CORRECTION: A reference to "Hawaiians" in this story was changed to "Hawaii residents," and it was the governor, not Lt. Gov. Josh Green, who mandated vaccines for state employees.
In this edition: A Democrat bets his campaign on pandemic management, an autopsy of the left's defeat in Ohio, and why the best-known candidates are skipping California's recall debates.
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HONOLULU — Last Tuesday, Hawaii Lt. Gov. Josh Green sent his son and daughter off for the start of the new school year. The 14- and 10-year olds left his home, which had been picketed by anti-vaccine protesters, and headed to their campuses, observing new coronavirus-safe rules that Green helped shape. Their father headed to work, checking the text chain he’d kept up for months between himself and liaisons for every hospital in Hawaii, preparing for that day’s live-streamed whiteboard update on total cases: 389 of them.
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“I've become like a part of the family for most of the state,” said Green, 51, sitting down next to a sheaf of infection data at his campaign office near the state Capitol. “I hear that every five minutes out there, when I'm walking around at the grocery store. It appears that I've formed a bond with people. Not just the Democratic Party electorate, or the primary electorate, but everybody.”
Green, an emergency room physician and longtime legislator, has been the face of Hawaii’s covid-19 response since the pandemic began. He’s running for governor next year on that record: Vaccines for teachers and state employees, indoor mask mandates for businesses and a “Safe Travels” system that requires people to show vaccination proof if they want to avoid quarantine upon arriving on the islands.
Since early spring, when coronavirus vaccines became widely available, red state governors have been on a tear against pandemic mandates. Texas restaurants that announce vaccine requirements get warning letters from the state. Florida Republicans can cool their beer using huggies with anti-mask quotes from Gov. Ron DeSantis. Bikers who ride to South Dakota are welcomed to “the freest state in the nation” by Gov. Kristi L. Noem.
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Those politics haven’t played well in Hawaii, and Green’s campaign for governor is the proof. As the virus’s more contagious delta variant spreads, Democrats are confidently positioning themselves as the party of vaccines and mandates. Eager to avoid 2020-style lockdowns, desperate to avoid both school closures and mass infections, they see an electorate that looks like the broader population: comfortable getting vaccinated and wary of getting sick.
“We think this is the right thing to do,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday, announcing that public school teachers would have to get vaccinated or submit to regular coronavirus tests as students return to classrooms. “We think this is a sustainable way to keeping our schools open and to address the number one anxiety that parents like myself have.” In increasingly blue Virginia, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe has embraced Gov. Ralph Northam's new mandate for masking in public schools; polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation this week found 63 percent of Americans comfortable with such a mandate, even as they were wary of requiring students to prove vaccination status.
Green’s situation is unique, like his state, which has not elected a Republican governor since George W. Bush’s presidency. Last April, as the coronavirus shut down most business and recreational travel, Hawaii’s unemployment rate increased tenfold, from a historically low 2 percent to a historically high 22 percent.
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“The virus was utterly devastating to our economy,” Green said. “It also meant that we became the state with the lowest covid rate in the country. We’ve consistently been the state that's had the lowest positivity rate and the lowest fatality rate. That came both as a blessing and a curse.”
Green had narrowly won the 2018 primary for lieutenant governor, becoming the running mate to a governor — Democrat David Ige — who’d gone through bouts of extreme unpopularity and who is now term-limited. The Ige-Green ticket won, and 14 months into their term, the pandemic began. The lieutenant governor was outspoken, calling for travel stoppages and quarantines; the governor initially sidelined him, but Green reestablished himself as a leader of the 20-member coronavirus task force, and as its public face.
Isolated from most Americans, wary of a disease that disproportionately affected native Hawaiians, Green’s constituents stuck with him. Polling at the start of summer found just 22 percent of voters approving of Ige’s performance, while 63 percent of them approved of Green’s. The lieutenant governor, who’d contracted the virus before vaccines were available, got the credit for mandates that voters still supported. Lieutenant governors are rarely so well-known in their own right, as we saw when New York’s Kathy Hochul was elevated to the national stage this week.
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Green’s internal polling was just as strong, finding 78 percent of potential Democratic primary voters approving of how he’d handled his job, and a 33-point lead over his strongest possible rival, U.S. Rep. Ed Case. The race is a full year away, and front-runners in Hawaii elections have been vulnerable to surprises. Green, who calls himself a “fiscal conservative,” is not a natural candidate for the party's most left-wing voters.
But no substantive opposition has emerged to Green or to the state's mandates. While anti-vaccine mandate rallies have spilled from the Capitol to Green's home, they've been small; representatives of the Aloha Movement, which has organized some of the rallies, did not respond to a request for comment. No well-known Republican has explored a run for governor yet, and the party's leadership has had to carefully navigate the space between anti-vaccine activists and support for vaccination that stops short of mandates.
“There's a lot of people out there who feel like the government is making decisions on behalf of them, their communities, their keiki [children] without consulting them,” state Rep. Val Okimoto, the leader of the four-member Republican conference in the 51-member state House of Representatives, said last week, criticizing the vaccine mandate for public-sector employees.
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But local Republicans have not shown the same brio as Florida's DeSantis or Texas's Gov. Greg Abbott, calling for state power to intervene and stop local schools or businesses from implementing mandates. Green, who updates Facebook Live viewers daily on the latest pandemic trends, has portrayed the situation as fluid, asking Hawaii residents to behave responsibility and insisting on the need to create tests like Save Travels as quickly as possible. Last week, as his 10-year-old and 14-year-old returned to the classroom, he contemplated what it would take for a reversal, an announcement that people who thought life was getting back to normal would need to adjust again.
“If the case counts plateau or drop, we're fine,” he said. “If there are outbreaks in schools and we can manage them, we're fine. And if our hospitals have the ability to provide care for that part of the committee, we're fine. If any of those things fail, then we have to put a firewall up and either close a school or close a classroom or do other things.” It wasn't what voters wanted to hear, but after more than a year of pandemic life, they weren't punishing him for it.
Reading list
“‘We are in harm’s way’: Election officials fear for their personal safety amid torrent of false claims about voting,” by Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman and Amy Gardner
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It's gotten a lot harder to do a nuts-and-bolts election job without harassment.
“Texas GOP hits new roadblocks in push for voting restrictions,” by Eva Ruth Moravec and Elise Viebeck
Democrats look for new ways to slow down a voting law.
“High-stakes redistricting process to start. Will Florida redeem bruised reputation?” by Mary Ellen Klas
Political operatives drew a map behind the scenes last time, and nobody wants it to happen again.
“Republicans risk becoming face of delta surge as key GOP governors oppose anti-covid measures,” by Felicia Sonmez and Hannah Knowles
Why “winning” the third phase might not impress voters if a fourth or fifth arrives.
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“Trump just won't stop messing with Mitch McConnell,” by Cameron Joseph
The ex-president doesn't want Republicans to give his successor a win.
“The spectacular implosion of Mike Lindell,” by Aaron Blake
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Will Donald Trump be reinstalled at the end of this week's cyber symposium? Maybe not.
What happened in Ohio?
At the start of June, Shontel Brown was in trouble. She'd entered the race for Ohio's 11th Congressional District in December, shortly after Rep. Marcia L. Fudge was nominated to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Fudge, a political mentor, had helped Brown rise from a city council seat to the leadership of Cuyahoga County Democrats, and her protege was a serious contender for the seat.
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But Nina Turner, the former Ohio state senator who'd co-chaired Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders's last presidential campaign, had comfortably outraised Brown. She'd sunk $500,000 into TV ads promoting her as a unifying, “progressive” voice for Cleveland and Akron. And she'd just released an internal poll that gave her 50 percent of the vote in the jampacked primary, to just 15 percent for Brown.
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The poll hurt Brown, whose campaign needed her friends in the Democratic Party — and the enemies Turner had made as a Sanders surrogate — to believe the race was winnable. Turner wanted them to believe she was running away with the race. For a while she was, and her defeat on Aug. 3 shocked allies who had been expecting her early lead, cash advantage and credentials as a candidate to put her in Congress.
“I am going to work hard to ensure that something like this never happens to a progressive candidate again,” Turner said in her concession speech. “See, we didn't lose this race. Evil money manipulated and maligned this election.”
Turner's take on the race has been broadly embraced in left-leaning media that had covered her campaign optimistically. “There will be independent expenditures well over a million dollars,” Turner told the American Prospect's Sarah Jaffe in late June, when Democratic Majority for Israel's DMFI PAC made its first six-figure ad buy against her. Her guess was too low: The PAC would spend nearly $2 million to defeat her, more than Brown herself would spend, while the business-friendly Democratic group Third Way's PAC spent another $500,000 against Turner.
“It’s difficult to see what might be drawn beyond the boringly bleak insight that organized money continues to dominate American politics — and is often terrifyingly capable of swatting down challenges to the status quo,” wrote Luke Johnson in the socialist magazine Jacobin. Another analysis of Turner's loss, by Alexander Sammon in the Prospect, focused on how Brown's campaign posted messaging suggestions for outside groups on its website. The Brown campaign didn't invent the tactic, he wrote, but by endorsing it “the Democratic Party has reached a low moment in its commitment to campaign finance standards.”
Turner raised $4.5 million and spent $3.9 million; Brown raised $2.1 million and spent $1.7 million. Without the PAC money, Turner would have had a 2-1 cash advantage. But Turner herself had expected the outside spending, so why was the campaign knocked off course by it?
One reason was that it probably spent too much too early. Turner's decision to go on the air in April, more than two months before early voting would begin, was splashy and helped reintroduce her to voters before anyone had the chance to attack her. The ads showed Turner walking through pivotal locations from her life, promising to be “a voice for change” in Congress. Turner, who'd battled Cleveland's political establishment at the start of her career, got the support of the city's outgoing mayor.
HuffPost called it a “normie campaign,” a reboot for a candidate whose fight against the Democratic Party's leadership once brought her to a 2016 counter-DNC convention with the Green Party's candidate for president. (“Dr. Jill Stein in the house!”) DMFI PAC's first ad warned voters that the old Turner was the real one, and summed up her criticism of the party with a quote she gave the Atlantic in 2020: “You have a bowl of s--- in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still s---.”
Turner's campaign saw the risk, and responded immediately, with an add attacking “out-of-state special interests” for “not telling the truth.” It wasn't effective. DMFI PAC's attack ads exploited Turner's own rhetoric and decisions as an internal, left-wing critic of the Democratic Party. The “bowl” comment was the most resonant, but the PAC also transformed Turner's protest vote against the 2020 Democratic platform as an attack on ideas like “universal health care.” The ads made some voters angry, but they turned more of them against Turner.
Could Turner have defused this by taking a page from the Republican candidates who'd recanted their 2016 criticism of Donald Trump? Could she have just apologized or retracted some of her Biden criticism? The campaign didn't see a reason to, and when asked by The Trailer about the idea, she rejected it.
“My focus is singular,” she said. “Who is a good Democrat? Is a good Democrat somebody that goes along to get along? The Democrats who opposed the radical Republicans, the ones fighting to abolish slavery: Were they all good Democrats? Or is does being a good Democrat mean that you are willing to bump up against the system?”
The Turner campaign simply didn't see her 2016 and 2020 criticism of Sanders's opponents as a real liability. It touted how much money the campaign raised in the 24 hours after Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown, and it brought rapper Killer Mike to Cleveland for an event that convinced House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who had quietly opposed Turner, to intervene and officially back Brown. The Brown team's attacks simply worked, and while Turner attacked Brown for depending on a partially Republican-funded PAC, she struggled to convince voters that Brown was corrupt or manipulated by donors.
When early voting began, in mid-July, Brown had closed the gap with Turner, and the onetime favorite was pulled into a negative ad war that drained her resources. That June 1 poll that temporarily froze support for Brown? Turner's team would end up paying Tulchin Research, which had also polled for the Sanders campaign, $100,000 for all services. Three times as much went to 518 Strategies, a digital ad firm founded by Sanders veterans. As the first voters cast ballots, Brown and PACs were actually outspending Turner on TV, even though Turner continued to raise more money than Brown.
Other left-leaning candidates have been able to win primaries despite being outspent. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), most famously, spent just a few hundred thousand dollars to win her 2018 race. Turner raised nearly three times as much as Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), another ally who came to northeast Ohio for her, did to unseat an incumbent in 2020.
Turner's unwise spending and her refusal to deal with what we'll euphemistically call the “half a bowl” issue were decisive factors in her loss, creating space for DMFI PAC to discredit her with suburban voters and a good share of older Black voters. And while DMFI PAC's ads didn't focus on Israel, Turner's criticism of anti-BDS laws (she does not personally support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign) got them interested in the race, and a grass-roots effort to turn out Jewish voters for Brown added to her margins on the east side of the district.
But for Turner, the story of the race was that big money came in and manipulated voters. Late last week, Turner joined a phone call for Our Revolution, the Sanders-founded group she'd run between his presidential campaigns, for an organizing call where she attacked the PAC money that reshaped her primary and said she'd have an announcement about her future in September.
“Rumors of my demise are premature,” she said.
Ad watch
MoveOn, “Caught Red Handed.” Off-year messaging ads continue to run in states with potentially competitive 2022 races, with Republican groups and Democratic groups trying to soften up incumbents' poll numbers. MoveOn is spending $1.2 million to run this digital spot in Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Wisconsin, portraying the GOP senators' votes against the Biden economic agenda as a kind of heist on behalf off “billionaires so rich that they shoot money into space while they dodge their taxes.”
Brian Harrison, “Fighter.” Earlier this year, Harrison left his role in the Trump administration's HHS to run for Congress in Texas's 6th Congressional District. He came in fourth place and missed the runoff after Trump endorsed Susan Wright, who'd go on to lose to Rep. Jake Ellzey. But that created a vacancy in Ellzey's old state House seat, and Harrison has jumped into the race to replace him by changing the campaign label, but nothing else, about the ads he ran in the May 1 primary. “I fight back and win,” Harrison says, using the same imagery of himself and Trump that he used before the ex-president undermined his House run.
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Poll watch
Thinking ahead to the school year, do you think your local public school should … (Fox News, 1002 registered voters)
Reopen fully in-person as usual: 36% (-15 since May)
Open in-person with social distancing and masks: 33% (+6)
Combine in-person and remote learning: 21% (+2)
Be fully remote: 7% (+6)
The delta variant of the coronavirus spread as most Americans, urged on by the White House, began to believing that the pandemic was ending. The issue of whether schools would resume in-person classes was seemingly settled, disappearing from campaigns for governor this year. Fox's polling has found a snapback in public opinion, with nearly 1 in 3 voters who'd said they favored full reopening without restrictions changing their minds. The same poll finds 54 percent of voters agreeing with the idea that schools should be “allowed to require teachers and students to either wear a mask or provide proof of a coronavirus vaccine,” as 61 percent of them favor something other than kids returning to the exact state of classrooms in February 2020.
Have you been vaccinated for covid-19? (Marquette Law, 807 registered voters in Wisconsin)
Republican
Yes: 45%
No: 43%
Independent
Yes: 71%
No: 23%
Democrat
Yes: 87%
No: 11%
Wisconsin's most trusted pollster has found both the president and Gov. Tony Evers (D) holding steady approval ratings, with Evers matching his numbers from last year and Biden slightly ahead of his support from the election. Both of them are benefiting from meeting most voters where they are on vaccinations. A bit less than half of Republicans are resisting vaccination, while around five-sixths of non-Republicans have already gotten the shot.
Redistricting watch
The Census Bureau released its delayed local data files on Thursday, the material that state legislatures and independent commissions need to draw new maps for the rest of the decade. We'll look in detail at the new numbers and what they mean in the next newsletter, but a few items jumped out immediately.
Urban growth. Before this data was released, non-White Democrats (especially Latinos) speculated that the Trump administration's campaign to keep noncitizens out of the Census led to undercounting in diverse states. The numbers are more mixed. Most of the nation's bigger, Democratic-leaning counties grew between 2010 and 2020, including New York's four most liberal boroughs, Illinois's Cook County (Chicago), and Pennsylvania's Allegheny County (Pittsburgh). That
Red tides in Florida. It was visible from the voter registration numbers, but the Census confirmed it: The most dynamic growth in Florida happened around The Villages retirement community, whose population grew by nearly 40 percent in a decade.
Rural (and White) decline. We already knew that population growth slowed over the last 10 years, compared to the previous 10. But we now know that first the first time, the Census found fewer White residents than it had 10 years earlier, and that the slowest growing counties, on average, were outside of the biggest cities and suburbs.
In the states
California. Rep. Ro Khanna (D) endorsed Sen. Alex Padilla for reelection next year, ending speculation that the three-term liberal Democrat from San Jose would challenge the appointed senator. Padilla, he explained, quickly proved that he was a “progressive fighter,” backing the left's legislative agenda and unlikely goals like filibuster reform.
Iowa. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R) continues to campaign alongside Republicans who may or may not want to return to her state eventually as candidates for president. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton (R) will join her at an August 20 fundraiser; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) will arrive eight days later for a “BBQ big bash fundraiser,” joining Hinson and Sen. Charles E. Grassley, who turns 88 next month but has not ruled out reelection.
Texas. Attorney Jessica Cisneros announced a new campaign for Texas's 28th Congressional District, after falling short to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D) in her 2020 primary challenge. “I feel like a lot of South Texans were left with hope because we asked them to envision something that was almost impossible — or what people said was impossible — last time around,” she told the Texas Tribune. Recruited in both races by Justice Democrats, Cisneros came close to winning in 2020 on the strength of Latino voters coming out to support Bernie Sanders in the March presidential primary, held on the same day as congressional contests.
Wisconsin. Rep. Ron Kind (D) will not seek reelection, a victory for Republicans who had never been able to beat the moderate even as his largely rural district shifted right. “I've run out of gas,” he explained on Tuesday, surprising Democrats who had wondered for more than a decade if he'd seek statewide office. Kind's retirement was a victory for Republicans' House campaign groups, which had not targeted him seriously (in his current district) until 2020, and spent the first half of this year attacking Kind over the human trafficking allegations levied against a tenant in a building he owned. In November, Kind narrowly defeated Derrick Van Orden, who would use some of his unspent campaign funds to join the Jan. 6 protest of the 2020 election results in Washington; Orden is running again next year.
California recall
The best-known Republicans running to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in the Sept. 14 recall election are Larry Elder and Caitlyn Jenner, who have never held elected office before. Both skipped the first candidate debate in Orange County, and both have said that they'll skip the next high-profile debate in Sacramento.
“I will not be doing any debates unless Gavin Newsom is present,” Jenner tweeted on Wednesday, after Inside California Politics noted that she and Elder had not confirmed their appearance at the Aug. 19 event in California's capital. “All recall candidates are on the same team. Gavin is the only opponent.”
That was as good as a blanket no-debates statement from Jenner, who has lagged in the low single digits since announcing her campaign; Newsom is not debating any of the candidates on the recall ballot. But Jenner was advancing the current party line on the recall, affirmed last weekend when the state GOP voted not to endorse any single candidate on the recall ballot.
“All candidates are on the same team as we make the case that California deserves so much better than Gavin Newsom,” state Assemblyman Kevin Kiley said last week, celebrating the decision.
“The Republican Party must be united to recall Gavin Newsom,” said John Cox, the businessman who unsuccessfully challenged Newsom in 2018, but has struggled for traction in the recall.
“The California Republican Party should unite toward the sole goal of driving support for this historic recall,” said former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who was building the most serious GOP campaign for governor in 2022, but has lagged behind Elder since the radio host entered the race at the last minute.
Not long ago, some Republicans thought it made sense to endorse a single candidate and pool resources behind him or her. That thinking changed after Republicans, intent on making the race a binary “yes or no” choice on Newsom, did not file a well-known candidate before the deadline. In an email obtained by the Associated Press, the state's RNC committee members argued to delegates that an endorsement would “discourage voters who are passionate about a particular candidate.”
The result, which the Trailer will cover in more detail next week, is less like one election and more like two elections happening for different sets of voters.
Newsom's “Stop the Republican Recall” campaign has elevated Elder, a conservative commentator who quickly raised $4.5 million thanks to his local and national fan base, and who they can portray as a far-right radical who's denied man-made climate change and supported Donald Trump. (Other recall candidates have been more circumspect about Trump, with Jenner giving incoherent answers to questions about who she supported for president.) Republicans, by choosing not to back any particular candidate officially, are letting a sort of intra-GOP contest play out, ready to celebrate whoever wins a plurality on the second part of the ballot if they get a majority of voters to recall Newsom.
As mentioned at the start of this issue, Newsom spent this week rolling out a vaccine mandate for public school teachers; every Republican recall candidate opposed it. Jenner will hold media-friendly events to highlight homelessness in west Los Angeles on Thursday, and to highlight illegal border crossings in San Diego; Elder will rally in San Jose.
Countdown
… 33 days until California's recall election
… 82 days until elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and primaries in Florida’s 20th Congressional District
… 152 days until the election in Florida's 20th Congressional District