Democracy On The Ballot

Democracy itself is on the ballot this November: 299 election deniers are on the ballot—more than half of all Republicans running for congressional and state offices, according to an exhaustive investigation by the Washington Post. Some, like Jim Marchant of Nevada, are running to be Secretary of State, where they could block the will of the voters in 2024, just as Trump wanted in 2020.

“If get all of our Secretaries of State elected around the country like this, we take our country back,” Marchant said, standing next to Trump at a rally on October 8.

But the House of Representatives may be even more crucial, for that’s where real solutions can be forged if Democrats can defy historical trends and keep their majority — and it’s where Republicans have already promised to impeach Joe Biden just for beating Donald Trump if they do not. A handful of Southern California races could be crucial in determining who controls Congress — problem-solving Democrats or mischief-making Republicans.

So meet Will Rollins, Christy Smith, and Jay Chen running to unseat Republicans in three of the tightest races. Rollins is running explicitly against extremism and disinformation, Smith is running on reproductive freedom, and Chen, who’s focused on consensus-based policies his opponent has abandoned, was just targeted with a photoshopped red-baiting ad. He pushed back hard, but what comes next is anyone’s guess.

Stopping Extremism
“My campaign is about stopping extremism,” Rollins told Random Lengths. “We need a legal framework to end profit-driven lies and division, so Americans can start to agree on basic facts again.”

Rollins is running for Congress in the Inland Empire against 15-term election-denier Ken Calvert, but his website’s front page video ad starts with a shot of him in front of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, putting the fight to save American democracy right on our front doorstep.

“I want to tell you a story,” Rollins says, in the video shot last year. “Last March the U.S. Navy sent a ship called the Mercy here to the Port of Los Angeles. The Mercy is a massive floating hospital and it was here to help if our ICUs became overrun with COVID cases.”

Just days after the Mercy docked, a train engineer attempted to derail his train toward the Mercy because he thought it was part of a government conspiracy.

“As a national security and terrorism prosecutor, I worked on that case,” Rollins explains. 9/11 is what first motivated him, “But today some of our biggest threats are right here at home,” and that train engineer is just one example. “This is a systemic problem…. But we can stop it,” he argues, going on to spell out how. And once we can agree on basic facts again, “there is a lot of work that we need to do together.”

It’s a relatively straightforward argument for a serious problem-solving approach that seems well-suited to a swing district electorate.

The Power of Branding
But that’s not how such elections are won according to political analyst Rachel Bitecofer, who was the first to accurately predict the size of the Democrats’ blue wave in 2018, based in part on a theory of “negative partisanship” that warned of similarly likely red wave this year. As she explained on The Last Word in 2019, after my Salon interview drew attention to her:

Under my model, Democrats win the White House in 2020, and then in 2022, they’re going to have a very tough electoral cycle because turnout for Democrats will go back to normal. And because Democrats have a poor electoral strategy, they’re going to compound that problem, probably by not appealing to Democrats to get them to the polls.

To address that problem, Bitecofer switched from academic polling analysis to forming her own super PAC, StrikePac, to run the sorts of ads that Democrats needed to win. Her premise was simple, she told me in June 2021:

The GOP doesn’t really run anything except a marketing/branding op and it’s predominantly a branding offensive against the left. They don’t spend a lot of time on their own brand, but they do spend a lot of time in their messaging on discounting, discrediting, and debasing our brand.

One of the first ads she released, “Fuse,” focused directly on Trump’s threat to democracy. Its purpose was also simple. “It’s flipping that GOP tactic over to our side,” she explained. “It’s attacking the Republicans to make a conversation about their anti-democratic power grab.”

Roe Reversal Changes Landscape
Bitecofer has had some success in influencing others, but not nearly enough to counter the 2022 red wave she saw coming. But then “The Roe reversal happened,” she told me last week. “It triggered a negative partisanship emotion on the left side, the in-party’s side of the electorate, because it taps right into fear, threat and hate, and it’s visceral,” she said. “If there had been no policies in America that made abortion illegal, it might’ve been a little bit different,” but because of all the laws on the books that kicked in right away, and some headline-grabbing cases, “It has allowed Democrats to capture or catch up that deficit of enthusiasm.”

Smith, who lost by just 333 votes in 2020, was already laser-focused on reproductive freedom. In an ad released last December, she said, “I will be damned if I nearly died having both of [my daughters], only to have them see the day where they would become second-class citizens, where their rights to their own health care, freedom, and reproductive choice is decided by people who see this as a political narrative, more about control than freedom.”

“Garcia’s proposal would outlaw abortion in every state even in cases of rape incest or health of the mother, an ad released in mid-September points out. “He even voted against keeping birth control legal.”

Issue Ownership
While abortion has played a key role in shifting campaign dynamics, polls still show that the economy remains an even higher concern—and that Republicans hold an advantage, despite a generations-long record of better economic performance under Democratic presidents—a point hammered home in another Strike PAC ad, using sports imagery to illustrate their superior performance on economic growth, job creation, and even the stock market.

This disconnect reflects what political scientists call “issue ownership,” Bitecofer explains. “If you ask these average normal Americans, ‘What do you think of when we say, Republican?’ They’re going to say ‘low taxes and the economy.’ That’s the Republican Party’s brand. And for Democrats, it’s healthcare and education.” And because of that, for decades Democrats haven’t wanted to talk about the economy. Which is a huge problem on two counts, she says. First, “The economy is always going to be the number one issue,” except briefly after 9/11, “and you can’t cede ownership of the most important issue.” And second, “We haven’t fought, we haven’t made our case that actually, no, the economy is better under Democrats.” This failure to fight puts Democrats at a disadvantage, when Republicans are the ones who ought to be, she notes: “They voted against the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA], they have absolutely zero plan to deal with inflation,” yet Democrats as a party—with too few exceptions—aren’t driving this point home.”

Jay Chen to some extent has, which the LA Times took note of when they endorsed him. His opponent, Michelle Steele, “would not even support bipartisan pro-business legislation, including the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act that provides federal funding to help make the U.S. semiconductor industry more competitive with industries in China and other countries,” they wrote.

Not only would Chen have supported those bills, he has positions on infrastructure, education, small business and healthcare that are all consensus-oriented, reflecting his background as a community college trustee, former school board member, and Navy Reserve officer. At a recent community forum, he said, “One of the things I value most about my service in the military is the fact that we don’t discuss politics or party. We work together to accomplish the mission, and we need more of that that in Washington DC right now.

Dirty Tricks
Steele didn’t attend that forum—she’s repeatedly avoided engaging in person with high-information voters, while toxically targeting the less engaged, repeating a dirty trick she used to win election in 2020: sending an unfounded mailer, in Vietnamese, to “Little Saigon,” the largest concentration of Vietnamese Americans in the country, accusing her Democratic opponent of ties to Communist China. It worked against Harvey Rouda in 2020, but her hamfisted followup against Chen drew swift condemnations. She portrayed Chen in a classroom holding Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto,” alongside images of communist figures Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin and Ho Chi Minh, with “Jay Chen invited China into our children’s classroom” is written in Vietnamese on the chalkboard.

Another flying accused him of “working for China” and claimed his “campaign was bankrolled by a donor in communist China,” a reference to his brother, an American citizen working as an investment banker in Hong Kong in 2012, when he supported an Chen in an earlier run for Congress.

Misrepresenting Chen’s brother as a sinister communist Chinese donor tells you all you need to know about Steel’s campaign. But just to be clear, the ‘China in classrooms’ charge refers to Chinese language classes, indirectly funded in part by the Chinese government, as part of program begun by the Bush Admnistration in 2006. Hundreds of such classes were funded across the US at the time Chen voted to approve them.

Chen defended himself by pointing to his grandmother’s escape from communist China and his status as a “Naval Reserve officer with top-secret security clearance,” backed up by other Asian-American Democrats with similar credentials.

But Republicans have been making this same sort of baseless accusation since Richard Nixon first ran for Congress in 1946, so it remains to be seen if it works. National defense, the economy, and crime are all “daddy party” brand issues that play in Republican’s favor, regardless of the facts, unless Democrats push back in ways they’ve habitually avoided. This cycle, attacks on Democrats over crime have been fueled by a dramatic spike in coverage by Fox News.

But here again, Democrats are much stronger than they realize. Not only are current crime rates well below where they were pre-Obama, a pair of reports earlier this found that red state murder rates were much higher than blue states and that Democratic-run cities spend more on police and employ more of them than Republican cities do. Specifically, the “The Red City Defund Police Problem” report found that:

• The 25 largest Democrat-run cities employ 75% more police officers than the 25 largest Republican-run cities, on a per capita basis.
  
• The 25 largest Democrat-run cities spend 38% more on policing than the 25 largest Republican-run cities, on a per capita basis.

This shouldn’t be surprising. It is, after all, Trump-supporting Republicans who assaulted the Capitol on January 6, injuring 140 police officers. Trump himself saw nothing wrong with that assault and he’s still the dominant force inside the GOP. Which is Bitecofer thinks its great that he’s been dominating the news since the FBI search turned up thousands of stolen documents in his Mar-A-Lago office, more than 100 of which were classified.

“He has created, legally, a situation where the new cycle can’t help but be about him constantly,” Bitecofer said. “And here’s the thing: that’s good for us.” Though its unfortunate it disrupted Democrats’ opportunity to promote the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s a trade she would gladly take.

A Brand Ambassador
There’s another candidate I I haven’t mentioned: Katie Porter. “If Katie Porter was running in all these California districts then I would be very confident we could hold 218 [a majority] in the House,” Bitecofer said. “She’s what I call a brand ambassador,” meaning “ Katie understands the best goal for her in a district like she faced was to make the brand popular.”

She’s done that, in part, by very specifically picking fights with special interests who harm her constituents, in ways that ordinary citizens find easy to understand.

The challenge for Democrats is that they’ve got to do both—draw a sharp line about what they’re against, while bringing together as many people as possible to find common ground. This is how Rollins sees it: First, he says, “If we truly care about our democracy – if we truly care about something as fundamental as the freedom to choose our leaders – we cannot stop fighting against the far-right forces and broken information system that are encouraging more extremism and attacks.” It’s a systemic problem, he argues: “Extremists, Big Tech and media outlets are profiting from spreading division based on lies, even as they erode our democracy and make it easier for adversaries like China and Russia to exploit us. We need to end this cycle of division-for-profit by updating our laws to break down information bubbles and propaganda networks, to require transparency in advertising, and to create a modern Fairness Doctrine that protects the public’s right to be informed.”

But then, “When we can cut through the noise and agree on the basic facts, we all – Democrats, Republicans and Independents – have more in common than what divides us,” he argues. “At this crucial moment in our history, America needs to elect a new generation of leaders with specific plans that will put an end to the toxic divisions that threaten our democracy and prevent us from solving problems together. I aim to be one of those leaders.”