What You Should Know and Why You Should Care
(Editor’s Note: Longtime political analyst Jack Lessenberry spoke to SOAR, the Society of Active Retirees, about the coming election last week. This is a condensed version of his remarks.)
We are struggling to make sense of the midterm elections … and I want to start by observing that in my experience watching, studying and reporting on politics, which goes back to the 1960s, every candidate always says that their election is the most or one of the most important ever. Nobody ever says, “well, I’d like to be elected dogcatcher here in Farmington Hills, but if I don’t win, it’s not the end of the world.”
Nationally, the two parties also always say that each election will determine the fate and the future of the world, or the universe, or sometimes if they are being modest, just America.
Mostly, that is hyperbole. Does anyone remember the tremendous impact the midterms of 2002, exactly twenty years ago, had on our country? That’s okay, I don’t either!
But having said all that – this one really is different. This one might be the most crucial midterm election we’ve had in decades, if not ever, for one big reason. One of our major parties — the Republicans — is no longer committed to democracy, or the will of law. A majority of their representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives voted against certifying the electoral votes of some states in the last presidential election.
Voted against, that is, accepting the electoral votes of states that voted for Biden, even though there was and is absolutely no evidence of voter fraud anywhere in that election.
Why am I rehashing this ancient history? Because,sadly, it’s not ancient history. The vast majority of Republican candidates this year at all levels, federal, state and local, have signed on to the big lie that Donald Trump really won the last election but was cheated out of it.
That includes all the statewide candidates in Michigan, by the way. Many of the big lie supporters don’t really believe this, but say they do because they don’t want to be attacked and destroyed by the creature President Biden calls “the former guy.”
By the way, I find it very annoying that Trump has been allowed to dominate the news as much as he has since his defeat. Traditionally, defeated Presidents and presidential candidates vanish after the election for at least a year.
Did you see much of John Kerry or Jimmy Carter the first George Bush for the first year after they lost? Did anyone ever see Michael Dukakis ever, except maybe on a milk carton?
But, why would we expect Trump to be gracious? He says the election was stolen from him, though in fact, there is utterly no evidence of fraud, and while 2020 was a relatively close election, Biden won by seven million popular votes — that’s about seventy times John F. Kennedy’s margin, by the way, and several times higher that Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush’s margin. He won every state he carried by more than 10,000 votes. Biden got more electoral votes, which is what really counts, than Richard Nixon in ’68, Kennedy, Carter, Truman, George W. Bush both times – the list goes on.
And two more, I should add, than Trump got in 2016.
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So this idea of election fraud is all BS, but the problem is that this cancer has now spread to other Republicans. Kari Lake, who is likely to be elected governor of Arizona, says she won’t accept the election result as legitimate unless she wins.
Tudor Dixon, who we will get to in a while, has hinted she might not accept the result here if she loses. Good luck with that. But what if Republicans win one or both houses of Congress this year? What might happen after the 2024 Presidential election? Carl Marlinga, a retired judge who is the Democratic candidate for Congress in Macomb County, reminded me recently of what almost happened January 6:
The Capitol riot, and the attempt to stop the certifying of the electoral vote. “They had two months to come up with that, and they were in a minority,” Marlinga told me. “Imagine what might happen if they have a majority and two years?”
That’s why this election is so important. Not since the Civil War have we had a major party that rejected democracy. (And in that case, they left our country and tried to start their own.)
Unfortunately, as of now, it looks like Republicans are likely to win a majority in at least the House — and they have a shot at the Senate too. It will likely come down to turnout, and what issues voters think are more important: If it is inflation, that favors Republicans. If it is Democracy and Reproductive Rights, that favors Democrats.
Early on in this cycle, it looked like Republicans might make huge gains, for two reasons. Inflation was one, and the party that holds the White House loses an average of 28 seats in the House and four in the Senate in a President’s first midterm election. Republicans don’t need to gain many seats.
Democrats now control the House by a razor-thin margin of 220 to 212, with three vacancies, which means all the GOP has to do is pick up six seats. They looked well on the way to doing that until June 24. That was the date the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case called Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe vs. Wade.
Suddenly, there was no constitutionally protected right to an abortion any more. And for perhaps the first time in his life, Donald Trump said something both honest and true: “This is going to hurt Republicans.”
Every sign indicates that he is right. Now every professional survey for years has found that a majority of Americans are opposed to late-term abortions, those after 20 weeks. But an overwhelming majority think it should be legal in the first trimester, and an even bigger majority think abortion should be legal in cases of rape and incest.
The Republican Party, which until recently never really thought the Supreme Court would do that, had locked itself into an extreme anti-abortion position. As the wonderful historian Heather Cox Richardson put it, “the dog has caught the car.”
This produced a dramatic shift in political polling, for a while. But as we moved through fall and inflation remained stubbornly high, Republican poll numbers began to move up.
Democrats also seem to have been hurt somewhat by redistricting. This isn’t the case in Michigan, where our new nonpartisan redistricting commission has given Democrats a more level playing field in both Congress and the state legislature, which had been gerrymandered by Republicans for years. But elsewhere, because of population migration, five of the seven states losing representation in Congress are generally blue, like Michigan. Six of the seven states gaining seats are red.
So indications are that there is about an eighty percent chance that the Republicans will capture control of the House, though it seems likely that they may gain no more than 20 seats or so, though we don’t even know that. Remember, this is not one election, but 435 separate races. Even if it is a very good night for Republicans, some Democrat is likely to capture some Republican seat somewhere, and vice versa.
As for the Senate, as you know, it’s currently deadlocked 50 to 50, which means Vice President Kamala Harris has broken a lot of ties to get key legislation passed. Now if Republicans gain that average four seats, that will be the end to President Biden getting anything through, including Supreme Court nominations, for the next two years. And you never know when God might decide to call Clarence Thomas home …
But Democrats have gotten lucky in two ways. First of all, only about a third of the Senate is elected at any one time. And of the 35 Senate seats up this year, Republicans now hold 21; Democrats 14. So Democrats have a lot less turf to defend, and a lot more opportunities to pick up seats.
And on top of that, Republicans have nominated some really awful candidates, like Hershel Walker, and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. Republicans should have had a real shot at unseating New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, who was elected by only a thousand votes six years ago. But Bolduc’s been so weak the Republicans have been transferring money from his campaign to Pennsylvania.
Michigan doesn’t have a senate race this year, by the way, and most of the races nationwide are not really competitive. Democrats have no chance in Oklahoma, Missouri, South Carolina or Kansas, for example; Republicans have no chance in Illinois or California, Connecticut or Hawaii.
But there are a few hotly competitive races. Democrats are most in danger in Nevada, where a freshman Democrat named Catherine Cortez Masto is running neck and neck with Adam Laxalt, whose grandfather was a popular Senator from the state.
That is, I believe, the Dems most vulnerable seat. The Republicans’ weakest and most contemptible candidate is, of course, Hershel Walker, who is attempting to defeat Senator Raphael Warnock, who won a special election on Jan. 5, 2021, thanks in large part to Donald Trump going down there and making a mess of things. I don’t think I need to say anything about Walker’s scandals or the fact that it is painfully clear that he is in no way up to the job.
But he still might win; people don’t talk about this much, but Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville (you couldn’t make up that name, right?) was every bit as ignorant when he got elected two years ago, and likely still is.
Two other races to watch at Pennsylvania, where the Trump-supporting TV doctor Amos Oz is just slightly trailing John Fetterman, who may have been politically damaged by the stroke he is still recovering from, and Ohio, where dark horse candidate Tim Ryan has kept that race surprisingly close, against JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
Part of this may be due to the fact that if authenticity were a food, Vance would have starved to death during this campaign. Still, Ohio has become a solid Trump state, and it would be a minor miracle if Ryan won.
If Dems win Georgia and Pennsylvania, they are very likely wind up with at least 50 seats, 51 if they can hold on to Nevada. But we’ll just have to see.
By the way, there’s one sleeper race: Iowa, where Admiral Mike Franken, a Democrat, is takin in the incumbent, Chuck Grassley, who is 89 years old and was first elected to the Senate in 1776. The expectation is that Grassley will win because he always does, but some polls show Franken coming up fast.
Now to turn to our statewide races in Michigan, beginning with the contest for governor. There’s one thing everyone can agree on about Gretchen Whitmer: Whatever your politics, she hasn’t done everything perfectly.
The right wingers are upset with her COVID lockdown policies, which I think saved countless lives. I am upset with the fact that she sold out to the big insurance companies, after being egged on to do so by Mike Duggan. Consumers got a temporary small reduction, and in return we lost the full catastrophic care coverage Michiganders involved in serious auto accidents always had.
But apart from that, she has done a pretty good job and engineered more bipartisan cooperation on some things than we’ve seen in a long time.
Nevertheless, a lot of people are mad at her, mostly I think for the wrong reason — the lockdown over COVID. I would stop to get gas in rural places in red Michigan during the pandemic and there would be signs that said.
“If you come in here you have to wear a mask by order of Governor Whitmer – a Democrat.” I guess they think she should just have told people to drink bleach instead.
Now, not everyone knows this, but Michiganders tend to give their governors second terms. No incumbent of either party has failed to win a second term since 1962, when the charismatic and well-known George Romney barely beat John Swainson. Nevertheless, I think Whitmer might have been beatable this year, if Republicans had nominated a candidate who could have won.
The logical choice would have been Fred Upton of Kalamazoo, who was redistricted out of the seat in Congress he’s held for 36 years. Though he is a fairly traditional conservative, he comes across as a moderate and might have had some appeal across party lines, since he did vote to impeach Trump the second time.
Now I don’t know if Fred would have wanted to be governor, but I do know that he couldn’t have even tried to run, because he had voted to impeach Trump, and the Trump crazies dominate the Republican Party now – especially the primaries. So he just decided to retire.
Now, as you may also know, the Republicans’ original preferred candidate for governor, as well as several other candidates, were tossed off the ballot once it was determined they had fraudulent petition signatures. Turned out they bought them from someone who had gotten in legal trouble before for selling fraudulent signatures. Hey, it’s called due diligence.
Makes you wonder how they’d had have handled the state’s business. So in the end, they had four unknown but nutty men on the August ballot, and one attractive woman who no one had heard of either.
Guess who won. The improbably named Tudor Dixon finished first with 40 percent of the vote. Trump endorsed her, but not till it was clear she was going to win anyway.
Like all her primary rivals, she has never run for anything before, nor spent a day working in government. Other than being a commentator on a right-wing streaming service called Real America’s Voice, the only job she seems to have held was as a salesmen for a steel company her father owned that went bankrupt in a cloud of unpaid bills, bounced checks, and workers’ complaints about unsafe labor practices.
Oh, and of course she acted in some zombie movies. In the one in which she stars, Buddy BeBop vs. the Living Dead, zombies bite a man’s genitals.
When she was asked how that squared with her family values campaign, she said, they were strictly adult movies, and she never watched them anyway.
Why anyone would think someone with those credentials could run a major industrial state is totally baffling.
Incidentally, when she sends out tweets or messages on her own, she is barely coherent and can’t spell very well.
Then last week we learned she is even more ignorant than we thought, or a flat-out liar, or both, and in any case she is a hate-filled bigot. One of her commentaries from June 2020 surfaced in which she said Democrats were mainly upset because they lost the civil war, and were really scheming to enslave people again.
The best reaction to this was that of President Obama when he was campaigning in Detroit last weekend. When this came up, he said “First of all … what?” and then he added, “I don’t actually have anything left to say.”
The respected site 538.com gives Whitmer an 88 percent chance to win. But never say never. Just ask anyone who was around for the governor’s race in 1990, when Jim Blanchard was ahead by 14 points going into the final weekend –and lost.
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By the way, if Tudor, who people are calling “Tooter,” isn’t bad enough the Republican candidates for attorney general and secretary of state are in fact worse.
In an odd quirk of Michigan government, the candidates for these positions are chosen, not by the people, but by the party hacks meeting around Labor Day.
Now, I frankly think the Republicans could have won the race for Michigan’ s Attorney General this year, if they had nominated the candidate they ran last time, former Speaker of the House Tom Leonard, who is a conservative but not a crazy.
Leonard lost to Nessel in the very Democratic year of 2018 by only 115,000 votes, while Gretchen Whitmer and Jocelyn Benson were piling up margins of about 400,000 votes each.
Some voters, it has to be said, don’t like Nessel’s abrasive style, personality and sense of humor; some, frankly, probably don’t like that she is married to another woman and is a strong supporter of transgender rights. She also could be criticized for her department’s prosecution of the Flint water cases; the criminal charges against seven state officials have all been dismissed, which I would think was embarrassing.
But Nessel is likely to be re-elected and should be reelected, for one big reason: Matt DePerno, the candidate Trump insisted Michigan Republicans nominate to run against her. As one Republican strategist really said “the less people know about him, the better our chances are.”
DePerno was actually fired from one law firm for alleged padded and false billings. He also allegedly physically assaulted a client. One retired Republican judge said of him,”the guy’s got no ethics at all.”
Now, for the really bad stuff:
If DePerno has no ethics, he also may eventually have no law license. His biggest claim to fame is that he has been loudly claiming the election stolen, and raised something like $400,000 to challenge the results.
But know what? Nobody knows where that money went, and there have been calls for a legal investigation. But DePerno is already under a criminal investigation by a special prosecutor to see if he participated in a scheme to tamper with vote tabulating machines. If he wins, Michigan could become the first state to have an attorney general who was disbarred and sent to prison. I’m not sure that’s a distinction we really want.
As for Secretary of State, the situation in some ways is even worse – not just for Republicans, but for Michigan and democracy. The Republican nominee, Kristina Karamo, has no qualification whatsoever for the job, and indeed apparently doesn’t even know what the secretary of state does.
She said earlier this year that her two main reasons for running for secretary of state were “to prevent teachers from introducing elementary school students to the delights of sex,” and to “stop abortions after the 40th week of pregnancy.”
Those two things aren’t exactly in the job description for secretary of state. The office deals with automotive and driver licenses, and with elections. That’s what the SOS does
They don’t monitor classrooms to see what kids are learning about sex. They have nothing to do with abortion, though I do have some good news for Ms. Karamo: Abortions after the 40th week of gestation are no longer a problem, because the babies have been born by them.
Aside from those things, the only problem with Ms. Karamo is that she is genuinely bat-shit crazy. She believes in QAnon; thinks gay and transgender people are possessed by Satan, calls herself an anti-vaxxer and is against the teaching of evolution in schools, and according to her ex-husband, tried to kill their whole family when he asked for a divorce.
She also is, of course, an election denier who claims she saw massive fraud in Detroit when the votes were being counted, a claim that has been proven to have been wrong.
And if you are wondering why in the world she is the Republican nominee for Secretary of State, the answer is clear:
She supports the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump, and he endorsed her and told the state party to nominate her, and the followers of his cult saw to it that she was.
Which is obscene. Try to imagine what would happen if she somehow were to beat Jocelyn Benson next week.’
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Now let’s look at the Congressional races.
As you may know, Michigan is losing another seat in Congress. Since 1980, we’ve lost five seats in the US House of Representatives, and even more political clout, which is perhaps a topic for another day. As of now, the parties are tied – Republicans and Democrats each have seven seats.
But that won’t be the case next year; we will have only thirteen total. We also have another new factor – the new districts have been drawn by the new Michigan Independent Redistricting commission, which was designed to end gerrymandering, create more competitive districts and keep communities together so far as possible.
Well, they weren’t perfect, but they did make both the congressional and legislative districts much more fair and competitive, which is good news for Democrats.
They didn’t, however, keep communities together very well, and they sharply cut down on what are known as majority-minority districts, those with black majorities of voters, but in fairness, this has become harder to do, because integration is working, Populations are more diffused and spread out.
So looking at Michigan’s new congressional districts, I can tell you that four are going to send a Democrat to Congress no matter what, and that four are hotly competitive, and five are projected to elect a Republican, no matter what.
If you are a Republican, you have to face the fact that Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Haley Stevens and Debbie Dingell and Shri Thanedar are guaranteed to win next week,
If you are a Democrat, you should know that your candidates have no realistic chance against Jack Bergman in the upper part of the state, even though he lives mainly in Louisiana, or Lisa McClain in the thumb, or against Tim Walberg,whose district stretches across southern Michigan, or Bill Huizenga or John Moolenaar in Midland.
But that leaves four races that are close, intense, and may decide who controls the House in 2023 — and beyond.
The four battlegrounds are:
The new 10th district, entirely in Macomb County, nationally famous as the symbol of blue-collar voters who switched from Democrats to Republicans with Ronald Reagan.
According to the analysts, the district has a six-point natural Republican advantage, which is close enough for a strong Democrat to possibly overcome.
Republicans are running John James, an African-American businessman who came close to beating U.S. Sen. Gary Peters two years ago, and made a respectable showing against U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow two years before that.
The GOP is pouring millions into James’ campaign, and he is seen as the favorite. But Democrats have a chance, for two reasons: They are running Carl Marlinga, who was Macomb County’s highly respected prosecutor for two decades, before becoming a probate and then a circuit judge.
Marlinga has name recognition, and surveys show that he is regarded favorably by most voters. But he has little money. James’ name is known, but he has a problem: He doesn’t live in the county, or anywhere close to it, and has no apparent plans to move. In Macomb, an insular and clannish place, that could matter.
The new Third District, centered on Grand Rapids, currently has freshman U.S. Rep. Peter Meijer, a moderate Republican who narrowly defeated Democrat Hillary Scholten in 2000. But the new district is more Democratic, and in the GOP primary, Meijer was defeated by John Gibbs, a far-right conspiracy theorist. Privately, many in both parties think this is a seat Republicans have thrown away.
Eighth District: This Flint-based district has been held by a Democrat named Kildee since 1976 – the late Dale Kildee until 2012, and his nephew Dan ever since. Usually they have won easily, but the new district is a tossup between the parties.
Dan Kildee is being challenged by Republican Paul Junge, a former TV anchor who ran in a different district and lost narrowly to Elissa Slotkin two years ago.
Finally, the new Lansing-based Seventh District is the most competitive of all. Elissa Slotkin, 46, is a two-term Democrat with an impressive pedigree. The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 inspired her to join the CIA; she soon rose to be a director of the National Security Council and then an assistant secretary of state. Four years ago, she defeated a lackluster GOP incumbent, and was narrowly reelected in 2020.
Now, however, she is in a district with a slight GOP advantage, and is facing a well-known GOP state senator, Tom. Tom Barrett. You can expect both parties to pour more than $10 million each into this race — for a job that lasts two years and pays $174,000 a year.
Do the astronomical sums elections cost today make sense? You know the answer. What can be done about that is, of course, the real question.
LEGISLATURE
House leans R; Senate D
It has been 39 years since Democrats had a majority in the Michigan Senate, and twelve years since they had a majority in the Michigan House of Representatives. But now both chambers are competitive; on paper, Democrats have a slightly better shot at getting the state senate; Republicans, the House.
But we’ll just have to wait and see.
Supreme Court of the State of Michigan
There are seven members of the Michigan Supreme Court, and unlike the justices on the Supreme Court of the United States, they are elected by the people to eight-year terms, and can’t run for reelection once they reach 70.
Technically these are non-partisan seats, but they are normally placed on the ballot by the major political parties.
Right now, there are four Democratic justices; two hardline Republicans and one Republican, Beth Clement, who sometimes votes with the Democrats on other than business issues.
Two sitting justices are up for reelection — Democrat Richard Bernstein and Republican Brian Zahra. And guess what. Both are extremely likely to be re-elected. Not only do they have far more money in the form of campaign donations, but it says on the ballot under their names that they are justices of the Supreme Court, meaning everybody else is Brand X.
And we know from watching all those TV commercials when we were growing up that you always want the name brand, right? So for the other Republican candidate, Paul Hudson, that’s too bad. The Democrat, State Rep. Kyra Harris Bolden, will likely lose too. But not to worry – after the election, Chief Justice Bridget McCormack is resigning, and all indications are that Governor Whitmer may appoint Bolden to succeed her; Michigan has never had a black woman on the state supreme court.
Finally, there are the BALLOT PROPOSALS
To a certain extent, the most important thing on the ballot may not be the candidates, although who wins these elections will be important.
But even more important may be on three hugely important ballot proposals which may stimulate turnout far more than the candidates.
All are proposed constitutional amendments. And whether they pass or fail, they are bound to have a major impact on the state for as far into the future as anyone can see. Proposal 2 would make it much easier and more convenient to vote. Proposal 3 deals with what has become the hottest of all hot button issues: Abortion.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Michigan apparently reverted to a 1931 law that outlawed almost all abortions and made performing one a felony. A state judge has temporarily blocked enforcement of that law because of a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality, but it could be reinstated.
Pro-choice individuals and groups anticipated abortion rights could be in jeopardy long before the Supreme Court ruling, and formed a group called Michigan Reproductive Freedom for All.
They then collected 753,759 signatures — the most in state history — to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect a woman’s right to an abortion in virtually all circumstances.
While it says “the state may regulate the provision of abortion care after fetal viability,” it emphasizes “that in no circumstance shall the state prohibit an abortion that … is medically indicated to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual.”
Opponents are likely to charge that this means abortion on demand in any case, no matter how far along the pregnancy.
What does seem certain is that this proposed constitutional amendment is likely to break all records for spending. Perhaps $30 million of more, with the pro-choice spending more than the anti-abortion forces.
The result may depend on what may be a majority of voters who are favor of keeping abortion legal in the early stages of pregnancy and in cases of rape or incest, but who aren’t happy with the extremes of either a total ban or third trimester abortions on demand.
While the abortion issue is bound to bring voters to the polls, another proposed constitutional amendment, Promote the Vote 2022, may excite almost as much interest.
Four years ago, the ad hoc group Promote the Vote managed to get an amendment passed that allowed anyone in the state to get an absentee ballot and added a number of other reforms, such as allowing voters to register on Election Day itself.
Promote the Vote 2022 is designed to make voting easier still; it would provide for nine days of early voting, something that hasn’t been allowed in Michigan, and would also publicly subsidize absentee ballots. In fact, it would allow voters of any age to register to get absentee ballots for every election.
The amendment would also, among other things, allow people without ID to continue to cast ballots if they sign an affidavit, require numerous ballot drop-off boxes, require that only the official vote count can be certified; and prevent outsiders from auditing the vote.
Generally speaking, Democrats enthusiastically support this amendment; Republicans do not. Supporters raised $8.4 million through June alone, after which they turned in 669,972 signatures, far more than the 425,059 valid signatures needed.
There is also a third proposed constitutional amendment , Proposal 1 that, in any other year, would have gotten more attention. It was put on the ballot by the legislature in May and which is backed by a group called Voters for Transparency and Term Limits.
Currently, Michigan legislators can serve up to 14 years – six in the state house of representatives, and eight in the state senate. Then they are banned for life. The proposed amendment would cut the time they can serve to 12 years, but allow them to serve it all in one chamber. Supporters say it would make for a better legislature with more experienced lawmakers. Opponents are against any change in the state’s strict term limits policy, which was enacted in 1992.
The original proposal also established strict financial disclosure requirements for the lawmakers, but that panicked the legislature, which weakened those requirements considerably.
Still, for those concerned with ethics, passing this would be a start. As it stands now, Michigan and Idaho are the only states whose legislators have no financial requirements whatsoever.
What remains to be seen is how many otherwise stay-at-home voters will be motivated by any of these proposals — and if so, which party is helped more by that higher turnout helps either party, as well.
Well, that’s a fairly broad tour of this year’s elections. Next week, we’ll see if what I predicted actually came true. Thank you.
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