By Mark Gruenberg
Labor and its allies in the Democratic Party in United States have built ground operations through which they plan to turn out record numbers of voters this November to take Congress out of the hands of the Republicans.
In 2018, they may be right, and not just because Congress could change hands. That’s because the 2018 election’s outcome, state by state, has the potential to redraw the nation’s political map for a decade or more, and it has nothing to do with who’s in Congress right now.
Voters will elect all 435 members of the U.S. House, 35 U.S. Senators, and – most importantly – 36 of the nation’s 50 governors. Plus thousands of state legislators. All but a handful of those 2018 gubernatorial winners will be sitting in their chairs in 2021, after the next census, and will have a big say in who will represent you – worker friends or worker foes – in the following decade. They’ll be big voices in redistricting.
Want proof? Look what happened in the 2010 off-year election. A combination of Democratic apathy, Republican hatred of Democratic President Barack Obama, antipathy towards the Affordable Care Act, the slow recovery from the Great Recession – with aid seemingly going to the rich but not to the rest of us – and the Tea Party troglodytes combined to produce a Republican sweep.
It didn’t help that organized labor focused so much on holding Congress, which failed, in 2010, that it downplayed the state legislatures – where worker friends got clobbered. Off-year elections like 2010 and 2018 feature lower turnouts and often turn on which side can motivate its partisans to vote.
In 2010 in state after state, from coast to coast, right-wing Republicans swept into control of state capitals, winning the governor’s chairs, the state legislatures, or both. The crows came home to roost when the politicians started drawing district lines the year after. As a result, in this cycle, the GOP is defending 26 gubernatorial seats, the Dems nine, plus Alaska independent Bill Walker.
Republicans gerrymandered themselves into decade-long control of legislatures and/or congressional delegations – and state and national policy agendas – in large and medium-size states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Alabama, and the Missouri legislature. Reddish Indiana became deep red. Conservative GOPer Chris Christie ran New Jersey.
Control in Minnesota and Nevada has swung back and forth. In 2014, a weak Democratic governor lost to extreme right-wing Republican Bruce Rauner in Illinois, while the governor’s chairs in deep-blue Massachusetts and Maryland went to moderate Republicans, though all three legislatures stayed Democratic. Only New York, where control was split, and the West Coast, solidly blue, seemed to stay immune to the GOP tide, and pro-worker.
The result was a raft of anti-worker legislation, both in Congress and in state capitols.
Start with right-to-work for less laws, repeal of project labor agreements and right-wing Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s infamous Act 10 which emasculated state public worker unions. Nationwide, add in cuts in workers’ comp and slashes in state pensions.
Continue with school vouchers, huge corporate tax cuts and education spending slashes, private control of public services – such as Indiana’s Toll Road and even Chicago’s parking meters — and an absolute fiscal and political disaster for workers and everyone else under radical right-wing GOP Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback.
And that’s just in the states. Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage in more than a decade – most hikes have come in deep-blue states and cities – and solons on Capitol Hill spend their time attacking federal workers, postal workers, their unions, and everyone else who takes home a paycheck for a living, while throwing billions at corporations and the rich.
All of this has pushed organized labor out on the campaign trail earlier than ever before. The AFL-CIO ramped up its political program and started door-knocking, phone-banking and house-to-house visits on June 1 and it has kept going ever since.
One development could help workers and their allies. People are very angry at Donald Trump’s policies, insults, racism, taunts and tweets, dictatorial tendencies and more.
The anger shows up in mass marches against him virtually every week since his inauguration, in a raft of progressive candidates – many of them women irate over his misogyny and his threat to reproductive rights — entering Democratic primaries and in high enthusiasm to vote GOP allies out.
Gun control, or lack of it, will also play a part, with students, energized by the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, leading a nationwide crusade for a crackdown on guns and gun nuts. “If they don’t listen, vote them out!” was a constant chant.
But labor and its allies must cope with another impact of the GOP sweep: Disenfranchisement, in state after state, of workers, women, minorities, the poor, the old and students. The GOP’s objective: Lock in control by “voter ID” laws and other nefarious methods, making sure your foes not only won’t vote but can’t vote.
As a result of that and the gerrymandering, non-partisan analysts say worker-friendly candidates must achieve a nationwide popular vote margin of anywhere from eight percent to 10 percent to swing the U.S. House Democratic. That big a swing hasn’t happened in decades. The Democrats need to grab at least 23 more seats to take control of the House.
Nevertheless, labor has concocted a strategy for this key election, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says. It’s divided states into two tiers and is throwing more people and resources into the “Tier One” states than the others.
The Tier One states are those, Trumka said in a pre-Labor Day session with reporters, that have “the trifecta” of races: Contests for the U.S. Senate and the state governor’s chair, as well as the U.S. House. “But we also have individual House races we normally wouldn’t go into,” he added. “And we’re going all the way down to state House races, too,” he promised.
Labor certainly has more opportunities: This year, all but four of the nation’s 435 U.S. House seats – not counting territorial delegates and Washington. D.C., whose solons can’t vote on the House floor – have major-party contestants. The GOP holds 26 governorships.
The “trifecta” states are among the most important and obvious, for both control of Congress and control of redistricting: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, California, Wisconsin, Illinois – without a Senate race – Minnesota, which has two open U.S. Senate seats, Texas and Florida. Growing Georgia has an open governor’s seat.
Democrats hope to pick off some of the remaining Republican U.S. representatives on Long Island and upstate. But progressive challengers to the party establishment – campaigning on Bernie Sanders-like platforms of Medicare For All and free public college tuition, among other issues – picked up their most-notable win so far in the Bronx and Queens.
There, 29-year-old progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, was outspent by incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, the 4th-ranking House Democrat, by $1.3 million-$38,000. But she used social media effectively, argued he was out of touch with his now-majority-minority district – and won the primary. It’s a safe seat, and she’s become a rock star, with Sanders, campaigning for candidates elsewhere nationwide. (IPA Service)
The writer is Washington bureau Chief of People’s
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