Running against Democrat Peter DeFazio for a congressional seat in Oregon's 4th District, Art Robinson is one of the most influential leading Global Warming denialists in America and has proposed dumping radioactive waste and crude oil waste at sea.
But wait! There's more.
For a the better part of a decade at least Robinson has been reprinting, marketing, and selling a virulently racist 19th Century English boys' adventure novel that suggests Africans are like retarded children.
If you read my take on the returns from the Massachusetts special election for the US Senate race then you know that Mass had some issues with reaching out to young voters. There was some confusion about who was going to do it.. or if it was going to happen... Someone even suggested the youth outreach was "well the President came..."
In the great state of Oregon we have a fantastic organization who has worked for years to get young voters to the polls, but also be engaged during years in between. The Oregon Bus Project worked the hell out of this special election and the results were noticeable.
In Massachusetts they had a turnout of 15% of 18-29 year olds for the special election. In the Oregon's special election about 24% turnout of youth voters (preliminary estimates from CIRCLE)
Caitlin Baggott from the Bus says that this is due to a few particularly important factors:
A year-round and multi-year strategy,
Populist messaging and policy development,
Budget (actually spending money on youth outreach
And finally, which I'll expand on, a focus on field and youth turnout
When it comes to a meaningful field outreach campaign Caitlin points to two major elements
A strong field campaign matched with a strong media campaign. Oregon Student Association, the Bus Project, and the coordinated campaign registered 30,000 voters--primarily on campuses and youth-dense parts of Portland and Eugene. The campaign led a huge GOTV field program to knock on 300,000 doors. We all phonebanked the hell out of our lists. (The Bus got a "thank you" message today from a voter who decided to vote after getting 15 phone calls from us.)
We expected it to be better than VA and MA. We're hoping that the lesson for all of us in 2010 is that young people will vote if we (1) Re-Register them, and (2) invest in youth-oriented GOTV. OSA and the Bus executed a huge youth-focused voter registration program in Oregon, and the Bus did youth-focused mail, earned and paid media, and phonebanks. (Trick or Vote for the fall!)
So here's the thing. Do the outreach. Do it because it builds the party long term, but do it because, I don't care what state you're in... it will make a difference and it could make the difference enough to win your election.
In the midst of what has otherwise been an extremely negative couple of weeks, voters in Oregon scored a big progressive victory. Ballot measures increasing taxes on wealthy households and on corporations were approved by comfortable margins:
Oregon voters bucked decades of anti-tax and anti-Salem sentiment Tuesday, raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy to prevent further erosion of public schools and other state services.
The tax measures passed easily, with late returns showing a 54 percent to 46 percent ratio. Measure 66 raises taxes on households with taxable income above $250,000, and Measure 67 sets higher minimum taxes on corporations and increases the tax rate on upper-level profits.
The results triggered waves of relief from educators and legislative leaders, who were facing an estimated $727 million shortfall in the current two-year budget if the measures failed.
With 97% of the vote counted, Measure 66 (raise taxes on high-income Oregonians) is ahead 53.93%--46.07%, and Measure 67 (raise taxes on corporations) is ahead 53.27%--46.77%.
Could this be a winning platform nationwide? Let's make a crude estimate by comparing Oregon's Presidential vote in 2004 and 2008 to the nation vote in those elections.
In 2004, John Kerry won Oregon by 4.16%, while Bush won nationally by 2.46%. So, Oregon skewed 6.62% toward Kerry compared to the national average.
In 2008, Barack Obama won Oregon by 16.35%, compared to his national victory of 7.27%. So, in 2008, Oregon skewed 9.08% toward Obama.
The average skew toward the Democratic nominee in Oregon was 7.85% across the two elections. This is virtually identical to the current of 7.86% for ballot measure 66, and slightly ahead of the 6.53% lead for ballot measure 67.
This suggest, based on admittedly small evidence, that the country as a whole would be almost evenly divided on these policies. Although, when one considers that special elections over ballot measures feature low-turnout electorates more favorable to Republicans than do mid-term or Presidential elections, winning on a national platform like this seems like a real possibility.
Given that it is highly unlikely that Democrats will regain their national 7-10% advantage anytime soon, fighting Republicans in close elections with a platform like this becomes attractive. If the country is going to be closely divided electorally again, it would be nice to at least be divided over something worth fighting for. Paying for teacher's jobs by raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations would certainly fit the bill.
Rather than moving to the right, the results of the Oregon special election shows that Democrats could still win in a bad political environment if they tap into the extant populism against powerful, wealthy interests.
I'm not saying there aren't plenty of 2010 candidates that need our help. (There are! Please help!) I'm just saying that helping our previous progressive winners to close their books and retire their debts could encourage other Democrats currently running to follow in more progressive footsteps, knowing we have their backs.
I'll leave you with a few reasons to be very, very proud of Senator Al Franken's first months as a U.S. Senator (and very, very motivated to help retire his campaign debt):
The California Legislature approved a bill last week to extend voter registration privileges to 17-year-old citizens. If signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bill would help put California youth on the road to a lifetime of democratic participation.
Access to voter registration continues to be an issue in the U.S. where only 71 percent of the voting eligible population is registered to vote. With young, low income, and minority citizens lagging behind in voter registration and participation, this fraction of registered voters only represents a skewed picture of the American people.
If you sign up to join a union, you won't face coercion or intimidation from your co-workers-or employers. Despite dire warnings by corporations against the majority sign-up process, a new study shows majority sign-up (card-check) protects workers and gives them the chance they need to form a union. It's another critical point in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers across the country the choice about how to form a union and bargain for a better life.
The study, "Majority Authorizations and Union Organizing in the Public Sector: A Four-State Perspective," written by top labor policy scholars under the direction of Robert Bruno of the University of Illinois, looks at the experience of four states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Oregon) where public-sector workers have the freedom to form unions through majority sign-up. If passed, the Employee Free Choice Act would give millions of workers the option of using either majority sign-up or a National Labor Relations Board election to form a union.
In order to comply with new transparency requirements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, state governments across the country are scrambling to put up websites that track how they spend recovery dollars. In just the last week, the White House’s count of state transparency websites has jumped from ten to twenty-five. Of all these websites, not one lists the number of jobs to be created by private contractors. Without such data, the sites are close to meaningless.
Fortunately, Oregon is leading a push to require contractors to report the number of jobs they create, as well as the hours worked and wages received by their employees. These requirements, created under Oregon HB 2037, would ensure that Oregonians get a website that doesn’t just make an empty gesture toward transparency but one that ensures their tax money actually goes toward creating quality jobs.
The benefits of such a site are simple. If contractors are creating jobs with recovery money, they can get more. If they aren’t creating jobs, the state can take away their money and target it to contractors that are. If they are serious about using recovery dollars to turn the economy around, Oregon lawmakers should make it a top priority to adopt these new standards
If the country is serious about getting the recovery plan right, they will push their states to follow in Oregon's example. Considering the fact that states are poised to distribute over $300 billion of the $787 billion set aside under ARRA, the transparency standards we adopt at the state level will more or less amount to the transparency standards we adopt as a nation.
Better Democrat and Senator-elect Jeff Merkley spoke out against Lieberman keeping his gavel. I'll have a statement from his office shortly. Hopefully we can get the 13 Senators who voted no on Lieberman to come out publicly so we can praise them. So far, we know that Sanders, Leahy, and Merkley were against Lieberman keeping his gavel.
Meanwhile, Howard Dean recites Obama's talking points about Lieberman, saying that revenge isn't warranted against Lieberman, that this is what Obama wanted, and that it's pragmatic and smart. It is worth noting that Congress is very much looking to Obama for leadership on nearly every issue, so that there were as many as 13 is surprising. It's also suggestive that there's a real nucleus of independent progressive energy in the Senate, since their votes were directly against the wishes of the incoming President.
I just got off a conference call with Jeff Merkley, the Senator-elect from Oregon. He's as progressive as we hoped, emphasizing energy, climate change (Gore called him last week), media consolidation, and Wall Street regulations. More than progressive ideologically though, Merkley's got a Tester-like middle class background; he was actually worried about health insurance for his family were he not to win the Senate seat.
Though soft-spoken and more of an inside advocate than a firebrand, in response to a question about Lieberman by Sam Stein of the Huffington Post, Merkley said that it was like a "knife through my heart" to see Lieberman attacking Barack Obama, the "most extraordinary candidate he'd ever seen for President in my lifetime". Merkley also said, in terms of forgiveness for Lieberman, that "it's certainly possible, but there's certainly a lot of damage done to overcome." Trust me, for Merkley who is a soft-spoken guy that in the following video talks about being a proud community organizer, that's really really aggressive. Merkley's no friend of Holy Joe.
I pressed him on Larry Summers, and Merkley wouldn't go on the record about Summers or any other specific candidate for Treasury Secretary. he did say that "the process of deregulating at the retail level and Wall Street level did enromous damage", blamed predatory lending for some of the crisis, argued that "we're going to need fierce proponents for transparency" and said that he hopes Obama will "put people in place who have a strong understanding that conflicts of interest at the retail side and on the Wall Street sector are completely unacceptable". Larry Summers, of course, is a managing director of hedge fund DE Shaw. Merkley sees a historical precedent in the 1933 Congress and President addressing a complete lack of oversight in the financial markets, and hopes that "they'll do that again."
Ok, so the big dollar donor match I announced earlier happened with the first $5k, and that money is being moved to candidates as we speak. Congrats, you guys unlocked a bunch of money to great Democratic women. But there's still some money left on the table, since we haven't yet hit $15k that the donors promised to match. This money will be useful for the campaigns; there are last minute cable and TV buys happening and field programs, so if you can put something in, your donations will be doubled.
You can give here. Nearly every woman on the list is in a tough fight, a close fight, and your bit of cash could possibly tip the scales.
Molly the robot helped organize this Trick or Vote event through the Bus Project.
The most fun field innovation I've seen since I've been in politics is Trick or Vote, a Halloween costume party combined with a canvass. Canvassing can be difficult for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that people aren't home or are suspicious if you are knocking at their door for no seemingly good reason. On Halloween, people actually expect random visitors, and if you show up in costume they tend to be warm and welcoming. Coincidentally, Halloween is right near election day, so it's a great time to canvass.
Jefferson Smith, the founder of the Oregon Bush Project and current candidate for the state house in Oregon to fill Jeff Merkley's seat, noticed this a few years ago, and created the Trick or Vote event. Smith is one of the most charismatic and entrepreneurial progressive organizers in the country, someone highly respected in Oregon and all over the country. Ron Wyden will be coming by in an hour to speak; here's Smith explaining the project.
Should I tease with a long drawn out intro? Nahhhh. Based on spreadsheets sent to me directly by John Lindback, Oregon's Director of Elections, here is a graph of the ballot returns so far, broken by party affiliation:
You have to hand it to Gordon Smith, he is quick on his feet when he's cornered. Now he's lining up names like Kennedy and Barack Obama to shore up his image.
What is his real record?
Well, he has been a great legislator......for President Bush's failed policies:
1. He's supported tax-cuts for the wealthy.
2. He's supported Subsidies for Big Oil.
3. He's voted against allowing the government to negotiate lower drug prices through Medicare.
Gordon Smith - he is in someone's corner, and that is Bush's corner.
About a third of the entire construction crane capacity in North America is between Bellevue and Seattle.
I've been traveling around over the past few days throughout the unbelievably beautiful and ridiculously wet Northwest, and I'm struck by the commitment of this new generation of organizers, both on the Obama campaign and the campaigns of both Darcy Burner and Jeff Merkley. Merkley's race in particular has really heated up in the last few weeks, concurrently with the financial meltdown. They are progressive, they work extremely hard, and they are dedicated to a new way of doing politics. It's fascinating and inspiring.
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