Mike Males at Yes! magazine writes—How First-Time Voters Led Change in a Deep-Red State. Election night’s most surprising Democratic victory defies the trend of a growing urban-rural chasm:
Beyond Democrats’ gain of nearly 40 seats to take control of the House of Representatives, the specter of widening national division looms even larger.
Election returns show rural areas (as in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee, Georgia, etc.) turned even redder, while more urbanized areas (coastal California, downstate New York, the Washington, D.C., area, but also parts of the urban and suburban Midwest such as Dallas, Kansas City, and Des Moines) went from blue to bluer.
What happened? Basically, returning voters voted only slightly more Democratic in 2018 than in 2016. But the key difference is that new, first-time voters, jumping from 10 percent of the electorate in 2016 to 16 percent in 2018. That increase accounted for more than half of the Democrats’ margin of 9.3 million votes, driving their House sweep.
There’s a silver lining to all this, but it’s unclear whether it’s applicable to other parts of the country or if it’s an outlier. The biggest illustration of a promising new reality is election night’s most surprising Democratic victory, one that defies the growing urban-rural chasm.
Political wonks from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com to The Guardian’s election analysts agreed in bafflement that the biggest, unpredicted lurch to the left occurred in the 5th Congressional District in the middle of deep-red Oklahoma.
The gerrymandered district combines once-Republican Oklahoma City with two reliably GOP rural counties. Its voters supported Trump by 13 points in the 2016 presidential election. It also handily elected Republicans to Congress since 1975, including two-term incumbent Steve Russell by margins topping 20 points. FiveThirtyEight gave Republicans 6-in-7 odds of easy triumph this year.
Then, the 5th District handed Democrat Kendra Horn a 51-to-49 percent victory as a stunning 80,000 more voters turned out than in the 2014 midterm. Horn out-campaigned the complacent Republicans. (Full disclosure: I live in the district and worked as a low-level door knocker in the Horn campaign. Like every other observer, I was shocked when she won. I thought she would lose respectably.) Her media strategies (boosted by a last-minute donation from Michael Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC) and a door-to-door movement of scores of regular volunteers were pivotal in her 3,300-vote victory margin.
Horn’s campaign also was boosted by a larger electoral movement. Analysis of the district’s 269 precincts from inner Oklahoma City to its sprawling suburbs and gated exurbs, to rural Pottawatomie and Seminole counties finds a wholesale, multiracial, urban-suburban-rural voter shift against Republicans of astonishing proportions. [...]
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—CEO likens union contract to cancer in American Crystal Sugar lockout:
Workers at American Crystal Sugar remain locked out after four months—and a recording of company CEO Dave Berg speaking to shareholders on Nov. 7 demonstrates very clearly what the workers are up against.
Berg describes a friend who was feeling unwell and, after going to the doctor, had a 21-pound tumor removed. He continues:
I’m not saying a labor contract is cancer, but it affects you, it will drag you backward, you can’t do what you need to do. And I’m not saying we’re trying to get rid of the labor contract, we are not about union-busting. Take that one home with you, we are not about union-busting, but we can’t let the labor contract make us sick for ever and ever and ever. We have to treat the disease and that’s what we’re do
(The recording was made available by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union.)
I don't know about you, but speaking for me, when the CEO of a company that has locked out its workers and hired replacement workers despite safety problems starts off with "I'm not saying a labor contract is cancer" in the midst of comparing his company's labor contract to cancer, his subsequent claim that "we are not about union-busting" starts to feel a little disingenuous.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Weekend prep! President Flight Risk is in trouble. Rep. Brenda Jones*: a short story. Ryan joins, then denies the voter fraud conspiracy. Procedural shenanigans in Michigan. A Khashoggi theory. And for levity, social media influencers are stupid.