This week, newly elected Republicans took office in several states, many of whom have big plans for the future of voting rights. Unfortunately, as we blogged and reported last month, these changes have little to do with actually assessing and improving state of elections. In fact, many of these officials used anti-immigration and voter fraud fear tactics to win their seats, and now are threatening to restrict access to the ballot via legislation or state ballot before 2012 elections.
Political scientist Boris Shor has a blog post premiering results from a forthcoming paper (pdf) where he goes to town mapping the ideological distribution of state legislators from 1996-2006. The post is titled, provocatively, "Scozzafava is a Conservative Republican (in New York)", and his reasoning is fairly straightforward: although the right is so upset with Scozzafava for being far too liberal that they may well be handing NY 23 to a Democrat, they aren't looking at the context:
Despite the laundry list of liberal issue positions held by Scozzafava, my research with Princeton's Nolan McCarty on ideology in American state legislatures shows that the Assemblywoman is actually a conservative Republican. Wait for it. Wait for it... In New York.
Her ideological "common space" score is 0.02. These scores, similar but far superior to interest group ratings, put state legislators around the country on the same scale with each other, as well as with members of Congress. Liberals have lower scores; conservatives higher ones....
Scozzafava's score puts her in the 58th percentile of her party, which makes her slightly more conservative than the average Republican legislator in Albany, so she's a conservative in her party. For example, she's more conservative than James Tedisco, who lost a special election to succeed Kirsten Gillenbrand in the 20th District (score: -.22 and in the most liberal fifth of the party). In the legislature as a whole, she's in the 83rd percentile, which makes her a conservative in Albany in general
Here's his chart of all the partisan state legislatures (Nebraska is officially non-partisan):
However, in the comments someone manages to throw some serious water on the claim, given that it appears Scozzafava has shifted ideologically while in office--a relatively rare phenomena in politics. So maybe the diary title is not really on the mark after all--but the larger point remains: there's an enormous difference in where Republicans and Democrats fall ideologically depending on the stat that they're from. You can see it simply by noting the lack of overlap between the bulk of Democrats to the left of the left-hand vertical grey line in states like California, New York, Washington, Wisconsin and Utah, and the bulk of Democrats to the right of that same line in state like West Virginia, Nevada, South Carolina, Arkansas, etc. A similar visual comparison can be made for Republicans as well.
When asked whether he intends to join the so-called "Fair Share" campaign being mounted by organized labor, the Working Families Party and others to get Gov. David Paterson and the Legislature to at least temporarily boost the PIT to avoid deep spending cuts, Silver said:
"This conference has in prior years has passed a increase in taxes on those who earn more than a million dollars. Clearly, that proposition by this conference is acceptable to a vast majority of people in this state."
Silver is correct, according to polls showing the majority of New Yorkers oppose Paterson's budget cuts and instead favor tax increases on the wealthy. And as states across the country struggle with budget shortfalls, these kinds of fights are going to keep coming up. The right will insist on balancing the budget with cuts to programs that help regular people, and it will be up to progressives to fight back with proposals to balance the budget with tax increases on the super-rich.
After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld one of the country's strictest voter ID laws in April, several states rushed to pass similar bills before the year's end. By December, more than 25 states introduced legislation to require voter ID at the polls. Though none of these bills were successful this year, lawmakers in several states are hoping to revive such restrictive requirements in 2009.
Since July of this year, at least seven states have pre-filed or carried over voter ID legislation for the 2009-2010 sessions, including Nevada, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.
It is important to ensure the wave extends as far as possible at the State House, Senate, AG, SoS, Gov, Lt.Gov, Mayor, Judge, City Council, School Board, Sheriff and dogcatcher level. Seriously, even at the bottom level Republicans can do a lot of harm. Just imagine cat-killer Bill Frist as your dogcatcher or Sarah Palin on your school board.
In addition to the vital function of building the Democratic bench strength, the State Legislatures and Governorships will be particularly important for the coming redistricting, as the DLCC says:
Time and time again, Republicans have shown that they will cut the Democratic voter base and gerrymander districts in favor of their incumbents, and now, when they take control of a legislature, they aren't even willing to wait until the end of the decade before they go to work.
Currently, of the 36 state legislatures that control Congressional redistricting, 27 chambers in 21 of these states are within 5 seats of tying or changing hands.
These 21 states control 260 Congressional districts.
Are state legislature races getting the priority they deserve? According to Tim Storey of the National Magazine of Policy and Politics, there are 28 of 84 legislatures that could go either way. Some of them are in large states that would dramatically impact redistricting in 2011.
We don't hear much about state legislative races on national blogs, because it would be overwhelming to keep up with what's going on all over the country.
But you should get involved on behalf of a good Democrat running for your state's Assembly, House or Senate. Here's why.
STATE BLOGS
