We were popping the champagne last night, when the conversation quickly turned to how to capitalize on our victory and the just deserts suffered by the GOP for all their hateful rhetoric and obstructionism. The most important time to wage these critical, difficult battles is right now, when the corrupt opposition is deflated, demoralized and disunited, and when our sense of enthusiasm and joint accomplishment is highest. Especially on matters like combating voter suppression, ensuring the fidelity of results and doing smart filibuster reform, we have a window to consolidate our efforts and push hard for the necessary reforms. I know I'm probably preaching to the choir on many of these, but I thought it would be useful to focus these efforts under one roof. I'll be spouting off in some detail here, but wanted to be as comprehensive as possible. Would love to hear you all's ideas on all this, too.
1. Combating voter suppression
This has to be Priority #1, and we should attack it from every angle under the sun- continuing our challenges of Voter ID laws, encouraging convenient, high-turnout registration and GOTV options like motor voter and vote-by-mail, ensuring multi-lingual ballots and wherever possible, encouraging criminal penalties (and general discomfort) for any GOP thug who tries to obstruct voting.
As I'm sure many other Diarists have been urging, the state-by-state Secretary of State positions throughout the country should become prime targets for Democratic campaigning, especially in Midterm years. It's critical to keep the taxpayer-salaried fraudsters like Katherine Harris and Jon Husted out, and make life as miserable as possible for them if they happen to back-door their way in. And whenever we do happen to capture an SoS position and/or a state legislature, we should focus aggressively on easing voter registration and early voting with statutes and if possible, State Constitutional changes that are tough to roll back. This is one area where it's worth it to be aggressive hard-asses, because the GOP has now been forced into the painful position of being losers whenever Americans simply engage in the most basic act of democracy.
2. Ensuring the vote count and heading off any GOP fantasies of electoral fraud
I don't think that vote-machine tampering or similar shenanigans were much of an issue in this election itself, but the temptation for Republicans to engage in it is becoming overwhelming. They've permanently angered so many constituencies (college students, minorities, women, professionals, the working class, dog-lovers, people with functioning frontal lobes) that they're coming to realize that a bit of number-massaging may soon be their only path to high office. Combine that with all the dirty money they get from the Koch Brothers, Adelson, hedge fund managers and other super-wealthy crooks, and you have a toxic combination. I've worked in 3rd-world countries before, and it's shocking how common electoral fraud and vote-miscounting are- everything from hacked voting machines to ballots from unfriendly precincts "conveniently" being lost on the way to being tallied. Too often the screwed-over electorate, rather than fighting back, simply acquiesces out of fear of retribution or rocking the boat.
In practice, this primarily means ensuring redundancy and strict transparency at all levels of the count, with steep fines and penalties for wrongdoing (which already exist in many states but could use some improvement in others). As other diarists have pointed out, this would be things like providing PIN numbers to voters on electronic machines to verify who they voted for, multiple paper trails, paper ballots instead of (or alongside) the machines, federal election monitoring and even the force of federal law to standardize the process (won't be easy with the GOP-led House but maybe something that could be slipped into an amendment?), strict surveillance of collected ballots from the polling location to the counting site, and counting conducted in the view of Webcammed broadcasts, so that the public can follow and ensure full transparency.
3. Accelerated voter registration of the mainland Puerto-Rican population.
A friend of mine placed a big-time emphasis on this leading into the 2012 elections, and I'm coming to think this may be a sleeping giant to dismantle the Republicans even further. Puerto Rico has been grossly damaged by the GOP's little tinpot dictators on the island, victimized by Republican cronyism and corruption. This has forced much of the population onto the mainland, with a disproportionate number settling in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and Arizona, joined by many others moving south from New York and Massachusetts. The Puerto-Rican population has been only mildly mobilized relative to their numbers, but as a result of the GOP's repeated offenses and arrogance against them, and their status as citizens, they're in a good position to take revenge against the GOP corruption machine. This could help us to for example, turn slightly Bluish Purple States like Florida into more reliable Blue ones in the elections to come. In fact of all the GOP thugs that I'd be delighted to see humiliated in the next few elections- outside of the ringleaders like McConnell, Demint, Cantor and Boehner- that fraud-committing criminal Rick Scott tops the list.
4. Sensible filibuster reform.
I'm cautious about getting rid of the filibuster entirely, as I think it can be a security buffer for us to protect critical programs in light of the GOP's continuing drift to the right of Mussolini, Ghengis Khan and Dickensian Britain. However, the filibuster is crying out for reform so that it can't be used as a default to require a supermajority on every single vote, which is what we have with this "virtual filibuster" that allows the GOP to painlessly demand a 60-vote majority. The filibuster should be painful to use and infrequent, reserved for rare cases of extremist, outrageous legislation, when there's genuine and sustained passion against a piece of legislation, and above all when the filibusterers have the support of the American people and the middle class, which overwhelmingly favors the Democrats over the pluto-crats in the GOP.
As it's been suggested before, the heart of it is to first of all, place the burden of filibustering on the filibusterers themselves. As it stands now, the filibusterers don't need to be physically present while they're doing the deed. Instead, there should be a strict demand that all filibusterers must be present at all times to carry on the filibuster, otherwise it's clotured automatically. Likewise, there should be a requirement for an actual filibuster, with the cots and sleeping bags like in the good old days, and the searing attention of the media focused squarely on the filibusterers at every moment. Maybe a modest boost in the number of Senators needed to filibuster, from 40 to 42 or 43, might also be a shift in the right direction. This is especially important for Obama's appointments to the Supreme Court, we can't repair our broken campaign-finance system among other things so long as Scalia and his merry band of idiots are anywhere close to a 5-vote majority.
5. Advancing the Purpling of Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi and other changing states.
I'm doubtful that Texas, let alone a state like Mississippi, will be Blue-leaning or even very Purple by 2016, but the day is coming. We can help move it along by a focus on the State and Local level, and increasing the engagement of the minority and college-age populations, who currently feel marginalized and disenfranchised. Obama's team was right to focus our resources on the immediately winnable battlegrounds in 2012, but in the flush of victory, we can now accelerate laying the groundwork for expanding our map.
We've been making gradual inroads in the urban centers and even some of the suburbs of Texas, aided of course by demographics and changes in the focus of the Texan economy. But turnout among the professionals and artists in Austin and Houston, or the Latino and African-American populations throughout the state, has lagged badly behind other states. I was in Texas last year, and it surprised me how many Blue voters and proud liberals there are even in some of the rural regions, who at this point just don't feel engaged by the political process. But if we can beef up our organization in the medium-ish cities as well as the urban centers, we can help to build up the farm team that will hit the big leagues in 2016 and especially 2020. Also certainly wouldn't hurt if we could channel Molly Ivins and launch a tough-talking, statewide star of our own in the process.
Arizona OTOH will likely be Purple already in 2016. Obama wasn't far away from catching McCain himself there in 2008, and although the margins weren't close in 2012, that's for the most part simply because his ground game was sensibly focusing resources elsewhere. Arizona has a fast-growing Latino population that's been justifiably angered by the antics of Brewer, Arpaio, Pearce and the other asshats who populate Arizona GOP politics. There was actually a decent voter registration and GOTV drive by some outside groups. While it naturally wasn't enough to flip the state in 2012, it's a nice base to build upon for Arizona in 2016, especially in combination with the college towns and the slowly growing communities of artists and high-tech workers around Phoenix. Mississippi is also witnessing fast demographic change, not so much as Arizona or Texas but still significant, with a majority-minority school population entering voting age. Also my impression from a business trip there earlier this year is that the college towns like Oxford, as well as Jackson and Hattiesburg, are starting to show the early indications of a professional class that draws in a number of Blue-staters thanks to the low cost of living, much like Austin did in the early 1990's. Maybe even Louisiana is moving in that direction, though haven't been there lately so can't really say much about it.