized as an attempt to create confusion and dilute votes among multiple candidates, also worked against Republicans when Earls managed to clear the field of other Democrats, while Chris Anglin, a Democrat who had re-registered as a Republican, filed to run against the

southern coalition for social justice

On a chilly morning last November, Anita

The legislature has made dozens of changes to state and local courts since Republicans took both chambers in 2010, but in the past two years the state House has stepped up its efforts, at one point considering a redistricting plan that would have eliminated most of the African American state judges. Last year, in a move seen as a warning shot to jurists challenging the moves, a bill filed in the Senate would have ended the terms of all local judges this year. The the bill went nowhere, but it sent a message, and Earls says the legislature is unambiguously trying to intimidate the judiciary.

Or even control it. One of the constitutional amendments that Republicans have placed on this year’s ballot would give the legislature far more authority to fill judicial vacancies, which are now filled by the governor based on recommendations from local bar associations.

This year, in the kind of plot twist that would be hard to dream up, two recent changes to election law, which made Supreme Court races partisan and eliminated this year’s judicial primaries, could work to Earls’s advantage.

Even though she didn’t support making those races partisan, running in a midterm election in a year in which Democratic voters are fired up is clearly going to help her. “People

j u l i a wa l l / t h e n e w s & o b s e r v e r v i a a p i m a g e s

The 2018 Midterms Republican incumbent and Earls. GOP leaders through meetings, forums, and social media. of those voters back to the polls could go a long denounced Anglin’s party switch as a dirty This year, the group decided to focus on Earls’s way in the statewide judicial races and constitrick, and the legislature quickly changed state campaign, canvassing and phone-banking to tutional amendment referendums.

“Midterms matter,” Fox says. “You can’t law in a way that would have forced Anglin to turn out Democrats and independents. assume people are going to vote in the midrun as a Democrat. But in one of six separate The decision came after a lot of soul-searchcourt cases challenging various parts of the ing following Trump’s victory. “We felt like we terms. Our thought was to turn out the vote ballot, a state court ruled in Anglin’s favor, set- had to do something; people were devastated,” in Durham.”

Working with Earls has provided another ting the three-way race as a two-Republicans, Fox says. “We decided we’re going to fight back. benefit, Fox says: someone to vote for. “You one-Democrat contest.

We know how to do this. We have a history of There is more riding on Earls’s candidacy people who know how to canvass effectively.” can’t always just resist and work against; you than just one seat on the Supreme Court. The The group focused on Earls because of her run yourself down that way,” she says. “To be current breakdown of the high court is four early support for their efforts, and the brief- with other people who care about democracy Democrats and three Republicans. Although ings and updates she’s given the group on vot- and justice, it’s better than therapy, better than there are currently seven justices on the court, ing-rights cases over the years. It focused on yoga. I think the most dangerous thing is when North Carolina’s constitution allows the legislature to add up to two more seats.

A not-so-secret strategy for a court-packing plan that has swirled around Raleigh since 2016 is that, should Jackson hold her seat and the 4–3 split stand, the legislature would add two more seats to the court. That change, coupled with the constitutional amendment on judicial vacancies, could flip the majority of the court to Republicans.

GOP leaders have accused those raising the courtpacking idea of “ridiculous speculation,” although the General Assembly has announced plans to return on November 27, after election results are certified, to act on enabling legislation for the amendments.

Regardless of the election Demonstrators celebrate a federal court decision striking down North Carolina’s gerrymandered congressional districts. results, that end-of-term session will give the GOP supermajorities another Durham because its members knew the terri- people feel discouraged and isolated and they crack at making changes. The new General tory and knew that’s where the votes were for stay home and read incendiary things on FaceAssembly elected this year won’t take office the statewide race. Usually, the drop-off in book, but they don’t go out and see other people.

Durham voters during the midterms is steep, Nothing substitutes for acting like a citizen.” until the first week in January.

Fox explains.

Although the group is focused on Earls and That’s especially true during “Blue Moon” Durham turnout, the group’s members underFaulkner Fox, co-founder of Durham for Organizing Action, is one of many activ- elections like this one, when there’s no state- stand that breaking the supermajorities in the ists shoring up the Earls campaign. The all- wide federal race on the ballot. They happen legislature is the key. They’ve joined with a handvolunteer group, which started as Durham for every 12 years here; the last time, turnout ful of other local groups to shuttle canvassers to Obama in 2008, has built an extensive network dropped to 37 percent. Fox said bringing some closely contested legislative districts in exurban

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 35

and rural districts one or two counties away.

Graig Meyer, a Democratic representative from neighboring Orange County, says the Durham group is part of a growing, informal network of organizations that work on campaigns. “There are dozens of these grassroots groups that started in women’s living rooms or online convening,” he says. “Almost all of them have the ability to channel volunteers into actual campaigns.”

He credits the Forward Together movement, led by former state NAACP President Reverend William Barber II, with laying the groundwork for that kind of solidarity through the 2013 Moral Mondays protests.

“All the advocacy organizations on the left got aligned and started working together with the Forward Together movement. So instead of being siloed off, it became all for one and one for all,” Meyer says.

Although Barber keeps his distance from individual races and candidates, Meyer says he’s

servative legislatures took the deal. In addition to the more than 500,000 North Carolinians who would qualify for the Medicaid expansion, health-care services offered in rural areas are being cut back and small hospitals around the state are being squeezed without the support that would come with expansion.

“I think we’ve turned a corner where people understand that for us to have affordable, accessible health care, the government has to play a role,” Meyer says. “People know it’s going to be a state and federal solution.”

If the veto-proof majority in the House goes away, he says, Cooper could have the leverage to push for an expansion, possibly as part of next year’s budget deal. “We’ll be able to sit at the table and negotiate that.”

Meyer says the ultimate goal is to gain control of at least one chamber of the legislature, although right now there’s only a slim chance of that happening. But any victories this year would put the House closer to being in play

Two years ago, almost one-third of all state legislative races were uncontested. This year, Democrats have fielded candidates for all 170 state House and Senate seats. also had a big impact on how they talk about issues. “Reverend Barber really gave us a clear moral language for how to talk about our values and why they lead to the policies that we’re fighting for,” he says. “That’s one thing the Democrats have failed in far too often in electoral politics.

We try to speak to people about policies when we ought to speak to people about values.”

This year, Democrats have managed to field candidates for all 170 state House and Senate seats. Republicans matched them in all but one.

Compare that to two years ago when almost a third of all the races were essentially uncontested. In all, the results for 2016 in nearly half of the 120 House seats and 15 out of 50 Senate races were locked in before November.

Meyer says that as he’s traveled the state, the overarching issue this year is health care, which should give Democrats an advantage since the General Assembly’s Republican leaders decided to opt out of Medicaid expansion in 2013. They haven’t wavered, even though some equally con-

36 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

for 2020. Democrats learned a painful lesson when they lost both chambers in 2010 and GOP mapmakers took over.

“Everyone on our side knows, if we gain a chamber, that leads to fair maps,” Meyer says.

Amy Cox, co-founder of FLIP NC, an independent expenditures organization that grew out of Durham’s Indivisible group, says fair maps that more closely mirror the almost even split of the electorate means the end of heavy-handed rule seen since the Republicans took the legislature.

“We’re playing the long game,” she says. “This legislature is so gerrymandered. Our goal is to flip one chamber, and then get fair maps.”

More balanced representation in North Carolina could also contribute to a shake-up in Washington. With the current 10-3 split in the state’s congressional delegation and the next census expected to add a 14th congressional district, a 50-50 split could mean a pickup of four U.S. House seats.

Cox, a data analyst, was part of a letter-

writing group in Durham during the 2016 campaign. She and other founders of FLIP NC thought a lot afterward about what they could have done to better connect with people outside of the solid-blue enclaves of the state’s Triangle region. “After the 2016 election, we really regretted not getting out, not doing more, and not getting out of our comfort zone,” she says.

“We heard from people who said we want to get out of our blue bubble and help in purple areas.”

FLIP NC has been organizing monthly canvass events all summer in a handful of key legislative races in the state, kicking into high gear in September with weekly events. “We try to make it fun,” she says. “It’s all geared at getting people from talking about it on Facebook to going out and doing the work.”

FLIP NC can’t coordinate with candidates, but has worked to develop its own voter lists targeting reliable Democratic voters. In talking to canvassers, she says it’s been striking how few of the people they meet who are tuned into national politics are thinking about the midterms in their own state.

“It’s shocking how many people who are otherwise politically informed don’t know they’re in a flippable district,” she says.

At 8:53 p.m. on September 5, Josh Lawson, the attorney for North Carolina’s Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, tweeted that his office’s ballot preparations, delayed by six separate lawsuits, had finally begun.

The board had barely beaten the deadline to have absentee ballots ready for distribution in accordance with federal voting laws.

Celebration was muted, however. No one who has paid attention over the past decade expects that to be the last of the court fights over the 2018 election. And if the GOP ’s supermajority is indeed broken, no one expects it to go quietly, not with a session already scheduled for after the election.

For now, in North Carolina there is no discernible light ahead in the state’s long dark ride. All anyone here can say for sure is that at least we are finally in the tunnel.

Kirk Ross is a longtime North Carolina journalist. He covers the state legislature for Coastal Review, Carolina Public Press, and The Washington Post.

The 2018 Midterms

Can a Blue Wave in a Blue State Make Ben Jealous Maryland’s First African American Governor?

He’s running to unseat one of the last remaining moderate Republicans—and he’s running on the left.

by R a c he l M. C o hen

T

hirty-six governor’s mansions are up for grabs this November, and Ben Jealous, the 45-year-old former president of the NAACP turned venture capitalist, is on a mission to reclaim Maryland’s for the Democrats. In theory, this shouldn’t be such a heavy lift. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1 in the state, and Hillary Clinton swept it in 2016 by 26 points. The election carries some symbolic weight as well: If Jealous won, he would become the first African American governor of this former slave state where Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman once toiled.

Like his fellow black gubernatorial nominees, Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida, Jealous could make some history this November.

But the media and most political observers remain skeptical of Jealous’s prospects. His opponent, Republican Larry Hogan, who previously worked as a real-estate developer, has governed as a centrist, avoided major scandal, distanced himself from President Trump, and boasts a 70 percent approval rating. Hogan’s fundraising haul also dwarfs that of Jealous. Pundits say his popularity and available resources should insulate him from any sort of blue-wave midterm.

But Jealous, a towering six feet, four inches, isn’t fazed—and certainly isn’t running to the center. He’s convinced that the path to victory doesn’t require courting the moderate Democrats in Hogan’s camp, but galvanizing the many thousands of Democrats who

stayed home on Election Day four years ago.

Running on Medicare for All, ending mass incarceration, fully funding public schools, legalizing marijuana, a $15 minimum wage, public infrastructure investments, universal pre-K, and tuition-free college, Jealous’s platform is a grab bag of unabashed progressive demands. “If we’re unafraid to be Democrats, we will win,” he told me in August.

Jealous’s campaign presents an interesting test case, not only for the Old Line State, but for the Democratic Party writ large. Though he failed to win the endorsement of much of the statewide liberal elite during the primary season, he ended up carrying 22 of the state’s 24 counties, beating out the presumed frontrunner by 10 points in a packed field of nine candidates—all while refusing corporate contributions, something no other gubernatorial candidate in Maryland has ever done.

“We won overwhelmingly in a very crowded primary by a big margin precisely because Marylanders are eager for us to solve problems at scale,” he says. “They want us to stop nibbling around the edges.”

In 2016, Jealous endorsed Bernie Sanders for president early on, quickly becoming one of Sanders’s most vocal and important surrogates during the primaries. Now in 2018, Jealous has chosen as his lieutenant-governor running mate Susie Turnbull, a party insider and 2016 Clinton supporter, in the hope that the BernieHillary divide can be overcome with the right team, attitude, and message.

For Jealous, Election Day will be a referen-

dum on incrementalism—and a measure of just how potent the state’s progressive movement really is.

Jealous’s strategy is rooted in the numbers. The Democrats project that the state’s electorate will hit 2.1 million voters this November, and “if we turn out one million voters to the polls, we win,” he says. Republican gubernatorial candidates, he likes to remind the public, have never secured more than 900,000 votes in this blue state, and in 2014, a cycle with markedly low turnout, Hogan won with only 884,400 votes, beating out his Democratic opponent by a 66,000-vote margin. Four years earlier, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martin O’Malley sailed to re-election with more than a million ballots cast in his favor. Democrats are banking on 2018 looking a lot more like 2010 than 2014.

What went wrong four years ago?

“There just didn’t seem to be as much at stake,” says Mark McLaurin, the political director for SEIU 500, which endorsed Jealous in the primary. “In 2014, we still had President Obama, most core Democratic constituencies considered 2016 in the bag, there wasn’t a sense of urgency, and the Democrats just didn’t have a very robust field operation.” McLaurin, an operative who has worked in Maryland campaigns for the past 20 years, says he “never saw a quieter Election Day in Baltimore City than in the 2014 general.”

The Democratic contender that year was former Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, a relatively uninspiring candidate who waged a muted campaign. He still won Baltimore City and other reliably Democratic counties, but the number of votes was way down. Baltimore City was down 13 percent from 2010, Prince George’s County was down by 5 percent, and Montgomery County dropped by 9 percent.

“In certain parts of Maryland, there’s a feeling that the real race is the primary,” says Roxie Herbekian, president of the UNITE HERE local in Baltimore City. “With Anthony Brown, we worked really hard to get him to be the nominee, and after that everyone kind of relaxed, his campaign relaxed, and then it wasn’t until the last two weeks that we were like, ‘Oh shit, what the hell is going on.’” Herbekian says this year, “no one is taking anything for granted.”

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 37

Aside from awakening from 2014 complacency, the other major difference between that midterm election and the fast-approaching one is a man named Donald Trump. A poll released in June found that 46 percent of Maryland Democrats ranked “removing Donald Trump from office” as their number-one priority.

While Hogan has tried to walk a careful tightrope as a centrist Republican who distances himself from the president or stays quiet on federal policy, November is the first opportunity most voters have to voice their opposition to the nation’s historically unpopular president. That, combined with the looming 2020 census and the fact that half of all legislators drawing the congressional redistricting maps in 2021 will be elected this year, makes this a higher-stakes midterm than the last.

Beyond riding the blue wave, Jealous’s campaign is banking on two strategies to improve Democratic margins: progressive policy solutions, and an aggressive voter turnout effort.

many resistance groups that have sprung up since 2016.

Chris Pickett, a science policy analyst in Montgomery County, joined the national grassroots organization Indivisible after Trump won. He founded Indivisible Montgomery in December 2016, and says his group grew from 15 friends to 1,400 members in just six weeks. (With “Indivisible MoCo” and “Indivisible Montgomery County,” Pickett’s county actually boasts three separate Indivisible chapters, a reality he chalks up to people wanting to focus on different things, and a lot of natural leaders in the region.)

“For the vast majority of our members, this is their first time being an activist,” Pickett says, noting that he’s a newcomer to activism, too. Indivisible Montgomery generally steers clear of Maryland Senate and House of Delegates races, but has focused its energies on flipping Congress and the Maryland governor’s seat. “We sent a bunch of people

we all just realized how energizing that was,” she says. In 2018, they focused on passing automatic voter registration—something Indivisible Baltimore and other chapters managed to achieve in Maryland’s latest legislative session.

(The policy will go into effect in 2019.) Now Ghowrwal says her group is ready to elect Jealous, someone they feel will do a better job than Hogan at standing up to Trump.

Martha McKenna, a Baltimore-based Democratic strategist, put it this way: “It’s not that I automatically think people are hooked into the governor’s race, but there’s a level of civic engagement in Baltimore and statewide spurred by the Trump administration and the school shootings and the Annapolis shooting that is very different than it was four years ago,” she says. “In a way, people have been feeling very anxious. The issues in communities feel scarier, more intense, and in many ways more political.”

But can Jealous, a first-time candidate who

Jealous reminds crowds that Maryland has the highest median household income of any state—and can afford Medicare for All and tuition-free college.

In 2014, the Democratic-coordinated campaign in Maryland had a total of 15 field organizers on the ground. This year, 27 Democratic organizers were hired by August, with near 70 active across the state by September.

Jealous also points to the political team he has assembled, which produced the turnout that led to O’Malley’s 2010 victory. In that year, Turnbull, Jealous’s running mate, was the chair of the state Democratic Party; his campaign manager, Travis Tazelaar, was executive director of the state party; and David Sloan, who is now running the statewide coordinated campaign for all Democratic candidates, was the state party’s political director.

“The NAACP was involved too, and together we turned out more than a million voters,” says Jealous. Turnbull, Tazelaar, and Sloan pointedly did not lead the 2014 political effort, and Jealous had also left the civil rights organization by that time.

His team also hopes for some help from the

38 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

down to Virginia for Ralph Northam; we had people go up to Pennsylvania for Conor Lamb; we phone-banked for the special election in Ohio,” he says. “We want to put a check on the federal government, and we recognize voting is the biggest way we can make our voices heard.” While Pickett’s chapter did not make an endorsement in the Maryland gubernatorial primary, he says his members have been eager to dive into the general.

The story is similar across the state. In Baltimore City, an Indivisible chapter formed after Trump’s inauguration and has met every two weeks since. In the beginning, according to member Jennay Ghowrwal, they focused almost exclusively on federal issues. But as time went on, Indivisible Baltimore decided to get involved in the Virginia election, and targeted a Republican state delegate seat in a district that Clinton won in 2016. “We organized carpools down there, knocked on 10,000 doors, and when the Republican lost in 2017,

ran as an outsider, get the insiders in his camp?

In the primary, most of the state’s Democratic establishment lined up behind Rushern Baker, the outgoing county executive in Prince George’s County, who ran a campaign premised on the idea that he could win back some Hogan voters in 2018. Baker, a Clinton supporter in 2016, claimed endorsements from former Governor O’Malley, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Senators Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin, and State Attorney General Brian Frosh.

(The Baltimore Sun endorsed Jealous, while The Washington Post backed Baker.)

Jealous, on the other hand, says he’s not wasting his time trying to win back the moderate Democrats who will vote for Hogan, arguing that there’s simply not that many of them. (Although, exit polls found that 23 percent of Democratic voters cast their ballots for Hogan in 2014, and a poll released in early June found that 24 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they planned to vote for Hogan in November.)

In June, a few dozen Maryland Democrats came out with endorsements for Hogan, though most were older white men who hadn’t served in office for years. Others had received political appointments from the governor, or had records of supporting Republican candi-

The 2018 Midterms

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Ben Jealous says his campaign to become governor of Maryland is “fundamentally about big ideas versus small ideas.”

dates in the past. The only statewide elected Democrat to back Hogan was 84-year-old Melvin Steinberg, who served as lieutenant governor from 1987 to 1995. In 1998, Steinberg endorsed Republican Ellen Sauerbrey for governor, a candidate opposed to abortion rights and gun control.

“We’ve seen this before,” Jealous says dismissively when I ask him about Democratic endorsements for his opponent. “There’s literally nothing happening in the Hogan campaign that wasn’t happening in the [Robert] Ehrlich campaign, and Ehrlich was a one-term bird, and Hogan will be a one-termer, too.” Ehrlich served as Maryland’s Republican governor from 2003 to 2007, and lost his re-election campaign to O’Malley by 6.5 points despite commanding a 55 percent approval rating at the time. Jealous’s team says Ehrlich’s defeat is instructive, and should give confidence to those who hear about Hogan’s high approval

rating. The 2006 election also featured the last Democratic wave, as popular disapproval of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq swept the Democrats back in control of Congress.

After the June primary, all the gubernatorial candidates quickly came together to back Jealous, though some other state Democratic leaders have been slower to voice their support. The long-serving state senate president, Mike Miller, initially offered only mild enthusiasm for Jealous, having praised Hogan for his bipartisanship work. The outgoing executive of affluent Montgomery County, Isiah Leggett, said Jealous’s support for a millionaire tax and redistributing more state funds to poorer school districts left him ambivalent about an endorsement. Senator Cardin and Maryland House Speaker Michael Busch gave Jealous their blessing, but made a point to highlight their disagreement with him on such issues as single-payer health care.

“We have to be clear about what happened here,” says Bob Muehlenkamp, chair of Our Revolution Maryland, the group that formed out of the 2016 Sanders campaign, which backed Jealous early on. “Not a single elected Democratic official came out for Ben in the primary, which means we defeated the established Democratic Party of the state of Maryland. What does it say about a party that will not unequivocally work now to throw out a Republican governor in the era of Trump?”

Muehlenkamp chalks the electeds’ reticence up to “how miserably corporate” the Democratic Party is in Maryland. “It’s a corporatecontrolled party, and they can use all the dog whistles they want about how they think his policies can’t win, or he’s too far out on Medicare for All, or we can’t do $15 minimum wage right now, but the truth is they want Ben Jealous to lose, because he would disrupt their nice little in-crowd club, and they’d rather make peace with whatever governor there is—even in the age of Trump.”

McLaurin of SEIU 500 says the recent primary suggests it’s not that important how quickly or slowly the stragglers from the Democratic establishment decide to get on board, because the primary results indicate a new generation of progressives are poised to disrupt the party. Not only did Jealous sweep the state by a considerable margin, but a number of progressive challengers down-ballot also defeated longtime Democratic incumbents.

Among those unseated were the chair of the state Senate Finance Committee and the chair of the Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee. “This is the kind of year where voters just aren’t taking the normal political cues,” McLaurin says.

Jealous isn’t campaigning on “making

Maryland great again,” but he does talk a lot about “restoring the promise of Maryland.”

Jealous describes the promise of Maryland as one where his grandfather could attend a year of law school at the University of Maryland in the late 1950s for $200 in tuition.

Today, Jealous says, if tuition had kept up with inflation, the cost for students would be about $2,600. Instead, it’s more than $31,000.

“There’s nothing outlandish about saying we want millennials to get the same deal the

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 39

40 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

slashed the costs of making phone calls home from prison.)

Jealous emphasizes his opposition to “crony capitalism” and to big corporations, those that pour their profits back into dividends and buybacks for shareholders. He’s criticized the way Maryland leaders have tripped over themselves with tax breaks to entice Amazon to build its new headquarters in their state. Jealous’s economic vision, he explains, is built on taking risks

Republican Governor Larry Hogan recognizes that Maryland is trending left.

t o p : j o s e lu i s m a g a n a ; b o t t o m : b r i a n w i t t e / a p i m a g e s

Greatest Generation got,” Jealous said to a I asked McLaurin of SEIU if he’s worried crowd of young political activists this summer. that Jealous’s emphasis on issues like singleThe promise of Maryland, Jealous also likes payer health care and ending mass incarcerato say, is one where a guy like him could have tion might turn off white, moderate voters. a mother born and raised in Baltimore pub“What I will say is that most statewide offilic housing, who one day sends her son off to cials—even your progressive ones—are very Columbia University and then to Oxford as a pragmatic, institutionalist,” he answered.

Rhodes Scholar.

“Even O’Malley was just an innately cautious Jealous has long been an activist. In col- politician who really wanted to put his finger lege, he led protests, boycotts, and pickets for to the wind, and he was not going to move on such issues as preserving financial aid and homelessness rights. He was ultimately suspended for his rabblerousing, and moved down to Mississippi to work as an organizer, later becoming a local reporter in Jackson. When he eventually returned to Columbia, he graduated with a political science degree, and went to study comparative social research at Oxford. He spent the decade after that leading an association of black community newspapers, directing the U.S. human rights program at Amnesty International, and doing a one-year stint training to be a priest.

In 2008, at age 35, he became the youngest person to ever take the helm of the NAACP. This was a controversial pick given his youth and lack of close ties to the movement.

But Julian Bond, the longtime chair of the organization, pushed hard for Jealous, believing in his potential.

Although Jealous vigorously eschews the “socialist” label, he’s happy to Under Jealous’s half-decade of have Bernie Sanders’s endorsement and shares many of his policy views. leadership, the NAACP, headquartered in Maryland, helped pass the state’s an issue until it was shown it would not be DREAM Act, its referendum on gay marriage, fatal to his own ambition.” To an extent he and the abolition of Maryland’s death penalty. has never seen, McLaurin continued, JealThe Baltimore Sun named him “Marylander ous has been “forthright in what he believes, of the Year” in 2013 for his accomplishments. even if it’s not always the safest thing. I think Some analysts worry about Jealous’s uncom- that authenticity is something the electorate promising platform, which says Democrats can is looking for.” do it all, Democrats can do it soon, and Marylanders can afford it. (He regularly reminds For all his break-the-mold leftism, Jealcrowds that Maryland has the highest median ous has consistently identified himself as a household income of any state in the country.) venture capitalist, touting his belief in market“This campaign is fundamentally about big driven social change. In the five years since ideas versus small ideas,” he tells me. “When he left the NAACP, Jealous worked at Kapor times were darkest in this nation, FDR called Capital, where he led investments in small on us to think big. He understood that we need businesses that target underserved communiwhole solutions to whole problems.” ties. (One of his favorite companies, Pigeonly,

The 2018 Midterms on entrepreneurs and small business owners, what he calls “community-based” capitalism.

Early this year, Discovery Communications, a Fortune 500 company, announced it was relocating its Maryland headquarters to New York.

Jealous pointed to this as evidence of the dangers of relying on big companies for economic security. Figuring out how to help small businesses thrive, like those at Baltimore’s Lexington Market, he says, is where there’s untapped potential for prosperity and job growth.

When I asked Jealous what he makes of the recent Gallup polling that showed 57 percent of Democrats viewed socialism positively, and whether he’s creating space for those who don’t see “socialism” as a dirty word, he didn’t directly answer.

“I’m just not interested in parlor debates about what we call ourselves,” he said. “I’m very intentional about building a big tent, and bringing in people who voted for Bernie, for Trump, for Hillary.”

But sometimes Jealous’s efforts to dispel notions that he’s a tax-and-spend radical can seem over the top. Over the summer, Hogan called Jealous a “far-left socialist” in a New York Times interview. A Washington Post reporter followed up by asking Jealous if he identified with the socialist label. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he responded brusquely.

(He later apologized for his language.) And when the Republican Governors Association funded a TV ad featuring Jealous on MSNBC saying, “Go ahead, call me a socialist” but cut off the rest of his sentence where he had said, “it doesn’t change the fact that I’m a venture capitalist,” the Jealous campaign demanded that local stations pull the ad for being too false and misleading. (Stations refused.)

These sometimes too-rash reactions to conservative provocation hark back to an incident from 2010, when, as NAACP head, Jealous called for the firing of a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, after a viral Breitbart video showed her talking about discriminating against a white farmer.

When it became clear the Breitbart video had been highly edited to misrepresent Sherrod’s remarks, Jealous apologized and retracted the NAACP ’s statement. It was an embarrassing moment and he calls the episode the lowest point of his professional career.

On the campaign trail, Hogan has accused

Jealous of trying to “nationalize” the governor’s race. Critics also blasted Jealous during the primary for taking some $600,000 from wealthy liberals in California and New York, a level of outside spending typically unheard of in a Maryland gubernatorial election. Jealous dismisses both criticisms, noting his campaign had more Maryland donors, and smaller donations on average, than any of his primary opponents’. “To the extent that we had out-of-state donations, they tended to fill the hole that we created when we refused corporate contributions,” he says, adding that it’s Hogan who has nationalized the race, by failing to stand up to the Trump administration.

These rebuttals can land fairly awkwardly at times—Hogan has made more efforts than other Republicans to distance himself from Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, and Jealous is running on a platform based partly on standing up to both.

Some local political experts caution against reading too much into Republican Bob Ehrlich’s 2006 loss when it comes to analyzing the tea leaves for November. Mileah Kromer, a Goucher College political science professor, pointed out that Hogan’s lead over his Democratic challenger is much higher than Ehrlich’s was at the time, and that Ehrlich was also much more closely tied to President Bush and the national Republican Party than Hogan is to Trump. Todd Eberly, a St. Mary’s College political science professor, adds that Ehrlich was considered both a more confrontational and a lazier leader, a politician who made many unforced errors.

Does that mean Hogan is invulnerable? Polling has consistently shown the number of people who approve of the governor exceeds those who plan to vote for him. And the Trump factor could be very real. In 2016, Anne Arundel County, a longtime red region of Maryland, went for Clinton, the first time a Democratic con-

No prominent elected Maryland Democrat endorsed Jealous in the primary, and some are still reticent about supporting him against the Republican incumbent.

But it’s true that Hogan’s distancing has also been inconsistent and sometimes tepid. When he failed to denounce the Muslim travel ban at the start of 2017, hundreds protested outside the governor’s mansion in Annapolis. Hogan dismissed the pressure at the time, saying he didn’t see protesting Trump’s policies as “his role.” Over the past year, however, as Trump’s polling hit the skids, he changed his tune. By June 2018, Hogan recalled Maryland’s National Guard unit (all of four soldiers) from the U.S.-Mexico border in protest of the president’s child separation policy.

Jealous is confident that as the general election heats up—as the spotlight starts shining more brightly on Hogan’s record, and voters get a chance to hear Jealous’s message—his campaign will grow more powerful. His campaign’s internal polling showed that as of July, one-third of Maryland voters, and one-quarter of the state’s Democratic voters, still did not know who Jealous was.

tender won the county in more than 50 years.

In his own way, Hogan, no less than Jealous, senses that Maryland is moving left. This past July, he announced a new student debt relief plan, and declared he would not accept donations or an endorsement from the National Rifle Association. He took the NRA’s money and endorsement back in 2014, a year the group gave him an A- rating.

“I honestly don’t think Jealous could have won a Democratic primary four years ago,” says McLaurin, who describes Maryland as a wait-your-turn kind of political state. “With Ben Jealous, it was not his turn by any measure. He’s never been elected to anything ever, his running mate has never been elected to anything ever. But they say in politics, a lot of it is timing, and I think 2018 is the pairing of the right man for the right moment.”

Rachel Cohen is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and former Prospect writing fellow.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 41

Fighting the Republicans’ Voter Purges in Ohio

If you miss voting in an election in Ohio, Republicans make you ineligible to vote in the next one. This year, Democrats are working hard to get Ohioans back on the rolls.

by H a r l a n Spe c t o r

H

aving won a United States Supreme Court ruling in mid-June that allowed him to kick voters off the rolls for not voting in previous elections, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted wasted no time directing county elections officials to restart his voterpurge program.

In July, Husted instructed Ohio’s 88 county elections boards to mail address-confirmation notices by August 6 to registered voters who haven’t voted in two years. This is step one in the controversial purge, which had been on hold since a federal appeals court ruled in 2016 that Ohio’s method of removing registered voters violated federal law.

It’s a safe bet that many Ohioans don’t know that they’ve lost, or they might lose, their right to vote simply by not voting. Under Husted, Ohio has conducted the nation’s most aggressive voter purges. If you fail to vote for two years, fail to respond to the aforementioned mailing, and don’t cast a ballot or update your registration in the next four years, the state cancels your registration. Due to a federal law that prohibits canceling registrations within 90 days of a federal election, no one currently on the rolls can be removed between now and this November’s Election Day. But many thousands of Ohioans may already have had their names stricken, and don’t know it. Others, if they don’t vote this November, may find themselves ineligible to vote in 2020.

Under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, states are supposed to have maintenance programs to keep their voter rolls up to date.

The idea is to remove voters who have died or relocated. Ohio’s program, by contrast, has

42 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

removed qualified voters who neither moved nor died. Like other Republican-led efforts to restrict voting, Ohio’s purge strikes hardest the poor and people of color—voters likely to support Democrats.

In its 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s policy is reasonable, even though the National Voter Registration Act prohibits canceling registrations for not voting.

The conservative majority said that because Ohio sent out a mailing to previous non-voters, the failure to vote was not the sole criterion for being dropped from the rolls—giving Ohio a constitutional pass.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the policy disenfranchises minority and lowincome voters. She pointed to a “friend of the court” brief that showed a predominantly black neighborhood in downtown Cincinnati had 10 percent of its voters removed since 2012, compared with only 4 percent of voters in a suburban, white-majority neighborhood.

According to the ACLU and other voting advocates, about two million Ohio registered voters have been purged under what the state calls “the supplemental process” since Husted took office in 2011. It’s not entirely clear how many Ohio voters are in the crosshairs this time around. About 835,000 Ohio registered voters haven’t voted in two years, according to an election data analysis this summer by Cleveland.com.

Democrats and voting-rights groups are

doubling down on efforts to counter the purge, through voter engagement and registration networks. Ohio Democrats are scanning data county by county to find purged voters they

hope to re-register in time for the midterm elections. Husted has forced the Democrats’ mobilization campaign to fan out to individual counties for information about who’s been purged. Remarkably, the secretary of state’s office said it doesn’t keep a centralized record of voters purged or those who’ve been flagged for infrequent voting. Husted spokesman Sam Rossi referred data requests to individual county boards.

Democrats and other activists are frustrated by lack of information from Husted’s office, and they say the system is riddled with errors and inconsistencies among counties.

“I have folks coming to us who have consistently voted and are still being knocked off the rolls,” said Erika Anthony, co-founder of Cleveland VOTES, a nonpartisan group that promotes turnout. “You have to wonder how many others.”

Finding voters who’ve been purged or who are in danger of being removed from the rolls has required activists to shift strategy from traditional voter-registration efforts. It’s not enough to visit public spaces and ask people if they’re registered. Volunteers are asking people if they have moved since they last voted, and if they have updated their addresses with their local elections board. They are using mobile technology to check registration status on the spot.

Husted didn’t originate Ohio Republicans’ reliance on voter purges, but he certainly intensified it. Elected as the state’s chief elections officer in 2010 (he had previously been speaker of the Ohio House), Husted (who is currently running for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket) stepped up the frequency of the purges from every two years to every year.

County elections boards in 2012 sent 1.5 million notices to voters who hadn’t voted in two years, according to the numbers cited by Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote a dissenting opinion in the Court’s June case. More than one million of those early mailings were not returned. One could argue the poor return rate underscores how badly flawed the policy is. Certainly not nearly that many voters moved away or died.

It’s likely that many people ignored the mailing or never saw it. Moreover, the postcard did not make it clear that failing to respond or vote in the next four years would result in certain cancellation of their registrations.

The 2018 Midterms

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The impact of the purge has been greatest in Cleveland, Columbus, and other cities, where voters are more likely to change addresses and miss elections. Cleveland has one of the highest big-city poverty rates in the nation (36 percent). The city housing court processes more than 11,000 evictions every year. Some 23,000 residents of Cleveland’s county (Cuyahoga) experience homelessness every year. It’s not hard to imagine how poverty and unstable housing get in the way of voting and answering postcards from the elections board.

Republican claims that aggressive purges, voter-ID laws, and other restrictions are necessary to prevent voter fraud have not stood up to

tions and presidential contests, historical turnouts show. Democrats are less likely to vote in mid-term elections and thus are more at risk of falling off the rolls,” Reuters reported.

“The purge strikes Cleveland and Cuyahoga County disproportionately, and I believe intentionally. It’s no mystery this is where Democratic votes come from,” Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley (who is also a Democratic party leader of Cuyahoga County) said in an interview. “The job of elections boards and government should be to encourage people to vote and help them exercise the right if there are obstacles. Turnout is so low already, why would they discourage it?”

In a statement after the Supreme Court ruling, Husted touted Ohio’s supplemental process as a model for other states.

A half-dozen states conduct voter purges similar to Ohio’s, and there are concerns that more will follow now that the Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s method. People on the political left have good reason to be worried about what’s ahead.

In a new report, “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote,” the Brennan Center for Justice said states removed nearly 16 million voters from the rolls between 2014 and 2016—a 33 percent increase from 2006 Secretary of State Jon Husted didn’t originate Ohio Republicans’ reliance on to 2008. The purges are often voter purges, but he certainly intensified it. f lawed and prevent eligible voters from casting ballots, the report said. scrutiny. That point was underscored in August, The Brennan Center also found several states when it was revealed that President Trump’s now-disbanded election integrity commission conduct purges in ways that violate federal requirements, and said the use of inaccurate found no evidence of widespread fraud.

The actual, and intended, effect of such information is problematic. purges is to shift the partisan balance of the electorate to Republicans. In reliably Demo- Despite the challenges that voter purges cratic Cuyahoga County, more than 40,000 present them with, Ohio Democrats have reavoters were purged in 2015 alone, according son to believe that voter turnout in November to published reports. A 2016 Reuters analysis will considerably exceed its 2014 levels. One found registrations were canceled in Demo- reason was the turnout rate in August’s special cratic-leaning neighborhoods at about twice congressional election in central Ohio’s 12th the rate of Republican neighborhoods.

District. A solidly Republican district for three “That’s because residents of relatively afflu- decades, the 12th spans seven counties and ent Republican-leaning neighborhoods are includes parts of Columbus. Trump carried the more likely to vote in both congressional elec- district by 11 points, as did Mitt Romney by 10

points in 2012. Republican Pat Tiberi, whose departure from Congress set the stage for the contest, won the district by 36 points in 2016.

But in August’s contest to fill out the balance of Tiberi’s term, Republican Troy Balderson barely edged out Democrat Danny O’Connor by less than 1 percent. (The two will face off again in November.)

Even more striking than the result were the turnout numbers. Democrats in the district increased their turnout by about 130 percent over that in May’s statewide primary; Republicans by just 50 percent.

Another gerrymandered Ohio congressional district that had been regarded as safe for Republicans is the First, in the Cincinnati region. In July, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a leading political newsletter run by the University of Virginia Center for Politics, issued a new rating tilting the district from “Leans Republican” to “Toss-Up.” Ohio First District had been competitive until it was redrawn to Republican advantage in 2011. The partisan architects lopped off parts of Cincinnati and added Republicanheavy Warren County. Republican Representative Steve Chabot won by 18 points in 2016.

Chabot’s challenger this year is Aftab Pureval, a young Democrat whose star is rising. Pureval was first elected to public office in 2016 as clerk of courts in Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati. He was the first Democrat to hold that office in more than 100 years.

The First District is now “the most winnable in the state for a Democrat,” Pureval said in an interview. Yet he is deeply concerned about the Supreme Court ruling and its disproportionate impact on black voters, who represent 22 percent of the district’s voters. His campaign has conducted voter registrations at events throughout the district, and was aiming to register 2,000 voters at the University of Cincinnati this fall.

“The purge will have and already has had a profound impact, not only on the community’s ability to vote, but on the community’s trust in government,” Pureval said. “We are poised and ready to blunt this voter purge as much as possible.”

On the heels of the Supreme Court ruling, Ohio’s top Democrat, Senator Sherrod Brown, slammed the purge as a violation of voter rights. Brown, a former Ohio secretary of

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 43

Pending a sea change in the federal gov-

ernment, Ohio Democrats’ brightest hope to reverse the voter-purge policy would be an election win in November for Kathleen Clyde, a state representative from Kent, Ohio, who is the Democratic nominee for secretary of state.

Clyde promises to end the purge if elected.

Clyde has made voting rights one of her signature issues. In 2015, she introduced legislation to bar the secretary of state from purging voters for missing elections or for moving within the state. Last year, she introduced a bill calling for automatic registration of eligible voters.

Her efforts had little chance of gaining traction

Supreme Court decision has galvanized activists, who are spending a good deal of energy informing voters about the purge, said Anthony of Cleveland VOTES. Nonpartisan groups such as the Columbusbased Ohio Voter Rights Coalition are stepping up efforts make sure registered voters who’ve missed elections get out to the polls and have up-to-date addresses with their county elections board.

The Ohio Voter Rights Coalition has developed a new mobile app that allows volunteers at fairs, food pantries, church, and other events to instantly verify a person’s voter-registration status. The coalition developed the app in response to the purge, and is sharing it with other voter organizations, said Camille Wimbish, the director of the organization.

“As we continue to promote this tool and get people to check their registration, we hopefully will make a bigger footprint as we go,” Wimbish said in an interview.

Republican claims that aggressive purges, voter ID laws, and other voting restrictions are necessary to prevent voter fraud have not stood up to scrutiny. in the Republican-controlled Ohio House.

Clyde’s opponent for secretary of state, Republican State Senator Frank LaRose, has voiced support for Husted’s voter purge.

LaRose applauded the Supreme Court ruling, saying in a statement it is “critical to ensuring the integrity and efficiency of our elections.”

In an interview, Clyde said her analysis, based on U.S. Election Assistance Commission data, shows about two million Ohio voters have been purged since 2011. That includes 1.2 million purged for infrequent voting and about 800,000 purged for moving and not updating their addresses. Some of those 800,000 may have moved out of state, but many moved in state and should remain eligible, she said.

“The purging of infrequent voters is overly aggressive, discriminatory, and needs to come to an end,” Clyde said. “We’re doing everything we can to get Ohio voters registered, including those who have been purged from the voter rolls.”

Clyde has lots of company in that effort. The

44 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

The group collaborates with Cleveland VOTES , which is giving grant money to 17

organizations this year—up from three last year. Cleveland VOTES has been conducting voter-registration training sessions this summer, and it has a dedicated staff person for the first time this year. The grantees involved with registration efforts are focused primarily in low-turnout areas.

On a recent Saturday under overcast skies, Jamie Sereika, a novice at registering voters, said she came out to Cleveland’s Uptown arts and entertainment district to do her part. A nurse practitioner in a local hospital trauma center, Sereika had recently decided to volunteer for a group called Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates. With a clipboard in hand, she stepped out from her table during an outdoor event and flagged down passersby.

“Are you registered to vote? Have you moved since the last time you voted?” she asked.

The event was only her second, but the mother

Jamie Sereika (right), a volunteer for Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates, is working to re-register purged voters.

of three seemed perfectly at ease calling out to strangers. Asked about her newfound activism, she mirrored feelings of others who find themselves for the first time attending rallies and volunteering, seeking an outlet for their bottled-up outrage about what’s happening in their country.

“I’m pretty horrified about what’s going on,” she said. “A lot of people don’t realize all that is going on. They’re not up to date on the purge or aware of the Supreme Court ruling.

“I had to do something to effect change. I had to get off my butt, get out of my suburban lifestyle.”

The Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, always active in voter registration, is targeting about 30 locations this fall, including homeless shelters and drop-in centers. The coalition, a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Husted, has seen a number of its members purged from the voting rolls, said director Chris Knestrick.

“We do a lot of work to make sure our constituents can participate,” he said in an interview.

The best counterpunch for voting-rights advocates would be legislation, such as the bills proposed by Sherrod Brown and Kathleen Clyde. But with Republicans controlling Washington and Columbus, such bills won’t become law anytime soon. For the time being, the battle to encourage more voting is being waged one street at a time.

Harlan Spector is a Northeast Ohio writer and a journalism instructor at Cleveland State University.

harl an spec tor

state, introduced federal legislation that would make it illegal to purge inactive voters, though it would surely require wall-to-wall Democratic control in Washington for such a measure to be enacted. (Brown is currently running for re-election against Republican Representative Jim Renacci; polls show him ahead.)

The 2018 Midterms in elections that have long been off the table.

Maine is not the only state to adopt a major reform; both California and Washington state have adopted an alternative election format known as “top two.” To sort out the different approaches and see how several reforms might work together in elections for Congress, it makes sense to consider how American congressional elections have been going awry.

Making American Democracy Representative A bold three-part proposal to introduce ranked-choice voting and proportional representation—and to abolish primaries

by Ben ja m i n I . Pag e a nd M a r t i n G i l ens

A

mericans are starting to catch on to the fact that our system of “first past the post” plurality voting in single-member districts can lead to perverse results. The citizens of Maine, for example, got stuck with an unpopular reactionary governor, Paul LePage, after he was elected in 2010 with just 38 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

Out of frustration, Mainers have since instituted an alternative system called rankedchoice voting (RCV). With RCV, voters do not just pick one candidate; they rank all the candidates in order of preference, from most favored to least favored. The candidate with the most first-choice votes wins outright only if he or she gets a majority of those votes. Otherwise, voters’ second choices come into play.

(See sidebar below.) In a moderately conservative state like Maine, RCV would usually mean a more centrist or middle-of-the-road official would win, rather than the far-right LePage.

In a more progressive state or district, it would also elect more representative officials—in that case, more progressive ones.

Despite repeated efforts by Maine’s Republican establishment to block RCV, citizens of the state have twice passed referenda in favor of it.

They recently decided to continue to use RCV in federal congressional elections and state primary elections. Ironically, as a result of a decision by the Maine Supreme Court, the system does not apply to the general election that motivated the reform in the first place—the election of the governor.

We believe that ranked-choice voting, which a number of cities have also adopted for local elections, could help elect members of Congress who better reflect the preferences of their constituents. (RCV could also help us elect presi-

dents more democratically, but that is a topic for another time.) For the House of Representatives, RCV would help reduce the influence of Tea Party–type extremists, thereby reducing party polarization and gridlock, and it would produce government policy better aligned with the wants and needs of all Americans.

The problems of unrepresentativeness and polarization call for further reforms as well, which should include more open ballot access for candidates and participation of all citizens at each stage of the electoral process—goals that we believe would be best achieved by abolishing primaries. In addition, Americans should consider adopting a variant of the method used by most democracies in the world for electing their national legislatures: a system of proportional representation through multimember districts, which would help ensure that the House of Representatives actually represents every political view embraced by a substantial number of Americans in proportion to the voters who support it.

This is a big agenda, not likely to be enacted overnight. But in the interest of overcoming widespread dissatisfaction with government, Americans may be ready to consider changes

In a typical primary election, a small portion (usually just 15 percent to 20 percent) of each major party’s eligible voters choose two nominees for the general election. Candidates who might draw some support from both parties’ voters as well as from independents have little chance of winning either party’s primary.

In states or districts that are dominated by one party, the officeholders who emerge tend to reflect the preferences of their party’s primary voters, donors, and activist organizations. As Michael Barber has shown, U.S. senators’ voting in Washington most closely reflects the preferences of their campaign donors, less closely the preferences of their same-party voters, and barely at all the preferences of their state’s voters taken as a whole. The Senate as well as the House could benefit from RCV and the abolition of primaries.

Even in states or districts with relatively even partisan divisions in the electorate, the Republican and Democratic candidates who make it through their party primaries tend not to represent the average voter in their state or district. What results instead is what Joseph Bafumi and Michael Herron call “leapfrog representation,” in which moderate districts are not represented by moderate officeholders but vacillate between Democrats and Republi-

How Ranked-Choice Voting Works

I

n Maine, voters assign preference rankings to as many of the candidates on the ballot as they like, as their first choice, second choice, and so on. If there are multiple candidates for a single office, the candidate with the most first-choice votes

wins only if she or he has a majority of all the first-place votes. If not, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Voters who had preferred the eliminated candidate then have their votes transferred to their second-choice candi-

date. If no candidate still has a majority of the votes, the process is repeated as many times as necessary, with the votes cast by people who had backed each eliminated candidate transferred to the stillviable candidate that they rank highest.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 45

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cans who stand to the left and the right (sometimes the far right), respectively, of the majority of voters.

In short, major party primaries, besides stifling third parties, tend to prevent the election of centrist candidates—who might appeal to the largest number of voters in their state or district—and give disproportionate power to small groups of party activists, donors, and interest groups.

California and Washington made some progress in addressing this problem when they adopted the “top two” nonpartisan nominating system. In those two states, primary elections are now open to candidates and voters of any party (or no party)—an excellent idea. The two candidates with the most votes win places on the November ballot. The hope is that in heavily one-party districts, if the top-two system produces two nominees from the dominant party, at least one of them will have broader Supporters of ranked-choice voting delivered petitions to the State House in Augusta, Maine, last February. voter appeal than the extremists and interest group–funded candidates that the old D, E, and F. If C was the second choice of many other states) rather than by party endorsesystem tended to come up with. Then, in the of those voters, majorities might prefer C over ments. Candidates could choose to list a party general election, voters from the minority party both A and B. In that case, C should go to the affiliation on the ballot as an aid to voters, will presumably join in a majority to elect the November runoff. Top-two would eliminate C, but that affiliation would not reflect any forcandidate who is more representative of the but RCV would forward C to the general elec- mal endorsement by the party. The winner district as a whole. tion. Consequently, the use of RCV in primaries should be the candidate who was ranked above But “top two” has not always realized this as well as general elections would lead to more all other candidates by majorities of voters in hope. For one thing, it has some of the same representative results than either plurality vot- head-to-head comparisons. defects as straight plurality voting for a single ing or even top-two.

Eliminating primary elections would advanwinner. Each voter must pick just one canditage candidates who appeal to as broad a swath date. So if several similar candidates split the But if we merely use RCV in primaries and of their districts as possible. It would have votes of their supporters, less-popular candi- general elections for single-member districts, other advantages as well. Americans are called dates may prevail, just as LePage did in Maine. we will not have dealt with the small, heavily upon to vote far more frequently than citizens That problem could be addressed by using partisan, and unrepresentative nature of pri- of any other democracy, one of the sources of ranked-choice voting in nonpartisan primary mary electorates, or with the lack of represen- lower voter turnout in the United States. Elimelections. If voters rank a number of candi- tation of minority viewpoints that is inherent inating primaries would reduce the burden on dates, both candidate A (with more first-choice in single-member districts. voters. November general elections typically In order to deal with unrepresentative pri- see considerably higher turnout and a more votes than any other candidate) and candidate B (with the next-highest number of first choic- maries, it would be helpful to take a second representative electorate than do primaries, es) might well win places on the November step and eliminate primary elections altogeth- which badly under-represent lower-income ballot, just as in the top-two system. At least er, nominating and electing members of Con- citizens and ethnic minorities. Focusing voters’ one of those two might be reasonably represen- gress in one unified process through “instant attention on one high-stakes general election tative of the average voter in the district. But runoffs” in November. Ranked-choice voting should help maximize turnout.

Further, eliminating primaries would it is also possible that candidate C could win would allow citizens to evaluate candidates fewer first-choice votes than either A or B only from any party—or no party—who qualified reduce the power of small but intense cadres of because many voters’ first-choice votes were for the ballot by gathering petition signatures extreme ideological activists. In low-visibility, split between C and highly similar candidates (as is currently the case in California and many low-turnout primaries, such groups can flood

The 2018 Midterms social media and turn out their supporters to nominate an extremist candidate. That is how Tea Party favorite Dave Brat ousted Eric Cantor—a conservative himself, but less extreme than Brat—in a Virginia Republican primary, despite Cantor’s big win in the previous general election and his closer fit with the district.

This November-only system, with open, petition-based nominations, would give voters more choices. With RCV, there would be no problem of “wasted” or counterproductive votes for third- or fourth-party candidates.

A voter could rank her or his genuine first choice first, and if that candidate did poorly, the voter’s second preference would count.

Third or fourth parties would no longer be blatantly discriminated against by the electoral system.

The openness of the system would put pressure on both major parties to pay more attention to all the voters in their states or districts, and less attention to their party donors and activists. Republicans would face more centrist pressures, while Democrats would have to pay more heed to progressive economic views. Large majorities of Americans hold progressive opinions on jobs, health care, the minimum wage, progressive taxation, bank regulation, and many other issues, yet those views are currently slighted by many Democratic officeholders, just as they are by nearly all Republicans.

If the major parties did not respond to the citizenry, new parties or independent candidates could challenge them. That threat would pressure the major parties toward democratic responsiveness.

Yet the two major parties would by no means be excluded from elections. We expect that they would continue to do most of the work of vetting, endorsing, and campaigning for candidates they favor, just as they do in nonpartisan primaries in California. Such candidates would generally choose to list a party affiliation on the ballot and would tend to win high rankings from most of their fellow partisans.

Still, even with these reforms, certain problems will persist as long as we stick with single-member congressional districts. For one thing, electing just one candidate from each district—even electing the one who is most

representative of the district’s median voter— would tend to leave Congress with many centrists but too few members with distinctly minority views or minority demographic characteristics. In order to get full representation of the whole range of diverse views and diverse groups in America and to enrich legislative deliberations in the House of Representatives, a third step would be necessary: moving to a system of proportional representation. In the United States, that can most feasibly be achieved by setting up multi-member congressional districts within each state.

Multi-member districts could also help with the nagging problem of “naturally” one-party districts that result from voters of similar political views being clustered together geographically, as they are, for example, in heavily minority urban areas. These lopsided districts waste votes for the Democrats: A district that is 90 percent Democratic can elect only one Democratic member of Congress, when con-

elect a member of Congress from the state’s majority party. The 40 percent minority party might be completely shut out of the state’s congressional delegation.

Proportional representation American-style, as we envision it, could solve this and other related problems. The system would start with all the reforms discussed above: involvement throughout the process by all citizens (no oneparty primaries); open ballot access through petitions; ranked-choice voting; and instant runoffs that combine nominations and election in one November-only contest. It would add (in large states) mega-districts electing four or five representatives at once, and (in smaller states) a single statewide district electing all of the state’s representatives at once. It would use voters’ rankings more comprehensively, not just to pick a single, most-preferred winner, but to select a set of the most preferred candidates for all the available seats in Congress, through a “single transferable vote” (STV)

Ranked-choice voting in a November-only election would provide more choices, draw higher turnout than primaries do, and force parties to pay attention to all voters. siderably fewer Democrats in a less lopsided district could do that job (the rest could vote elsewhere and affect those elections). “Naturally” lopsided districts contribute to the perennial Republican edge in the number of House seats the GOP wins relative to the proportion of votes the party gets nationally. Such districts are bad for democracy regardless of their particular partisan effects.

Although independent redistricting commissions can and should help get rid of partisan gerrymanders, they cannot solve the problem of naturally lopsided districts even if they try to maximize two-party competition. In a heavily (say, 60 percent) one-party state, maximizing two-party closeness would be impossible except in a few districts (which ones?) and would leave the others extremely lopsided. Or, if the maximum amount of competitiveness were sought uniformly throughout the state, there would be a 60-40 balance in every district, every one of which would likely

counting system. (See sidebar on page 44.)

In a four-seat mega-district that was evenly divided between Republican and Democratic voters, the result might be to elect to Congress one very progressive Democrat, one moderate Democrat, one moderately conservative Republican, and one libertarian, with roughly the same mix of races, ethnicities, and genders as in the mega-district as a whole. A more progressive district would elect more progressives, perhaps including minor-party progressives.

If this reform were implemented throughout the country, it should result in a House of Representatives that actually looks and thinks like America. It would be a House that represents all views and all demographic characteristics in close proportion to their shares in the whole adult population of the United States.

To be sure, reformers would need to address a variety of specific problems. It is essential to limit the number of seats to be filled and the number of candidates running for those

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 47

seats in each mega-district, so that voters are not burdened with a hopelessly confusing number of choices, and so that promising second- or third-choice candidates do not get lost when the candidates with the fewest firstplace preferences are eliminated by STV. This would also help each citizen keep in touch with his or her “own” representative (not based on geographical closeness, which has lost much of its relevance, but perhaps on ideological-, gender-, or ethnicity-based closeness) to deal with personal problems or requests.

The number of seats up for election can easily be specified by law. The number of candidates will be a function of the number of

use in Australia, Ireland, Malta, and many U.S. communities and private groups. But besides avoiding excessive numbers of offices to fill or too many candidates seeking to fill them, the precise design of ballots needs to be addressed.

For example, while party labels can be helpful to voters, making it too easy to vote for an entire one-party slate might damage proportional representation. If too many voters made rigid, party-line preference rankings there would be less chance of candidate merit overcoming party loyalty. True, ranked-choice voting would solve a big problem that bedeviled early-19th-century multi-member districts.

(Back then, each citizen cast as many votes

How the Single Transferable Vote Works

R

anked-choice voting can be extended to fill multiple seats, as in a multi-member congressional district.

Here, too, each voter ranks as many candidates as she or he likes, assigning first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on down to the voter’s last-choice candidate. But the rankings are used to pick a set of winners, as many winners as there are seats to be filled.

The best way to do this using the rankings is by the single transferable vote system.

First, a threshold is established for the number of votes needed to win a seat,

which depends on the number of voters and the number of seats to be filled. (When picking two winners, the threshold is one-third of the number of voters; with three seats, it is one-quarter, and so on.) In the first round of counting, any candidate or candidates with more first-choice votes than the threshold wins a seat. If those candidates have excess votes above the threshold, their extra votes are transferred proportionally to the second-choice candidates of their supporters, and any candidates whose new totals exceed the threshold are elected. (This prevents vot-

signatures required to qualify for the ballot— a number that must be high enough to prevent an unwieldy number of candidates but low enough to allow access to a wide range of office-seekers. California seems to have hit a plausible balance: The median number of primary candidates in each of California’s 53 U.S. congressional districts in 2018 was four.

The STV system for counting ranked-choice votes has had a generally successful history of

48 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

ers from being “punished” for wasting their top preferences on a popular candidate who would have won even without their support, and helps eliminate any incentive for strategic voting.)

If all the seats are not filled in this manner, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and that candidate’s votes are transferred to their supporters’ second choices. After this transfer, any candidate who is pushed over the threshold wins a seat, those candidates’ excess votes are redistributed, and the process repeats itself until all the seats are filled.

as there were seats in their state, and each party listed its candidates on a single slate.

The dominant party in the state generally won every seat—a very undemocratic outcome.)

Even with totally party-line voting, RCV would at least produce a congressional delegation whose partisan makeup reflected the partisan proportions among voters in the district. Still, we think it would be a mistake to let voters put a fixed list of candidates from one party in high

positions in their preference rankings simply by making a single check-mark or a single click.

Better to encourage voters to think about, and distinguish among, the merits of the individual candidates affiliated with their party (and, if they choose, candidates not so affiliated).

Advocates of federalism and states’ rights should not worry that a federal law mandating proportional representation would mean too much intrusion into the business of individual states. Mega-district boundaries could be left up to the states, requiring only that each small state elect all its representatives (by RCV) in a single statewide district, and that all large states carve out a mega-district to choose at least, say, three or four and no more than (perhaps) five or six members of Congress. Under proportional representation, the precise sizes and boundaries of districts would not matter much. Oddities would mostly cancel out across districts. Opportunities for gerrymandering would be minimal.

No constitutional amendment would be required. This system of proportional representation could be adopted by a federal law (as the current system of single-member districts was in the mid-1800s).

No doubt this proposal would arouse substantial political opposition, based on incumbent protection and partisan or ideological worries, even if most of those worries are exaggerated. Achieving proportional representation American-style might require persistent pressure over a number of years from a broad, sustained social movement, just as was needed in the 20th century to win direct election of senators, voting rights for women, and enfranchisement of African Americans.

But we are optimistic that major reforms will be once again possible as more people come to recognize how our electoral institutions have contributed to the problems of polarization, gridlock, and unresponsiveness that beset American democracy today.

Benjamin I. Page, Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University, and Martin Gilens, professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, are the authors of Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It.

The 2018 Midterms nor, which opens up election administration decision-making to partisan meddling.

Scott restored automatic voting rights for some former felons, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a lower-court ruling ordering the state to develop a new process for ex-offenders to regain those rights. A proThis purple state remains a plum target for hackers foreign posed constitutional amendment will appear and domestic, and its history of suppressive voting measures on the November ballot. complicates efforts at cybersecurity.

State lawmakers rolled back popular measures like early voting, widely used by students,

by G a br i e l l e G u r l e y service workers, and African Americans.

“Souls to the Polls” Sunday was especially popver since the infamous election of tant for Verified Voting, a nonpartisan watch- ular among black voters, when churches offer 2000, Florida has been ground zero dog group, after 2000, many counties adopted transportation to polling sites after services. in the struggle to improve the tech- paperless touchscreens that they used until When lawmakers made the cuts in early voting prior to the 2012 election, they miscal2008 when paper ballots were required for nology and security of voting. Unforculated just how popular it had become. The all voters.

All jurisdictions use paper ballots tunately, those critical issues have massive public backlash about long lines on that voters can mark with pens and then feed been conflated with deliberate political efforts to suppress voting and undermine confidence through the scanners. (Paperless touchscreens Election Day forced Scott and state lawmakers in voting systems, and 2018 is no exception. are still in use for voters with disabilities in to reinstate early voting in 2013.

State elections officials next The reforms instituted since the went after early-voting sites for 2000 debacle, such as early voting, served to make voting more convecollege students, prohibiting the nient and restored confidence that siting of polling places on college campuses. This past sumall votes would be counted accumer, U.S. District Judge Mark rately. Even Republican Governor Walker found that prohibition Rick Scott, no fan of convenience unconstitutional, a violation of or expanding the franchise, finally students’ First, 14th, and 26th went along with online voter regAmendment rights. istration last year. Thanks to the Detzner, Scott’s blunt instruwork of county election officials ment for these suppression and civic reform groups, as well moves, has been a regular fixas good-faith efforts by Scott’s ture in federal court, often Republican predecessor, Charlie appearing before Walker, who Crist, Florida had already made occasionally sprinkles his opinsignificant strides on election ions with film references. In the administration and had extended campus polling locations case voting rights to certain disenfranhe remarked on the distances chised former felons as well.

Last May, Florida’s Secretary of State Ken Detzner declined a $20 million share of federal cyberthat some students had to travPaper ballots that were once security money, until Governor Rick Scott forced him to accept it. el to get to off-campus polling on their way to extinction have become the bulwark of election security as some places like Miami-Dade County and will sites, noting that the University of Florida has the same prohibitions against “apparating onconcerns about cyber attacks dominate the be eventually phased out.) campus—or instantaneous teleportation” as But since 2012, Scott and his secretary waking hours of the 67 county supervisors who Hogwarts, the school for wizards in the Harry of state, Ken Detzner, have worked hard to run elections in the state. “It’s night and day to Potter books and films. reverse that progress.

Scott came into office what it was,” says Susan MacManus, a FloriWalker summed up his view of the state’s da political analyst and University of South on the Tea Party wave. Both houses of the Florida professor emerita of government and Florida legislature had long been dominated efforts this way: “This court can conceive of international affairs. “But the ghost of 2000 by Republicans who proved more than recep- fewer ham-handed efforts to abridge the youth tive to his efforts to restrict the franchise. The vote than the Defendants’ affirmative prohibiis always on the minds of every supervisor.”

According to Dan McCrea, a Florida consul- secretary of state is appointed by the gover- tion of on-campus early voting.”

Florida Wrestles with Election Cybersecurity

f lo r i d a p o l i t i c s . c o m

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Fall 2018 The American Prospect 49

One of the strangest moves by Detzner was his attempt to refuse federal money made available this past March to help county voting officials resist cyber attacks. After federal intelligence officials confirmed that Russia had unsuccessfully hacked into voter systems in five Florida counties and 20 other states in 2016, President Trump signed an appropriations bill March 23 that included $380 million for state cybersecurity efforts. (In August, Republicans in the Senate rebuffed Democrats who tried to come up with additional funding.)

A week later, the federal ElectionAssistance Commission announced the immediate availability of the funds, and urged states to apply.

But in late May, after dragging his heels for two months, Detzner stunned voting-rights advocates and county voting officials of both parties by announcing that Florida would not accept its nearly $20 million share of cybersecurity funds. After an outcry from the supervisors of elections, Scott ordered Detzner to take

Instead, he spent what he could and ended up leaving a few hundred thousand dollars on the table.

That’s because even after Scott ordered Detzner to take the federal money, his approval decision came with onerous restrictions, including requiring funds to be spent by November of this year instead of by September 2023 as specified by the Election Assistance Commission. Detzner also prohibited counties from hiring their own cybersecurity experts, reasoning that the state had already spent funds to hire five specialists whom he could put at the counties’ disposal. Many Republican and Democratic county election officials expressed bewilderment, while Florida voting-rights advocates speculated that the only purpose of the rigid framework was to reduce confidence in the accuracy of balloting and in turn depress voting should a cyber attack occur.

“Ken is very concerned about security for protection of voter registration rolls and vot-

One area of concern is voter-registration databases: Connected to the internet, they are susceptible to hacking. Eligible voters can be removed accidentally or on purpose. the money. But the delay cost local officials dearly, leaving elections more vulnerable to hacking by both the Russians and freelance hackers.

One area of concern in the security framework is voter-registration databases, which are connected to the internet and susceptible to hacking: Eligible voters can be removed accidentally or on purpose.

Bill Cowles, the Orange County supervisor of elections, invested in a variety of measures including physical security precautions like surveillance cameras and 24/7 security guards to work during the election period. He really wanted to use the money for new electronic pollbooks to replace the county’s aging devices.

But the delays and red tape meant that he did not have enough time to purchase the number of pollbooks he needed county-wide for November, much less do the testing or training on the devices for Orlando and the other municipalities in his Central Florida area.

50 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

ing in Florida, which is good,” says Pamela Goodman, president of Ruth’s List Florida, a progressive group that recruits Democratic women to run for state and local office. Recalling his negative views about online voter registration, Goodman, a former League of Women Voters president, adds, “However, he is so concerned about it—there’s a fine line [where] it can cross over into voter disenfranchisement.”

Detzner declined an interview request through a spokeswoman.

Recent election security studies by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive Washington think tank, and by the Democratic members of the Committee on House Administration have both found Florida’s election administration seriously deficient in areas like its less-than-rigorous post-election audits.

CAP gave Florida an “F.” Audits in Florida are electronically tabulated and vulnerable to hacking. But they are very weak and nearly ineffective, as the state conducts post-election

audits after election results have been certified.

American intelligence officials have warned that one of the aims of the state-sponsored cyber attacks is to sow discord in the United States by shredding confidence in democracy.

What is easier than attacking the privileges of citizenship that the vast majority of Americans take for granted: elections and voting?

Putting obstacles in the way of fortifying election security ensures that local officials will be unprepared to deal with intrusions and other crises when they occur, as they inevitably will. Florida is a tempting election target as a purple state. The two main November contests are already polarized: the bitter U.S. Senate race between Scott and Senator Bill Nelson and the gubernatorial showdown between Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, a progressive Democrat, and conservative former Republican Representative Ron DeSantis, a Donald Trump acolyte. The governor’s contest has already degenerated into nasty racebaiting—offering a fertile breeding ground for cyber machinations.

By initially refusing federal funding and making it difficult for localities to use the allocations that the state finally parceled out, Florida has cracked open another chapter in its long and ignominious election history.

While election officials can thwart would-be intruders with sophisticated firewalls, two-factor authentication, intrusion detection software, and other state-of-the-art tools, no system is hack-proof. Threats evolve and attackers adapt.

“It’s similar to a thief coming into your neighborhood and rattling doorknobs,” says Goodman. “If it’s locked, he’ll go on to the next house and the next and the next until he finds a door that is not locked.”

Florida’s August primary appears to have gone well, since there were no reports of significant problems. But vulnerabilities remain.

That may be dumb luck, or it may be because hackers are waiting for the far more consequential general election. This November, Florida’s election may go off well—or it may be impaired by cyber attacks. If Floridians do dodge this bullet, it will be no thanks to Republicans in Congress or the current governor and secretary of state.

Mobility

Mass Transit in the Sun Belt If you build it, they will come— but not if the system is skimpy and unreliable.

By J oan F it z g e rald

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ven in car-dependent middle America, there is support for local mass transit in surprising places. Some of these are blue cities in red states, with City Hall governed by Democrats or pragmatic Republicans. In some, the local business elite backs transit initiatives out of frank acknowledgment that reliance on cars has reached its limits. This stance, however, puts them at odds with more ideologically antigovernment Republicans who typically control Sun Belt state legislatures. The pro-carbon obsession of the Trump administration largely eliminates federal funds, at least for now, as any sort of carrot.

The transit coalition is also fragile. With mass transit underdeveloped and inconvenient, many suburbanites view buses as transit of last resort for the poor and prefer commuting by car. And in some cities minority communities want more transit in principle, but don’t trust that new rail lines will serve them when basic bus service in their communities is sporadic. Whether these aspiring cities prevail in their efforts to expand transit depends largely on the vagaries of political leadership, timing, and luck.

This article looks at three of them. In Houston, which famously has no zoning, planning of any kind is a challenge—and transit requires long-term planning. Although voters approved a light rail system plan and a regional transit agency to build it in 1978, the first light rail line didn’t open until 2004. Adequate scale has been blocked by local opposition and hostile members of Congress, particularly Representatives Tom DeLay and John Culberson. While rail has been slowed, Houston has nonetheless managed an impressive revamping of its bus service.

Salt Lake City, despite a state that is rockribbed Republican in its governors and senators, often elects Democratic mayors. The mountain west has always been reliant on federal funding to aid development, and Republican legislators and governors in Utah tend to be less ideologically opposed to help from Washington than those in some other red states. Salt Lake City transit advocates are also helped by geography. The city is hemmed in by mountains on two sides and the Great Salt Lake on a third, so there are severe limits to highway expansion and suburban growth requires mass transit. Salt Lake City has also had competent local leadership that isn’t opposed to planning.

In Nashville, by contrast, political bungling upended a far-reaching plan for a region-wide light rail system. Given extreme highway congestion, popular and elite support for expanded transit has grown in recent years. Yet different political and business leaders had rival visions of how to proceed. In 2017, a broad coalition managed to qualify a $5.4 billion ballot initiative that included 19 transit centers, expanded bus service, and five new tram lines, as well as sidewalk and bike infrastructure improvements. The proposal was backed by the Chamber of Commerce and Nashville’s popular Democratic mayor, Megan Barry. But when she resigned in disgrace in a sex scandal, the transit plans died with her. The final nail in the coffin was financial support by the Koch brothers for a nasty media campaign against the plan.

Beyond the vagaries of local policies, efforts to catapult car-reliant cities into a mass-transit era are hobbled by the logic of building large transportation systems. These projects take decades. If you don’t build it, they won’t come.

Federal and local subsidies for autos have a 70-year head start. The highway lobby is not at all averse to planning—for highways—and the existing pattern of development both reflects and reinforces the dominance of cars. By contrast, the incremental expansion of bus or light rail lines fails to change the basic dynamics of how people get to work or go shopping, or where development occurs. Local government that reflects fierce partisan, ideological, and interest-group contention typically produces stop-and-go transit plans.

It’s only in a few older, denser cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston that long-established commuter rail, bus, and subway systems are credible alternatives to cars, and even in these cities, mass transit systems are crumbling because they’ve been starved for adequate funds and some have been woefully mismanaged. Newer Sun Belt cities, reflecting divided partisan government and a stronger pro-highway coalition, typically have great difficulty getting mass transit out of first gear.

One political misstep can be fatal.

Houston: A Story of Stop and Go

Houston is one of just three metropolitan areas that saw mass-transit ridership increase in 2016. A big factor was a major revamping of its bus system. When Tom Lambert became president and CEO of Houston METRO in 2013, he and the board examined declining ridership, and realized the hub-and-spoke system taking people from the suburbs to the downtown hadn’t changed much in 30 years, despite population growth and changes in where people lived and worked. Given the checkerboard pattern of Houston’s unplanned development, few commuters came into a downtown hub—they

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 51

commuted every which way. METRO board member Christof Spieler led a participatory process of reimagining the system, reconfiguring it into a grid pattern that aligns better with jobs, population, and commuting patterns. The revamped system opened on August 16, 2015, and a year later, ridership reached about 4.5 million—an almost 7 percent increase.

Building light rail has been tougher. There is a long history of contentious debate breaking down on city-suburban lines, but with shifting and unstable race and class alliances. After a defeat of a proposed light rail system in 1973, voters approved the creation of a regional transit agency, METRO, in 1978, and also approved a one-cent sales tax in the service area as its source of revenue. To get that approval, METRO had to focus on roads as much as transit, a move that intensified Houston’s sprawled growth pattern. METRO would also need voter approval to float bonds for transit, a stipulation that would slow down light rail development.

When pro-transit Democratic Mayor Kathy Whitmire came to office in 1982, the Houston Chamber of Commerce released a regional mobility plan that focused on expanding and improving roads and the bus system. METRO responded with another rail plan and the fight was on. Houston voters seemed to support transit, but rejected it in a 1983 referendum.

The federal dollars that had been earmarked for the project were redistributed to other cities.

A transit proposal finally happened in 1988, when Whitmire proposed a 22-mile rail line extending from the Texas Medical Center to downtown and then south to the Galleria, a regional shopping mall. Voters approved a $650 million bond initiative to fund it and the federal government agreed to cover $500 million of what had escalated to a $1.2 billion project, with city revenue paying the balance.

But after five terms, Whitmire was defeated by a more conservative Democrat, Bob Lanier, in the primary. When he became mayor in 1992, Lanier stopped the rail project and sealed Houston’s fate as a car-dependent sprawled city. He diverted the federal funding to road maintenance and beefing up the police force, which were key to his agenda of stemming middle-class f light. Lanier’s pet project was a billion-dollar Grand Parkway, an outer ring road to allow further develop-

52 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

ment of undeveloped parts of the metro area.

Rail got back on the agenda in 1997, when another Democrat, Lee Brown, became the city’s first black mayor. Brown supported a light rail line on Main Street, a major northsouth thoroughfare. This time, the grinch who stole transit was Republican Tom DeLay, representing a suburban district, who made sure federal transit funds wouldn’t find their way to Houston. As the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation chair, not only did DeLay kill a $65 million congressional appropriation for Brown’s proposed project, he inserted language into the federal transporta-

It takes time for mass transit to catch on in a caroriented city—in terms of ridership, convenience, public confidence, image, and reliability. tion bill that would ensure Houston would not receive federal transit funds under his watch.

Even so, METRO was able to use its accumulated sales tax funding stream to build the green line on Main Street. The $325 million line opened in 2004, extending south from the downtown to a medical center and north to a sports complex.

While the red line was under construction, another voter referendum for a $640 million bond issue to expand light rail and the bus network was put on the ballot. Despite suburban developers and highway contractors creating an opposition group, Texans for True Mobility, which raised close to $2 million to fight the initiative, it passed in 2003. Construction on the red line expansion started in 2009 and was completed in December 2013—ahead of schedule and under budget. Two additional lines, serving eastern and southeastern parts of the city, opened in 2015.

The most controversial line proposed was the blue (university) line, an 11-mile east-west span that would make a much-needed connection of the red and purple lines south of downtown. It was always planned as part of the system and was part of the 2003 referendum. Republican Representative John Culberson was adamantly opposed to the line, citing opposition from his constituents, particularly businesses along its route who thought it would reduce car and foot traffic. He inserted language into five consecutive federal appropriations bills, the latest in 2017, making the project ineligible for federal funding because of opposition from his constituents.

With no chance of federal funding for rail, the Uptown Management District began planning a four-mile BRT corridor to serve this growing mixed-use area roughly equivalent to the entire downtown of Denver. John Breeding, president of Uptown Houston, comments that the local business community realized that continued economic vitality of the district required better transit links and was willing to finance it. Uptown Houston is a specialpurpose district created by petition of property owners that can tax itself to support specific purposes, which it does, generating about $10 million a year. The total project, which includes enhanced pedestrian walkways, will cost about $200 million. The project has $62 million in federal grants and the Texas Department of Transportation is paying at least $25 million for the dedicated stretch along Interstate 610.

The rest will be financed by local funds.

Houston has a good start, but hasn’t been able to finish the system originally envisaged in 2003. There has been a strong anti-transit movement while the light rail system was being built that continues today. They voice concerns about costs and infringement on space for cars.

It takes time for transit to catch on in a caroriented city—both in terms of ridership and development. While the initial red line has exceeded ridership predictions and property values along its route have increased, the other two lines haven’t yet met expectations. Kyle Shelton, a Rice University transportation expert, says that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—with a big hole in the system (the blue line), ridership won’t increase. People then point to low ridership and use it as justification for not investing in expen-

Houston METRO opened its green line on Main Street in 2004. Three additional lines opened in 2013 and 2015.

m i c h a e l s t r avat o / a p i m a g e s

sive transit. With the bus revamping, residents woke up one morning to an entirely different system (with plenty of education and outreach prior). With transit, building incrementally creates a less-than-optimal system.

In Houston, there is still substantial voter and business opposition to increased transit.

Every funding referendum that passed took years of fighting. The promise of expanded transit keeps being undermined by the occasional hostile mayor, a Republican state government focused on roads, and outright sabotage by congressional Republicans such as DeLay and Culberson. As a consequence, only 5 percent of black Houstonians take public transit to work and not quite 2 percent of whites. Even so, Houston has made some headway. With federal and state support, it could do a great deal more.

Salt Lake City—A Surprising Leader in Transit Growth

Utah hasn’t had a Democratic governor since 1985 and has had a Republican trifecta since 1992. Yet the Salt Lake City region, which has a mix of Democratic and Republican mayors, has been building transit since the 1990s—much of it funded locally. Salt Lake City itself has been led by Democratic mayors since 1976. Politicians and the business community are united on the need for transit to fuel the area’s economic

growth. Surrounded by mountains the length of the metro area on the east and west and two lakes north and west, they realized early on that there is no room for more highways.

A 1992 ballot initiative to fund transit failed.

But when the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which serves the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, received federal funds for 80 percent of a light rail line, it jumped on the opportunity.

The first line of what became the TRAX system, a 19-mile north-south line, opened in 1999 and transit has been expanding ever since.

A growth-planning process undertaken in the late 1990s by Envision Utah, a nonprofit organization that works with cities and towns to plan for healthy expansion in Salt Lake City, called for 300 miles of light rail and created a vision of how denser growth would create better neighborhoods and downtown than unchecked sprawled development. Envision Utah sought considerable citizen participation so its recommendations were well regarded by the public. Once the first line was built, residents who were skeptical about transit saw the benefits and wanted it in their neighborhoods. A second line, spanning east-west, opened in 2001 to connect the downtown to the University of Utah.

An 89-mile commuter rail, FrontRunner, opened in 2008 and was expanded in 2011. In addition, the city’s nine-mile BRT line, MAX,

opened in 2008. It operates in segregated lanes and has off-bus fare collection. Another BRT line is scheduled to open in 2019 and others are being planned.

In August 2013, a project that added 70 miles of rail connecting suburbs to downtown and a line to the airport was completed two years ahead of schedule and $300 million under budget. A streetcar line also opened in 2013 to connect neighborhoods to TRAX and bus services. The line has been so popular that an additional track is being built to allow more frequent service. In 2013, Salt Lake City was the nation’s only city simultaneously building light rail, BRT, streetcars, and commuter rail.

The TRAX light rail system now has three lines with 50 stations along 42.5 miles of track.

It has created a virtuous cycle—the more residents see transit, the more they want it and the businesses want to locate near transit stations.

The UTA estimates that 25 percent of downtown workers arrive by public transportation.

Transit planning is widely supported. A plan developed by all of the state’s transit agencies was unveiled in 2010. Its state funding formula called for spending one-third each on transit, state roads, and local roads. Unity on the importance of transit from the state on down has translated into success in obtaining federal dollars. State funds along with dedicated local sales taxes approved by voters in ballot initiatives make up the difference. As a result, Salt Lake City has been one of the nation’s leaders in per capita transit investment for most of the 2000s.

Following Envision Utah’s commitment to transit-oriented development, a walkable suburban development with connection to transit has been built. A planned development called Daybreak is a mixed-use community of about 12,000 that will ultimately have 20,000 homes.

Yet the Salt Lake City area also has had bumps in the road in transit planning. Voters rejected Proposition 1, a $58 million sales tax hike for mass transit and road improvements, in 2015. While 62 percent of Salt Lake City voters, representing about 17 percent of the county, supported the increase, it was not popular in much of the rest of the county. But rather than being a vote against transit, many saw it as a vote of no confidence in the UTA , which was under scrutiny for problems of mismanagement, bloated salaries, and questionable deals.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 53

In November 2017, a ballot initiative proposing to raise $87 million from a 0.25 percent sales tax increase was rejected by seven of 17 counties in the region. In March 2018, the state legislature passed a transportation bill with a clause that allowed counties in which the proposition failed to approve it or place it back on the ballot.

In May, Salt Lake County passed an ordinance to enact the percent sales tax increase to fund transit and other infrastructure improvements if cities and towns representing 67 percent of the county’s population adopted it as well. A month later, that threshold was reached, allowing a 0.25 percent county-wide tax. And in June, the proposition from 2015 passed, which will be spent on roads and transit.

So it appears that transit is back on track in Salt Lake City. A new transit master plan was unveiled in 2017. When its projects are completed in 2040, at least 73 percent of Salt Lake City residents will live within two blocks of a high-frequency bus or rail service. The lesson of Salt Lake City is that broad public support is crucial and that success builds on success.

Once a transit system is valued by actual users, popular backing is reinforced. The constraints imposed on highways by those mountains and lakes didn’t hurt either.

54 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

Bungling Transit in Nashville

Nashville provides a sad contrast to Salt Lake City. In principle, several key ingredients for a transit expansion were there—increased demand and citizen and business support.

But the city’s political and business leadership failed to turn that opportunity into success.

Like many Sun Belt cities, the pattern of Nashville’s rapid growth has been low-density and sprawled. So for most people, cars are the only way to get to work. As a result, Nashville has been working its way up the most-congested-city charts, reaching 27th in 2018.

Nashville’s bus system hasn’t been keeping up with growth and has provided inconsistent and infrequent service. Expansion and improvement of the system serving commuters was on the agenda of Karl Dean when he was sworn in as mayor of Metro Nashville and Davidson County in September 2007.

Working with Dean, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and the Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County appropriated $7.5 million for improving the system. Dean sought federal funding for a BRT route that he hoped would connect the divided city. Proposed in 2012, the Amp, named to acknowledge Nashville’s reputation as a

rick browner / ap images

Salt Lake City’s commuter rail system, FrontRunner, opened in 2008 with 70 miles of track. It was expanded in 2011.

music city, would create a 7.1-mile BRT route, at a cost of $174 million.

The project sought $75 million in federal funding, $35 million from the state, with the remaining $65 million to be funded from the city’s capital budget. The proposed route would have extended across the city, connecting the poor but gentrifying east (40 percent African American) side and wealthy west side (92 percent white) through the downtown.

But t he se em i ngly straight line across Nashville had several fault lines. Supporters included the Nashville Chamber of Commerce and the Convention and Visitors Corporation, Vanderbilt University, several hospitals, and many downtown businesses, who saw transit as essential to continued economic development. Members of the opposition group, Stop Amp, were against using tax dollars for transit generally and had specific objections related to their businesses. Key among the members were Rick Williams, the owner of a limousine company, and Lee Beaman, who owns a large car dealership.

The east-west route, which would have served several rapidly growing neighborhoods across the city, was controversial. Residents of largely African American North Nashville didn’t support it because they preferred improvements in the regular bus lines serving their neighborhood. The downtown entertainment and tourism industry opposed the dedicated lane because they thought it would ruin the character of the neighborhood and scare off tourists with years of construction.

Wealthy West End residents worried about “riffraff” from East Nashville coming to their neighborhood.

Despite the critics, the project seemed to have popular support. When the Obama administration committed $27 million in fed-

eral funds for the project in March 2014, Beaman determined that the Amp would have to be killed at the state level. He enlisted Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing political advocacy organization financed by the Koch brothers. Andrew Ogles, director of the Tennessee chapter of Americans for Prosperity, worked with State Senator Jim Tracy, chair of the transportation and safety committee, to draft legislation that banned BRT using dedicated lanes or rights of way.

The bill passed in the Senate, but the compromise bill that passed allowed dedicated lanes only with approval from the state legislature and the state highway commissioner (regardless of whether state funds are used).

By then, Dean, near the end of his term and termed out, figured a new mayor would be unlikely to take up the divisive issue, so he announced in October 2014 that he would not seek financing for the project. Three months later, Steve Bland, new CEO of the MTA , called for halting the ongoing design work.

But Bland was not giving up on transit—he authorized using $750,000 in unused Amp funds for strategic planning for transit. The MTA and the Regional Transportation Authority developed a 25-year strategic plan, nMotion, released in September 2016. It laid out three scenarios for improving transit—modest improvements in the existing bus system, expansion of bus and BRT, and bus and BRT with regional light rail.

The next steps were up to then-Mayor Megan Barry, a charismatic liberal Democrat with close ties to the city’s business community and a transit supporter. Working from the third scenario of nMotion, she assembled a group including the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, real-estate developers, and property owners to develop a plan, Let’s Move Nashville, that was released in October 2017 to go on the ballot in May 2018.

It called for expanding service hours of the bus system, creating four “rapid bus” routes (BRT-lite that would have signal priority, but only dedicated lanes and level-boarding platforms on limited stretches), 26 miles of light rail along five corridors, 19 transit centers, and sidewalk and bike infrastructure improvements. The $5.4 billion in capital costs for the plan, totaling $9 billion, would be financed

through four tax increases (sales, hotel, car rental, and business and excise) that would start in 2023 and end in 2068, raising about $100 million annually.

The Nashville Chamber of Commerce started the Transit for Nashville campaign to promote the initiative, and quickly raised $1.3 million to sell it to voters. The business community seemed to be in agreement that it was essential to continued economic growth. The Tennessean editorial board supported it, as did many politicians in the region.

On the opposing side, Lee Beaman launched No Tax 4 Tracks in January 2018 and the state

The Nashville experience shows that major local funding for mass transit is an uphill climb, even when local business supports it. chapter of Americans for Prosperity launched a “Stop the Train” campaign to encourage residents to voice their disapproval at what they called a waste of tax dollars. They ran a very effective door-to-door campaign, calling it a $9 billion boondoggle.

In May, the referendum failed; 64 percent voted against it. A post-mortem reveals death by a thousand cuts. While the Americans for Prosperity campaign was one factor, it was only one of several factors that killed the proposal, starting with the behind-closed-doors approach to developing it. The announcement of the Let’s Move Nashville proposal came as a complete surprise to most members of the city council and the public, feeding suspicion that it was more in the interest of developers and those whose property values would increase than for commuters.

The coup de grace came in March, when Barry resigned after pleading guilty to felony

theft of city funds and having an affair with her bodyguard. But she already had been losing credibility among her base in the African American community by proposing to reduce services in a hospital serving the community and using a historic park, Fort Negley, to develop low-income housing.

Several advocates of the program told me a big lesson learned was that messaging matters.

Transit for Nashville didn’t have a persuasive story of why transit would benefit everyone, particularly to those living in the outer parts of the county. In a city where few used transit, a campaign such as one used in Salt Lake City, “Some of us use it, all of us need it,” would have been more effective.

Another political miscalculation was choosing a low-turnout election in May rather than waiting until November. The campaign was short, leaving little time to explain the plan to skeptical voters. The Nashville experience shows that major local funding for mass transit is an uphill climb, even when the local business community supports it, and that there is little margin for political miscalculations, of which there were many.

It’s a tough time to be selling transit—

whether rail or bus or bus-rapid transit (buses with separated lanes)—when ridership is down in almost every U.S. city. And there’s a new element. Naysayers argue that our traffic gridlock can be solved with Uber and Lyft van services and autonomous vehicles, painting rail as a 20th-century solution to a 21st-century problem. They may be part of a solution, but will only add to highway congestion. Cities do need a multimodal approach, with increased rail and bus-rapid transit.

The problem is that in most newer cities, the existing transit grid is so partial that too few citizens use it and trust it. So cars keep begetting more cars. Mass transit is only likely to reach critical mass with significant federal funding, something that awaits a massive infrastructure push from the next progressive administration.

Joan Fitzgerald is a professor of urban and public policy at Northeastern University. She is currently working on her next book, Green­ ovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 55

Private Equity Pillage

Grocery Stores and Workers at Risk The private equity business model is to strip assets from companies that they acquire. The latest victims: retail grocery chains

By Eil ee n Ap p e lbau m a nd Ro s e m ary Bat t

S

ince 2015 seven major grocery chains, employing more than 125,000 workers, have filed for bankruptcy. The media has blamed “disruptors”— low-cost competitors like Walmart and high-end markets like Whole Foods, now owned by Amazon. But the real disruptors in this industry are the private equity owners who were behind all seven bankruptcies. They have extracted millions from grocery stores in the last five years—funds that could have been used to upgrade stores, enhance products and services, and invest in employee training and higher wages. As with the bankruptcies of common household names like Toys “R” Us, private equity owners throw companies they own into unsustainable debt in order to capture high returns for themselves and their investors. If the company they have starved of resources goes broke, they’ve already made their bundle.

This is all perfectly legal. It should not be.

The bankrupted private equity–owned grocery chains include East Coast chains A&P/ Pathmark, Fairway, and Tops; West Coast chains Fresh & Easy and Haggen; the Southeastern Grocers chains (BI-LO, Bruno’s, WinnDixie, Fresco y Más, and Harveys); and in the Midwest, Marsh Supermarkets. We could find no comparable publicly traded grocery chains that went bankrupt during this period.

The future of regional supermarket chains is a major concern for consumers, vendors, local communities, workers, and their unions. Grocery workers are by far the most unionized of all retail workers. The United Food and Com-

56 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

mercial Workers International Union (UFCW) has 1.3 million members in the United States and Canada, with 60 percent working in supermarkets and another 15 percent employed in meatpacking and food processing. Most UFCW members (two-thirds) are employed by the top five supermarket chains, with Kroger and P.E.owned Albertsons-Safeway clocking in at first and second respectively in market share and accounting for the lion’s share of unionized supermarket workers.

P.E. firms, famously, have no commitment to the long-term sustainability of the companies they buy; their time horizon is three to five years until, ideally, they exit these investments.

The heart of the private equity business model is the “leveraged buyout” (LBO). This is a deal in which a P.E. fund uses capital supplied by pension funds, endowments, wealthy individuals, and other investors as a down payment, and buys out a company using high levels of debt that it loads on the company—typically in the range of 70 percent of the purchase price. Postbuyout, P.E. firms often add on more debt in order to pay themselves a dividend, or they sell off assets or real estate, reducing financial stability. Strangled by debt and newly obligated to pay rent, these grocery chains have neither the ability to cut prices to compete with low-cost chains nor the resources to invest and compete with upscale markets. And in an industry like grocery, where profit margins are thin, a small drop in revenue may undermine a P.E.-owned supermarket’s ability to keep up with interest payments on the debt.

Debt sucks the life out of P.E.-owned companies

The bankruptcy of Southeastern Grocers, owned by private equity firm Lone Star Funds, provides a classic example of how private equity drives companies into bankruptcy while extracting millions of dollars for themselves and their investors. Southeastern is the owner of well-known brands BI-LO, Fresco y Más, Harveys, and Winn-Dixie, located in seven southeastern states. While all supermarket chains face intense competition and thin profit margins, Southeastern’s regional competitors, such as Publix Super Markets, have survived and flourished.

Lone Star first bought out Southeastern’s predecessor, BI-LO, in 2005 in a leveraged buyout, and took the company private. It ran the company into bankruptcy by 2009 and emerged from Chapter 11 in 2010. It tried to sell the chain to publicly traded Kroger and employee-owned Publix Super Markets, but they were not interested. After six years of ownership, Lone Star was overdue in paying promised outsized returns to its investors. So it executed a “dividend recapitalization”—meaning that it loaded the company with even more debt to pay dividends to itself and its investors. Between 2011 and 2013, it paid itself and its investors $839 million in dividends—money that could have been used to make stores more competitive. The struggling company became saddled with interest payments. One loan of $475 million, used to pay dividends of $458 million to Lone Star, required Southeastern’s BI-LO

to pay $205 million in interest between 2014 and 2018. Lone Star’s owner, John Grayken, is a billionaire who famously renounced his U.S. citizenship to avoid paying taxes.

As if this weren’t enough debt, Lone Star sent Southeastern on a buying spree rather than invest in existing stores. In 2012, it bought out Winn-Dixie for $561 million, creating a chain of 690 stores and 63,000 employees. In 2013, it added another 165 stores (Harveys, Sweetbay, and Reid’s) in an LBO worth $265 million, as well as 22 Piggly Wiggly stores in an LBO worth $35 million. Lone Star renamed the company Southeastern Grocers.

To offset the growing debt due to dividends and LBOs, the company sold the real estate of a distribution center for $100 million and several stores for $45 million, and then required the affected entities to pay rent on the buildings they used to own—further undermining their financial stability—referred to in financial parlance as a “sale/leaseback.” In need of more cash, Lone Star secured a series of revolving credit loans and debt financings between 2014 and 2017. In the meantime, between 2011 and 2018, Lone Star took out a total of $980 million in dividends from Southeastern Grocers, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

By March 2018, Southeastern filed a “prepackaged” Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Once used for unique situations, private equity firms now

treat them as a staple in their bankruptcy proceedings, allowing the P.E. owners to fasttrack the process by working out a deal with senior creditors before the bankruptcy filing.

Unsecured creditors—mainly vendors, suppliers, and workers who are owed back wages, vacation pay, health insurance, and other payments—have little time to respond and are often left out in the cold. When the company exited bankruptcy in June 2018, about 2,000 workers had already lost their jobs. The deal reduced debt from about $1.1 billion to $600 million, with creditors swapping debt for equity and the company agreeing to close 94 stores, affecting thousands more workers’ jobs.

This all too familiar story is not about “disruptive” new competitors or price wars—it is about private equity extracting wealth and driving companies into bankruptcy. The same playbook drove Tops Markets into bankruptcy only a month before Southeastern Grocers. The northeastern chain of 170 grocery stores was bought out by Morgan Stanley Private Equity and Graycliff Partners in an LBO worth $310 million in 2007. Morgan Stanley pursued a number of LBO add-ons between 2007 and 2012, and then financed the buyout of the company, including all of its debt, by Tops management in December 2013. By that time, Morgan Stanley had loaded the company with $724 million in debt—more than twice the original purchase price. That included some $377 million in dividends that Morgan Stanley paid to itself and its investors—

tiler84 / istock by get t y

Private Equity–Backed Chains that Went Bankrupt Grocery Chain

p.E. Number Number of Bankruptcy Sponsors of Stores Employees Date

A&P (Food Basics, Food Emporium, Pathmark, Super Fresh, Waldbaum’s)

Yucaipa Partners

296

28,500

July 2015

Fairway Market

Sterling Investment Partners

15

4,000

May 2016

Fresh & Easy

Yucaipa Partners

150

4,000

Oct. 2015

Haggen Food Grocery Store

Comvest Group

164

10,000

Sep. 2015

Marsh Supermarkets

Sun Capital

116

14,000

May 2017

Southeastern Grocers (BI-LO, Bruno’s, Fresco y Más, Harveys, Winn-Dixie)

Tops Markets LLC

Morgan Stanley

Lone Star

>730 > 50,000 Funds 170

14,800

Mar. 2009, Mar. 2018 Feb. 2018

equal to 55 percent of the total debt that had accrued. This does not include advisory fees charged by Morgan Stanley nor the future interest payments that Tops had to shoulder.

As in the case of Southeastern Grocers, the debt overhang left Tops with little wiggle room to reduce prices or resources to invest in store upgrades, new products, and online services needed to be competitive, as it reported itself in its bankruptcy filing. At the time of the bankruptcy, it had 14,800 employees, with 12,000 represented by UFCW and 700 by the Teamsters. The company used the bankruptcy process to substantially reduce the pension benefits for members of both unions by withdrawing from the unions’ defined benefit pension plans and replacing them with 401(k) plans. In January 2018, the S&P Global Ratings agency downgraded Tops’s credit rating from CCC+ to CCC , eight levels below investment grade. In August, one day before it announced its plans for emerging from bankruptcy, the company closed ten stores. The bankruptcy plan will reduce Tops’s debt from $700 million to $435 million, and its interest payments from $80 million a year to about $36 million.

The future remains uncertain, however, as Tops’s financials are still fragile. Despite the reduction in debt, Tops expects its interest expenses will wipe out nearly all its operating profits for the next three years. It projects a loss of $13 million in 2019 and expects to just about break even in the following two years.

Fairway Market, a small chain of upscale specialty grocery stores mostly in Manhattan, faced a similar struggle for survival. Acquired by private equity firm Sterling Investment Partners for $150 million in an LBO in January 2007, the grocery chain found itself with $100 million in debt—a very high debt load for a small company in the cyclical grocery industry. But its private equity owners weren’t done loading Fairway with debt. Five further rounds of debt financing occurred between December 2009 and December 2012, including a leveraged recapitalization in January 2010 to pay down some of the chain’s existing debt and to finance the purchase of additional stores.

Industry observers characterized the expansion as “aggressive and miscalculated.” The chain grew to 15 locations in the New York City area.

In April 2013, Sterling returned Fairway to

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 57

the public markets via an initial public offering (stock sale), but retained a large portion of the stock, giving it control of about 80 percent of the voting power in the chain. Fairway’s shares sold at $13 a share, above its expected range of $10 to $12. The IPO raised $177.5 million, most of which ostensibly went to the chain; only $3.2 million went directly to its P.E. owners.

However, the chain used the proceeds from the IPO to pay affiliates of Sterling Investment Partners $76.8 million in accrued dividends on their preferred stock, $9.2 million in connection with the termination of the monitoring fee agreement, and $8.1 million in bonuses to certain members of the management team. So Sterling and its investors extracted even more money from the actual grocery operation.

Things did not go well for Fairway following its IPO. Burdened by significant debt obligations and recurring interest and principal payments, Fairway was far less able than other specialty shops to respond to the increased availability of organics in mainstream supermarkets or to the entry of Whole Foods in the neighborhoods it served. By July 2015, its share price had plummeted to $3 a share from its IPO value of $13, and by December it was down to 70 cents. As with Southeastern Grocers, efforts to sell the highly indebted chain failed, and in May 2016 Fairway initiated a pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. In the prepackaged bankruptcy, the company’s senior lenders exchanged some of the debt for equity, reducing Fairway’s debt from nearly $280 million to $140 million and its annual debt service by $8 million a year. Suppliers and vendors who were owed $21 million to $27 million would be kept whole and not suffer losses.

In sharp contrast to bankruptcies in other P.E.-owned businesses, Fairway pledged to respect collective-bargaining agreements with its 3,400 unionized workers—85 percent of its employees—who were primarily represented by UFCW. Fairway’s legacy of positive labor-management relations and investment in human resources management practices predates its acquisition by Sterling Investment Partners. It had traditionally hired a full-time workforce and provided workers with employer-sponsored health insurance and a defined benefit pension plan. Management attributed the chain’s ability to cater to its high-end cli-

58 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2018

entele to the quality of its customer service.

Remarkably, the P.E. owners left this in place even as the company sank into bankruptcy— but the creditors absorbed the losses.

In July 2016, a couple of months after seeking Chapter 11 protection, Fairway was bought out of bankruptcy by GSO Capital Partners (a unit of private equity giant Blackstone Group) and a consortium of Wall Street investors through yet another LBO for an undisclosed amount of money and debt. As the cycle of added debt and bankruptcy continues, worker pay could well be next.

How real-estate plays leave companies vulnerable

Private equity has a wide range of financial engineering tools at its disposal, depending on the particular conditions of each company. In the case of Marsh Supermarkets, private equity cashed in on its rich real estate before throwing it into bankruptcy. The private equity buyout dates to 2006, when the Indianapolis-based company with 116 groceries and 154 convenience stores was up for sale due to losses it incurred during the “grocery wars” of 2005.

Prospective buyers were thin until a footnote in one of the company’s financial reports showed that Marsh’s real estate was worth $100 million to $150 million more than listed on its financial statements. In September 2006, Sun Capital Partners took Marsh private in an LBO. Soon after it acquired the chain, Sun did a saleleaseback deal for the real estate of many of Marsh’s stores, raising tens of millions of dollars for itself and obligating the supermarket stores to pay rent on locations they had previously owned. Sun also sold Marsh’s headquarters building and saddled the grocery company with a 20-year lease to 2026 at an annual rent of $2.8 million, scheduled to increase 7 percent five years later. In 2017, with just 44 stores remaining, Marsh went bankrupt.

A sale-leaseback deal, coupled with private equity mismanagement, did in the Haggen supermarket chain as well. In September 2015, Haggen entered bankruptcy; thousands of workers were affected. Comvest Partners bought out Haggen, a chain of 30 stores, in an LBO in 2011. It soon sold or closed 12 stores.

In December 2014, it agreed to acquired 146 stores for $309 million from Albertsons, which

needed to divest them to satisfy antitrust concerns related to its takeover of Safeway. With a nine-fold increase in the number of stores it owned, Haggen struggled to manage the transition. By the summer of 2015, customers were complaining about higher prices in the stores. Supermarket analyst David Livingston of DJL Research noted at the time, “They were just clueless from the very beginning. … You couldn’t do worse than what they’re doing.” Eight months later, in September 2015, Haggen filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company closed, sold, or auctioned off its 164 stores, with 29 of them going to Albertsons.

Workers, vendors, suppliers, and landlords were losers in this story, but not Comvest.

Many of the 146 stores acquired from Albertsons came with valuable real estate and most were operating in the black, according to documents obtained by The Seattle Times. At the time that the P.E. firm agreed to buy the 146 stores, securities filings show it also reached a deal to sell the real estate underlying 20 of the new store locations for $224 million—and lease them back under a sale-leaseback agreement. It later engaged in sale-leaseback transactions for additional stores—for a total of 39 stores. Through these sales, Haggen made an estimated total of $300 million according to regulatory filings and real-estate documents— roughly equal to what it paid for the 146 stores.

The unsecured creditors meanwhile—mainly laid-off workers, suppliers, and landlords— were owed roughly $100 million. In September 2016, they sued Comvest, alleging that the company had siphoned off the real-estate assets to its benefit, undermining the stores’ financial stability. In their complaint, the creditors alleged that “the massive and inflated rental obligations incurred by the [operating companies] contributed directly to their rapid collapse.” But the creditors lost—the bankruptcy court ruled that they had failed to establish gross negligence, self-dealing, or fraudulent transfers. This is an astonishing free pass for what most lay observers would consider selfdealing, and an invitation for Congress to act to curtail what has become a template of abuses.

Fresh & Easy is yet another example of a case in which a private equity firm used the real-estate assets of a company it controlled to enrich itself. In November 2013, Yucaipa, Ron

viper agp / fotolia

Burkle’s private equity firm, bought 150 stores employing 4,000 workers from the bankrupt supermarket chain Fresh & Easy.

There were high hopes that Burkle, a billionaire investor whose fortune was made in 1990s buyouts of such supermarket chains as Ralphs and Food 4 Less, could make a go of Fresh & Easy. But there were also misgivings. Yucaipa’s more recent supermarket investments in the A&P and Pathmark chains ended in bankruptcy. When the A&P chain was liquidated, 145 stores were sold off, and the rest closed.

Thousands of workers lost their jobs.

To turn Fresh & Easy around, Burkle hired Jim Keyes, an experienced former 7-Eleven CEO, to manage the chain. Keyes’s turnaround effort focused on convenience, longer hours, more fresh foods, and a greater variety of craft beers. Under the Wild Oats banner, he planned to transform the chain into upscale, healthy convenience stores that featured organics and appealed to women. Keyes began implementing this plan with investments in Las Vegas, but the pilot didn’t pay off and the Wild Oats concept was abandoned.

But in March 2015, the chain announced the closing of 50 stores—the first step on the way to its second bankruptcy. Yucaipa had bought the stores cheaply, but was unprepared to make the necessary large investments. As one market analyst observed, “Beyond a few experiments, Burkle never invested the money to enact a vision of attracting affluent shoppers with upscale convenience. The chain failed to communicate the stores’ mission. And cost cutting, price increases, and distribution snags turned off even loyal customers.”

On October 30, 2015, Fresh & Easy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Unable to get the financing it needed to continue operating while in bankruptcy, Yucaipa began the process of liquidating the business. Across three states, 3,000 employees were thrown out of work.

Despite the bankruptcy, Burkle and Yucaipa had plans in place to profit using Fresh & Easy’s real estate—a plan he had put in place in April 2014, six months after acquiring the chain. As part of the bankruptcy process, the bankruptcy court appointed a Committee of Unsecured Creditors, made up of vendors and other suppliers owed money by the now-defunct grocery chain. In its informal investigation of events at

Fresh & Easy, the committee determined that Yucaipa and Burkle had transferred 19 Fresh & Easy stores with a real-estate value of at least $40 million to themselves via a real-estate holding company they controlled. These stores were no longer available to satisfy the debt owed to the vendors. The committee wanted to prevent any further real-estate transfers. When Yucaipa and the real-estate company declined to agree not to transfer other Fresh & Easy stores, the committee asked the bankruptcy court for a

Private equity can assemble resources needed for healthy businesses. But their strategy is to flip and strip rather than reinvest in facilities and workers. temporary restraining order. The bankruptcy judge agreed with the committee’s concerns and issued the order on May 31, 2016.

Under these circumstances, Yucaipa and Burkle came to a settlement with the vendors that was approved by the court in April 2017.

The settlement terminated the agreement that had enabled Yucaipa to transfer the 19 Fresh & Easy stores to the real-estate holding company and Yucaipa and Burkle agreed to pay the unsecured creditors $21.5 million—a fraction of the $103 million to $115 million they were owed. Individual vendors ended up receiving 14 to 26 cents for every dollar they were owed.

As for the workers who had lost pay, Fresh & Easy and Yucaipa agreed to pay $2.2 million.

What’s next for sustainable jobs in the grocery sector?

Grocery chains employ 2.8 million workers, distributed in small towns and cities across the country. They still account for the majority of food-at-home purchases and are an important source of jobs in local communities. Their continued presence is important to the local economy and to a sense of community in the neighborhoods they serve. Private equity firms have acquired at least 50 grocery chains in the last few years—attracted to them for their real-estate assets, low debt, and high cash flow. Their strategy of buying, selling, and flipping stores undermines the economic security of workers and the stability of local communities.

With heightened demand for onestop shopping, organics, a wide variety of healthy products and services, online ordering and delivery, and more, grocery chains find they must race to emulate the most innovative products and services while containing prices. This takes deep financial pockets.

Private equity can assemble the resources needed to invest in facility upgrades, technology, worker skills, and product and service innovations to help supermarkets remain competitive. But their core business model requires these funds to be extracted rather than reinvested. Kroger and Albertsons—the numbers one and two supermarket chains in the country—provide a useful comparison.

Kroger is conventionally owned. Albertsons is held by private equity. Kroger is about twice the size of Albertsons—with $105 billion in sales in 2017 compared to Albertsons’s $60 billion. But both are huge successful corporations with locations in 35 states each. Kroger operates under 26 banners (including Dillons, Food 4 Less, Fred Meyer, King Soopers, Ralphs, City Market, QFC, Owen’s, Pay-Less, and Smith’s) in 2,782 supermarkets and 2,268 in-store pharmacies, plus 1,489 fuel centers and 42 distribution centers, according to its 2017 Fact Book.

Albertsons operates under 20 well-known brands—including Albertsons, Safeway, Shaw’s, Acme, Vons, Jewel-Osco, United Supermarkets, Market Street, Star Market, and Haggen. Its 2,318 supermarkets include 1,777 pharmacies, 1,275 in-store coffee shops, and 397 adjacent fuel centers, according to its website. Both report that

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m e l e va n s / a p i m a g e s

they have robust sales of their own private-label revised its outlook on Albertsons to negative merger, which they viewed as one of desperation—two weak companies becoming one brands, with Kroger owning 37 manufacturing in November 2017. plants and Albertsons 20. Both have developed Despite poor financial performance, howev- larger weak company. Rite-Aid and Albertorganic and healthy food lines and both have er, Albertsons paid out a $250 million dividend sons called off their planned merger on the acquired a “meal kit” services company (Home to Cerberus and the firm’s investors in June eve of the vote because of growing opposition Chef for Kroger and Plated for Albertsons). 2017. It financed the dividend in part from the from Rite-Aid shareholders. Some of the largest Moreover, both are majority unionized—Kroger proceeds of a sale-leaseback arrangement for had announced plans to vote against it, jeopwith 449,000 full- and part-time workers, and some of its stores. Moreover, during this same ardizing its success. Cerberus’s next move and Albertsons with 280,000—with workers in each period, Cerberus was charging “advisory” and Albertsons’s future are uncertain. Albertsons’s chain represented by the same unions, primarily “transactions” fees to Albertsons, which will debt-weakened state has undermined its P.E. cost the company at least $70 million for the owners’ attempts at a speedy and profitable UFCW and the Teamsters. exit. Will they now turn to asset sales to pull The big difference is Albertsons’s private equi- period of 2014 to 2018. cash out and reward themselves, ty ownership and history of leverwithout regard to the poor prosaged buyouts that has burdened pects this will create for Albertthe supermarket chain with a sons, its 280,000 workers, and debt overhang of $12 billion since its buyout of Safeway in January the hundreds of communities the 2015. This constrains its abilstores serve? Or will they postity to lower prices or innovate to pone plans to exit their ownership compete against Amazon’s Whole of Albertsons and increase their equity investment in the superFoods, Walmart, or Kroger. Commarket chain? Such an infusion pared with other grocery chains, of cash would enable Albertsons, Albertsons has more than twice the net debt-to-earnings ratio— after years of underinvestment in 4.74, compared with Kroger’s its stores, to make meaningful 2.13, Sprouts Farmers Market’s improvements in its operations.

1.44, and Publix’s 0.35.

The answer may hinge on what Following the private equipublic pension funds do. These ty playbook, Cerberus Capital funds have increasingly invested Management bought Albertin private equity, despite its unsasons in an LBO in 2013 after When the A&P chain was liquidated, 145 stores were sold off, and the rest were closed. vory and anti-worker practices, having held a minority stake in lured by the promise—if often Cerberus attempted another IPO in April not the reality—of higher returns. The questhe company since 2006. Under this ownership, Albertsons grew through a series of 2018 for $2 billion, but canceled it in favor of tion of whether the big pension funds should LBO -financed acquisitions from 2006 to a reverse merger in which Rite-Aid ostensibly avoid private equity or use their investment to 2013, culminating in the mega-buyout of bought Albertsons, even though it was Albert- reform its practices has been hotly debated.

Safeway for $9.2 billion (using 82.5 percent sons that initiated the $24 billion merger. The (Pension funds cling to the hope of high yields debt) in January 2015. This pushed Albert- deal would have created a combined company despite the reality that half the private equity sons’s debt level to $12.5 billion, a factor in of 4,900 stores, including 4,300 pharmacy funds launched since 2006 have not beaten Cerberus’s failed attempt to launch an IPO counters and 320 clinics, but would not provide the stock market and many more have failed in mid-2015. One industry analyst noted that much-needed new equity capital. It would, how- to provide returns high enough to compensate the failed IPO would “definitely put them at a ever, have positioned the Cerberus-led investor for the added risk of these illiquid investments.) disadvantage, because if they can’t improve group to exit its investment in Albertsons. The The California Public Employees’ Retirement their stores, improve their customer experi- reverse merger with publicly traded Rite-Aid System (CalPERS) has a large stake in Albertence, it’s hard for them to stand out among would have transformed Albertsons into a pub- sons via its investment in the Cerberus fund the competitive grocery market.” licly traded company, with Cerberus and its that owns the supermarket chain. Will Cal­ After Albertsons’s failed IPO in the fall investors holding a huge number of shares in PERS, which has responsibility for managing of 2015, its financial performance declined: the newly merged business. The supermarket’s the retirement savings of California publicOperating income fell substantially between owners hoped to sell off their shares in the now- sector workers, many of whom live in com2016 and 2018, and bond investors assigned public grocery and pharmacy chain after a long munities served by supermarkets Albertsons higher levels of risk for the company’s bonds 12 years as investors and owners. owns, insist that Cerberus abandon attempts at during 2017, and the S&P Global Ratings Critics pointed to the downside risks of the a quick exit, extend the time they are willing to

hold the grocery chain, and commit to making investments that will improve store operations and increase profits?

In the meantime, Albertsons’s competitor, Kroger, is in a far different competitive position. The June 2018 Moody’s credit opinion of Kroger noted its large scale and strong balance sheet as key credit drivers. According to its 2017 Fact Book, Kroger’s debt strategy is to maintain a low net total debt-to-earnings ratio of between 2.3 and 2.5. Between 2015 and 2017, it invested roughly $3 billion each year in existing stores and operations, and it plans similar levels of capital investment in existing facilities for the 2018–2020 period. This is part of its “Restock Kroger” program, announced in October 2017, that includes the substantial renovation of its 2,800 supermarkets, expansion of partnerships to provide additional services, and investment in workforce development. It will use free cash flow to invest $9 billion in these projects to enhance the use of customer data, to optimize space allocation, and to upgrade technology and infrastructure for faster checkout, digital displays, video analytics, machine learning, and online shopping. Investments will include funds for employee training and development as well as $500 million to incrementally raise wages of associates over the three-year period. It has already launched its own new apparel line, is piloting a driverless vehicle for home delivery, and has formed a new partnership with the leading online supermarket service, Ocado, to build 20 new automated distribution centers at an estimated cost of $400 million to build in the next three to five years.

Leading Wall Street analysts cite these strengths, plus Kroger’s unexpectedly strong earnings report for the first quarter of 2018, as evidence that the company can survive Amazon’s threat. Kroger’s digital sales grew by 66 percent in the first quarter of 2018. The Wall Street Journal cited Kroger’s “aggressive” strategies on many fronts as evidence it will remain an industry leader. It also noted that Kroger is increasing wages and benefits for its workers and is investing a billion dollars to shore up pension liabilities. The pension contribution is unusual for the grocery industry and contrasts sharply with Albertsons’s behavior.

Kroger may see this pension contribution as a

key investment in its workforce and in its efforts to respond to new competition. According to the Journal, the company’s “strategy is paying off.”

For Kroger’s workers, the future looks bright.

This tale of two supermarkets tells us much about the future of regional grocery chains.

The rapid shifts in the competitive environment these chains face is a force to be reckoned with, but it need not be a death knell for them.

Supermarket chains, like most retail establishments, are frequently buffeted by economic conditions and changes in consumer preferences. Traditionally, they have carried a low debt burden and owned their own real estate to serve as a buffer against hostile headwinds and to provide breathing room and resources to respond to new challenges.

Private equity owners have turned this model on its head—loading the supermarket chains they own with huge debt burdens intended to boost returns to themselves and their investors and, frequently, selling off realestate assets in sale-leaseback arrangements to lower debt and line the P.E. firm’s pockets. In stable market conditions, this is a winning strategy for private equity owners. But in today’s turbulent times, with supermarkets facing a series of disruptions, the outcome for the stores, their workers, their vendors, and their customers is increasingly uncertain—and the specter of bankruptcy omnipresent.

The Reforms We Need

Public policies can reduce incentives for the types of financial engineering by private equity firms that drove these grocery chains into bankruptcy. First, in a joint letter, major federal bank regulatory agencies have issued guidance to banks to limit the debt they load onto companies to no more than six times EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). A debt higher than this, in the view of these regulators, puts a company at too high a risk of bankruptcy. Legislation that limits the amount of debt that can be levered onto a company from all sources, not just banks, would reduce the possibility that a company will fail because it is strangled by debt. Recent changes to accounting standards now require companies to report lease agreements along with outstanding debt in their financial reports. Rent payments on leases,

like interest payments on debt, can threaten a company’s solvency and its continued operation. Lease obligations should be taken into account by lenders when considering how large a loan to make to a company.

Second, P.E. firms could be precluded from requiring companies they acquire to pay them dividends in the first two years following the LBO—similar to a rule for P.E. firms in Europe under the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive. These resources, according to the directive, should be available to the company to use to improve its operational performance. This will benefit its employees and other stakeholders, including the pension funds that have invested in it.

Third, private equity firms should be required to reveal to pension funds and other investors the full extent of the fees they collect. This includes the management fees and expenses investors pay the firm; the 20 percent share of any profits that the P.E. firm typically receives—pay for performance referred to as “carried interest” and taxed at a favorable rate; and the monitoring and transaction fees the P.E. firm collects directly from the companies it owns. California law now requires that public-sector pension funds collect information on what they pay to P.E. firms in management fees, expenses, and carried interest, and make this information available to the public.

Monitoring and transaction fees charged by a P.E. firm directly to the companies acquired by the buyout funds it sponsors should also be reported to P.E. investors. In the case of public-sector pension funds, all of these fees should be made publicly available.

Finally, P.E. firms need to be treated as the owners that they are. But the courts for the most part treat those firms as passive investors.

This lets private equity off the hook when companies they own engage in wage theft or subject employees to unsafe working conditions.

The multiple abuses by private equity firms exist only because of loopholes in the law. That can and should be reformed.

Eileen Appelbaum is the co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Rosemary Batt is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School, Cornell University.

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Puffins: Harbingers of Climate Change These small ocean birds are the proverbial canary in the coal mine as the ecology of their habitat worsens. story and photos By

D er r ick Z. Ja ck son

A

udrey Holstead watched a puffin rocket in from the ocean with a beak dripping with fish. It zoomed over boulders in front of her bird blind and dropped with pinpoint accuracy into a narrow, dark crevice.

Holstead’s skin crawled with electricity. Puffins come ashore with fish for only one reason: to feed a chick. This was the first feeding of the season observed at this particular hole. It belonged to the 173rd breeding pair of Atlantic puffins on Eastern Egg Rock, an island six miles off Pemaquid Point on Maine’s midcoast. That set a new record for the National Audubon Society’s Project Puffin, one of the

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world’s most famous bird restoration efforts.

The season finished with 178 breeding pairs.

“I just wanted to jump up and down and scream to the world,” Holstead says. “I did a little wiggly dance.”

Holstead’s victory jig was one of several in the 45th summer of the project founded

by Steve Kress, National Audubon Society’s executive director of seabird restoration and vice president for bird conservation. I was his co-author and photographer on the 2015 book Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock.

For nearly a century, the island went without puffins, eliminated by the 1880s by coastal

dwellers hungry for the birds’ meat and eggs.

Kress dreamed of bringing them back while teaching about birds at Audubon’s Hog Island summer camp up the Muscongus Bay coast from Pemaquid Point.

The only problem was that no seabird had ever been restored to an island where people killed it off.

In 1973, Kress convinced the Canadian government to let him translocate puffin chicks from 800 miles away in Newfoundland. Kress and colleagues fed fish to chicks in handmade sod burrows on Egg Rock until they f ledged. The team then set up decoys and mirrors to make the birds perceive abun-

The Audubon Society‘s Project Puffin has been working to restore the birds to an island off Maine’s coast for the past 45 years.

dance when they returned as adults to breed.

Kress hoped the chicks would return to Egg Rock rather than Newfoundland. He guessed right. The first puffins returned in 1977 and began breeding in 1981. Today, 1,300 pairs of puffins breed on five islands in the state, most of the birds being managed in a partnership between Project Puffin and the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge. The bird now fuels the local economy with boat tours all along the coast.

The techniques used to bring back puffins have been used to re-establish or relocate 65 species of seabirds in 17 countries. A spectacular example is the 1996 return of the common

murre, an auk cousin of the puffin, to Devil’s Slide rock, a 900-feet-high coastal sea stack south of San Francisco. The rock’s colony of 3,000 murre was wiped out by a massive oil spill in 1986.

After a barren decade, a team of climbers advised by Kress and now-longtime Project Puffin colleague Sue “Seabird Sue” Schubel, scaled the rock to install decoys, mirrors, and solar-powered soundtracks. A murre landed the very next day. Breeding occurred that year and the colony today is again 3,000 birds.

The murre success came back full circle this year to Maine. That bird was also wiped out in the state in the late 19th century. Inspired by

Devil’s Slide, Project Puffin started trying to bring murres back to the island of Matinicus Rock. This summer, researchers discovered four healthy murre chicks under boulders.

For Kress, 72, seeing this bird was as close as he could come to welcoming back the similarlooking, twice-as-tall great auk, which was driven to extinction in the mid-1800s.

“When the murres came back to Devil’s Slide, the lead person of that project, Harry Carter, gave me a cigar and said, ‘Keep this until murres return to Maine,’” Kress says. “I still have that cigar. Now I’ll have to light it up with Seabird Sue.” Kress says the murre chicks are proof that

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his project is still “reaping rewards of work done over long decades. We can bring back whole communities. It’s wild and exciting to be on the forefront of restoration. The murres show us that momentum is still rolling in the right direction.”

Even as Maine’s puffins and murres make

history, a malicious momentum is rolling in from the wrong direction to fog the future.

Project Puffin is in the giant Gulf of Maine, which extends up from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia. The gulf is unique for its swirl of the cold Labrador Current and the warm Gulf Stream.

The diversity of water has allowed for a wide range both of birds at the southern end of their North American breeding limits, like puffins and Arctic terns, and birds at the northern end of their nesting range, such as species of herons, ibises, and oystercatchers.

But climate change is making those currents go haywire, warming the Gulf of Maine faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans.

The Labrador Current is being disrupted by freshwater runoff from warming and melting Greenland ice sheets, the Gulf Stream is pushing northward, and warmer air in the jet stream is transferring more heat into the ocean as it flows off the East Coast.

To understand how fast that change is occurring, Andrew Thomas, professor of oceanography at the University of Maine, puts it like this: The duration of summer-like sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine is extending by about two days every year.

Today, the duration of summer temperatures is two months longer than it was 35 years ago.

“It is a head-scratching number,” Thomas says. “It’s a perfect storm of perfect impacts.

When I first saw the numbers, I couldn’t believe it. I did the calculation three more times. I got the same numbers no matter how I plotted it.

This is something I never expected.”

Nor did Kress when he started his project.

His puffins are now sentinels warning us of what we are doing to our oceans. They tell us via the fish they bring to their chicks.

Take herring, a workhorse forage fish. Whales, sharks, seals, and porpoises eat them underwater. Humans eat them out of cans, grind them into nutritional supplements and pet food, and throw them back in the water for lobster bait.

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Young herring are an ideal fish for many seabird species because of their high fat content and streamlined bodies that are easy for chicks to eat. When the first breeding puffin was spotted flying into an Eastern Egg Rock burrow in 1981, the project’s newsletter proudly proclaimed that its beak was “packed full of glistening herring!” A 1985 newsletter said, “This is the puffin’s principal and most nutritious food.”

No more. Herring have virtually disappeared from the puffin diet. Overfishing crashed their commercial population in the late 1970s. Despite federally managed rebuilding of stocks to “robust” status in 2015, the fisheries division of the National Oceanic

As ocean temperatures rise, herring move further north and deeper into the sea, depriving puffins of the ideal fish to feed their young. and Atmospheric Administration still cut the allowable 2018 catch in half over fears of record low numbers of young herring.

The herring that do exist are being driven farther out and deeper into the ocean by warmer water. According to Rutgers University marine biologist Malin Pinsky, the “center of abundance” for Atlantic herring has slipped from 200 feet of ocean depth in the late 1960s to 250 feet today.

That begins to fall out of range of a bird whose record diving depth is 200 feet. A 2012 study on Petit Manan Island found that most puffin dives were above 50 feet. “The fish might still be there, but it’s not going to help the birds if the fish go down too deep,” says Linda Welch, who has worked as a biologist for two decades at the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, which manages Petit Manan. “We have to start facing the fact that some fish

may not be coming back in range of the birds.”

Other iconic New England species show similar trends. Pinsky says the core abundance of lobster has moved north 155 miles since the early 1970s and yellowtail flounder have moved north 145 miles since the 1960s.

Fish more associated with mid-Atlantic waters, such as black sea bass, are showing up in bigger numbers in the Gulf of Maine as their core population has moved up from the latitude of Virginia Beach to that of Trenton, New Jersey. Red hake have moved up from the latitude of Trenton to that of Boston.

“It’s like shaking a snow globe and waiting to see how things settle down,” says Pinsky.

“And it may not settle down unless we get our greenhouse gases down.”

To view these shifts in another way with another animal, it’s as if in just one human lifetime, the northern range of the American alligator had moved up from the swamps of northernmost North Carolina to hailing distance of the Washington, D.C., suburbs (this might be a particularly appropriate analogy, given how America is mired in the swamp of political inaction on climate change).

“We’ve flipped into a new, disturbing phase, an alarming new normal,” says Janet Nye, a professor of marine and atmospheric sciences at Stony Brook University. She was a member of a groundbreaking 2015 study that determined that the continued collapse of New England’s iconic cod fishery was significantly due to overfishing and the failure of commercial catch limits to account for the effect of ocean warming on cod.

“What’s really interesting is that no one yet has taken a hard look at the interactions between different species,” she adds. “We’ve typically taken a look at one species at a time to see how temperature change alters their range and distribution. The next step is trying to understand how that affects how species interact with each other.”

Seabirds and fish are rapidly helping us

to understand that interaction, and sometimes tell us stories of government success. In recent years, puffins on some islands have brought to their chicks large numbers of small haddock and Acadian redfish, species that rebounded with federal regulation. A 2017 NOAA report

As warming waters move their ranges northward, butterfish (shown above left) have begun to replace herring (right) and other more appropriate fish as food sources. Unfortunately, the butterfish’s oval shape makes it difficult for puffin chicks to swallow, causing many to starve.

said haddock, a cousin of cod, “is currently at an all-time high.”

But with water temperatures soaring to alltime highs, redfish and haddock are two of the fish projected to decline in the Gulf of Maine, according to a study last year led by Kristin Kleisner, a former NOAA researcher who is now a senior ocean scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. That study also found that white hake, the top replacement of herring for Maine puffins, will also decline in abundance as the gulf’s surface waters may warm by another six or seven degrees this century.

“A huge question is which species can coexist with each other in a new area,” Kleisner says. “There are definitely fish that will leave the Gulf of Maine or not recover. It may not be all doom and gloom if there are other fish that move in that are still nutritious. But puffins are in a hot spot. They may or may not adapt.”

How hot is this spot for puffins? In 2012, the Gulf of Maine had its warmest waters on record. The 2012 summer temperature was 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit above historical averages.

Less than a four-degree difference means little to humans who can shed clothes. For fish, four degrees is like being forced to wear a parka on Miami Beach.

As the puffins’ familiar fish “shed clothes” by fleeing for colder water, fish are showing up in their diet that are “shedding” the waters to the south. One is the butterfish, whose core

population has moved just since 2004 from the latitude of central Virginia to the latitude of central New Jersey.

Large butterfish are a plague to puffins, especially if they arrive early in the season when their oval shape makes it difficult for newly hatched chicks to eat, causing many to starve. The upward push of butterfish coincided with the 2012 heat and was a major challenge for puffins. Petit Manan saw its breeding puffin count crash from 104 pairs in 2009 to 47 pairs by 2013. Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge and Matinicus Rock, each of which is home to more than 500 pairs of puffins, fledged only one out of every ten chicks in 2013, a record low.

Since then, there have been years of slightly cooler water and breeding success for puffins.

Last year, Egg Rock hit 172 pairs of puffins.

Seal and Matinicus fledged four out of every five chicks.

But the summer of 2018 was a maddening rollercoaster of the best and the worst things that could happen for puffins. The season started fine with ample haddock and white hake.

Puffins began breeding in their record numbers.

Then, a July ocean heat wave sent the water to near-2012 levels. Haddock and hake largely disappeared at Eastern Egg Rock. Butterfish started showing up. On Matinicus Rock, supervisor Frank Mayer said he saw 25 to 30 chicks dead of starvation in an 85-nest study area. On

Seal Island, supervisor Keenan Yakola found seven dead chicks in 60 study burrows, surrounded by rotting whole butterfish. Surviving chicks were dramatically underweight.

“What scares me is what we don’t know,” said Yakola, a graduate fellow at the Interior Department’s Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This was his fourth year as Seal supervisor. “Are water temperatures causing mismatches in spawning and [in] when the fish are available to seabirds?

“If herring are gone and hake decline, what comes next? We’ve had big butterfish years in the past but now the frequency of butterfish years when little else is present is concerning. In 2016 and 2018, we saw the number of feedings declining, some days we saw no feeding, possibly because the adults have to spend hours looking for food.”

Yakola’s graduate adviser and climate coordinator at the climate center, Michelle Staudinger, says she saw on Seal Island the surreal sight of puffins and terns bringing in goosefish. Otherwise known as monkfish, the fish is often considered one of the ugliest in the sea, with a body that is almost all head and mouth. “That was shocking,” Staudinger says. “What is a bird doing eating that? Why is a bird bringing that in? Seabirds like fish they can slurp down like spaghetti. This is like trying to eat a hamburger in one bite.”

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Solar-powered soundtracks, mirrors, and decoys (shown above left) have been used over the years by Steve Kress and his team (right) to lure puffins to nest on Eastern Egg Rock.

Puffin chicks were in such poor condition by late July that Eastern Egg Rock intern Kay Garlick-Ott, a 22-year-old graduate of Pomona College, said, “You can actually feel the lack of food in the bird. You expect your fingers to hit something like bones, but it was just a puffball.

When I pulled it out of its burrow, I knew it wasn’t right. It was so sad.”

But in yet one more twist, there was a lastminute reprieve for puffin chicks that clung to life in Maine. By the second week in August, a time when most chicks normally would have fledged, parents found a surprise final wave of hake and haddock to feed offspring, bringing home as many as 18 feedings a day. The chicks, sensing they needed the food to survive their first winter, stayed in their burrows an unprecedented full month longer than normal to fatten up. Just before Labor Day, there were at least 20 chicks still in burrows on Seal Island. On Eastern Egg Rock, Kress observed a puffin feeding on September 6, a date by which the birds have usually vacated for the winter.

“I’ve never seen a year that started out promising, then turned troubling with butterfish and very few feedings per day, and then reversed with many feedings per day,” Kress says. “It’s

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kind of symbolic for the last several years. It adds to the idea that it’s a roll of the dice as to how this unfolds. I was very impressed with the puffins’ ability to come up with the strategy of slow development. But we’ve never seen such slow development that then reversed itself to faster development.”

Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which found that the 2018 waters reached their second-highest recorded temperature of nearly 69 degrees Fahrenheit on August 8, says Americans are further gambling with the future with the deterioration of data. He says prior and proposed federal research cutbacks are curtailing or ending studies of plankton abundance, the foundation of marine life, and letting aging weather buoys fall into disrepair.

“Thank goodness we can observe what’s happening to seabirds,” Pershing says. “But it’s getting harder and harder to study what drives those changes. Without hard data, it’s hard to get ahead of what the gulf will look like.”

Tony Diamond, emeritus professor of wildlife ecology at the University of New Brunswick and one of Kress’s longtime colleagues, is not sure how much stress the puffins can take

before they take some sort of leave. When Kress first asked the Canadian government for chicks, top wildlife officials at first refused, postulating that at the first sign of ecosystem stress, the birds would retreat back over the border and make the experiment a waste of time.

Nearly a half-century later, the fear of retreat or worse is not just in Maine but also in the Atlantic puffin’s strongholds of Iceland, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Similar environmental scenarios are so worrisome that the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List changed the bird’s status from one of “least concern” to “vulnerable” in 2015.

Canada’s top home for puffins in the Gulf of Maine, Machias Seal Island, has 5,500 pairs, and Diamond fears for them as well. Its own roulette of fish crashes has resulted in puffins going from fledging two out of every three chicks from 1995 to 2005 to only every other one ever since.

“The puffins are a hardy bird [capable of living into their 30s], and they can handle a few bad years,” Diamond says. “But now things are hitting us at a time scale we’ve never known.

We used to kill birds for feathers and meat. We stopped that a century ago with management, and the birds came back. Now we’re causing

them to die again to support our lifestyles in a new way. They’ve become collateral damage for our consumption.

“Unless we do something drastic for the fish, I fear there won’t be much work for a puffin researcher in the Gulf of Maine 50 years from now.”

That’s not what today’s puffin researchers want to hear. Kress has long entrusted his islands to members of the next generation, for them to spend hours observing in the blinds, to contort themselves upside down to reach down into boulders to band chicks, and occasionally rush outside to get rid of puffin and tern predators such as gulls, eagles, and falcons overhead or mink and otter that swim from island to island.

Besides Holstead and Garlick-Ott, the Egg Rock crew when I visited in July included Laura Brazier, a 27-year-old graduate of Loyola University in Maryland with a wildlife conservation master’s degree from University College Dublin; Nicole Faber, 24, a graduate of Bowdoin College; and Blanca Gonzalez, 29, a graduate of the Autonomous University of Madrid with a master’s in animal behavior from Cordoba University.

They contrasted the struggle for the puffins and terns to find the right fish with all the concern people show for pandas, whales, the 2015 killing of Cecil the lion, and even conservation efforts for lobsters. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the University of Maine, and NOAA found that conservation efforts established by the lobster industry can maintain a stable industry in the face of climate change, averting the collapse that hit southeastern New England.

“It was devastating when the switch to butterfish occurred,” Faber says. “The worst is watching a tern chick trying to stretch its mouth, get the fish halfway down. You see this great lump in their neck. Then when they realize they can’t get it down, they hack it out on the ground. Then they try it over and over and the fish just gets covered in sticks and dirt. It’s horrible. It’s something I didn’t expect when I was told I’d be studying fish.”

Holstead recalled another tern chick that kept rejecting a butterfish and its parent picking it up over and over again to keep trying to feed it. “I’m sitting in the blind mentally screaming to myself, ‘Drop the stupid thing!

Go find something else! You want your chick to die!?’ I wince every time I see it.”

Brazier was spending her fourth summer on Project Puffin and her second as Egg Rock supervisor. She has traveled the world to assist the conservation of penguins in South Africa, turtles in Greece, hares in the Yukon, and albatrosses on Midway Atoll. This winter, she is headed to Antarctica for penguin research.

For all that travel for creatures that inspire movies like March of the Penguins or books like Carl Safina’s Voyage of the Turtle and Eye of the Albatross, Brazier has spent the last four summers realizing that a puffin is only as beautiful as the oily fish it eats.

“It’s so easy to feel Totally devastated and crushed by a government that wants to pollute everything again.

WE have to resolve to not let it happen.”

“When I see puffins fly into the burrow with butterfish, I think, ‘Puffin, stop!’” Brazier says.

“But we can’t make them stop and they don’t seem to have the ability to realize what they’re catching. Last year was so insanely good. This year, as the summer deteriorated, puffins were loafing less, probably because they had less time to hang around and needed more time to find fish. You just wonder sometimes when their energy is going to run out.”

One thing that will not run out is the

energy of the interns. Just as Kress returned the puffin to Maine against many odds to heal an environmental wound of the 19th century, the interns say this summer’s difficulties make them that much more dedicated not to let 21stcentury problems reopen those wounds. They are quite clear that Project Puffin’s efforts are being hurt by President Trump’s and the

Republican Congress’s attempted gutting of environmental protections. Many of those protections, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, were enacted in the 1970s, just as Kress began bringing puffins back.

The administration is also trying to allow commercial fishing in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, 130 miles off Cape Cod. President Obama gave this region permanent protection because it has canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon and many previously unknown species of deep-sea corals. It also is a prime feeding area for whales, turtles, and late-winter puffins that fatten up here before migrating to Maine to breed.

From this seven-acre rock, the interns are fighting back by giving people a more vivid picture of what the puffin faces.

“We can transfer anger against Trump into something positive,” Gonzalez says. “We know conservation science is not a field to get rich and famous. But we have passion.”

The question, of course, is when society will feel and honor this passion with a movement to prevent rollbacks of existing environmental laws and reverse the long-term threat to puffins, fish, and humans—climate change.

“The political environment makes me really appreciate everyone who is working out here,” Faber says. “It’s so easy to feel totally devastated and crushed by a government that wants to pollute everything again. We have to keep the resolve to not let it happen.”

Brazier, the veteran of the group, says: “Sometimes I wonder what we’re doing out here in the grand scheme of things. What is the part that five people on this tiny island do to save the planet? So many people out there are complacent and I know not everybody is going to care about the fish.

“But I have to remember that none of what we’re seeing out here was here when the project started. That’s how I stay hopeful.”

As long as they have hope, so do the puffins.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists, and co-author of Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 67

The Trade Strategy We Need Trump isn’t wrong to criticize the trading system.

But his policies won’t fix it.

B y K evin P. Ga llagh er

H

ardly a week goes by without another U.S. tariff hike on China, Mexico, Canada, or one of our European allies. Different justifications are given each time: to stop Mexicans from immigrating to the United States, to shrink the trade deficit, to make China and Germany play by the rules, and of course, to “make America great again.”

But Trump’s tariff tantrum is doomed to fail because it isn’t driven by a clear idea of what is wrong with the system. His policies will inflict pain on the United States and across the global economy, and crack the foundations of the international system. Worse, they are not part of an underlying economic strategy to restore balanced and equitable growth in the U.S. and world economy.

The one real bright spot is that Trump’s actions have revived an overdue debate about

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reform of the global trading system. Argument has been going on for decades, while trade policy was made by a bipartisan establishment cheered on by mainstream media—with critics banging on the door. Trump’s tirades have made trade reform prime-time.

From Global Prosperity to Global Deregulation The WTO’s predecessor, the post–World War

II General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was highly influenced and shaped by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. The GATT established treaty-based rules, principles, and governance that sought to increase global trade in a manner that allowed plenty of room for national policy, calibrated toward the pursuit of financial stability, full employment, and long-run prosperity.

A golden age of capitalism ensued. Between

1950 and 1973, average incomes in the United States and the rest of the world grew at a faster rate than they had for the prior century—and haven’t been beaten since.

Not only did the United States prosper, but so did countries like Japan, South Korea, and to some extent Brazil and Mexico (but still leaving behind the least-industrialized countries), by fostering national policies for innovation and industrial development that enabled these nations to become global traders themselves. GATT, unlike the successor World Trade Organization created in 1994, left plenty of room for national development policies and a managed form of capitalism.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, the Reagan and Bush administrations and their counterparts overseas transformed the GATT from a treaty-based multilateral regime aimed at balancing global commerce and national economic

t c ly / i s t o c k b y g e t t y

goals into what would become the WTO. The new trade organization was created to facilitate deregulation of global finance, health policy, the environment, labor laws, and more. Developing countries were jarred by such proposals, but agreed to them on condition of stable and open access to the U.S. and Western markets.

The GATT system was very, very good to the United States and the world economy, but the more recent trade regime is yielding diminishing returns. Economists estimate that trade liberalization injected $1 trillion into the U.S. economy between 1947 and 2002, yet more than 90 percent of those gains had already occurred by 1982. The benefits of trade deals since that time have been marginal, and are shrinking. They may even be negative when one offsets the gains against the massive losses of the 2008 collapse and the recession that followed, which resulted from financial dereg-

ulation facilitated by the new global rules.

Efforts by the second Bush administration to further liberalize the global economy under WTO auspices were stymied in 2003 when many WTO members pushed back against a further deregulatory agenda. In response, the United States created a policy of “competitive liberalization” that leveraged its market power to promote numerous bilateral and regional deals that went far beyond the WTO’s terms. Since the establishment of the WTO, more than 2,000 regional and bilateral trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, proliferated.

Rather than tightly regulating the financial sector so that finance, trade, and investment flow toward productive investment and good jobs, as was permitted under the more multilateral GATT regime, the more recent deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership seek to deregulate finance and investment. They

also make it illegal for participating countries to enforce regulations meant to ensure productive investment, meaningful employment, and social welfare. What is more, many of these treaties allow corporations to sue governments under the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), a system of private tribunals that usually side with foreign firms over host-country regulations on finance, public welfare, and the environment.

Indeed, the definitive study of NAFTA by members of the Federal Reserve, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Yale University found that the pact only led to a marginal U.S. economic boost equal to a one-time 0.08 percent increase in GDP. Even though the TPP would have involved many more and larger economies, the economic benefits were predicted to be 0.38 percent for the United States. Indeed, if all the tariffs in the world were completely eliminated, there would only be a one-time bump in the world economy of just 0.7 percent.

As the gains from trade shrank, its costs grew. Financial crises became more frequent.

Indeed, the International Monetary Fund found that the countries that liberalized their financial services industry, as many trade and investment pacts required them to do, were among the worst hit by the Great Recession.

Rather than investing the profits from globalization into productive and employmentgenerating activity, global corporations have been choosing to speculate with their profits and buy back their own stock. The U.S. government isn’t redistributing the gains from trade either. Research from the Brookings Institution shows that the people who lose their jobs because of free trade are not compensated enough to make up for their losses through Trade Adjustment Assistance, a program that pays for people who wind up unemployed due to overseas outsourcing to get professional training and income support.

Nor have the losses for American workers translated into widespread gains overseas. Indeed, NAFTA boosted Mexico’s trade and investment, yet its per capita growth has hardly budged. Environmental damage, however, has followed since NAFTA shifted pollution-intensive manufacturing south of the Rio Grande. Rural communities have suffered since more than two million Mexican farmers

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 69

and farmworkers lost their livelihoods to cheap imported corn and other agricultural products exported from the United States.

China’s Challenge For all the WTO’s faults, the global trade body

actually remains fairer than regional deals like NAFTA . Under the WTO’s one-country, one-vote negotiation structure, our trading partners were able to push back on the most egregious proposals and thus leave considerably more room to maneuver than under U.S.led bilateral and regional megadeals. What is more, rather than having corporations govern the rules under ISDS, the WTO allows governments to settle disputes among themselves.

While the United States has been using such trade deals to lock in draconian deregulation at home and with weaker trading partners, China has pursued its own course under the relative flexibilities of the WTO. The U.S. never had a prayer of pushing China into “competitive liberalization” deals like NAFTA .

Like the United States in an earlier era, China sought to further integrate its economy with the world’s in the early 1980s. China’s strategy was to invest heavily in infrastructure, industry, and innovation in the country, more than 40 percent of annual GDP for decades. China also kept tight rein on financial markets to ensure it was steering credit and investment into strategic industries that would someday become globally competitive, rather than investing abroad in firms that were more competitive at the time.

Until the turn of the century, China refrained from joining the WTO and regional and bilateral trade and investment treaties such as NAFTA .

Regardless, U.S. and multinational companies flocked at the chance to invest in China.

Despite strong conditions on the Chinese side (of the kind that the United States does not permit under deals like NAFTA), most global corporations were more than willing to trade technology and knowledge for access to the fastest-growing market in world history. Indeed, many U.S. firms also pushed China to maintain a “competitive” wage and currency environment so they could reap the benefits of being global exporters. Alongside the many joint ventures and other sharing arrangements that China required, China invested heavily in associated

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technology parks, research and development, and education through the public purse and a series of national development banks.

We know the story from there. The former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic has shown that the winners from these paired globalization strategies were China and the richest in the United States and the industrialized world. The losers were the middle classes in the U.S. and across the industrialized world.

China’s GDP per capita has jumped by a factor of ten in the past three decades and Chinese wages are higher now than in parts of Europe. According to the World Bank, in 1990, more than 750 million people in China lived in extreme poverty (less than $1.90 per day), representing almost 70 percent of the entire population. Despite some lingering rural poverty, just 1 percent of China today is extremely poor—though inequality is on the rise and (as was the case in the United States) China’s industrial boom has come at heavy environmental cost.

The United States pursued an opposite course. The U.S. strategy was to largely deinvest in infrastructure and industrial innovation, and to deregulate financial, labor, social welfare, and environmental protections, supposedly to reduce the cost of doing business and to make incumbent U.S. firms more globally competitive. Some firms thrived, but the broader U.S. economy did not. According to the World Bank, investment in the United States has fallen from nearly 25 percent of GDP in 1979 to 19 percent now. According to the Hamilton Project, wages for all but the top quintiles of wage earners have remained stagnant or declined in the United States since the early 1980s as the country lost competitiveness in key well-paying industries. Economists have found that China’s 2001 entry into the WTO likely cost the U.S. as many as 2.4 million jobs.

It’s no surprise that China maximizes the policy space that the WTO allows. Meanwhile, the United States disdains development policy and promotes deals that further deregulate large corporations and weaken protections for working people. Looking at the record of disputes, there is no question that China pushes the limits of WTO rules in an effort to globalize and develop their economy. So is China the villain? Or is it the U.S. and other industri-

alized nations that, under the GATT regime, used similar strategies to build global market share only to “kick away the ladder” by pushing through the more restrictive WTO rules once they thought Western corporations would forever have the upper hand?

As the United States resists a serious development policy, China is doubling down on a new round of investment and innovation. As Trump denies the science of climate change and Western companies use ISDS to stamp down attempts to reduce the use of climateharming fossil fuels, China accepts the inconvenient truth of climate change, caps the use of fossil fuels, and invests in renewable technologies that have become the envy of the world.

No New Deal: Why Trump’s Tariff Policy Will Fail

Trump’s tariff war has been popular in some quarters, but a closer look suggests that Trump’s policies are unlikely to achieve the goals of reviving a balanced and more equal U.S. economy or of spurring development across the world.

First, the tariffs that do improve conditions for a small number of workers are producing retaliation that squeezes workers in other businesses. For example, higher tariffs on imported steel and aluminum are already raising costs in the automotive industry and construction, which are big employers. That was a lesson the White House should have learned from reviewing what happened when President George W. Bush experimented with similar across-theboard tariff hikes in 2002.

Second, unilateral and scattershot tariff hikes by the world’s largest economy will inflict real economic pain across the world. It would be one thing if Trump’s tariffs were carefully targeted in the service of renegotiating trade rules so as to achieve a more balanced trading system, but they are not. A new study by the World Bank estimates that the trade war could reduce global exports by up to $674 billion and global GDP by $1.4 trillion. If the trade war makes the investment community go into hysterics it could even be worse. Moreover, as Ken Shadlen from the London School of Economics has reminded us, developing countries went along with some of the draconian WTO proposals on condition that they would have stable and expanding access to the world econ-

omy. Trump is breaking that deal with tariff hikes that block developing countries’ access to Western markets, and in so doing may jeopardize the foundations of the entire system.

Third and most importantly, trade deals are not ends in themselves but tools to implement broader economic policy goals. Trump lacks any overarching economic plan that these tariffs would support. His trade measures are not connected to any set of innovation, industrial, or infrastructure policies of the kind that countries as diverse as China and Germany deploy to build strong industry. Rather than investing in America, we have a major tax cut that slashes investment and jeopardizes our ability to do so in the future, and at the same time assaults the investments in health care, financial stability, and environmental integrity that we have already made.

Five Principles for a Real Global Deal

tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and preferential purchasing measures. That’s their proper domain.

But there’s little justification for using trade deals to reduce regulations on foreign investment (especially financial flows) or on health, the environment, and worker protections. The economic costs of financial crises, climate change, and healthy societies far outweigh the “benefits” that otherwise flow to unregulated firms.

3. Preserve the right to regulate. Trade is not an end in itself. Tax, subsidy, and social investment policies are needed so that the world economy is less environmentally destructive and more socially inclusive. Private markets will not supply these public goods.

Governments need the flexibility to design appropriate policy for social welfare. Too often, trade “liberalization” has been veiled deregulation. Economics has shown time and again that incorporating the costs of financial crises,

Again, let’s credit Trump for one thing—globalizing the conversation across television screens, research papers, and Twitter feeds about the need for trade reform. In that spirit, here are five principles for global reform that are ready for prime time.

1. Restore multilateralism. A multilateral system with a one-country, one-vote system can lead to more balanced growth for the world economy. By contrast, regional and bilateral deals like NAFTA accentuate national power inequities and distort global trade. The bedrock of multilateral trade is non-discrimination. By resorting to bilateral deals, free-traders violate their own first principles. Trade and investment are not a zero-sum game; the more all nations and people prosper from trade and globalization, the stronger and more stable the world economy will be.

climate change, health care, and worker protections make economies more efficient and better off, not worse. Powerful global firms have sought to deregulate global markets as a form of implicit subsidy in their pursuit to capture more and more profit while externalizing the costs of their actions on households and the environment. Nations, developed and developing alike, need the policy space to calibrate the globalization of their economies in terms of national economic priorities.

2. Make trade agreements about trade again. The case for liberalizing trade in goods

4. Re-balance trade and investment governance. The governance of trade needs to be

like shoes and cars is fairly ironclad. The lowcost producer of comparable products should make the sale. Countries that already enjoy comparative advantages in such goods should have low tariffs, while countries still trying to become competitive should have the flexibility for more protection for a certain amount of time. The end result is more competition and more general economic well-being.

Trade deals used to be about liberalizing

inclusive and transparent. The privatization of dispute resolution to private firms through ISDS should be reversed. The WTO model of state-to-state dispute settlement, whereby nation-states can properly weigh the private costs versus the social benefits, should be the core of a multilateral trade system. What is more, trade negotiations and dispute resolution needs to be done in a more transparent and inclusive manner. The Washington

Post, in an investigative report titled “Industry Voices Dominate the Trade Advisory System,” revealed that U.S. trade policymaking is run by the same corporate interests that get to govern the treaties through ISDS. Negotiations need to be transparent and inclusive, and dispute resolution needs to be settled between nations, not privatized to corporations.

5. Make use of parallel investments, standards, and adjustment assistance. When the

European Union became more economically oriented, that region set a series of strong and uniform environmental, health, and worker standards so that nations would not compete based on low standards. What is more, recognizing that some countries would have a difficulty in meeting those standards, the EU set up adjustment funds for regions and individuals. Finally, the European Union’s mammoth European Investment Bank (as well as national development banks such as Germany’s Kf W)

The Trump administration’s trade measures are not connected to innovation, industrial, or infrastructure policies like those China and Germany use to build industry. was refueled to invest in the technologies and companies of the future to get them ready for the global marketplace. Such an approach, which the United Nations has elaborated on as part of a “global new deal,” not only better ensures that the benefits of trade and investment are shared, it also generates a stronger constituency for integration.

Trump’s tariff tantrum is far from a serious effort to correct the wrongs in the current system. Yet, for the moment, Trump has kept allies and adversaries off-balance, and has simulated an America First trade policy for his base. But as the effects of these policies sink in, he is managing to unite America’s trading partners, divide the Republican coalition, and produce no economic gains. The debacle of Trump’s trade policy creates real opportunity for a new approach to trade that actually delivers.

Kevin P. Gallagher is a professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, where he directs the Global Development Policy Center.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 71

Mexico’s Hopeful New President López Obrador’s victory ousted Mexico’s establishment.

If U.S. and Canadian progressives work with him, they just might create a more democratic continent.

By J e f f Fau x

T

he election of the left populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president of Mexico is a historic breakthrough for progressives there. It could also offer progressives in the United States a path out of their own political stalemate on immigration and trade.

In his third run for president, 64-year-old “AMLO” broke open the piñata of Mexican politics that had been tightly sealed by neoliberal oligarchs since the early 1980s. He won 31 of the 32 Mexican states, taking 53 percent of the total vote. His coalition, led by the political party he organized just four years ago, swept to control in both houses of the Mexican Congress.

As in his past campaigns, López Obrador was demonized in most of the media as a Latin American caudillo like Hugo Chavez, who would bring Venezuela-type chaos, or the Mexican version of the despised Donald Trump.

The comparisons are pure propaganda; López Obrador has no connection with the military, has spent his life in democratic politics, and could not be less like Trump. From a family of small shopkeepers, he began his political career by defending the land rights of the indigenous poor in his native Tabasco. Since then, he has been a relentless critic of what he calls the “mafioso” Mexican elite, whose greed has spread corruption and tolerated violence throughout the country. He has a modest lifestyle, driving a five-year-old car, flying coach, and promising to cut the president’s salary and sell the presidential plane.

Unlike Trump, he is also an astute and pragmatic politician. As mayor of Mexico

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City between 2000 and 2005, he ran a competent and innovative government—launching programs that ranged from helping the poor and elderly to building elevated highways to ease the congestion that was choking local commerce. He left office with an 85 percent approval rating.

Within days of his election as president, he met with business leaders who had bitterly opposed him, plunged into the practical issues of the upcoming transfer of power in December, and appointed a cabinet of people with recognized experience and expertise—a majority of whom are women.

Yet, as different as they are, López Obrador and Trump are products of a similar historical context. They represent, respectively, left- and right-wing populist/nationalist responses to the economic insecurity and social disruption of corporate-driven globalization.

The similarities end there. Trump is a monstrous parody of capitalist imperialism—bullying, greedy, and unstable—who brazenly uses the presidency to promote his personal business deals in dozens of countries. He plays to his political base with xenophobic rants, while personally profiting from cheap immigrant labor on his worksites and at his homes.

By contrast, López Obrador’s nationalism is rooted in a long struggle for democratic control over Mexico’s economic and social development.

After 20 years of civil conflict following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the country’s exhausted warring factions established a system of broadly representative one-party rule.

The system was autocratic, inward-looking, mildly socialist, and consciously distanced

from the United States, which had dominated—and dismembered—Mexico over the previous century. The system brought 50 years of peace, steady economic growth, and decreasing inequality to the nation.

But in the early 1980s, the international energy-price bubble burst, plunging oilexporting Mexico into an economic crisis.

Infected by the market-fundamentalism of the Reagan-Thatcher era, a new generation of politicians allied with U.S. business interests opened up Mexico to the global economy.

Their instrument was the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, which in turn became the model for the global deregulation of trade and investment that swept the world over the next two decades.

Not surprisingly, NAFTA failed to deliver on the promise of its backers that it would reduce Mexican immigration in the United States.

President Clinton also argued that allowing U.S. companies to produce in Mexico would prevent them from going to China. NAFTA , he claimed, would create a growing middleclass job market—and middle-class consumers for American goods—in Mexico. In a similar vein, then-Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari asked Americans, “Do you want our tomatoes or our tomato pickers?”

But these promises turned out to be so much political bait and switch. Instead of a North American strategy for global competition, NAFTA turned out to be a Wall Street strategy to undercut the bargaining position of labor in all three countries. A half-dozen years after NAFTA took effect, Clinton opened up the Unit-

While illegal immigra-

lu i s c o r t é s / g d a v i a a p i m a g e s

López Obrador

ed States to goods from China in exchange for opening up China to American investors. The privileged U.S. access promised to Mexico was undercut by even cheaper Chinese labor. Many Mexicans—echoing the bitterness of downsized U.S. industrial workers—will tell you that Clinton stabbed them in the back.

Compared with their experience in the previous era, Mexicans since NAFTA have seen slower growth, widening inequality, and less personal safety. As writer Jorge Castañeda Gutman, who later became foreign minister, acknowledged at the time it was adopted, NAFTA was “an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding ordinary people in all three societies.”

Deregulating the flow of money and goods across the border also turned what had been a modest, illegal business smuggling marijuana into the United States into a huge criminal industry that now encompasses trans-shipping cocaine and heroin from South America and

synthetic drugs from the Far East. Narco-traffickers expanded into extortion, robbery, and kidnapping. Drug money infiltrated the courts, the police, and the military. Only 7 percent of the country’s crimes are reported, chiefly because of fear of the police. Of those reported, less than 5 percent result in convictions. During the recent elections, at least 145 candidates and political activists were assassinated.

In 2008, the Pentagon started providing aid to the Mexican military to take over the leading role in combating the cartels. But the military is untrained for police work, unaccountable to civilian authority, and itself laced with narcocorruption. Human rights violations have escalated. Last spring, the Mexican government was caught using surveillance systems paid for by the United States to spy on its political opponents. By any measure, the U.S. intervention has been a complete failure; in 2017, the murder rate in Mexico reached its highest level since the government started keeping records 20 years ago.

tion to the United States tripled between 1990 and 2013, a weak U.S. recovery from the crash of 2008 combined with Obama’s tougher border policies have since reduced the f low from Mexico.

Trump’s brutal tactics have taken a further toll.

Yet the f low continues; in the first seven months of 2018, the number of undocumented people arrested or turned back at the southern border rose by 140,000 over the same period a year ago. A growing share has come from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, where the combination of criminal violence and chronic poverty is even greater than in Mexico.

Lost in this debate is the uncomfortable reality that Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador have long been de facto colonies of U.S. corporate and military interests. For well over a century, we have intervened in the region to support the reactionary business oligarchs and generals who have brutally suppressed both development and democracy.

This is not just ancient history. In 2009, when the elected president of Honduras, himself a member of the oligarchy, outraged the Honduran establishment by attempting a few mild education and labor market reforms, he was kidnapped by U.S.-trained armed forces, taken to a U.S. base, and shipped out of the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the coup, following up with increased aid to the Honduran military and the corrupt government it protects. When protesters demonstrated against this year’s rigged election, the military police fired live ammunition at them, killing at least 20 of the demonstrators.

The dirty little secret of migration across

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 73

our southern border is that it has benefited elites on both sides. The Mexican and Central American oligarchs get to send their most ambitious and energetic—and therefore the most frustrated and politically dangerous— working people out of the country. The U.S. business class gets a large supply of ambitious, energetic, cheap labor. And as the recent numbers suggest, wall or no wall, desperate people will keep finding a way in.

As if the problems of inequality, vio-

lence, and corruption on López Obrador’s plate when he takes office were not enough, there awaits the foul-mouthed Donald Trump, still demanding that Mexico pay for his border wall, which no Mexican politician could possibly do.

But neither can any Mexican leader avoid dealing with Trump. López Obrador, like his progressive counterparts in Canada, originally opposed NAFTA . Leftists in both countries feared that greater integration with the United States would weaken their already fragile national independence. As the humiliating submission of their leaders to Trump’s arrogant demand for a renegotiation of NAFTA showed, they were right.

After 24 years of integration under NAFTA , the economies of both Mexico and Canada are much more dependent on their larger neighbor. Mexico especially relies on the U.S. for imports of basic foods and gasoline, and it sells 80 percent of its exports in the United States.

López Obrador is fully aware that tearing up the treaty now would plunge Mexico into a depression from which it would take years to recover, and doom his plans for turning the country toward a social democratic future.

López Obrador has been arguing that the central issue is not how the United States treats undocumented Mexican immigrants, but the maldistribution of income and wealth that drives them out of Mexico. The priority should not be making it easier for Mexicans to leave their country, he says, but making it possible for them to stay.

To do this, he has laid out an ambitious plan of economic development along social democratic lines, terming policies of the past a failure.

After his election, he declared that neoliberalism was finished in Mexico. His plan includes: Increasing public social spending, par-

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ticularly in education and pensions for the destitute elderly, Raising private incomes with higher minimum wages and reform of corrupt labor unions, Job creating investments—especially in the impoverished south—in water, transportation, energy, and the targeted expansion of new industries, including exporting to the world’s rapidly legalizing marijuana markets.

At the same time, he must make visible progress against the widespread criminal violence and official corruption. As a first step, he wants to de-militarize the war on drugs, sending the army back to its barracks while reforming and professionalizing the civilian police.

This is a huge task, and he will be opposed

López Obrador and Trump represent, respectively, leftand right-wing populist/nationalist responses to the social disruption of corporate-driven globalization. by powerful international, as well as national, interests—including Wall Street investors, the Pentagon and its contractors who are close to the Mexican military, and the right-wing ideologues both in Mexico and in the U.S. administration and Congress. To have a chance of pulling it off, López Obrador needs time and political space—and minimal interference from the U.S. government.

His immediate need is to get the current negotiations over NAFTA out of the way, even before he takes office. Fortunately for him, the lame-duck Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto has already reached a deal with Trump, who has informed Congress that he will sign it before December 1.

Given Trump’s unstable personality, nothing is certain. Canada has not yet joined, and even some Republicans have questioned whether Trump could base a deal with Mexico alone

on his authority from Congress to renegotiate the three-nation agreement. But there is little reason to think that the spineless Republicans in Congress won’t ultimately give him whatever he asks for.

Moreover, although it is hard for progressives to acknowledge that anything Trump does is positive, the proposed amendments in the deal with Mexico are an actual improvement for workers on both sides of the border.

First, they weaken the rights of corporate investors to sue governments for policies that might reduce future profits. Second, they require Mexico to pass legislation ensuring workers’ rights to secret ballots in union elections. Third, they mandate that the share of North American content in autos and parts that cross borders without tariffs be raised from 62.5 percent to 75 percent. Fourth, they stipulate that 45 percent of autos be produced by workers making at least $16 per hour, which if finally incorporated into NAFTA could represent a historic breakthrough for making wage levels a part of trade treaties.

The deal does not do much to strengthen enforcement of these new rules. But this could change. López Obrador’s designated labor minister, Luisa María Alcalde Luján, is smart, energetic, and committed. She comes from a network of activists (including her parents) that for years has dedicated itself to cleaning up union corruption and promoting worker rights—something that has been totally absent from Mexican governments of the past.

Despite Trump’s threats, there is nothing in the deal about building a wall or requiring Mexico to impede emigration to the United States. Trump, of course, is still assuring his base that, somehow, in some unspecified way, his wall will be built and Mexico will pay for it.

In addition to dealing with the unstable

and dangerous mega-power to the north, López Obrador must deal with the violence and chaos spilling over in the form of displaced immigrants from Central America. In a letter to Trump, he suggested that both Mexico and the United States work together on a new project of social and economic development for the region.

No one can expect Trump to take this seriously. But López Obrador’s ideas, and the fact that he will be president of Mexico for six years,

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could kick-start progressives into a desperately needed rethink of America’s global priorities.

It is not just Mexico that needs a new internal development path. Rising inequality, chronic trade deficits, and shrinking opportunities for the majority of Americans over the last three decades reflect a dysfunctional economy that is competing in the world by lowering wages and living standards at home.

To escape the downward spiral of low-wage competition, both the United States and Mexico need to rebuild their capacity to compete in the world on the basis of high quality and efficiency.

To do this they need time—and each other.

Mexico needs stable access to American investment and technology. And the United States needs Mexico and Central America—both to create a larger close-in market for American goods and to limit the forced immigration from south of the border that is a major, if not the major, subject of the nativist demagogy that breeds the reactionary politics clogging our path toward a social democratic future.

NAFTA created a continental market. U.S. trade with Canada and Mexico is almost double its trade with China. People and culture now flow across the borders. What NAFTA has lacked is a democratic politics that would make it work for the ordinary people who were left behind by the original deal.

Opposition to the original agreement in all three countries created what might have been a foundation for that politics. But after critics failed to stop it, the left embraced other concerns. In the United States, the anti-free-trade movement moved on, reaching its peak in the 1999 protests against globalization in Seattle.

Today, it has been elbowed out of the trade discussion by Trump. Its internationalist human rights vision has often been misappropriated by policymakers of both parties as a justification for disastrous military interventions.

What goes on in Mexico and Central America has much more impact on the daily lives of more Americans than events almost anyplace else. But among U.S. foreign policy networks, stretching from Congress and federal bureaucracies to academia and multinational corporations, the world south of the Rio Grande is a policy backwater. The media tell us more about who is going to jail in Turkey and China than who is murdered in El Salvador or Mexico.

The idea that market ties among nations

help create a more peaceful and just world is not wrong. What is wrong is that the neoliberal model systematically erodes the democratic governance necessary to make it work.

With the ascension of López Obrador to Mexico’s presidency, the rise to influence of a new generation of progressive Democrats in their party in the United States, and the existing substantial base for progressive politics in Canada, there may be an opportunity for social democrats in all three countries to work

Luisa María Alcalde Luján, Obrador’s new labor minister, comes from an activist background dedicated to cleaning up union corruption and promoting worker rights.

together toward transforming NAFTA into a North American economy in which rising living standards for all who live there take priority over profit opportunities for global investors.

The first task is to strengthen cross-border ties among progressives. Within the Mexico/ Central American diaspora, there is already a great deal of collaboration on immigration and environmental issues across the border. And, despite their own domestic struggles, some U.S. and Mexican labor unions have cooperated in joint organizing along the border. One recent example of trinational cooperation is the story of Napoleon Gomez, a labor leader prosecuted

by the Mexican government on fake charges after he criticized the callous indifference of a powerful mining corporation to a disaster that killed 65 miners in Coahuila. The American steelworkers union helped Gomez flee the country, and Canadian trade unions gave him refuge in Canada. After the Mexican Supreme Court finally dismissed all of the charges against him, he was elected in July to the Mexican Senate as a member of López Obrador’s party.

Strengthening such links among continental progressives should be a major priority for American progressives over the next few years.

But they need to see progressive movements to our south not just as objects of charitable political help, but as essential partners. There is no social democratic future possible in the U.S. without a strong democratic union movement. But workers on both sides of the border need each other to succeed. Given the ongoing integration of economies, a strong union movement here is not possible without one there.

The Mexican and Central American left does not need eager U.S. progressives rushing to help them reform their countries. Far more useful is an American left inspired to press long-neglected questions about the behavior of its own. Our own left would do well to focus on why the United States maintains military bases in Central America that have nothing to do with U.S. national security, and why the United States aids the Mexican army and police with military technology that often ends up in criminal hands.

The current alliance among progressives, moderates, and establishment neoconservatives to rid our country of Donald Trump is a practical necessity. But no progressive should be lulled into thinking that the social democratic vision of the Sanders/Warren wing of the party is compatible with the bipartisan “deep state” goal of restoring America’s post–World War II role as world policeman and de facto board chair of global corporate capitalism.

It’s time for another strategy. And for American progressives, the place to begin is here in our own North American neighborhood.

López Obrador has suggested the next step, but he cannot do it alone.

Jeff Faux was the founder, and is now Distinguished Fellow, of the Economic Policy Institute.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 75

Science Under Siege The Trump administration is undermining research in key areas, but the scientific enterprise continues within the government largely as it was—at least so far.

T

he HONEST Act may be one of the most perversely named pieces of legislation ever. Sponsored by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science Committee and one of the most fervent climate-science deniers in Congress, the acronym stands for Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment. Smith, who is retiring this year, attempted to get the legislation through Congress in the past two sessions.

Both times, it barely passed the House and failed in the Senate. That would usually be the end of it, but in line with the Trump playbook, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, announced he would issue most of the “HONEST ” agenda as a proposed rule retitled “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.”

The proposed “HONEST ” rule sounds ever so reasonable. It would require that EPA’s scientific decisions rely only on research where all the data are transparent and available for public view. The problem is that the definition of transparency cripples much of the ability to regulate. The EPA would be prohibited from using critical epidemiological studies of human subjects because access to the data would violate the privacy of those in the study.

Under the rule, the EPA could hypothetically decide that air pollution causes no death or illness because the major studies that proved it already could not be used as evidence.

Despite the opposition of dozens of medical and science organizations, the new rule could

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go into effect soon. Pruitt, in fact, made it even more extreme than the original legislation by inserting language that would lower the threshold at which the EPA could limit doses of radiation and some dangerous toxins. That policy emanates from the highly controversial views of University of Massachusetts Amherst toxicologist Edward Calabrese that a little bit of some poisons may be good for us. Calabrese often remarks that we live in a “radiation-deficient environment.”

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines science as “the state of knowing: knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding.” This hardly describes the type of thinking most congenial to the man now sitting in the Oval Office, who is barely able to utter a few words by mouth or tweet without lying. Donald Trump himself clearly cares or knows little about science. His tweet this past summer, for example, that water that could be used to fight wildfires in California was being diverted into the Pacific Ocean, displayed profound confusion and ignorance. But many professionals in the conservative think tanks that influence his policies understand science well.

Starting from the days of fending off regulation of tobacco in the 1950s, the scientists employed by industry and right-wing think tanks have been working to find clever ploys such as the HONEST Act to sow doubt about science and undermine it to protect industry profits.

From the perspective of business, the most important policy choices center, as they have

for generations, on where to draw the line on government regulations that seek to limit harm to public health and the environment from toxins, pollutants, and other hazards. Even before his inauguration, Trump signaled his intentions on those policies by appointing officials to regulatory agencies who have long vowed to undo the agencies’ rules. Unsurprisingly, Trump has issued orders to allow increased use of asbestos, to open ever more public lands to mining and logging, to weaken enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, and to halt a consumer-friendly update of food nutritional labels. The administration has cut off funding entirely for a planned study by the National Academy of Sciences of the health effects of mountaintop mining and another of the health effects of oil drilling in the Arctic. It has been stuffing scientific advisory bodies, especially at the EPA , with more industry-friendly scientists. This list grows by the week. In many cases, trade associations or corporations have not only lobbied for the regulatory rollbacks but written the newly relaxed rules.

To satisfy the Republican base, a recent draft strategic plan from the Department of Health and Human Services defines human life as “beginning at conception.” Vice President Mike Pence has voiced his doubts about Darwin’s theories, while Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her family generously support organizations that oppose teaching evolution in schools. Trump has repeatedly shouted his support for the National Rifle Association and

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its long-standing opposition to studying the public health effects of gun violence.

Human-induced climate change, the major environmental concern of our time, has been the target of Trump’s most savage assaults on science. As has been widely reported, his administration scrubbed mention of climate change from most government websites and documents and prohibited scientists in federal agencies from discussing the subject at public meetings. The administration is also in the process of withdrawing Obama-era restrictions on emissions from power plants and trying to roll back the ability of states to impose tighter restrictions on auto emissions standards. It has transferred several scientists at the Department of Interior away from climate-related research.

Make no mistake: These actions are despicable. Some will cost lives and degrade the environment. But, for now, despite all of Trump’s bluster and the marches and petitions from scientists protesting “the war on science,” the scientific enterprise is not just surviving—it is vibrant. To be sure, the potential for future mischief remains vast—“a scary situation,” as Neal Lane, science adviser to President Bill Clinton, puts it. So the questions are, how have scientists been coping with the pressures from the Trump administration? And what is the risk to science of real and lasting harm?

Let’s start with government funding.

Science as a whole has never had more support than it has right now, but even before Trump, the federal share of total funding for basic science was on the decline. In the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government provided more than 70 percent of the money for basic science, but by 2015 that proportion was down to 44 percent, as private funds grew more rapidly. If Trump had had his way, federal money would have fallen in absolute terms. In his first budget, he asked for huge cuts to many agencies with science components, including the EPA , the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Department of the Interior. It added up to a 4.6 percent reduc-

tion in R&D overall. Congress replied with the bureaucratic equivalent of laughter. It restored it all and added more. There is both massive popular support for most of the scientific work of these agencies and enough pork in most districts to make members of Congress allergic to cuts. Trump’s 2019 budget includes an overall 4.1 percent increase in R&D. “Viewed from many perspectives, the science enterprise is flourishing,” Rush Holt, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a former Democratic congressman, told me. “The quality of the research and the papers coming to our journals is terrific.”

Hundreds of thousands of scientists, almost all civil servants, inside the federal government and many more on the outside with government support, continue their work unimpeded.

This pattern of continuity might not be sur-

$100,000 or more must be approved by a political appointee. The EPA , however, awards a tiny number of grants compared with NIH, NSF, and many other agencies. Republicans over the years have made noises about getting involved in the granting process, especially for the social sciences, but so far have refrained from interfering. It is a good bet that if the administration inserted politics into the study sections of the big agencies that award many grants, it would arouse a response even from the current Congress.

Recently, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a liberal pro-science group, together with researchers from Iowa State University sent anonymous surveys to scientists working at 16 federal government agencies. Of the more than 63,000 contacted, 4,211 responded. Although some said that political appointees were mak-

Congress so far has resisted President Trump’s budget cuts in research. Government scientists go about their work, but fear is pervasive. prising at NIH, which carries out the basic research to cure disease, including helping pharmaceutical companies find new drugs.

Nor might it be surprising at the CDC, which is our primary defense against epidemics. The protected position of basic research supported by the NSF might not be unexpected either.

But according to dozens of others I spoke to, continuity prevails even in climate science.

For example, I asked Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer, one of the world’s top climate scientists, whether the quality and quantity of climate research in the United States has changed since Trump assumed office. “Not yet,” he said. “The only changes are within agencies as they shift science priorities to avoid angering Trump. Thus, there has been some relabeling programs to avoid using the word ‘climate’ and some shifts out of climaterelated activity but nothing cataclysmic ... yet.”

As those comments reveal, fear is pervasive, stemming from unknowable future budgets and policies and because of the administration’s actions so far.

Recently, the EPA ruled that all grants of

ing their jobs more difficult, the numbers who said so ranged from fewer than 5 percent at the FDA to just over 20 percent at the EPA .

“Of course, we can never measure how much self-censorship there is,” Jacob Carter, head of the project at UCS, told me. There is no disputing that. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the vast majority of the thousands of scientists employed by the federal government, most of them civil servants, are continuing to do their jobs as before.

“That’s why we have a civil service,” says Andrew Rosenberg of UCS and a former top scientist at NOAA. “Enormous amounts of work need to be done, and [that work] is getting done.”

The vast majority responding to the survey in all the agencies agreed that the agency continued to adhere to its scientific integrity policy but complained of a lack of resources. The problem, according to Rosenberg, is that cutbacks in hiring and the perception of Trump as anti-science are impeding recruitment. “We are deterring the next generation of bright young scientists from careers in government, and that will hurt in the long run.”

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 77

In contemplating the future of the scientific enterprise, it is important to keep in mind that what Trump is doing for the most part is rolling back Obama-era regulations. Republican members of Congress are not standing up to Trump’s directives, but they evidence little desire to legislate away years of progress in science and environmental policy. The House did pass the HONEST Act, but it was a symbolic gesture since its future death in the Senate was assured.

Some laws such as the Endangered Species Act leave significant discretion about enforcement to the agency in charge. In those cases, a president’s executive orders and other directives, including memoranda and proclamations, can make a big difference quickly. But many of Trump’s declarations will face months or years in court before they are carried out—if they ever are.

ment on anything. The deficit created by the Trump tax bill will inevitably squeeze all non-defense discretionary funding, including research.

Beyond the budgetary concerns, will the HHS direction on life beginning at conception lead to restriction on research about birth defects and contraception, let alone abortion?

How many toxins will spill if drilling and mining are resumed in response to presidential directives? During the 2016 campaign, Trump supported the discredited idea that childhood vaccines increase the risk of autism. He even talked about setting up a commission to investigate the effects of vaccines on autism, but has done nothing. Where he will go next with all kinds of science is no more clear than any of his thought patterns.

After an 18-month delay and much com-

Trump and other climate denialists look as stupid and scandalous as tobacco executives denying under oath in 1994 that nicotine is addictive.

For example, soon after Trump’s election, the auto industry asked for a rollback in fuel efficiency standards. But in their Trumpian zeal, administration officials lowered the standards so drastically that even the industry asked for changes. In accord with federal law, California sets its own fuel efficiency standards. Other states can and often do follow. California wanted no parts of the latest administration proposals, and the industry wants definite standards, presumably to help with long-term planning.

“What happens next with federal or California standards is not clear,” says David Friedman, a vice president at Consumer Reports who served as acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during the Obama administration. “What we are looking at now is a mess that will result in court battles not likely to be resolved for years.”

Much of what will happen with science next depends on the budget. Congress is still funding all of government on a continuing resolution in an era when there is little agree-

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plaint from the scientific community, Trump named a science adviser, Kelvin Droegemeier, an expert on severe weather who enjoys wide backing from top scientists and has extensive experience in Washington. How much Trump will listen to him remains to be seen.

A Democratic House majority next year could apply brakes to many of Trump’s science and environmental policies.

Holt, a nuclear physicist who has gone from Congress to head the world’s largest scientific organization, told me he saw a time coming soon of “a renewed appreciation of the search for truth” through greater public understanding of science. That sounds like the optimistic view of someone whose job it is to defend and promote science, but perhaps one can find a grain of truth there.

Consider the situation of the right-wing climate-change deniers. In early August, members of the Heartland Institute, one of the strongest climate change–denying think tanks, met in New Orleans for their second “America First” conference. While the group “had every reason to celebrate the unprec-

edented influence they enjoy in the Trump administration,” reported the publication InsideClimate News, “they found plenty of reasons for dread.”

“With carbon tax proposals floating, climate lawsuits advancing, big corporations embracing the need for action and states and cities getting into the act, many of those gathered grappled with the reality that a fossil future was not secure—despite a largely pliant White House and Congress.”

Trump and other denialists increasingly look as stupid and scandalous as tobacco company executives denying under oath in 1994 that nicotine is addictive. As a result, the future is likely to bring increasing defections from the denialist camp. Jim Bridenstine, the new administrator of NASA , which conducts enormous amounts of climate science, was an activist climate-science denier as a congressman from Oklahoma. But in May, he said his thinking has “evolved.”

“I don’t deny the consensus. In fact, I believe fully in climate change and that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way,” he told NASA workers during a televised conference. Perhaps Bridenstine sees a future for himself in a post-Trump administration.

The attitudes of the young also don’t offer much encouragement for the denialists. A March Pew survey found 53 percent of the U.S. population believes that human activity is warming the planet, but among millennials that number jumps to 65 percent.

In the chaos of the 2016 election, science and environment got scant notice. But many people, especially younger ones, could well base much of their vote on those issues in 2018 and 2020, especially with record heat waves almost daily and constantly rising coastal waters. Surveys show continuing high regard for most aspects of the scientific enterprise. Its resiliency seems assured for now, but there is little doubt that Trump and his cronies will continue attempting to degrade the environment and threaten public health in the defense of profit as long as they hold office.

Robert Bazell is adjunct professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale. For 38 years, he was chief science and health correspondent for NBC News.

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What Would Jesus Do? The radical social justice of the early Christian Gospel and its good news for our own day By James Carroll b

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ou see things; and you say, ‘Why?’” So begins the famous line cited at various times by all three of the Kennedy brothers.

“But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” This beautiful dream of political possibility comes from George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, but the Kennedys drew no attention to its particular attribution in the play. Shaw puts the words in the

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mouth of the tempting serpent in the Garden of Eden, about to bring down Eve and wreak havoc with all of history. Was Shaw warning that the idealistic vision of a just world free of suffering counts, actually, as a hubristic denial of what is real?

The serpent seems to propose the hope of a better future, but the myth of Paradise suggests that humans more readily locate

their dream state in the past.

(To “make America great again” aims to recover a quality of public bliss that once existed, but was then lost. The bliss, of course, was white.) But, abstracting from the American present, the myth of an original blessedness ruined by a Fall is a way of accounting both for the intractable injustices of the human condition and for the undying human refusal to

make peace with such injustices.

Indeed, these days the three Kennedys themselves furnish the latest version of a mythical lost blessedness (Camelot; RFK’s 1968 campaign; “the Dream will never die”) against which to measure the grim politics of the present.

With The Forgotten Creed, Stephen J. Patterson has written a highly technical work of biblical scholarship that nevertheless has an unexpected relevance to the contemporary American crisis of private morale and public morality. Unlike Shaw, whose dreams of a better world “never were,” Patterson, in his “forgotten creed,” lifts up a vision of primordial justice—across class, race, and

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 79

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gender—that not only existed once, but that enlivened the igniting pulse of Western civilization.

Patterson’s, too, is a story of original blessedness and a terrible Fall, for, as the rough course of history shows, injustices of class, race, and gender continually prevail over every attempted remedy. That Patterson’s description of the original blessedness he detects is vague (his subtitle speaks of an “original struggle”), and that his account of an all-destroying Fall lacks historical definition (what actually defeated the struggle?) do not take away from his narrative’s surprisingly bracing hope. The book matters for its acute biblical erudition, but also as a case study of humane possibility.

Patterson’s subject is not American politics, but rather the story of Christian origins. The “creed” that he identifies as the first statement of what following Jesus Christ meant is a simple formula found in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: “For you are all children of God through Faith in Christ Jesus; for as many of you who have been baptized have put on Christ. There is no Jew or Greek; there is no slave or free; there is no male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

Patterson, a scholar at Willamette University, argues plausibly that Paul, whose letter dates to about 50 CE, is simply repeating a pre-existing ritual affirmation that probably originated in the baptism practice of first-generation Jesus people (not yet “Christians”). The formula, therefore, would date to the years not long after the death of Jesus in 30 CE. Patterson’s thesis is that to join this community (a community of Jews) was to embrace a new arrangement free of the perennial structures of domination by ethnicity (“no Jew or Greek”), class (“no slave or free”), and gender (“no male or female”).

Alas, in Paul’s rendering of the preexisting promise of “no” denigrating distinction by ethnicity, class, or gender—or at least in how Paul’s rendering would be subsequently read—the seed of a new denigration was sown by an additional qualifying phrase, “in Christ Jesus.” That qualifier would spawn an “othering”—those “in” against those

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THE FORGOTTEN CREED: CHRISTIANITY’S ORIGINAL STRUGGLE AGAINST BIGOTRY, SLAVERY, AND SEXISM

By Stephen J. Patterson

Oxford University Press

“out”—that would be stoutly used against the unbaptized. The supposed “universalism” of Christianity, later set against the supposed “particularism” of Judaism, would prove, with excluding claims made for Jesus as the “one way” to God (John 14:6), not to be universal at all. But Patterson insists it was not like that at the start.

The original impulse reflected in the “forgotten creed” was simply to repeat the pattern Jesus had set in the way he spoke of God, and in the way Jesus behaved. These first “followers of Jesus were trying to be like God, to imitate God,” Patterson says. “God is merciful and kind to everyone.”

There’s the point: everyone. Yet Patterson does not naively assume that the iron laws of human “othering” were repealed by baptism, even in the very beginning. Slavery and pauperism, patriarchy and sexism, as well as complications of Jewish-Gentile relations, not to mention tribalism, remained givens of the ancient world.

But Patterson argues that the meaning of these traditional sources of domination was changed simply by measuring them against the standard set by Jesus, in the name of the allloving God he proclaimed.

For the first followers of Jesus, his memory quite simply demanded a radical equality enshrined in that “creed,” a commitment that made his movement what, in hindsight, must be reckoned as a counterculture of virtue. (It should be emphasized, by the way, that Jesus was advancing here a profoundly Jewish vision, not a superseding “Christian” vision. After all, the primal principle of God’s universal love was established in Genesis, with Israel’s God as the loving creator not only of the tribe, but of all that exists.)

The counterculture of virtue proclaimed that the impulse to divide the world into realms of “us” and “them” was not inexorable, nor, therefore, was dominating injustice inevitable.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to think so?

If such a dream had taken hold in the West, there would today be no “one percent,” no immigrant children ripped from their families, no need for Time’s Up and #MeToo. Patterson applies a cold eye to what went wrong, noting for example the way in which

“no Jew or Greek” could, as Christianity came to dominate, effectively mean, “there is no longer Jew.” That the Church-sponsored move to eliminate the Jewish religion spawned, ultimately, the move to eliminate the Jewish people, required a reassessment of how Paul had been read.

Using that faithful Jew’s words to justify hatred—and killing—of Jews, Patterson maintains, has represented “one of the greatest intellectual failures of Western civilization.”

As with anti-Semitism, so with patriarchy, which readily prevailed over the ideal of male-female equality, and was firmly advanced within a generation of those early equalityminded Jesus people by the Gospel writers themselves. (Recall that the four Gospels were composed between about 70 and about 110 CE, so a few years after Paul, and decades after those who composed the “creed.”)

Contempt for Jews, contempt for women—and, of course, slavery, which continued to thrive as a pillar of culture, with even Paul taking it wholly for granted. Not only did the original vision of the Jesus people fail, but then the institution created in Jesus’s name became that vision’s great enemy. So complete was the triumph in Christian doctrine and practice of anti-Judaism, misogyny, and class inequality that such forms of dominance were taken to represent not “the Fall,” but the will of God. Therefore, is Patterson’s “forgotten creed” a mere pipe dream, the hazy wish of a modern liberal? No. The reason for believing that the Jesus movement began with an ideal of equality against which the subsequent Church and the civilization it spawned must be judged harshly is embedded in one of the few undisputed facts of early Christian history. Little is known for certain about Jesus, the peasant nobody from Galilee. The Gospel accounts are not works of history. What is known for certain is, on its face, a fact of history that, were it not taken so wholly for granted, could seem as astounding as the miracle stories, and that was the unbridled rapidity with which the illegal backwater Jewish sect spread across the Hellenized Mediterranean world, reaching into every level of the

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social classes, ultimately to take over the Empire itself.

This unlikely progress can be accounted for in various ways, but its all-surpassing energy was ignited at the very start: There had to be something singularly uncommon about the man Jesus, who set the current moving. Theologies were developed to explain what made him unforgettable: He was the Jewish Messiah, the Greek Logos; he gave his followers leave to call God “Father”; his crucifixion and resurrection transformed the meaning of suffering and death; he sponsored hope in eternal life. But all of this came after an initial encounter that changed the lives of the men and women who experienced it. Eventually, the quality of that encounter could only be described as a presence of God. Patterson has put his finger on what may have been the transforming content of that first encounter with Jesus.

Something about him cut to the heart of the human condition’s most troubling aspect—the way, out of fear and for the sake of power, we humans turn accidents of identity into weapons. In making God vivid, Jesus made God’s meaning clear: no to group bigotry; no to economic exploitation; no to gender-based domineering. What Patterson sees as the primordial dream of Christianity and the West was obviously not realized in social structures robust enough to survive. By now, of course, with right-wing Bible-toting fundamentalists in America and Islamophobic Catholic neo-tribalists in Europe, Christianity is reconstituting its alliance with bigots. That only makes the retrieval of the counterculture of virtue more urgent.

That forgotten dream can be remembered as a standard against which to measure what we of the West have become, and as a motive for yet changing our beliefs, our economies, and our politics. Patterson is right to lift the old creed up, especially now, and say, “Why not?”

James Carroll is the author of 20 books, including Constantine’s Sword, a history of Christian anti-Semitism, and The Cloister, a post-Holocaust novel set, in part, in the Cloisters Museum in New York.

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Walmartism and Its Discontents Most employees loathe their managers, but haven’t found a way to go union. By Ruth Milkman b

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ntil the “gig economy” and artificial intelligence became their primary preoccupations, observers of the 21st-century workplace were obsessed with the 800-pound gorilla of global retail: Walmart. Infamous for its low wages—so low that many of its workers are eligible for public assistance—and for its intransigent resistance to unionization, this global corporate behemoth was also the target of multiple gender discrimination lawsuits over the years. Although many of its practices are similar to those of other large retailers, Walmart became the poster child for labor exploitation.

It has made fewer headlines lately, but it remains the world’s largest privatesector employer, with more than four times as many workers as Amazon, and more than twice as many as Amazon within the United States.

No one has analyzed the experiences and aspirations of Walmart workers as thoughtfully as Adam Reich and Peter Bearman do in their captivating new book. They also explore the challenges of low-wage worker organizing, largely through the eyes of 20 students who spent the summer of 2014 assisting with the authors’ research and simultaneously working on the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) campaign. Inspired by Freedom Summer, launched exactly 50 years earlier, this program was called the Summer for Respect.

The book’s authors, sociology professors at Columbia University, note that most of their friends and colleagues have never been to a Walmart store, not only because of the firm’s shabby reputation as an employer, but also due to a more visceral “classtinged disgust at the company’s low class.” Reflecting the ever-widening divide between the cultural elite and the bulk of the population, however, there is no such disdain for Walmart in the heartland. On the contrary, Reich and Bearman found, jobs at

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its stores are coveted by many non-­ college-educated workers, who line up by the thousands whenever there is word of new hiring. In the wake of decades of de-industrialization and de-unionization, the available alternatives are often far worse, especially in the rural and working-class suburban areas where the stores are concentrated. Many Walmart “associates” value the sense of community they find among co-workers and customers, some of whom are neighbors or even family members. Moreover, workers can often carve out spaces on the job where they have substantial autonomy and can exercise their creativity.

The Walmart labor force is also surprisingly diverse. Many of the women employed there (70 percent of the company’s U.S. payroll as of 2014) are happy to escape the isolation and tedium (and in some cases abuse) of domesticity. Retirees returning to the workforce are similarly appreciative of the sociability the jobs provide.

Workers with criminal records, whose job options are extremely limited, are grateful for a second chance. Overall, Reich and Bearman conclude, “for many employees, relative to other jobs that they can realistically get, working at Walmart is not so bad.”

Walmart does have its share of disgruntled employees, of course. They include downwardly mobile workers who landed there after losing wellpaid jobs in unionized settings and who are keenly aware of what they have lost, unlike new labor market entrants and retirees. And even the most enthusiastic Walmart employees may sour on the situation once they realize that their advancement opportunities are limited, and/or after experiencing arbitrary or abusive treatment from managers.

Managerial despotism, a central component of what Reich and Bearman dub “Walmartism” (as in “Fordism”), has structural roots in the sheer complexity of the labor process and

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the unpredictable nature of customer traffic and behavior. These factors make it imperative that supervisors have a great deal of discretion to shuttle workers from task to task, opening the door to rampant favoritism.

Workers also complain that they often receive conflicting instructions from managers at different levels.

Other features of Walmartism include pervasive in-store surveillance and automated just-in-time scheduling systems that assign hours to workers based on algorithms that predict fluctuations in customer demand.

But Reich and Bearman report that these are minor concerns compared to the arbitrariness of supervisors, which provokes many more complaints among workers than even the low pay for which Walmart is notorious. Like their counterparts in many other settings, Walmart workers yearn above all to be treated with dignity and respect, as the book’s title signals. Because managers often abuse their power and behave like petty tyrants, they spark deep resentment. Black men who experience such mistreatment invoke “comparisons to prisons and slavery,” while for some women workers, Walmart “comes to feel like the abusive spouse they sought to escape.”

All this would seem to make the company fertile ground for organizing. So why have efforts to unionize Walmart made so little headway? One reason, Reich and Bearman note, is that the standard response among workers who become discontented is simply to quit: high turnover, endemic across the retail sector, “protects the company from people who might, in other circumstances, feel invested enough in problems at the company to try to fix them.” And the sheer size of Walmart—the problem of scale—is also a formidable challenge.

Like most employers today, Walmart has invested deeply in “union avoidance.” As Barbara Ehrenreich memorably documented in her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, management systematically screens for union supporters in the hiring process, and new employees are required to watch antiunion videos during orientation. For decades, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) did try to

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organize Walmart, but the few inroads that it managed to achieve were quickly squashed. When the union succeeded in winning recognition at a Walmart tire and lube facility in Quebec, the company unceremoniously closed it down; the same thing happened in Texas when a handful of meat department workers unionized.

UFCW eventually abandoned the idea of a conventional union drive at Walmart, and instead lent support to OUR Walmart, founded in 2010. The group is best known for its Black Friday actions at Walmart stores around the country, where workers and their allies mount public protests against the company’s labor practices, leading some customers to shun the stores and attracting extensive media attention. OUR Walmart partnered with Reich and Bearman in the Summer for Respect, providing the authors with extensive access to the campaign’s internal dynamics through the students.

OUR Walmart’s “alt-labor” organizing approach may have departed from the conventional union playbook, but the company responded as if it were a standard unionization campaign. At the Pico Rivera Walmart in Los Angeles, after more than one-third of the workers joined OUR Walmart, the company laid off the entire workforce and closed the store for six months in 2015 (supposedly to address plumbing problems); when it reopened, none of the core activists were re-hired.

OUR Walmart lost UFCW’s backing in 2015, morphing into a moderated online discussion group; a bit later, it promoted an app called “Work It” that workers could use to access information about their on-the-job rights from labor lawyers and other experts.

This “virtual organizing” effort had just begun when Reich and Bearman finished their book, but they see it as a promising path, in part because of its potential to solve the daunting problem of scale. The online approach also capitalizes on workers’ existing social networks, which the authors consider vitally important.

Indeed, Reich and Bearman argue that social networks built on mutual trust are the key to successful labor

Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart

by Adam Reich and Peter Bearman

Columbia University Press

organizing. Drawing on the students’ observations, they identify “organic work groups” in the stores—informal networks of workers that include leaders whom other group members respect and trust. This idea is by no means new, but Reich and Bearman explore it more systematically than previous commentators, documenting (and diagramming) networks in detail. Their analysis shows that OUR Walmart’s recruitment efforts were most successful when they leveraged these networks, building on workers’ “connection to and loyalty to one another.” Workers rarely signed up for OUR Walmart individually but rather, did so in clusters. Joining could be contagious if it tapped into pre-existing networks.

The authors also explore the networks that formed among the students who participated in the project and the OUR Walmart staffers who supervised them during the Summer for Respect. None of the five organizing sites that hosted the students was successful by conventional standards—the students hardly recruited anyone into OUR Walmart. But the sites did vary along another metric: At three of them, the organizing teams developed strong, trust-based networks among the students and their supervisors, while at the other two sites they failed to do so.

Reich and Bearman debriefed the students in lengthy interviews, and also conducted before-and-after brain scans, enabling them to compare the sites systematically. The brain scans distinguished between trust and friendship (the technical details on this part of the research are tucked into an appendix for interested readers), and ultimately what mattered was not students “liking” the supervisors, but instead trusting them.

These networks of trust had enduring effects: The students in the organizing teams that succeeded in building trust were more likely to continue doing social justice work after the summer project ended; a few of them remained involved in labor organizing.

The punch line of this engaging book is that organizing succeeds when it leverages networks of trust, which can be transformed into tools to build

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workers’ power and win social change.

Among organizers and workers alike, the authors show, trust is what matters for creating solidarity. Thus, rather than focusing on “bread and butter” issues, they argue, the labor movement should “return to the idea that the essence of workplace organization is positive solidarity, a sense of belonging.” Because this argument is embedded in a detailed case study of efforts to organize (on- and off-line) the world’s largest private employer, it merits close attention from anyone who cares about labor’s current dilemmas and future prospects.

Yet fostering solidarity is not by itself an adequate solution to the enduring problem of de-unionization, which can be traced back to the neoliberal turn of the 1970s, and a better approach to organizing is not sufficient to turn things around. I vividly recall the giddy optimism that infused the labor movement after 1995, when John Sweeney’s ascent to the AFLCIO presidency sparked a new wave

Efforts to unionize Walmart have made little headway in the face of a problem endemic to the retail sector: high turnover. Discontented workers simply quit rather than invest in the hard work of fixing a company’s problems.

of organizing led by an extremely talented group of unionists. With an assist from the economic boom of the late Clinton years, this effort actually managed to halt the relentless erosion of union density for a few years.

It relied on rank-and-file-intensive organizing tactics like home visits, worker committees, and the like—tactics that fostered the trust-building and attention to workers’ own concerns for respect that Reich and Bearman advocate.

But even the top-notch organizing of that period could not achieve the scale necessary to defeat the evermore sophisticated anti-unionism of employers (Walmart was but one of many who mastered that art). Moreover, employers’ adamant hostility to unions was buttressed by an increasingly hostile legal and political infrastructure. In the 21st century, the long-term decline resumed. With the failure of a herculean effort to win private-sector labor law reform during the 2000s, and the more recent Supreme

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Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which dealt a body blow to public-sector unionism, finding a path forward is going to require something beyond more effective organizing, welcome as that would be.

Today, it’s almost as if the breakthroughs of the New Deal never happened: Union density has fallen to the same low level as a century ago, and employers seem to have all the cards. As they did in the early 1900s, many organizers are placing their bets on local struggles to raise the minimum wage and to win protective legislation (like paid sick days), bypassing employers entirely. The worker centers and other alt-labor efforts also harken back to settlement houses and other cross-class alliances from the Progressive Era. Unions can survive in such progressive localities as New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but it’s hard to see how they could rebound more widely without a fundamental political realignment and new federal legislation. Though public sentiment has turned decidedly more pro-union in recent years, it will require a radically more progressive federal government to remove the decades of accumulated constraints on union organizing.

Still, there’s much to be learned from Reich and Bearman’s study for anyone who cares about the 21st-century workplace, and about how workers could win more power should the political climate be transformed.

Ruth Milkman is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and research director of CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. Her most recent book is On Gender, Labor, and Inequality.

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Tax Evasion Exposed Senator Carl Levin was the Senate’s exemplary investigator of corporate tax scams. By David Cay Johnston b

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enator Carl Levin of Michigan, who retired in 2015, was one of the Senate’s legendary workhorse progressives. He used his chairmanship of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to probe the corruption of American capitalism as enabled by feeble or complicit government policies. One of his prime subjects was tax evasion. Indeed, a lot of what we know about techniques of tax avoidance and evasion is courtesy of Levin’s work and that of his staff.

For 15 years, Elise Bean, a lawyer educated at the University of Michigan, worked as an investigator and then staff director and chief counsel for Levin’s subcommittee. Bean passes on in plain English what she learned about the secretive schemes of people who owe their fortunes to the American system, but lack the character to behave with integrity. Individual dishonesty—mere venality—is not her focus. Rather, she looks at the system and at how weak government rules, insufficient to nonexistent oversight, and abuse of power by corporate interests, especially at some of the “too big to fail” banks and the Big Four accounting firms, promote and protect white-collar criminality.

With candor and humility, Bean tells how she came to work for Levin and how wide her eyes were opened to the pervasiveness of immorality at the top of our corporate culture, where success is measured in how many commas show up on a profit and net worth statement, not in whether that money was earned honestly. And she manages this without a hint of rancor.

Bean tells us about the foundation laid by subcommittee precursors, including the World War II Truman committee that exposed war profiteers who put their fortunes first, delivering sometimes shoddy weapons for pilots flying through German flak or GIs assaulting Pacific Island beaches.

After a quick history, Bean turns to how the subcommittee staff did its

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work and how Levin cajoled fellow senators into letting him take aim at corruption in Big Business. She writes so smoothly that this reader kept turning pages well past bedtime.

Bean distills Levin’s directives into 12 principles that can be applied to many other areas of government oversight and management. These include going after big targets, conducting original research, working relentlessly to build bipartisan agreement among staff and senators, and eventually using public hearings to wring change from the system. “Enabling investigators to build sufficient bipartisan trust to come to agreement on a complex set of facts typically took a year,” Bean writes.

Bean subtly reveals her personal views on the competence and quality of senators. Some are described either in positive terms or without even damning faint praise. Thad Cochran of Mississippi is “an active, intelligent Republican senator with a courteous staff.” Fred Thompson, the lobbyist and actor turned lawmaker, is merely named. She describes Levin as “one of the little-known giants” in the Senate, with a knack for asking tough questions and yet not coming off prosecutorial. She admires Levin’s skill at capturing public attention by marshaling powerful facts dug up by the subcommittee staff.

The work Bean describes lacks glamour. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) staff worked out of a basement in the Russell building, where Bean scrounged for furniture and file cabinets discarded by senators who moved from their offices.

One crucial lesson she learned: It’s not just crooks, businesses, and their agents who want to hide the facts.

Sometimes, the law enforcers want to go through the motions and then file away the awful truths they uncover.

When subcommittee staff learned in 1999 that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had conducted reviews

Financial Exposure: Carl Levin’s Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse

By Elise J. Bean

Palgrave Macmillan

of anti–money laundering at 40 big banks and found problems aplenty, they asked for the reports. In time, the staff focused on one American institution, Citibank, only to be told that the Fed bank would not provide the underlying documents, known as work papers. Here, bipartisanship was crucial. Levin sought help from the PSI chair, Susan Collins, and the Maine Republican agreed. Only then did the bank agree to let PSI staff read, but not copy, what turned out to be devastating documents establishing how deeply Citibank was involved in helping drug lords and their friends in high places move millions illicitly, notably Raul Salinas, whose brother was the president of Mexico. (Bean recounts how she spent two weeks in a Federal Reserve office in Washington, giving advice on how to organize such files before digging into them so that they make sense—another reason this book is invaluable as a guide for investigators.)

The audit of “Citigroup’s private bank contained harsh assessments of what the bank examiners had found. Memos noted that the private bank’s Swiss headquarters received the ‘worst possible audit rating’ from Citigroup’s” internal watchdogs, whom Federal Reserve examiners concluded “were not taken seriously”

by Citibank.

Bean shorts deserved credit for journalists who exposed Citibank’s corrupt role two years before subcommittee investigators got onto the case, but she generously credits a convicted Citibanker, Carlos Gomez, who, during a three-hour prison interview, drew a detailed roadmap for subcommittee staff. Gomez explained how Citibank’s private bank operation in Switzerland was organized, who worked there, and what they did. “That one interview equipped us with detailed, inside information about both the private bank and Salinas account,” Bean writes. “It was a lesson in how prisoners, when treated with courtesy and asked wide-ranging questions, can help advance an investigation.”

Here again Bean provides valuable information on the art of good government. Interviewers who listen sympathetically get cooperation and

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informing disclosure, in contrast to the popular, and wrong, idea that browbeating and even torture are necessary to get people to spill the beans on their confederates. Gomez also got a benefit from talking: He was supposed to be held in a federal prison near his family in Florida, but the Bureau of Prisons had lost track of that and held him in New York state until the PSI staff came along.

Bean’s account of how some Citibank executives were arrogant and withholding contrasts with the day-long interview of John Reed, the bank’s chief executive, who she reports was deeply informed, precise, and made no attempt to lie or deny. Not explained is why Reed did not order changes when the internal audits and the Federal Reserve examinations revealed rampant corruption, not to mention when The New York Times ran front-page exposés in 1997 that won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

Extraordinary care with facts, and sharing with Republican staff and senators, was crucial when the

digging was done. “[W]e had the low down on money laundering problems at private banks generally as well as what happened” with four major accounts at Citigroup, but “the facts were so sprawling and complex that we had to write them up. Otherwise, much of what we’d learned would be lost,” wrote Bean, who was assigned to prepare the initial draft.

“Our Republican colleagues reviewed the revised text and made still more changes. We didn’t complain. The high stakes meant we had to get the law and the facts right; no errors allowed,” she continues. Here, Bean evokes an era when bipartisan cooperation was still possible—and illustrates the virtues of patience.

In November 1999, two days of public hearings were held. What Bean calls “the Levin report” then became public. “Senators Collins and Levin knew the facts cold and were ready to disclose them to the public. A powerful tag team, they delivered a one-two punch that prevented the witnesses from dodging the issues” about corrupt banking.

A lot of what we know about tax avoidance and evasion is courtesy of Senator Carl Levin’s work as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

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A crucial lesson is that Levin did not stop at exposing wrongdoing. His staff followed up to make sure Citibank cleaned house.

Levin also introduced legislation intended to reduce illicit money transfers, at least when the digital dollars flowed through American banks. (Levin’s legislation died in Senate Banking Committee. Its chairman at the time was Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who later became a senior foreign bank executive.)

When the PSI staff dug into Enron, they came up with more evidence of how easy it is for the unscrupulous to manipulate the financial system for their gain at the expense of everyone else. Again, structural reform proved elusive despite damning facts. Congress did pass the SarbanesOxley Act to require honest accounting, which became law in 2002, only to have it reviled as interference with legitimate business and a drag on the economy, as if corruption is a free lunch. It also contained a big loophole in Section 201: Auditors paid to examine the books could not also be consultants—unless the client’s board of directors approved.

Financial Exposure is expensive, priced like a college textbook. I nonetheless hope Bean’s book is universally adopted by professors of political science, public administration, public finance, and related disciplines.

Anyone who cares about how Congress functions—and how it could function—will find in this book an easy primer well worth the price. It’s the kind of book that should be read decades from now, too, as a guide to the congressional oversight we could have if we just demanded it.

David Cay Johnston’s next book will propose a new federal tax system for the 21st century that is simple, fair, progressive, and promotes economic growth.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 85

The 2016 Election Was Ultimately About One Big Thing A new book argues it was a struggle over identity. By Justin Gest b

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ith more than 20 candidates and expanded sources of both news and disinformation, the 2016 presidential campaign was a cacophonous circus. And with a result that hinged on razor-thin margins across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, post-election analyses have been equally disorienting.

They have pointed to meddling by the Russian GRU and the American FBI; white people, black people, brown people; Hillary Clinton’s hubris, her charity, her wardrobe; widespread racism, misogyny, piety, fear, and desperation.

With the luxury of hindsight and analytical acumen, political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck have produced an exceptionally well-researched and insightful postmortem that soberly isolates the election’s core significance: a polarizing debate over American identity spurred by immigration and demographic change. The result, Identity Crisis, is a definitive, statistically informed account of the 2016 presidential election.

The trio craft a coherent narrative underpinned by an original analysis of multiple sources of voting records, media content, and public opinion data along with an extensive review of related research and commentary. While its step-by-step recitation of campaign highlights is tedious and sprawling at times, the prose is succinct, and the argument is amply supported with evidence. Through it all, the book finds that the election turned on President Trump’s rhetorical capacity to capture public attention and focus on the transformational impact of immigration on the status of white Americans.

There is a long tradition of books offering the “inside story” of elections, going back to Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960. The risk with such books is always that the

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enthralling story yields few lessons that have general application. That is not the case here; three powerful findings emerge: First, Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck marshal extensive evidence to show that partisanship in the United States has been racialized. The 2016 election helped strengthen ethnic identities among minorities and polarized white people based on their level of formal education. These divisions now predict partisan preferences to an extent unseen before. Indeed, no other factor predicted changes in white partisanship during Obama’s presidency as powerfully and consistently as racial attitudes did. The strength of white identity and antiimmigrant sentiment best predicted support for Donald Trump.

Second, the response to Trump’s employment of divisive cultural issues has inspired “trickle-down tolerance,” not hate. While there is little doubt that his bigoted remarks and policies have emboldened average citizens to act on their own bigotry, the authors find that more Democrats now support marginal and vulnerable communities such as Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and refugees.

While this is encouraging, it has hardened the partisan divisions.

And third, as parties became more closely tied to racial identity, the boundaries between them ossified. A good example is what the authors call “racialized economics,” where individualized economic anxiety is replaced by collective economic grievances between competing racial groups.

Partisanship has become so strong that it now dominates people’s perceptions about the state of the economy.

A book this ambitious will attract criticism. Some people may say that Identity Crisis lacks rich, personal illustrations, and that is true. Its few

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In the cacophony of the Republican primary campaign, Donald Trump—here shown after a debate in New Hampshire in 2016—was able to define what the election was about.

vignettes feel obligatory. The authors’ contribution, however, is to make full use of quantitative data to analyze social and political trends and single out the critical drivers of events. Their dispassionate analysis is a refreshing break from a world of vitriol.

Critics may also say that the book’s omniscient narrative belies the fluky character of the 2016 election—and this is also largely true. Sides, Vavreck, and Tesler make frequent references to classic works of American political science and the predictability of certain components of the 2016 cycle. But the book would have been entirely different if, as a result of highly unpredictable events, Hillary Clinton had won the election. The authors do acknowledge surprises but insist those don’t defy the enduring fundamentals of American politics. Their conclusions diverge from much of Vavreck’s earlier work touting

Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck

Princeton University Press

economic drivers of voting behavior, and indicate the extent to which she and her co-authors have let the data dictate their conclusions.

Finally, some people will say that the book wields advanced statistical analysis to produce a diagnosis—a devastating diagnosis—but its methods do not produce a remedy. This is largely true, too. The authors’ omniscience appears to end on November 9, 2016. But it would be unreasonable to expect that they could supply a remedy on the basis of their style of analysis.

Political “moneyball” is not the same as baseball “moneyball” because voters may change in ways that quantitative techniques cannot always anticipate.

Identity Crisis had ventured further, they might have addressed a number of issues that their book raises. Three questions, in particular, are worth further thought.

If the authors of

First, how can we square ossifying partisanship with a desire for governance by outsiders? In candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Franken, Mike Bloomberg, Jesse Ventura, and Ross Perot, American voters have long found business and celebrity profiles attractive, and many such figures have run as independents untethered to the constraining status quo. In 2016, Trump’s association with the Republican Party was perfunctory, and Bernie Sanders’s relationship with the Democratic Party was similarly fraught. With abysmal levels of job approval for Congress and low trust in government institutions, parties have effectively been reduced to necessary evils for candidates. They possess structural power as gatekeepers of electoral success and help organize increasingly unwieldy coalitions. But we cannot rule out a future backlash against outsiders.

volume 29, number 4. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published quarterly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2018 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. printed in the u.s.a.

Fall 2018 The American Prospect 87

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Emerging research finds that fringe parties in Europe may weaken once they face the pressures of governance and representation. The election of far-right candidates may also placate anti-immigration anxiety and, once cathartically satiated, allow a turn away from identity politics.

Second, is media coverage good even when it is bad? Identity Crisis makes use of extensive data on the nature and frequency of news coverage and connects those trends with public opinion and electoral outcomes. The analysis, however, underscores two conflicting stories.

One emphasizes that Donald Trump sucked all the oxygen from his Republican primary competitors with his must-see bravado and unpredictable commentary. Another highlights the persistently negative coverage of both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, including the steady drip of bad news from the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. One wonders if Trump’s manipulation of free media worked because he was running against 16 other primary candidates wrestling for distinction. Perhaps, as a result of ethnic tribalism, impressions of the two nominees had so hardened by the general election that they were unaffected by criticism from the major media. The media created the monster that is Donald Trump but now find it impossible to destroy him.

Finally, what are the prospective risks of a racialized party landscape?

This is perhaps the most disconcerting of all the questions raised by Identity Crisis. When partisan differences are matters of priority, common ground may be found. Since the 1990s, however, Democrats and Republicans have cast their differences as arising over values, where compromise is much more difficult. The value differences arise from different ways of life in American society—on the one hand, a cosmopolitan, liberal value orientation largely attributable to ethnic minorities and urban, professional white people; and, on the other hand, a nationalist, provincial, and nostalgic orientation that predominates among whites with less formal education.

Amid the growing racialization of American politics, Democrats cannot give up all efforts to appeal to white workingclass people.

The prognosis, observable in other countries with racialized partisanship such as Belgium or Trinidad, is that even the most minor disagreements take on an existential importance.

The result is not necessarily civil war, but bitter intransigence and paralyzing polarization.

Amid the growing racialization of American politics, Democrats cannot give up all efforts to appeal to white working-class people. It is a large, diverse constituency, and many supported Trump as a symbolic protest vote against Hillary Clinton and 40 years of the status quo. White working-class voters still determine important statewide races and share a number of priorities with non-white working-class people. A Democrat who is unafraid to engage them and their grievances could win many of them back.

Where Democratic leaders find little traction with white workingclass people, they may consider pursuing suburban white moderates who are anxious about social instability and appalled by Trump. Both strategies, however, contradict the current push inside the Democratic Party to double down on the country’s demographic prospects and shift the party further to the left at a moment when Republicans are leaving the center unprotected.

For now, the racialization of American politics holds together a Republican Party that was on the verge of disintegration as recently as August 2016. While a deepened tribalism may viscerally satisfy some on the left, Democrats stand to gain little from that development. It weakens the party’s chances outside major cities, and will ultimately weaken the social fabric of our fraying nation. Trump’s plans are clear. Democrats’ response over the next two years will determine whether Americans’ concerns about identity truly do become a national crisis.

Justin Gest is an assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government and author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality.

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Struggling in a ‘strong’ economy

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

he economy is coming up roses, if you believe Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. In between insults and exclamation points, President Trump likes to take credit for lowering taxes, creating jobs and revving up the stock market. But when you get in the weeds a little bit, a thornier picture comes into view. Most Americans aren’t benefiting from the tax cuts, profits and stock buybacks that corporations and wealthy investors are enjoying. Private sector employers have been adding jobs for 101 straight months, but workers’ real wages have barely budged in four decades as the cost of living has gone up. And, because half of all households don’t have a penny invested in stocks, most Americans haven’t hit the stock market’s jackpot.

There is a massive gap between Trump’s populist economic rhetoric and his actual policies. The “forgotten men and women” who Trump said have “borne the cost” as others amassed great wealth were overlooked somehow in his exorbitant tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.

Companies aren’t using their tax windfall to raise workers’ wages or create more well-paying jobs; they’re rewarding investors and executives. Days after the 800 workers at Harley-Davidson’s Kansas City, Mo., plant learned they’d be out of a job, the company announced a dividend hike and stock buyback plan worth about $696 million for investors. And, in Indiana, workers at the Carrier plant that Trump boasted he “saved” live in constant dread, as the company slashes jobs in waves of hundreds.

laws with its recent decision in Janus v. AFSCME, voters in Missouri recently did the opposite, repealing a state law that would have weakened unions by an emphatic 2-1 ratio. Polls show that public support for unions is at the highest level in many years—around 60 percent. Among adults under 30, a decisive 76 percent approve of unions. They understand that when we work together in unions, we can achieve what is impossible alone.

Teachers get it, too, as we saw in the recent teacher walkouts in states that have long underfunded public education in order to lavish large tax cuts on corporations and wealthy residents. In 25 states, public K-12 education has been stripped of $19 billion over the last decade, and low-tax Republican states are guilty of the worst underfunding. In 38 states, the average teacher salary is lower in 2018 than it was in 2009. Educators have blown the whistle on excessive tax cuts that benefit only those at the very top and eviscerate vital public services.

The big things that Americans need aren’t being addressed. Americans are clear about what they want elected leaders to do: Adequately fund public education,

including pre-K, special education and higher education.

Ensure that healthcare is accessible and affordable and covers people with pre-existing conditions. Rein in student debt; expand public service loan forgiveness; and prevent bad-actor federal loan services like Navient from abusing borrowers. Help working people secure a real raise, a real voice and the right to union representation. Fund infrastructure projects that make us safer while creating good jobs. Enact fiscal policies that help make the economy work for all. Protect the right to vote.

Extend economic dignity and security into retirement.

And display decency, as voters responding to last week’s Quinnipiac poll made clear: They dislike Trump almost 2-to-1, with majorities disapproving of not only his policies but his disparagement of those he disagrees with, particularly people of color, and his emboldening of racism, sexism and xenophobia.

Essayist Frank Rich recently wrote that the assumption that, over the long term, a rising economic tide would lift all Americans in equal measure is “dead and buried.”

I hope not, but making that aspiration a reality will require Trump and other leaders to really, not rhetorically, put America’s “forgotten men and women” at the center of economic and social policies.

Most Americans aren’t benefiting from the economic boon the wealthy are enjoying.

Photo by Michael Campbell

Gas prices have hit the pain point for many Americans, and rising healthcare costs are eating into their paychecks. Student debt has surged to $1.5 trillion— up from $600 billion 10 years ago. The rate of people 65 and older who are filing for bankruptcy has tripled since 1991 as a result of higher healthcare costs, the decline in employer-provided pensions and, increasingly, their children’s college debt.

Rather than addressing this economic pain, Trump and his allies are making things even worse. They’re trying to bust unions. They’ve made it harder for defrauded borrowers to seek student debt relief. They’ve tried to gut the Affordable Care Act, and to slash federal support for summer school and after-school programs. And the Trump administration is rushing to pack federal courts, including the Supreme Court, with conservative, probusiness and anti-worker judges.

Working people understand that this power imbalance hurts them. Even as the Supreme Court—cheered on by the president—tried to decimate public sector unions by imposing anti-union, so-called right-to-work

Photo by Michael Campbell

Weingarten rallying in support of public education in Pittsburgh.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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