Whitmer was hosted at a fundraiser thrown by lobbyists for Blue Cross Blue Shield. She netted $144,000 during a single day at the event.

The company’s interest in the race came as no surprise, as Whitmer’s chief rival, former Detroit public health chief Abdul El-Sayed, was campaigning on establishing a statewide single-payer health care system. Essentially, he was running to put the company out of business.

But it appears that Blue Cross Blue Shield gained more than just the defeat of single payer. This week, Whitmer won the governor’s mansion, putting the state back in the Democratic column. She quickly announced the composition of her transition team.

One of the “honorary co-chairs” is Daniel Loepp, the president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.

In a 2015 interview, Whitmer credited Loepp with being the first person to suggest that she enter politics, back when he worked in the state legislature.

During the campaign, Gretchen Whitmer — whose father is Richard Whitmer, formerly the head of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan — was defensive against criticisms that she was too close to the health insurance giant. “It’s extremely sexist to say that a woman is beholden to her father’s former employer,” she told CNN.

The governor-elect’s team did not respond to a request for comment. Though Whitmer ran to the right of El-Sayed, her platform was still broadly progressive and pro-labor.

Whitmer’s transition team isn’t the only one bringing corporate interests onboard post-election. In Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp has declared victory, despite an ongoing legal effort by his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams to chase down enough provisional and absentee ballots to take the race to a run-off.

Kemp announced Thursday that his transition team would be led by David Dove, Kemp’s former legal counsel and chief of staff. More recently, Dove was added to the new lobbying arm of the litigation and regulatory law firm Robbins Ross Alloy Belinfante Littlefield LLC.

The newly minted Robbins Government Relations Group opened October 2, just over a month before the election. In an interview with a legal publication, partner Josh Belinfante explained why the firm decided to open a lobbying arm. He emphasized the potential to influence regulations.

“A lot of our clients’ problems can be resolved through the legislative branch more easily and effectively than through the judicial branch,” Belinfante said. “Or our clients may have a win in the judicial branch that may need to be protected in the legislature — particularly clients who are highly regulated, and particularly when legislation or regulations pass that govern what they do.”

According to disclosures, Dove is not currently registered to lobby. But presumably, the firm’s clients now have a chain of communication to the man responsible for staffing the next governor’s mansion. The Intercept reached out to the firm and to Dove to ask if he would be taking a leave of absence while serving on the transition team, but they have not yet responded.

The post Michigan’s Democratic Governor-Elect Puts Blue Cross Blue Shield Executive on Transition Team — After the Company Funded Her Campaign appeared first on The Intercept.

Two congressional districts held by Republicans flipped to the Democratic side. In the state House, Texas Democrats picked up a dozen seats. In the state Senate, two more Republican incumbents fell to Democrats.

One of those Democrats was Nathan Johnson, who defeated incumbent Don Huffines in state Senate District 16.

Johnson, like many Democratic candidates who ran across the country this cycle, has an unusual background for a politician. He graduated with a degree in physics from the University of Arizona, and later received a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. He co-founded a law firm dealing with business disputes, while doing pro bono legal work for the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas, which works on immigrants’ rights.

On the side, he has owned a music production business, where he composed classical music as well as music for the American dub of the popular Japanese animation series “Dragon Ball Z.”

In an interview with a fan website, he explained that he got that job because he happened to rent an office from someone who was connected to the production company. “It was one of the most bizarre collisions of circumstance I’ve ever experienced,” he said. Among other things, Johnson campaigned against state pre-emption laws, which prevent cities from enacting their own policies on things like living wages.

In Iowa, Republicans held the governor’s mansion. But down the ballot, there were some bright spots for Democrats. Zach Wahls, a prominent gay rights activist whose 2011 testimony before the Iowa state House invoking his lesbian parents in favor of marriage went viral, won a state Senate seat. He campaigned against the privatization of Medicaid, an experiment that has been costly for Iowa.

Nebraska sent Megan Hunt, a progressive atheist, to a seat in the state’s nonpartisan legislature. It is noteworthy that a state known for its religiosity would elect someone like Hunt, though she did not campaign by wearing her lack of religion on her sleeve. She’s a survivor of sexual assault who previously founded Safe Space Nebraska, a nonprofit that works with bars and nightclubs to address sexual harassment and assault. She knocked on 23,000 doors over the course of her campaign, even while her campaign manager worked two jobs and went to school while working on Hunt’s operation. She campaigned on expanding Medicaid and enacting paid leave in the state.

Out in Hawaii, social studies teacher and Democratic Socialists of America member Amy Perruso will be joining the state House after defeating Republican John E. Miller. She campaigned on raising Hawaii’s minimum wage to $15 per hour; its current minimum wage is $10.10.

In New York, a “Dreamer” named Catalina Cruz was elected to New York state Assembly. She campaigned on fixing the mismanaged New York City subway and establishing a universal health care system in New York state.

The “Panera” strategy of mobilizing swing voters in suburban counties seemed to be in full effect in Georgia, as around half a dozen Republican incumbents in metro Atlanta were either lagging behind their Democratic challengers or outright defeated, as votes are still being counted.

In North Carolina, the Republican supermajority in both the House and Senate was broken. The Michigan Senate and Pennsylvania Senate also saw GOP supermajorities broken. Meanwhile in Oregon, Democrats achieved supermajority control of both chambers. Oregon law requires a three-fifths vote to raise taxes, so this should put the party in a place where it could possibly raise revenue for its priorities.

Democrats also picked up trifectas — control of the governorship and both legislative chambers — in Colorado, Maine, New Mexico, and Illinois. The Minnesota state House flipped, as did the New Hampshire House and Senate.

Correction: November 8, 2018
A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of Amy Perruso. Wahls’s viral speech was in favor of full marriage equality, not civil unions, as previously reported. It has been updated.

The post A “Dragon Ball Z” Composer Unseated a Texas Republican Senator, and Other Down-Ballot Democratic Victories You Didn’t Hear About appeared first on The Intercept.

But its operations in the state where it is headquartered are threatened by the campaign of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum.

Gillum has stated clearly that he is opposed to the prison industry. Over the summer, he pledged not to take any money from private prison corporations and vowed to eliminate them from the state of Florida. “I believe private prisons ought to be illegal in the state of Florida. They should not exist,” he said.

On the other side of the aisle, Geo Group has  given heavily to Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis’s campaign. Filings show that the company gave $50,000 to DeSantis’s committee Friends of DeSantis on March 26, 2017.

On August 15, the company gave another $50,000 to the campaign. Its CEO and founder, George C. Zoley, gave $50,000 on the same date. On October 3, Zoley gave another $50,000 to the committee, as well as a separate $3,400 donation.

Geo Group money is also finding other ways into the campaign. For instance, it has received a total of $150,000 over three October donations from the group Jobs for Florida. Geo Group has given $25,000 to Jobs for Florida this year.

The company is also active in the attorney general’s race, giving $45,000 between two October donations to Republican candidate Ashley Moody’s independent political committee. Jobs for Florida has given the same amount. Ron Book, a GEO Group lobbyist notorious for successfully pushing for the implementation of draconian restrictions on sex offenders across the state, gave $2,000 as well.

To be clear, the vast majority of Florida prisoners are in state-run prisons, not the private sector. The Sentencing Project notes that in 2016, around 12 percent of Florida’s prisoners were in privately run facilities. That’s for now, however. There was a 211 percent increase in that population between the years 2000 and 2016.

The post Private Prisons Fight for Their Lives in Florida Against Andrew Gillum appeared first on The Intercept.

In both Kansas and Oklahoma, the GOP’s hold on its governors’ mansions is in peril, as polling has tightened and the elections in these states are now considered toss-ups. Alongside these two heartland states, Democrats are running competitive races for governor in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio, meaning that the splotch of blue could become a broad swath running across the middle of the country. In addition to various local issues, redistricting in these states after the 2020 Census will be heavily dependent on the outcome of state-level and legislative races. Control of the governorships also has significant implications for the 2020 presidential contest.

Kansas and Oklahoma, for their part, have something in common: Republicans have dominated statewide offices since 2011, and they have broken the states they were charged with governing.

In Oklahoma, GOP Gov. Mary Fallin, who was elected as part of a 2010 tea party wave, made cutting taxes a priority.

But in 2014, Oklahoma saw a collapse in oil revenues, which also decimated much of the state’s remaining income. The impact on basic services was severe. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that out of 513 school districts, 96 eliminated either Monday or Friday classes because they could only afford to send children to school four days a week.

Fallin has taken a beating in the polls and over the summer was named the least popular governor in the entire country, with an approval rating of 19 percent. She is term-limited, and the Republicans chose businessman Kevin Stitt to be their 2018 nominee for governor, facing off with Democrat Drew Edmondson, the state’s former attorney general.

It remains to be seen whether Stitt can overcome Fallin’s unpopularity, but there are signs that the Republican Party’s brand is damaged. Democrats at the legislative level have swept special elections since Trump’s 2016 win, and a wave of teacher protests led to the defeat of several Republican incumbent lawmakers in their party primaries. Polling on the race has been sparse, but what does exist shows a narrow single-digit lead by Stitt. Last week, Cook Political Report moved Oklahoma into its toss-up category.

David Blatt, the director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute and a longtime observer of state politics, told The Intercept that most political watchers believe the race will be close. “It definitely does look like a tight race,” he said. He pointed to a set of issues that the Democratic candidate is using to motivate voters. “Edmondson has tried to make it all about the record under the Republican government under the last eight years … particularly cuts that we saw in education and education funding shortages,” Blatt said. “He’s also talked a fair deal about health care and the need to expand Medicaid.”

In neighboring Kansas, the race is considered to be even closer. Republican gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach has maintained a slim 1 point lead over Democrat Laura Kelly in the last couple months of polling.

Like in Oklahoma, Kansas’s then-Republican Gov. Sam Brownback sharply cut taxes, straining the state’s budget for many basic services. Since then, the legislature has raised taxes as moderate factions within the state GOP battled conservatives in Brownback’s mold.

Burdett Loomis of the University of Kansas told The Intercept that Brownback’s legacy continues to hang over the state’s politics.

“He left us with unpopular policies, lots of reductions in revenues because of tax cuts. … [I]n 2016, the voters basically rejected this and brought in a bunch of moderate Republicans and Democrats into the legislature,” he said. “But Brownback is overhanging the election in the person of Kris Kobach.”

Incumbent GOP Gov. Jeff Colyer, widely seen as moderate, was likely a more electable candidate for the Republicans. But Kobach — an ally of President Donald Trump who has made his name backing strict right-wing measures on voter ID and immigration — narrowly defeated Colyer in the August primary.

Kobach and the approach he represents are so unpopular in Kansas that the only thing keeping him competitive is an independent drawing votes away from the Democrat — businessman Greg Orman is pulling around 8 or 9 points in polling.

Another difference in the race is that Kelly has a strong fundraising lead over Kobach. The Wichita Eagle reports that Kelly has out-raised Kobach by nearly $1 million since the end of July, while Kobach has just $61,000 left. Edmondson, on the other hand, has consistently lagged behind Stitt in fundraising.

Kansas briefly burst onto the national radar in April 2017, during a special election that was supposed to be a sleeper. But Democrat James Thompson wound up making his race for a Wichita congressional seat against Rep. Ron Estes close — he lost by 7 points — and the two face a rematch in November.

Brandi Calvert, a real estate agent from Wichita who organized the city’s Women’s March, is volunteering for Thompson again. She said that the campaign and allied organizers have registered tens of thousands of new voters in Sedgwick County alone. She noted that every living former governor — Democrat and Republican — has endorsed the Democrat. “It’s just wild high energy here,” she said.

The post Kansas and Oklahoma May Deliver Surprise Victories for Democrats on Election Day appeared first on The Intercept.

His authorship of the blog is a critical election issue, as a key question in the race is whether each candidate can play the role of the state’s top cop in a nonpartisan manner. Many have doubted that Wardlow could do so. At a private fundraiser earlier this year, Wardlow boasted that he would “fire 42 Democratic attorneys right off the bat and get Republican attorneys in there.”

He later sought to walk back this sentiment in a statement to the press. “I have consistently stated throughout this campaign, I will appoint assistants and deputies who believe in the rule of law and the Constitution. There will be no litmus test for party affiliation,” he said.

Wardlow is locked in a tight race with Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison for the state attorney general job.

A lawyer who clerked with Wardlow at the time — in 2004 and 2005 — told the Minnesota-based publication City Pages this week that Wardlow maintained a personal blog while working at the state Supreme Court. That blog was called The Rostra.

The blog has long since been deleted, but portions of it were captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which stores old webpages that may no longer be active.

The captured posts, in which the author decried liberals and offered open support for partisan politicians, reveal deeply partisan activity, which ethics experts say could run afoul of court rules.

In a post made two months before the 2004 presidential election, the author defended Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack ads against John Kerry. “It is fine, apparently, for Kerry-supporting 527s to demonize and lie about our sitting president in war time to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, but heaven forbid a group of war veterans raise under a million dollars and go on the air in a handful of states with two advertisements,” the author wrote. The author also cheered on Republican National Convention speakers, as in one post titled “Give ‘Em Hell, Zell,” where they applauded the former Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller’s barbs at the Democratic Party.

In a post from November 15, 2004, the author advocated for Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state. “The selection of Condoleezza Rice would be momentous — the first black woman to ever hold such a high post, more proof that the Republican Party is truly committed to diversity and inclusion, while the Democratic Party and groups like the NAACP continue to be exclusive, only showing favor on minorities of a markedly left-wing flavor,” they wrote.

In other posts, the author lamented efforts to expand early voting. “Their goal is generally to increase turnout and make voting easier,” the author wrote of voting advocates. “Laudable goals? Maybe not. Higher turnout is not necessarily a virtue if it is sparked not by voter education and real civic concern on the part of those casting ballots, but rather by the goading of voter turnout advocates combined with easy access to balloting. If people are too lazy to show up at the polls over the course of twelve hours, it says something about the intensity of their support for their chosen candidate.”

In another post, the author expressed outrage at the Supreme Court ruling that found death sentences unconstitutional for minors who committed crimes. The author floated impeachment of judges if similar decisions continued to be made.

Nowhere in the blog does it explicitly say that the author is Wardlow, but City Pages notes that there is circumstantial evidence that he was indeed the author. The blog’s “about me” statement says that they hold a degree in government and political theory from Georgetown and a J.D. from its law school — just as Wardlow does. The contact email listed is “dwardlow@mac.com.” The American flag banner on the webpage was hosted at “lynnwardlow.com/rostrabanner.jpg” — Lynn Wardlow is Doug’s father.

But the strongest evidence is a blog post from 2004, which was not archived on the Wayback Machine but was saved by a source before the blog was taken down, and provided to The Intercept. The post gives away the identity of the author by referencing Wardlow’s brother, Capt. Jason Wardlow:

Wardlow’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept. They also did not respond to City Pages.

Authoring these blog posts while serving as a clerk may have run afoul of professional ethics norms.

“The rules of judicial conduct, which applied then and which include clerks, would have prohibited this type of partisan activity,” David Schultz, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who has taught professional responsibility and legal ethics courses for 20 years, explained to The Intercept. “In addition, the Rules of Professional Conduct would have also prohibited it.”

Another University of Minnesota legal expert, Carol Chomsky, offered a more nuanced answer, saying that it depends on when and where Wardlow would have written the blog posts.

“I believe that the current policy of the state court, adopted in 2006, states that ‘[a]ll of an employee’s activities and actions, both on and off the job, have the potential to reflect upon the impartiality and integrity of the Judicial Branch,’ but the specifics of the rule don’t expressly forbid all political activity,” she wrote in an email to The Intercept. “The rule forbids engaging in political activity during scheduled work hours, on court property, or when using government vehicles or equipment, and also prohibits using public facilities or an official employment title even during non work-hours. The ethical rules in federal court are more expansive, indicating that judicial employees should ‘refrain from partisan political activity’ without reference to whether the activity is during or outside of work hours. I think engaging in partisan activity of the sort you’ve referred to is contrary to the spirit of the state rule because it would reflect on the sense of impartiality of the Judicial Branch, but may not have violated the explicit provisions of the rule, depending on when and how the work was done.”

The post Doug Wardlow, GOP Attorney General Candidate, May Have Violated Judicial Ethics With A Partisan Blog appeared first on The Intercept.

In a giddy investor call on Thursday, Timothy Hassinger, chief executive officer of Lindsay Corp., the Nebraska-based farming equipment manufacturer, referred to the far-right politician as “considered strongly as pro-ag,” calling his likely election victory a “bullish opportunity for us.”

Bolsonaro surprised political observers with a strong 46 percent showing in the first round of the country’s election, and is expected to easily defeat Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad in an October 28 runoff vote.

Many human rights advocates are alarmed by Bolsonaro’s repeated praise for Brazil’s military dictatorship and a platform calling for a more repressive approach to the country’s crime and social problems, which includes reintroducing the death penalty and making it harder to investigate and prosecute cops who kill in the line of duty.

But the global financial community is pleased by his strong performance, heartened by his choice of Paulo Guedes as his chief economic adviser. A right-wing, University of Chicago-trained banker, Guedes would take charge of finance, planning, trade, and other domestic policies. Bolsonaro’s economic record in the Brazilian Congress was more moderate, and he has been criticized for his lack of economic literacy, but his choice of Guedes has been seen as a signal that he will embrace the neoliberal consensus that investors have been pressuring Brazil to execute.

Guedes has promised to sell off state assets, cut the public pension system, revise the tax code, and deregulate the economy. Another Bolsonaro adviser, Nabhan Garcia, told Reuters that the administration would slash fines for farmers who violate environmental rules in sensitive areas like the Amazon.

Last year, The Intercept covered a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, Florida, at which Bolsonaro told the crowd, “The press says I do not understand the economy. Look, as far as I know, Ronald Reagan didn’t either, and he was one of the best American presidents.”

In September, when polling numbers suggested that Haddad was gaining steam, the Brazilian currency, the real, plummeted to multiyear lows, but has since bounced back by more than 12 percent against the U.S. dollar.

As news of Bolsonaro’s performance spread, investors immediately responded. CNBC noted that “the benchmark Brazilian Bovespa index gained 4.6 percent” the Monday after the election, while the “iShares MSCI Brazil exchange-traded fund (EWZ) jumped 6.74 percent its biggest one-day gain since May 19, 2017, when it rose 6.75 percent.”

A number of finance industry analysts took to the airwaves to lay out how impressed Wall Street investors are with the prospects of a Guedes-guided Bolsonaro administration.

Julia Leite, a Bloomberg News reporter who covers Brazil, appeared on Bloomberg Markets on October 8 and offered that view. “Markets are reacting really well,” she said. “Markets have a clear preference for Bolsonaro, whose economic adviser is very liberal, who wants to privatize everything, wants to have a smaller state. … So for markets, this is really clear-cut. They want Bolsonaro.”

Leite noted that, after the first round election results came in, Bolsonaro did a Facebook Live show featuring not his vice presidential candidate Hamilton Mourão, but Guedes. “Yesterday evening, Bolsonaro didn’t hold a presser but he held a Facebook Live, sitting next to him, not his VP, but his economic adviser,” she noted.

“Fascinating symbolism there, that’s terrific,” Bloomberg Markets anchor David Westin replied.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board heaped praise on Bolsonaro, calling him the “Brazilian Swamp Drainer” and downplaying his violent and antidemocratic rhetoric. At a rally on Sunday in São Paulo, he said he would “wipe the map of these red bandits,” referring to his political opponents. At a previous rally, he said, “Let’s shoot the petralhada here,” using an offensive term for Workers’ Party voters.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Latin America strategist Emy Shayo told Bloomberg Markets on October 8 that the market appreciates certain aspects of a potential Bolsonaro government. “I guess what we know is that he has appointed an economic guru that the market appreciates with a liberal economic policy, and this is better than the alternative at least from what the market knows at this point. So the market has embraced this view from Bolsonaro, and we are seeing stocks and currency rally on the back of that,” she said.

Shayo also commented on the Brazilian federal legislature, which shifted even further to the right as a result of the elections. “What we saw, especially in terms of Congress composition, is an important backing for Bolsonaro’s parties, which had no representatives virtually and now will have a decent number of representatives, over 50. And I also expect to see many of the parties that are at the center of the political spectrum to join Bolsonaro and help build this urgent agenda of reforms that Brazil needs,” she said.

The JPMorgan Chase strategist also offered some commentary on what she hopes Bolsonaro would achieve in his first term, if he is indeed elected. She pointed to his willingness to cut social security programs.

“Our view is that this election is his to lose at this point,” she said. “Beyond this, we need to see a clear up of his economic proposals especially vis-à-vis social security reform and if there will be willingness from Congress to vote [for] this agenda.”

Bloomberg Markets followed up by asking if this right-wing agenda would be imperiled by a potentially split Congress.

“I am not too worried about this. In the beginning, indeed the Congress is fragmented, but it tends to join together the forces of a president that is elected especially in the first term. Something that we have not seen in Brazil for eight years. So at the beginning, at least Bolsonaro should have a decent, very, very decent support. We have seen the opposition gathering about 30 percent of the vote. This is significant. But he will be able, I think, I hope so at least, to have a margin of maneuver to get the reforms going, which is what Brazil urgently leads.”

Not everyone is on board, however. Some Brazilian economists question Bolsonaro’s commitment to the neoliberal vision that Guedes represents, citing his own statements as proof. Earlier this month, in an interview with TV Bandeirantes, the candidate contradicted his economic advisers and said he was against the privatization of state-led electric company Eletrobras and the core operations of the Petrobras oil company. “Imagine you have a henhouse under your home and live off of it. When you privatize, you don’t have the guarantee of eating a boiled egg.” He added, “China isn’t buying in Brazil, it’s buying Brazil. You’re going to leave Brazil in the hands of the Chinese?” By noon the following day, Eletrobras stock dropped 14 percent.

“The market believes what it wants. But for 30 years, he had a statist posture. That’s not going to change overnight,” economist Sergio Vale told the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper.

The Economist called Bolsonaro “Latin America’s latest menace,” adding that “he would make a disastrous president,” citing human rights concerns.

On CNBC’s Squawk Box, pundits mused that critics are too focused on Bolsonaro’s explicit threats to return Brazil to a military dictatorship; rather observers should view his economic policies as the true barometer of freedom.

“You’re going to read a lot about what a threat to democracy this individual is,” said CNBC contributor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “But what I find astounding, people are very worried about lack of political freedom and a return to a political dictatorship in Brazil, but they have been unwilling to acknowledge that there’s been an economic dictatorship in Brazil for decades.”

The other guests agreed that Bolsonaro’s candidacy represented “economic freedom.” Earlier this month, Brazilian investment firm XP Investimentos polled 187 institutional investors who, on average, rated Bolsonaro as the most economically liberal of the top four contenders.

CNBC host Joe Kernan asked if it would be fair to compare Bolsonaro’s opponent, Fernando Haddad, as just as “far left” as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Caruso-Cabrera agreed it was apt, noting that both believe in single-payer health care. “Absolutely,” she said.

Lack of access to quality public health care is consistently the most cited problem in polling. Seventy percent of Brazilians are against privatizations, according to a Datafolha poll from last December. Earlier this year, a government-funded poll found that only 14 percent of the population supports social security reform. Popular opinion forced President Michel Temer and Congress to put many unpopular measures on the shelf until after the election. They are expected to take them on again during the lame-duck session this year, but Temer told allies on Sunday that he does not expect to be able to push through social security reform with the current Congress. Previous attempts brought workers into the streets in mass demonstrations.

“Again the market is grossly underestimating future risks,” said Paulo Leme, the former president of Goldman Sachs in Brazil, in an interview with Estado de São Paulo. “The market is falling into a new error by underestimating the difficulty of governing,” he continued, adding that he felt both Bolsonaro and Haddad are “terrible.”

The post American Executives: Election of Far-Right Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil Is a “Bullish Opportunity for Us” appeared first on The Intercept.

Addario is known for her bravery, and her work has taken her to dangerous places. She was sexually assaulted by pro-Libyan government forces, and forced to remove her clothes and subjected to physical search by the Israeli military.

It’s not surprising that Warner Bros. is currently producing a film based on her memoir, “It’s What I Do.” Ridley Scott, of “Alien” fame, is tapped to direct, and Scarlett Johansson will star.

But in a Facebook Live interview with the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof on Tuesday, Addario revealed an ironic detail. The initial set of funders interested in financing the film included none other than Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is suspected of ordering the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But Addario revealed that Johansson vetoed the crown prince, pointing to his role in the war in Yemen.

“Scarlett Johansson said absolutely not. She said, ‘This guy is perpetuating the war in Yemen. He has women in prison,'” Addario told Kristof.

“This was before the killing of Khashoggi,” she added.

“This was basically, as far as you can tell, a public relations effort by the Saudi crown prince to associate himself with journalism at its finest, a female, empowered journalist, at the same time that he is preparing to, it looks like, torture and murder one of Saudi Arabia’s own leading journalists,” Kristof summarized.

“I didn’t meet with him personally. But my sense is that he probably — my movie got folded into this huge charm campaign. And that fact that he wanted to show the West that he was into Hollywood, he was into all the great things of the West,” she replied. “Do I want him associated with this movie? Obviously not. And thank God he’s not.”

The post Mohammed bin Salman Wanted to Fund a Film About a Heroic Journalist. Scarlett Johansson Said No. appeared first on The Intercept.

“As you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine,” he explained in a private email, a screenshot of which was later uploaded to Facebook. “This boycott includes writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there. I should have let you know earlier, and for that I apologize. But for reasons of these politics, I must rescind my offer to write your letter.” (Cheney-Lippold later clarified in an interview with The Intercept that when he said “departments,” he meant to write “professors.”)

He went on to tell the student that he would be happy to write other letters in the future.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the ongoing public debate around free speech on college campuses, this soon became national news. Subsequently, the university took an unusually public stance in condemning Cheney-Lippold’s choice.

“Injecting personal politics into a decision regarding support for our students is counter to our values and expectations as an institution. The academic goals of our students are of paramount importance,” the school told CBS News at the time. “It is the university’s position to take all steps necessary to make sure our students are supported.”

On October 3, the university upped the ante. The Detroit News reported that Elizabeth Cole, the interim dean of the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, wrote to Cheney-Lippold informing him that he will be denied a merit raise during the 2018-2019 academic school year and will not be able to go on sabbatical for two years — effectively canceling a sabbatical already planned for January 2019. Furthermore, she informed him that if a similar incident were to occur in the future, he could be dismissed from his position altogether.

“It was a harassment campaign.”

In an interview with The Intercept, Cheney-Lippold said that he never intended Cole’s letter to become public — the Ann Arbor News filed a records request to obtain it — but described how it felt to be in spotlight over the summer when it was initially reported that he had declined to write the letter.

“Around two or three weeks ago, I got thousands of messages — most of them being supportive and extraordinary, but several death threats and very, very vile, often racist, sexist, and homophobic emails –accusing me of a lot of things that are obviously abhorrent, but it was a harassment campaign,” he said.

When Cole decided to sanction Cheney-Lippold, it added injury to insult. He had been planning to spend a sabbatical in January conducting an ethnography of Silicon Valley companies and workers. He now is prohibited from doing this work until fall 2020.

Cheney-Lippold views the incident through the lens of academic freedom. The incident at the University of Michigan comes amid a widespread crackdown aimed at the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which seeks to use economic and cultural boycotts to pressure Israel to respect the human rights of Palestinians.”Even if you don’t support BDS, you should still support the ability of a faculty member to not be compelled to speak,” he said.

Recently, Cheney-Lippold received some support from academia in the form of a letter from the American Association of University Professors.

The AAUP weighed in after Cheney-Lippold received a disciplinary letter from Cole that relied on AAUP guidelines, among others, as a basis for the sanctions against him. On October 16, the AAUP responded with a recommendation that heavily favored Cheney-Lippold.

In her disciplinary letter, Cole based the decision to sanction Cheney-Lippold in “longstanding norms regarding student letters of recommendation,” which were affirmed by the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs last month. These guidelines suggest that teachers “encourage the free pursuit of learning,” “demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors.” Moreover, they advise professors to “make every reasonable effort to foster honest academic conduct” and “avoid any exploitation, harassment, or discriminatory treatment of students.”  She went on to cite the AAUP, which she said advises that merit be the primary guide for determining whether to write a recommendation letter.

However, in its letter, the AAUP criticized the University of Michigan’s sanctions as overly harsh and lacking certain procedural protections. According to the AAUP, severe sanctions like the ones levied against Cheney-Lippold would ordinarily follow “an informal inquiry” by a faculty committee as per the organization’s guidelines. Moreover, if sanctions are warranted, the AAUP standards “require an administration to demonstrate adequate cause for imposing a severe sanction in a hearing of record before an elected faculty body,” which was not done in this case.

The AAUP recommended that “the sanctions imposed on Professor Cheney-Lippold be rescinded.”

The AAUP noted that it is “additionally concerned” that Cole’s letter “appears to misrepresent AAUP-supported standards of academic freedom.” Cole’s letter criticized Cheney-Lippold for discussing the letter controversy in his classes and using class time to explain his views on BDS. She cited the AAUP as saying “it is improper for an instructor persistently to intrude material that has no relation to the subject,” and went on to argue that “[a]lthough this material was discussed in only one session, an entire class period represents a significant portion of your total contact hours with students over the semester.” But the AAUP disagreed that Cheney-Lippold’s limited discussion of his beliefs was a misuse of his role as a professor, disputing that raising the issue in one session of two different classes meets the “persistent intrusion” standard. As a result, the AAUP recommended that “the sanctions imposed on Professor Cheney-Lippold be rescinded.”

Despite the sanctions, Cheney-Lippold acknowledged that he’s lucky to have the protection of tenure: The university can only punish him up to a point. However, others may be less lucky.

Lucy Peterson, a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan, also declined to write a recommendation letter for a student studying in Israel — a risk Cheney-Lippold opted not to take before earning tenure. “Somebody like Lucy,” Cheney-Lippold told us, doesn’t have that protection.

The Intercept reached out to Peterson, who told us that last week she attended a meeting with Associate Dean of Social Science Rosario Ceballo and the chair of her department, Nancy Burns, where they asked Peterson about the facts surrounding the incident.

“They sort of were just asking questions, information-gathering. And at the end of the meeting, they said they didn’t know if there would be disciplinary action,” she told us. “I think I’ll find out soon, but I really don’t know.”

The incident at the University of Michigan is one of many BDS-related free speech controversies in recent years. In Kansas, a star teacher was denied a contract because she followed her church’s teachings and boycotted consumer products made by Israeli companies and other companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories. In Texas, contractors were told that they could only get money to rebuild after Hurricane Harvey if they pledged not to boycott Israel. But these cases have also provoked a backlash from free speech advocates. The clause on hurricane relief applications was removed following pushback from the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro-BDS activists, and the Kansas law was blocked by a federal judge.

The university’s rebuke of Cheney-Lippold was notable in part because students aren’t typically entitled to recommendation letters from professors. When The Intercept reached out to Cole for clarification about what policy Cheney-Lippold has been accused of violating, we received a terse response from Rick Fitzgerald, the assistant vice president for public affairs at the university.

“The university has a policy of not discussing personnel matters,” he told us. He said that we could file a freedom of information request to locate Cole’s full letter to Cheney-Lippold. It was subsequently made public by the press.

The free speech concerns presented by the Cheney-Lippold case were addressed in a lengthy blog post by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which works to defend free speech rights of college students and faculty.

FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley declined to take a position on the issues underlying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he argued that there is little justification for punishing a professor who chooses to boycott Israel for nondiscriminatory political reasons.

“The refusal to write the letters appears to be based not on the national origin of the students, but their national destination. That is not a distinction without a difference. National destination (or whatever one might call it) is not a protected class, and the adverse effect on the students is caused not by hostility towards the students themselves but on hostility to a third party (in this case, academic institutions in Israel) that renders the affected students’ wishes to study abroad a kind of ‘collateral damage’ of the wider boycott movement,” he wrote.

“Faculty recommendation letters are, of course, a type of speech. (They are, after all, letters.) Whether or not to write them on behalf of a particular student is also traditionally, and necessarily, left to the discretion of the individual faculty member, as it would be entirely nonsensical to require faculty members to write recommendation letters for students they simply can’t or don’t recommend,” Shibley continued. “Yes, writing such letters is an expected part of the job, but generally speaking, no student has a ‘right’ to a recommendation letter.”

Correction: October 19, 2018
Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story incorrectly stated that John Cheney-Lippold contacted the AAUP after receiving the disciplinary letter from the University of Michigan. In fact, the AAUP reached out to him.

The post Professor Was Improperly Punished for Israel Boycott Actions, Says Academic Group Cited in Punishment appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. has long given the Saudis a blank check, politically and militarily, and there have been voices advocating for a rethinking of that decades-old relationship for nearly as long as it has lasted. But the widespread belief that the Saudis assassinated Khashoggi inside their consulate has brought those voices squarely into the center. Suddenly, the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States is being called into fundamental question.

President Donald Trump initially responded to questions about Khashoggi’s disappearance by saying, “I don’t like hearing about it, and hopefully that will sort itself out.” But on Thursday, he began to sound much less confident in his defense of Saudi Arabia, the first foreign country he visited as president. He said that it was beginning to look as though Khashoggi, a critic of the crown prince, was indeed murdered, but worried that jobs would be at risk if arms sales to the country were halted.

In the Senate, the kingdom is starting to lose its traditional bipartisan support, with almost every member of the Foreign Relations Committee calling on Trump to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. The Washington Post, meanwhile, has devoted extraordinary resources, both in reporting and editorial, to the case of its columnist.

Washington-based lobbying firms that do business with Saudi Arabia — particularly Hogan and Lovells, the Glover Park Group, and Brownstein — are facing a difficult decision, as pressure mounts across the board to break with the kingdom. The New York Times has withdrawn its sponsorship of an upcoming technology conference in Riyadh. Meanwhile, the Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and CNBC “Squawk Box” co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin have announced that they will pull out. A CNN spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the news organization is reconsidering its sponsorship, and spokespeople for CNBC and Fox Business told The Intercept that they are “monitoring the situation.”

The shift in discourse over Saudi Arabia is palpable in the think tank world as well. The vice president for security at the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, called on the United States to freeze arms sales to Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi’s disappearance.

https://twitter.com/kellymagsamen/status/1049855027173617669

Kelly Magsamen, a former Bush and Obama National Security Council staffer, also warned that the affair had the potential to unify a bipartisan “anti-Saudi sentiment.” Just two years ago, the think tank was arguing for keeping the U.S.-Saudi relationship more or less the same.

Prominent right-wing columnist and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot, a longtime defender of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, warned that if the Saudis did indeed kill Khashoggi, there “must be hell to pay.”

The conversation about Khashoggi’s disappearance has been extremely muddled, with conflicting reports from Turkish and Saudi officials over what happened, but the evidence of foul play by Saudi Arabia has piled up. We now know, through reporting by the Post, that U.S. intelligence had picked up conversations between top Saudi officials discussing a plan by bin Salman to capture Khashoggi and render him back to Saudi Arabia for detention.

Meanwhile, Turkish officials, remaining anonymous, have said that a team of 15 Saudis, many of them part of bin Salman’s personal guard, traveled in two private planes to Istanbul on the day Khashoggi was scheduled to venture into the consulate, and left that same day. The professional backgrounds of the Saudis give it the clear markings of a kill-or-capture squad, and official Turkish sources have said that Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in the consulate. Surveillance video shows Khashoggi walking into the consulate, but never walking out. NBC News reported that Khashoggi checked his phone just before heading in but has not checked it since. (The Intercept has independently confirmed this claim.)

The Saudis, meanwhile, have denied any wrongdoing. Their official line is that Khashoggi left the consulate shortly after his arrival, but they have not offered surveillance footage or any other evidence to back up that assertion.

On Wednesday, Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to Trump over Khashoggi’s disappearance. The letter instructs the administration to determine whether Khashoggi was indeed kidnapped, tortured, or murdered by the Saudi government and, as the Global Magnitsky Act requires, to respond within 120 days with a determination of sanctions against individuals who may have been responsible.

The letter was signed by the entire Senate Foreign Relations Committee, save for Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who is preparing his own push for freezing arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Many of these senators have in the past been steadfast allies of the Saudis, and it is unusual for the committee to be united on an issue like this.

The Saudis will keep killing civilians and journalists as long as we keep arming and assisting them. The President should immediately halt arms sales and military support to Saudi Arabia.

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) October 11, 2018

Corker spoke to the Saudi Ambassador Khalid bin Salman and was curiously told that the government cannot provide video footage of the consulate because they only have livestreaming, not recorded video. “I’ve never heard of an embassy in my life that doesn’t tape,” he said. “And so to me it feels very much like some nefarious activity has occurred by them. But I don’t want to rush to judgment.”

In an email the ambassador sent to a handful of reporters on Tuesday, obtained by The Intercept, he sought to downplay fears about Khashoggi’s fate.

“I assure you that the reports that suggest that Jamal Khashoggi went missing in the Consulate in Istanbul or that the Kingdom’s authorities have detained him or killed him are absolutely false, and baseless,” he claimed. “What we do care about is Jamal’s wellbeing, and revealing the truth about what occurred. Jamal is a Saudi citizen who went missing after leaving the Consulate.”

None of that, however, passes the smell test in Washington. If Khashoggi had indeed left the consulate, there would be video or some other evidence of his having done so. The gap between that reality and the Saudi statement is so wide as to be its own insult to Washington, exacerbating rather than lessening the fury at the kingdom for apparently assassinating a Virginia resident who is known personally by many influential figures in town.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., on Tuesday said that Khashoggi’s disappearance is “personal to me,” noting that Khashoggi was a resident of his state. He called on Trump to raise his case with the Saudis and Turkey. Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, who represents a portion of Virginia, attended a vigil outside the Washington Post on Wednesday to call attention to the case.

On the Republican side of the aisle, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio have both said that there should be a strong U.S. response if Khashoggi was indeed killed.

On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., used a portion of a Washington speech on global authoritarian trends to demand transparency about what happened to Khashoggi and accountability if he was indeed murdered:

I would like to take a moment to note the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, last Tuesday. Over the weekend, Turkish authorities told reporters that they now believe Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate, and his body disposed of elsewhere. We need to know what happened here. If this is true, if the Saudi regime murdered a journalist critic in their own consulate, there must be accountability, and there must be an unequivocal condemnation by the United States. But it seems clear that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman feels emboldened by the Trump administration’s unquestioning support.

Although Sanders did not specify what kind of accountability the United States should demand, there are a variety of levers for the Trump administration to pull if it wants to punish Saudi Arabia for the disappearance and possible murder of a U.S. resident.

The United States is currently providing material and intelligence support to the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which has created a humanitarian disaster in that country. As Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, a leading expert on Saudi affairs, has testified, “If the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war [on Yemen] has to end, it would end tomorrow because the Royal Saudi Air force cannot operate without American & British support.”

Sanders opposes this support for Saudi Arabia, which has come from both the Obama and Trump administrations. Efforts in Congress to limit or terminate this support have so far been unsuccessful.

Top photo: In front of the Washington Post in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10, 2018, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., right, speaks during a news conference about journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance.

The post Is This the Beginning of the End of the U.S.-Saudi Alliance? appeared first on The Intercept.

As Collins spoke on the Senate floor, the Crowdpac site raising funds for her opponent crashed from the volume of traffic. More than $1 million was added to the fundraising haul within 24 hours.

In stark contrast to the typical corporate campaign finance model, the activists’ innovative effort aims to send a message to the senator via a large number of small contributions. A source close to the campaign recently told The Intercept that the average donation is $28.40.

Collins is not responding well to the campaign. She went to the conservative website Newsmax to call the effort a “bribe.”

“I consider this quid pro quo fundraising to be the equivalent of an attempt to bribe me to vote against Judge Kavanaugh,” she said. “I think it demonstrates the new lows to which the judge’s opponents have stooped.”

In this claim, Collins has been joined by others on the right who have similarly condemned the effort and called it “bribery.” Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, both went on the attack.

The harassment campaign from the far Left against Susan Collins—including threats of sexual violence against her staffers and potential illegal bribery—is truly shameful, and shows the desperation of the radicals to try to stop the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh. It won’t work. https://t.co/eZ60ppIr0j

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 12, 2018

The irony is that all of those who are now complaining about the small-donor organizing effort by Barkan have spent their careers defending the right of large-money donors to influence politics.

Collins, for instance, worked with her Senate Republican colleagues in 2014 to vote down a Democratic amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which further opened the floodgates for corporations to spend money in politics. Two years earlier, she voted against the DISCLOSE Act, which would have required outside special interest groups to disclose their donors.

She is a prolific fundraiser, having raised millions of dollars from corporate interest groups despite the fact that she holds a very safe seat (she won re-election in 2014 with 68.5 percent of the vote). According to OpenSecrets, Washington, D.C.-based sources, largely lobbyists and contractors, have given her $1,517,130 — just short of the $1,521,190 she has raised from Portland, Maine.

Her top contributors are employees from the defense contractor General Dynamics and related political action committees. In a letter to constituents explaining her vote for the GOP-written tax reform bill, which dramatically slashed the U.S. corporate tax rate, she boasted of talking with General Dynamics about the law. Collins is also a frequent guest or host of private fundraisers where attendees pony up thousands of dollars to rub shoulders with corporations like Marriott International, Microsoft, Raytheon, and Boeing.

If Cruz is opposed to political bribery, it must be due to a recent change of heart. During a 2014 hearing on an amendment to reverse the Citizens United decision, Cruz defended the unlimited right to spend on elections as a constitutional guarantee. “This amendment, here today, would repeal the free speech protections of the First Amendment,” Cruz said. “As immune as we are to abuse of power from government, citizens are still astonished that members of Congress would dare support repealing the First Amendment.”

In 2015, when Cruz ran for president, fracking billionaire brothers Farris and Dan Wilks gave $15 million to Super PACs supporting his bid. Their motives for backing him aren’t particularly opaque: Cruz has called fracking a “providential blessing.”

Hatch has been similarly welcoming of big money donors, and is known as one of the top allies of the pharmaceutical industry on Capitol Hill. It is possible that he sees a moral imperative in preventing Colombia from producing cheaper cancer drugs. But a more likely motive is that both his campaigns for office and his foundation are financed by the drug industry.

Unlike the closed-door fundraising with millionaires, billionaires, and corporations favored by Collins, Cruz, and Hatch, Barkan’s effort is transparent and clear about its goal. It is unlikely that those who have argued that the superrich should have the unlimited right to spend in American elections are suddenly concerned about the influence money can have on politics. They just don’t like it when small donors play the same game.

Update: October 6, 2018
This story has been updated to reflect new fundraising totals.

Top photo: Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is surrounded by reporters following a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill, Sept. 26, 2018, in Washington, D.C.

The post Activists Pledge More Than $2.9 Million to Susan Collins’s Democratic Challenger If She Votes to Confirm Brett Kavanaugh appeared first on The Intercept.

But a post-election survey of Ocasio-Cortez’s race suggested that this was not the case: Her upset was due in large part to high voter turnout in gentrified neighborhoods in Queens. The bulk of her votes came from areas that were experiencing rapid gentrification, and were less uniformly black or Hispanic than districts that turned out in high numbers for Crowley.

New data shows that the same was true for New York state Senate winner Julia Salazar: The lion’s share of her votes came from neighborhoods known for recent gentrification: East Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Greenpoint.

Steven Romalewski of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York provided an electoral map to The Intercept showing the results:

A 2016 study by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy found that Greenpoint and Williamsburg were the gentrification capitals of New York City. Rents there had increased a whopping 78.7 percent between 1990 and 2014 while incomes rose: Between 2000 and 2014, Greenpoint and Williamsburg saw the largest increase in income of any gentrifying neighborhood in the city. They also saw the largest increase in residents with college degrees.

Although gentrification does not strictly occur along racial lines — nonwhite residents can be gentrifiers, and each neighborhood has at least some white residents who lived there long before gentrification began — the unequal distribution of wealth across racial groups means that gentrification has brought significant shifts in the racial composition of these districts in recent years.

Between 1990 and 2014, the Hispanic populations of Greenpoint and Williamsburg declined by 12 percent, and both neighborhoods are now predominantly white. In Bushwick, the Latino population fell 13 percent over a 15-year span, while the white population has increased 610 percent. Still, the neighborhood maintains a slim Hispanic majority.

While Salazar performed well in whiter neighborhoods with newer transplants, Dilan performed best among voters in Highland Park and Cypress Hills. Highland Park is majority Hispanic and African-American, while Cypress Hills is nearly 90 percent Hispanic and black. Neither is considered a hub of gentrification, though Dilan also did well in the heart of Williamsburg.

In addition to Salazar’s win during the September 13 elections, progressives were successful in unseating six of the eight former members of the Independent Democratic Conference — a breakaway group of Democrats that effectively assisted the Republicans in controlling the state’s Senate chamber.

In the two races that took place in Queens and Brooklyn, the impact of highly gentrified neighborhoods is clear.

The contest between Zellnor Myrie and former IDC incumbent Jesse Hamilton mooted the traditional racial identity-based analysis. Both candidates are black, but the incumbent did much better in heavily African-American neighborhoods like Brownsville and Crown Heights with over 60 percent of the vote, while Myrie took Park Slope — a gentrified neighborhood that is 70 percent white and one of the wealthiest in Brooklyn — with over 70 percent of the vote. He also won a huge number of votes from Prospect Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Between 2000 and 2010, the white population jumped from 28 to 47 percent in Prospect Heights. And although Prospect Lefferts Gardens is still predominantly black and Hispanic, Myrie, who was raised there, had a home-court advantage.

Jessica Ramos, 31, unseated incumbent state Sen. Jose Peralta in the 13th state Senate district. Like Salazar and Myrie, she benefited from very strong results in gentrifying areas, including Astoria, Queens. Peralta, like Crowley, held a commanding lead in East Elmhurst — a heavily Hispanic neighborhood known to be one of the most demographically stable neighborhoods in the city.

It is noteworthy, however, that Ramos also did well in Jackson Heights, a historic neighborhood with a small white minority and a longtime Hispanic- and Asian-majority population. This further suggests that the appeal of progressive insurgents was not limited to gentrifying neighborhoods.

To be clear, we don’t yet have the data on the exact voter makeup of these progressive voting coalitions. The maps show that progressive challengers generally did best in areas that are the most gentrified, and that have seen large increases in college-educated residents and higher incomes. But it is possible that longtime residents of these neighborhoods, those suffering from the effects of gentrification, came out in large numbers to support Salazar, rather than, or in addition to, the gentrifying newcomers. After all, Salazar campaigned strongly against gentrification, calling for more powerful rent and vacancy controls to help stem displacement.

It’s also possible that success in gentrifying areas was driven by the influx of younger voters who tend toward more progressive politics — regardless of race or class. Ocasio-Cortez benefited from progressive organizations like Our Revolution and Democratic Socialists of America, who deployed young voters on a wide-reaching door-knocking campaign, and Salazar seems to have been boosted by similar ground efforts.

The topic would benefit from further research.

Top photo: On Aug. 15, 2018, Democratic New York State Senate candidate Julia Salazar, center, speaks to supporters before a rally in McCarren Park, which is split between the Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods of Brooklyn, N.Y.

The post Like Other Progressive Candidates in New York, Julia Salazar Was Buoyed by Neighborhoods Experiencing Gentrification appeared first on The Intercept.

Maloney is heavily funded by Wall Street and New York real estate interests, over which he would have jurisdiction as attorney general.

On September 7, a vehicle calling itself the Committee for Justice and Fairness political action committee reported $100,000 in independent expenditures on digital ads attacking Zephyr Teachout, one of Maloney’s opponents.

A little over a week earlier, the New York-based real estate firm Related Companies LP gave $100,000 to the PAC. Two days after that, the founder and chair of the firm, Stephen Ross, gave $21,000 to Maloney’s campaign. This suggests that the ad buy is for the benefit of Maloney, not New York City Public Advocate Tish James, another major candidate in primary contest. James, however, stands to benefit as her progressive opponent is pummeled.

Fresh off a surprise endorsement from the New York Times and other newspapers around the state, Teachout’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for New York attorney general has wind at its back, but a Monday poll found her in third place, closely behind James and front-runner Maloney.

Maloney is friendly to the finance and real estate sector — which has a keen interest in who becomes New York’s top cop, given the heavy presence of industry in the state. Earlier this year, over the protests of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., he voted to roll back certain regulations for large banks.

Maloney has quickly become the preferred candidate of that sector. The Financial Times reported on September 3 that “senior figures from Wall Street are lining up” to support the congressman, citing backing from Wall Street lawyers like Martin Lipton of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Rodgin Cohen of Sullivan & Cromwell.

We have no idea what these ads look like, or what their content is. The New York Board of Elections recently enacted new regulations that would require groups making large independent expenditures to submit copies of their paid internet or digital ads at the same time they disclosed their spending. These ads would then be available for viewing by the voting public.

But the regulations go into effect September 9 — two days after these ads were purchased. A spokesperson for the New York Board of Elections told The Intercept that they will not be required to disclose the content of the ads until their post-election filing. As of now, they are likely being targeted directly at voters with a high propensity to turnout on primary day this Thursday.

Ross’s political giving is bipartisan, but leans heavily toward Republicans. This year, he gave $49,000 to Democrats and $325,000 to Republicans, including $72,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and $50,000 to the Republican National Committee.

Related Companies is a massive developer in the New York City market and has more recently been in a dispute with the city’s labor unions after deciding to exclude them from a major project. Ross is a power player in the city, sitting on the board of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Jackie Robinson Foundation. He’s also the owner of the Miami Dolphins. He found himself under criticism earlier this year, when he implied that he would force players to stand for the national anthem; he quickly walked back these remarks.

Top photo: Real estate developer and Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross watches his team before a game against the New England Patriots on Dec. 11, 2017, in Miami Gardens, Fla.

The post Real Estate Tycoon Dumps Money Into Super PAC to Stop Zephyr Teachout’s Bid for New York Attorney General appeared first on The Intercept.

Mattias Karlsson, the party’s leader in the legislature, was triumphant at a results party. “2018 is to conservatism what 1968 was to the left,” he reportedly said.

But the results were far less than the party, famous for its anti-immigrant rhetoric, had hoped for, with leaders boasting that perhaps 1 in 4 voters would choose them. That didn’t happen, and the relatively meager 5 percentage point boost calls into question the conventional wisdom that anti-immigrant politics are inevitably on the rise in Europe.

Many analysts have noted that the Sweden Democrats have used demagoguery about the large flow of refugees that have arrived in Sweden to attempt to increase their political support. The party has made three different complaints: that migration is increasing crime, that it is increasing economic pressures on the country, and that the largely Muslim immigrants are undermining the country’s secularism and national unity.

While there is no evidence that the refugees are responsible for a major increase in overall crime, there has been intense media focus on acts of violence by some immigrants, including attacks with hand grenades.

These attacks, along with complaints about economic pressures and culture, have helped shift Sweden’s wider political climate to the right. As one example, Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats, the country’s center-left party, has campaigned on reducing the number of refugees granted asylum in the country. Both the center-left and center-right parties moved to the right on immigration, under pressure from the Sweden Democrats.

But what if the rise of the Sweden Democrats has less to do with exposure to immigration, and more to do with rising inequality, driven by austerity and financials shocks?

In a paper released last month, five Swedish academics examined the factors driving the performance of the Sweden Democrats between their marginal status in 2002 to becoming Sweden’s third-largest party in 2014.

They looked not only at the voters who backed the Sweden Democrats, but also the politicians they elected.

Part of the Sweden Democrats’ appeal is their claim to be outsiders. The researchers found that more than 96 percent of the party’s politicians elected going back to 1982 have never been elected for another party.

Data the researchers collected on Sweden Democrat politicians elected to local offices also shows that they are considerably poorer than the politicians from other parties:

The researchers conclude that the “the Sweden Democrat politicians stand out by over-representing low income percentiles and under-representing high income percentiles.”

But what about their voters? The researchers lumped them into two large categories: “insiders” with stable employment and “outsiders” with unstable or no employment. The former category is also broken down between “vulnerable insiders,” whose jobs are at higher risk of automation versus “secure insiders” who don’t face the same risk.

They then look at how two major economic shocks impacted their voting behavior.

The first shock started in 2006, when the Social Democrats lost power to a center-right coalition that proceeded to enact tax cuts and austerity measures. The second shock was the 2008 global financial crisis.

The results of their regression analysis “strongly indicate that the Sweden Democrats gained the most votes in municipalities where outsiders faced the largest drop in incomes relative to insiders, and where there was a larger fraction of vulnerable insiders who risked losing their jobs in the financial-crisis recession. The associations are statistically precise and quantitatively non-trivial.” The trend is present in both municipal-level results for parliamentary elections and for municipal council elections.

But what of the Sweden Democrats’ marquee issue, immigration? The researchers note that their  “analysis does not show a link between direct exposure to immigration and support for the radical right.” In fact, the “2002-2014 rise of the Sweden Democrats coincides with a higher tolerance for immigration of the average Swede.”

Their regression analysis finds that “the municipality’s immigrant share is never significantly correlated with voting for the Sweden Democrats, once we include our measures tied to losing groups. Moreover, the association between these measures and Sweden Democrat vote shares are not sensitive to including immigration.”

For the outsider group, they use survey data to show that around 50 percent of outsiders have long believed that Sweden should accept fewer refugees, but this number has stayed close to the same over time. Among insiders, the percentage who believed that Sweden should accept fewer refugees actually significantly declined between the mid-90s to 2014.

They are careful to note that they are not entirely precluding the conclusion that immigration may contribute to the party’s growing electoral strength. “We could easily think of an indirect link from economic outcomes to attitudes on immigration, and/or the salience of immigration policy in voting decisions,” they write. “Perhaps most importantly, economic pressures may make people more receptive toward political messages that emphasize the fiscal costs of immigration and the latent redistribution from foreign to native-born by restricting it.”

In other words, it’s not that the Sweden Democrat voters despise immigrants, but when a party scapegoats immigrants, that messaging may be viewed as a signal that the party at least recognizes the underlying problem — economic stagnation. Shades of that phenomenon are evident in the United States. Richard Ojeda, a Democratic state senator in West Virginia, supported Donald Trump in 2016, reasoning that at least Trump talked about bringing jobs back to West Virginia, even if in the back of his mind he didn’t think he’d accomplish it. “At least he’s saying something. You know, nobody talks about West Virginia. Nobody talks about helping West Virginia,” he explained.

We asked Uppsala University’s Olle Folke, one of the researchers who conducted the study, about what its implications are. What political wisdom could competing parties take from the research shown here?

“It helps us understand the mobilization [of the party],” he said of the findings.

When it comes to advice he might give to other parties, he pointed to the Sweden Democrats’ success in recruiting outsider candidates, which sets them apart from other parties.

“I think an overall recommendation would be [to find] ways to incorporate people who are economically marginalized into politics,” he said.

The researchers’ work would be backed up by what exit polls are showing about who forms the composition of the Sweden Democrats’ votes. One pollster found that 19 percent of the support base is driven by individuals who backed the center-left Social Democrats in 2014 — the highest portion outside of already committed Sweden Democrat voters.

Some exit poll data provides an insight into the source of votes for the national populist Sweden Democrats… #val2018#SwedenElection pic.twitter.com/IhRnYlpJxS

— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) September 9, 2018

The Social Democrats, meanwhile, are looking at their worst result in a century.

It is worth noting that the paper’s scope of research is through 2014, before Sweden committed to taking in as many as 190,000 new refugees. It is possible that the issue of immigration is more potent in recent years than it was during the initial rise of the party. But the reality that the party only grew incrementally over that period, even as the salience of its key issue grew exponentially, suggests that it is not as important to voters as the conventional wisdom would have us believe.

What the research does indicate is that the Sweden Democrats’ initial rise is much more closely linked to growing social inequality than it is attitudes about or an increase in immigration. Had Sweden’s center-right and center-left parties offered more in-depth solutions to social inequality, eschewed austerity and recruited candidates closer to the working class, they may have been able to avoid the initial rise in Sweden’s far right.

Sweden’s political climate is not identical to that of other Western countries, but it’s worth mentioning that other nations have also seen a shift in voter composition for major parties.

In both the United States and France, and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom, the composition of left and center-left parties has shifted from worker-oriented parties to parties oriented around highly educated voters, according to research published by economist Thomas Piketty this year:

New from @PikettyLeMonde: how the left in #US and #France (but not in #UK) have transformed from working class parties to representatives of the highly-educated, and how this contributes to #populism and the rise of income #inequality. 174 pages of joy: https://t.co/5CNNEX6FjC pic.twitter.com/TpMK1sYug8

— Jonathan Mijs (@JonathanMijs) March 23, 2018

Top photo: The party leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Akesson, speaks at a campaign meeting in Malmo, Sweden, on Sept. 8, 2018.

The post People Might Be Getting the Swedish Elections All Wrong appeared first on The Intercept.

All of the candidates ran on the promise of some commitment to criminal justice reform, aimed at making the system more humane and compassionate.

But Rollins offered the starkest contrast with the status quo. She laid out explicit policy changes she would make to the DA’s office, including naming the charges in which the default would be not to prosecute unless supervisor permission is obtained. These charges include minor crimes like trespassing, disorderly conduct, drug possession, or a standalone resisting arrest charge, but taken as a whole, they are an effort to decriminalize poverty, addiction, and mental illness.

The establishment candidate in the race was Greg Henning, an assistant district attorney in the current DA’s office. Henning was backed by the outgoing DA, Dan Conley, and the lion’s share of police unions. (The only police group backing Rollins being the MBTA Police Association.)

Massachusetts law strictly limits how much a political action committee can give to a candidate. So the bulk of Henning’s financial support from the police came from individual contributions by police officers, which totaled over $69,000. The average donation from police and law enforcement individual contributors was $263.

Henning was considered the favorite in the race. In May, Boston Herald columnist David Bernstein, a prominent political watcher in the area, conducted a straw poll of 50 regional political insiders — 60 percent said that Henning would succeed in the race. Just 16 percent said Rollins would win.

It is likely that high turnout in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood that has a large share of African-American and Hispanic voters, benefited Rollins. That uptick is also a data point for the case often made by backers of the movement to elect progressive prosecutors — that even if the Democratic Party doesn’t care about the issues from substantive perspective, simply as a pragmatic matter, putting criminal justice reformers on the ballot has the potential to engage new voters in the political process, ones who are likely to vote Democratic up and down the ballot.

The Jamaica Plain neighborhood has some overlap with the Massachusetts’s 7th Congressional District, where At-Large Boston City Council Member Ayanna Pressley defeated 10-term Democratic Congressman Michael Capuano in his primary. But any synergy between the two candidates was organic.

Neither Pressley nor Capuano endorsed Rollins.

In contrast, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been compared to Pressley, decided to endorse Cynthia Nixon in her Democratic gubernatorial primary one day before her own congressional primary — a move that risked alienating her among Cuomo’s supporters, who vastly outnumbered those of Nixon’s. She also later went on to support Zephyr Teachout in her attorney general bid, and backed Julia Salazar, a democratic socialist seeking to unseat a nearby incumbent state senator, back in April.

Although full demographic data on the election has yet to be collected, several individuals who worked closely with the campaign said that support for Rollins cut across demographic lines, and that it would be a mistake to attribute her victory solely to turnout among minority groups.

One of the organizations that advised the Rollins campaign was Real Justice PAC, which works to elect reform-minded prosecutors across America. (Shaun King, an Intercept columnist, is affiliated with the PAC.)

Julia Barnes, a senior adviser to the organization, pointed to strong support in neighborhoods from various racial backgrounds.

“Rachael built a truly impressive coalition of voters that cut across age, race, and geographies within Suffolk County. She had equally impressive support in places like Allston/Brighton, as in East Boston, as in Roxbury. She pulled impressive margins in South Boston, West Roxbury and Hyde Park. Her margin was bolstered everywhere,” Barnes, who was formerly the national field director for the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign, said.

Top photo: Prosecutor and criminal justice reformer Rachael Rollins.

The post Underdog Criminal Justice Reformer Rachael Rollins Wins District Attorney Primary in Boston’s Suffolk County appeared first on The Intercept.

Progressive activist Ady Barkan, who has the impairing condition of Lou Gehrig’s disease, spent the last five months crisscrossing the United States to campaign against Republicans who supported Donald Trump’s tax law.

In mid-August, he announced an innovative tactic for pressuring Maine’s Collins to vote “no” on Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Using the website CrowdPac — which allows users to pledge a certain amount of campaign funding should certain conditions be met — the campaign announced that it would be collecting pledges for a future Democratic challenger to Collins.

The pledges only activate (and then users are charged) if Collins votes in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination. If she opposes him, they will be wiped out.

The campaign released a video of Mainers calling on Collins to oppose Kavanaugh over the long weekend:

Maine voters — @SenatorCollins constituents — are standing up today to let her know: if she votes for Kavanaugh, they will defeat her. Watch the new video, and pledge $20.20 at https://t.co/VshoGeTtcG to defeat Susan Collins *if* she votes for Kavanaugh #StopKavanaugh pic.twitter.com/jjrKMouiAL

— Be a Hero (@BeaHero) September 4, 2018

As of the second day of the Kavanaugh hearings, the campaign is well more than than halfway to the $500,000 goal of the page.

Collins is considered a swing vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination because she has signaled that she would not back a nominee who supports overturning Roe v. Wade. After meeting with Kavanuagh in late August, she said that he told her that he believes the case to be settled law; however, many scholars and activists on both sides of the issue expect that he would roll back abortion rights.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the debate, there is no grassroots energy on behalf of Kavanaugh.

Top photo: Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, meets with Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh at her office, before a private meeting in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 21, 2018.

The post More Than $300,000 Has Been Pledged Against Susan Collins If She Votes for Brett Kavanaugh appeared first on The Intercept.

The controversy represents a new chapter for DSA, as it grows from a marginal player on the fringes of politics into an organization with serious political clout. The group grew during the 2016 primary campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders and then surged in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, as activists looked to take down not just the agenda of the new president, but also the political and economic system that created him. The June victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cemented the organization’s place in New York politics, leading Cynthia Nixon — who also endorsed Ocasio-Cortez and attended her victory party — to solicit the group’s endorsement.

In the wake of Ocasio-Cortez, the No. 1 NYC DSA priority has been to elect Salazar, a project that was humming along until the Tablet revelations. At a crossroads, the organization has decided to stand firm with its comrade, dismissing the story as much less important than the issues she is running on.

“We just want to really point to the issues and not focus on, you know, labels and whether somebody fits a label or not,” New York City DSA co-chair Bianca Cunningham said about the discrepancies in Salazar’s biography.

Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin magazine and a DSA member since he was 17, said that the Tablet article only deepened his commitment to Salazar’s campaign.

https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1033082318968303616

The article reviews Salazar’s turn as a former conservative activist, strident supporter of the Israeli government, and opponent of abortion rights, to a democratic socialist and critic of Israel. That broad journey had been reported before, but the real grenades were a pair of revelations that suggested she had concocted elements of her biography. First, the author interviewed Salazar’s brother, who said that her father never identified as Jewish, contradicting the candidate’s claim that she has Jewish lineage. This has led to criticism and examination in the Jewish press.

Julia Salazar (or any Jewish person of color) doesn’t owe you her backstory of how she’s a Jew. She had a community that claimed her before any campaign, that’s all the proof she needs. Yet here she is sharing her story, to be accountable in the face of a dishonest & racist smear https://t.co/60362rQ1Cx

— Rebecca Pierce (@aptly_engineerd) August 26, 2018

Secondly, the story notes that Salazar was born in Miami, contradicting a number of press outlets — including this one — who had identified her as a Colombian-born immigrant. The revelation also contradicted her own website, which described her as a “proud immigrant.”

The article forced Salazar into crisis mode, with the campaign issuing a response linking questions about her stated Jewish faith to “bigoted policing” of who is allowed to be Jewish.

In response to the article’s section about her place of birth, Salazar claimed that she had never said she was born in Colombia:

It really bends over backwards to try to put words in my mouth, instead of seeking to understand that my US-born mother and Colombian-born father had two different kids and raised us between two different places. I don’t present myself as an immigrant nor as a non-citizen.

— Julia Salazar (@JuliaCarmel__) August 24, 2018

My mom lived in Colombia via my father (my father is the Colombian immigrant here) but she was born in the US! To be clear I have never misrepresented that fact in any interview I’ve given. I think it’s even in the article.

— Julia Salazar (@JuliaCarmel__) August 24, 2018

In an interview with Jewish Currents published on August 27, Salazar addressed the fact that she was wrongly identified as an immigrant on her own campaign website. She blamed confusion among staffers for the mix-up. “My mistake was that I didn’t sit down and make sure everyone knew where I was born. So many times reporters contacted this staffer to confirm details of my life. And that included, was she born in Colombia? And they thought I was,” she said. “And I wasn’t included in those background conversations, and that was normal. But we weren’t on the same page. We’re a first-time team.”

Cunningham said the DSA has had no meetings on how to respond to the story, and dismissed its importance. “Julia’s been completely transparent about her very complicated background from the very beginning. It’s not on her to try to explain her identity. If anything, we think it’s disgusting and racist the way she’s being attacked,” she said.

Journalist Emma Whitford, who interviewed Salazar for a piece for the Village Voice that didn’t end up running, shared some notes she took from early May, in which Salazar identified herself as having been born in Miami:

i share this simply because these details shared in an on-the-record conversation w/ a reporter, so early in her campaign, challenge the notion that she crafted some sort of alternative narrative about herself (just listened back to the tape to be sure) pic.twitter.com/ou3Wbyikh7

— Emma Whitford (@emma_a_whitford) August 24, 2018

But over the summer, Salazar repeatedly implied that she herself was an immigrant.

During a July 3 event with political podcast Chapo Trap House, she was asked to explain her biography. “My family immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia when I was a little kid,” she said.

The Bushwick Daily, which covered the event, then identified her as Colombian-born.

At a fundraiser around the same time, she used similar language. “I immigrated to this country with my family when I was very little,” she can be heard saying in a video taken at the event.

She was born in Miami, but traveled between Colombia and the U.S. as a child, she said later. At the time she was born, she said in a statement in response to the allegations, “my parents had been living in Colombia, where my father was born and immigrated from, before settling permanently in Florida when I was still a small child.”

When pressed on whether DSA should at least offer a response to the public for electoral reasons, Cunningham said that voters would not care about the story. “Constituents don’t really care about why she practices the Jewish faith or whether or not a woman of color can practice that religion. I think people care about their rents going up and being displaced from their community,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez herself has also stood by Salazar. On August 24, a day after the Tablet article, Ocasio-Cortez reiterated her support of Salazar, without referencing the allegations.

And of course, these are in addition to our endorsements of
– @SalazarSenate18 for State Senate (https://t.co/us26UkHk3B)
– @CynthiaNixon for Governor (https://t.co/MTkATnB53e)
– @ZephyrTeachout for Attorney General (https://t.co/XkO4kOCCRH)

NY: VOTE?VOTE ?VOTE? ON SEPT 13th!

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 24, 2018

And on Thursday, the pair will be canvassing together. Corbin Trent, a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez, said that she remains “100 percent behind Julia.”

“Julia is far and away the best choice to represent the people of North Brooklyn in Albany,” Trent said. “As part of a broader movement in New York and across the country she has been working to improve the lives of all New Yorkers by fighting for universal healthcare, affordable housing, and wholistic criminal justice reform. A vote for Julia on September the 13th will bring much needed new leadership for North Brooklyn to Albany.”

https://twitter.com/SalazarSenate18/status/1034079538354028549

Salazar appears to be arguing that going back and forth to Colombia as a child allowed her to experience a version of life in the U.S. as an immigrant. “There isn’t one immigrant identity. Colombia is where my family was and where I was in the first years of my life. Most of the time when people asked about my childhood, they haven’t been interested in literally where was I born. They wanted to know how the first years of my life were spent, and where my family came from,” she told Jewish Currents.

“I would never claim nor have I ever claimed to share the experience of someone who has lived a life threatened by deportation. That’s not part of my narrative. [But] I’ve experienced people exoticizing me, or alienating me, or treating me as different. … I can acknowledge the importance of my family, and how I’ve been separated from my family, and how my family chose to live in the U.S. to be safer. All of this is part of an immigrant narrative.”

The post NYC DSA, Ocasio-Cortez Stand by State Senate Candidate Julia Salazar, Despite Story Disputing Her Biography appeared first on The Intercept.

Earlier this year, Oklahoma’s teachers protested by the thousands, demanding higher pay and better funding for public education. Many lawmakers were concerned that these protests would culminate in a strike.

The state’s Republican-dominated legislature responded by hiking teacher pay by an average of $6,100 per teacher; in order to finance this pay raise, it increased taxes on cigarettes, fuel, lodging, and oil and gas production.

Nineteen GOP legislators voted against this tax increase, and despite Oklahoma’s deep-red hue — Donald Trump received 65 percent of the vote there — Republican primary voters punished many of those lawmakers for opposing teacher interests.

During the June 26 primary elections, 10 Republicans who opposed the tax increase package were up for re-election. Two of them, Reps. Scott McEachin and Chuck Strohm, were defeated by Republican primary challengers. Seven others failed to secure enough votes to win their primaries outright, moving on to August 28 runoff elections.

Six of them were defeated during the second round of voting. Stan May, a Republican who campaigned in favor of the tax increase, was one of the challengers who won.

Asked whether GOP primary voters he met supported the tax hike, May said, “The majority of ’em do. There’s a few that are for no tax increase regardless, you get a few of those. The way the primary came out, it was obvious that most of the voters were sympathetic to the fact teachers needed a raise.”

May handily won the race in the state’s 80th House District, with 58 percent of the vote to incumbent Mike Ritze’s 42 percent. He was helped along by an endorsement from high school teacher Cody Coonce, who came in third place in the first round of voting.

The electoral impact of teacher activism was on display in Arizona as well. Earlier this year, the teachers there started what came to be known as the #RedForED movement, wearing red T-shirts and engaging in protests to push the state government to increase funding for public education. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey responded to the teacher activism by offering a 20 percent pay increase by 2020, but the teachers  were not satisfied, and they staged a walkout to continue to pressure the state government to act.

On Tuesday night, teachers and others supportive of the walkout won Democratic primaries for state seats.

At the top of the ticket, David Garcia, a professor at Arizona State University, edged out his rivals to win the Democratic nomination for governor with 49.2 percent of the vote. Garcia, who has a background working on education policy, campaigned in support of the teacher movements’ demand for a 20 percent pay increase. He will face Ducey in November.

Public school speech therapist Kathy Hoffman secured the Democratic nomination for school superintendent. Hoffman has worked in public schools for five years. She won with 52.8 percent of the vote, defeating David Schapira, a former Democratic leader in the state Senate who also once worked as a public school teacher.

Down ballot, teachers were represented in a number of other races as well. Arizona’s 2016 Teacher of the Year, Christine Porter Marsh, won an uncontested primary to become the Democratic nominee for the 28th state Senate district. The district narrowly went to the GOP in 2016, with incumbent Kate McGee, who is again running for re-election, winning a little over 51 percent of the vote that year.

In Arizona’s 12th House District, Joe Bisaccia, a public school teacher, was one of two Democrats who won a primary (each district elects two representatives in the Arizona system). Bisaccia, along with attorney Lynsey Robinson, will face Republican incumbents Travis Grantham and Warren Petersen in the fall.

Top photo: Thousands rallied at the Oklahoma state capitol building during the third day of a statewide education walkout on April 4, 2018 in Oklahoma City.

The post In Oklahoma and Arizona, Primary Voters Rewarded Candidates Who Stood With Teachers appeared first on The Intercept.

A longtime opponent of the state’s teachers unions, he told a local newspaper that he wasn’t worried about any political ramifications of the strike. “I can’t say that it will have zero effect, but I don’t think it’ll have any significant effect because, more often than not, they probably weren’t voting on the Republican side of the aisle anyways,” he said of the state’s teachers.

Essentially, Karnes bet against his constituents’ interest in education funding. And they called him on it.

Karnes lost his May primary election, winning only 3,749 votes compared to Republican Del. Bill Hamilton’s 5,787 votes. Hamilton was an opponent of right-to-work laws and expressed sympathy for the teachers strike. He secured the support of labor groups like the West Virginia AFL-CIO and the West Virginia Education Association Political Action Committee; altogether, organized labor contributed around $10,000 to his campaign.

“I think that teachers showed their political power in the primary,” Edwina Howard-Jack, a local high school teacher, told The Intercept. “Teachers showed up and they were voting in their ’55 United, 55 Strong’ shirts. … Once the results started rolling in, it was phenomenal. Teachers were really empowered to say: If we stick together, we can make a difference.’”

Karnes’s defeat was far from a one-off. Across the country, teachers have been getting heavily involved in Republican primaries to change the party’s stance on public education from within, and their successes suggest that Republican incumbents ignore the concerns of educators at their own risk.

Kentucky

During massive teacher protests in Kentucky this spring, educators demanded increased funding for public education and protested cuts to teacher pensions.

On May 22, Republican state House Majority Leader Jonathan Shell lost the primary to R. Travis Brenda, a math teacher.

Like Karnes in West Virginia, Shell underestimated the strength of the public education vote. “We’re talking about a small fraction of people who are acting the way we are seeing,” Mr. Shell told the Associated Press about the teacher protests just a couple weeks before the election. “The majority of people, whether it be teachers or the general public, people understand that we had a problem that we had to fix.”

Brenda spent just shy of $20,000 on his campaign, compared to Shell’s $126,000. But a 6-to-1 funding advantage wasn’t enough to stem the tide of public anger surrounding his support of a bill which forced teachers into an unfavorable retirement plan.

Although Brenda’s website reveals that, in many ways, he is a standard-issue pro-life, pro-gun rights Republican, his campaign also branded him as “an educator, not a politician.” The top item on his agenda was protecting public education.

“There was no coordinated effort to recruit educator candidates,” Kentucky Education Association president Stephanie Winkler told The Intercept. The state’s main teachers union offered support to teacher candidates, but did not go out and actively recruit candidates to run. “I think it was just issue-based. There were so many people fed up and upset with how the legislature had been disregarding education issues for so long,” she said.

Winkler says the KEA didn’t hesitate to participate in a Republican primary, because the organization’s commitment was to principles over politics.

“It wasn’t a party thing. Educators don’t see party, we go after who’s going to take care, and be for, public education, and that was the movement. It didn’t matter what party you were from. It still doesn’t matter. We just want to support pro-public education candidates, no matter what party,” she said.

In all, a dozen teachers won Democratic and Republican primaries in Kentucky this year.

Oklahoma

Earlier this year, Oklahoma teachers engaged in massive demonstrations and walkouts to protest consistently low teacher pay and inadequate funding for public education.

In response, the GOP-led legislature voted to increase taxes on cigarettes, fuel, lodging, and oil and gas production in order to fund pay raises and avert a strike. On average, teachers got a $6,100 annual pay raise. And the tax increase put into effect to pay for it was the first major tax increase the state has had in a quarter-century.

David Blatt, the executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, noted that the lawmakers had to clear a stiff hurdle in order to pass it. “Oklahoma requires a three-quarters vote of the legislature to pass a tax increase, and they were able to get that three-quarters support through our Republican-dominated legislature,” he told The Intercept. “And somewhat surprisingly, I guess, it’s the Republicans who voted against the tax increase who are, for the most part, facing the strongest primary challenges.”

During the June 26 primaries, 10 Republicans who opposed the tax increase package were up for re-election. Two of them, Reps. Scott McEachin and Chuck Strohm, were defeated by Republican primary challengers. Seven others failed to secure enough votes to win their primaries outright, and will compete in a runoff election tonight, August 28.

In the first round of voting, Republican Rep. Mike Ritze received 2,641 votes, losing to firefighter Stan May, who received 2,849 votes. A third candidate, high school teacher Cody Coonce, received 1,620 votes.

In contrast to Ritze, May is backed by several teacher and labor organizations, including the Oklahoma Retired Educators Association and the Oklahoma Public Employees Association. “My opponent is not very education-friendly,” May said in an interview with The Intercept. Coonce has also endorsed May, citing his views on teacher issues. “After talking with Stan, I think he’s our next step for education, moving into this race,” he said.

Ritze defended his votes against the tax hikes. “I voted for the teacher raise,” he said. “But the taxes, I felt like that was overkill. We had the money for the raises. Some cuts could have been made.”

He told a local Republican group that some of the protesters were “probably not teachers,” and implied that some may have been paid by liberal financier George Soros.

Blatt, who has followed Oklahoma politics for decades, told The Intercept that there is a new trend emerging among Republican primary voters. “What we’re seeing is that within the Republican Party, the candidates who are seen as pro-education, and who were willing to support tax increases to pay for teacher pay raises, are for the most part doing better, and the Republicans who are not seen as sufficiently pro-education are facing challenges,” he said.

When The Intercept asked May if he finds Republican voters to be supportive of tax increases in support of teachers, he affirmed that most were. “The majority of ‘em do. There’s a few that are for no tax increase regardless, you get a few of those,” he said. “The way the primary came out, it was obvious that most of the voters were sympathetic to the fact teachers needed a raise.”

He estimated that turnout among teachers in the primaries was double what it normally was. “Is that going to be a trend going forward? That’s the reason teachers are out in force across the state. To make sure that they’re going to vote from now on,” he said.

In a recent article, Tulsa World noted that no Oklahoma lawmaker who finished in second place in the first round of voting has won a runoff in over 20 years.

Top photo: Teachers hold a rally outside the Senate Chambers in the West Virginia Capitol on March 5, 2018, in Charleston, W.V.

The post Republicans Who Oppose Teacher Protests Are Losing Their Primaries, Even in Red States appeared first on The Intercept.

Both senators have signaled that they would be reticent to support a nominee who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and Kavanaugh’s past suggests he would eagerly do so as a Supreme Court justice.

Progressive activist Ady Barkan, who has the impairing condition of Lou Gehrig’s disease, spent the last five months crisscrossing the United States to campaign against Republicans who supported the tax law. He’s now pursuing an innovative tactic for pressuring Collins to vote “no” on Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

His “Be A Hero” campaign has a simple message for the senator. Barkan will raise as much money as he can for Collins’s 2020 Democratic opponent. If Collins chooses to vote “no” on Kavanuagh’s confirmation, he will give it all back.

“Basically what we’re saying is, this money will be sitting there waiting for the challenger, but if she announces a position on Kavanaugh and helps kill the nomination, we will refund the money,” he told The Intercept. “So we’re trying to create good incentives for her and provide Democrats in blue states all over the country with a concrete way they can put pressure on her.”

Liz Jaff, the campaign manager for the “Be A Hero” campaign, explained the tactic to The Intercept.

“You can’t bribe a senator, right? Imagine if you said, ‘We will pay you $10,000 to vote no on Kavanaugh. That’s illegal,'” she rightly noted. “But what we can say is, ‘We won’t pay your future opponent if you vote no.'”

The campaign will use the Crowdpac platform, which allows candidates to collect pledges of contributions that can be released if certain conditions are met.

Barkan met with Collins recently. “We were just in Maine, nobody would listen. And so Ady’s thought is, ‘Okay, let’s try a new tactic. Politicians seem to listen to money. So let’s raise a shit-ton of money,'” Jaff said.

They’re asking people to pledge $20.20 to an as-yet-undetermined Democratic opponent. They won’t be charged unless Collins votes for Kavanaugh.

In addition to putting pressure on Collins, Barkan and Jaff hope to inspire someone to jump into the race against a Republican senator who has quite easily fended off Democratic opponents in the past.

“Let’s say we crowdfund … like $50,000. To start a campaign is pretty hard — if I’m thinking of running against Collins in 2020, and I know there’s a pot of money out there … if I decide to run and I get approved and I’m a good Democrat, I can start my campaign with $50,000 and that’s incredible,” Jaff said. “So it incentivizes other people to step up and run against her, because there’s a pot of money there.”

Correction: August 16, 2018, 1 p.m.
A previous version of this story misspelled the last name of Liz Jaff. It has been updated.

Top photo: Minneapolis City Council Member Lisa Bender introduces Ady Barkan at a rally to support Rep. Keith Ellison’s bid for Minnesota attorney general on July 13, 2018, in Minneapolis.

The post Brett Kavanaugh Opponents Are Raising Money for Sen. Susan Collins’s 2020 Opponent — but Will Refund It If She Votes “No” appeared first on The Intercept.

In Milwaukee, former MLB security official Earnell Lucas won the Democratic nomination for sheriff, which almost guarantees he will win the general election in November. Lucas, a progressive with the backing of the Working Families Party, defeated Acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt, who had previously worked under Sheriff David Clarke, whose tenure was marked with mistreatment of Milwaukee residents. Schmidt was unable to overcome the association with Clarke, who is better known these days as a Fox News personality.

Schmidt’s loss came just a week after the movement dealt another controversial and high-profile law enforcement official a blow, unseating Bob McCulloch in St. Louis County. McCulloch’s anemic response to the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement.

Bryce, who captivated a national progressive audience with his working-class background and straight-talking campaign commercials, won the Democratic nomination for Congress in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, defeating opponent Cathy Myers.

Bryce and Myers originally entered the race to challenge House Speaker Paul Ryan, but he announced that he would retire, and therefore vacated the seat. Bryce will face off with Republican Bryan Steil, a former aide to Ryan, in the fall.

In debates, the two Democratic candidates disagreed little on policy and focused on their biographical differences. “I … think we need more moms in Congress,” Myers said to applause during a July debate. She also noted that she’s a teacher, and that she’s “seen the fear” in her students eyes during an active shooter drill, emphasizing her support for gun control.

Bryce, on the other hand, focused on his working-class background. “The average member of Congress is a millionaire. They don’t know what it means to be a working person in Wisconsin. But I do. Because I am,” Bryce said at the same debate.

Throughout the campaign, Bryce portrayed himself as essentially an ordinary guy with ordinary issues. In early July, news broke of Bryan’s history of arrests, including for driving under the influence.

Bryce’s campaign made the historic decision of supporting his campaign’s union drive, becoming the first Democratic congressional campaign in America to become fully unionized. In an interview with The Intercept, Bryce said he would “absolutely” like to see congressional staff, many of whom are notoriously underpaid, also organize.

Also in Wisconsin, Tony Evers won the Democratic nomination for governor. Evers is the Wisconsin state superintendent, serving since 2009. Evers is running on public education, heavily taking aim at incumbent Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s record on schools.

In western Wisconsin, Jeff Smith, a rural populist, defeated Steve Boe, who was backed by much of the Democratic establishment, in a three-way primary for a state Senate seat. Smith, a longtime member of Citizen Action Western Wisconsin, campaigned on restoring local control on a number of issues, establishing a public option, and boosting environmental laws. He will face Republican Mel Pittman in the general election.

Top photo: Democratic congressional candidate Randy Bryce, right, celebrates with a supporter at an election night rally after being declared the winner in the Wisconsin Democratic primary on Aug. 14, 2018, in Racine.

The post Sheriff David Clarke’s Deputy Goes Down in a Night of Big Wins for Wisconsin Progressives appeared first on The Intercept.