U.S. Election Day: Democrats Headed for Defeat, Hopefully Some GOP Governors Too

Election Day dawns in the United States. "Beacon of democracy" according to the press release but "Great Satan" to parts of the planet, there are some interesting trends of which to take note today in the land of Lucifer.

The conventional wisdom as blared by loudspeaker in the media monopoly is that today the GOP will roll. I think the conventional wisdom is on the money this time around. The death knell for the Democrats began sounding last year. At first, at the end of the summer 2013, Obama dodged a bullet when he aborted his bombing run on Damascus by clutching at the Russian-sponsored proposal to have Syria get rid of its chemical weapons. Peace Prize winner Obama's move to initiate a war seriously undermined his credibility among the progressive, anti-war wing of his party, which is the informed, activist wing you need come election time.

Then there was the golden opportunity of tarring Republicans for their government shutdown in October 2013 squandered by the disastrous premiere of Obamacare. It has basically been all downhill since last fall --  from ISIS to Ebola to anemic job growth.

For a rundown on the election check out "What to Watch For as G.O.P. Expects Big Night at Polls" by Jonathan Martin and Nate Cohn.

Colorado is a designated bellwether:

Republicans are closely watching Colorado, where Senator Mark Udall and Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, both Democrats, are in danger of losing. Mr. Obama won the state twice, and with a younger, increasingly progressive population, Colorado has been trending Democratic. If Representative Cory Gardner can defeat Mr. Udall, who made his campaign almost exclusively about abortion rights and contraception, it will demonstrate that Republicans still have strength in a state that could be essential to regaining the presidency.

Colorado passed gun control legislation post-Sandy Hook and legalized cannabis in a 2012 vote, both under Gov. Hickenlooper. For the Republicans to take him out, as well as a Udall, a name synonymous with liberal Democratic politics in the U.S., would be a significant victory.

On the other hand, The GOP is walking the wire with its union-busting governors in the industrial heartland:

The polls also show up-in-the-air races in Michigan and Wisconsin, where the Republican incumbents, Rick Snyder and Scott Walker, appear to hold nominal leads. 

If the Republicans lose one or two of these races, it will complicate what might otherwise be an impressive performance for them in governors’ contests nationwide. Republican governors in competitive states have no business losing in what should be a good year for the party.

The wounded Dems are relying, once again, on the Obama coalition -- blacks, women, Latinos, students -- to hold on:

Every vote counts, of course, but some constituencies — especially those that made up Mr. Obama’s victories — will play a crucial role in shaping the outcomes on Tuesday. 

Democrats will need to counter a strong Republican advantage with men by winning women by nearly as much. That might require an even larger gender gap in some states than the 18-point one in the 2012 presidential election. Democrats will also need a much stronger turnout among nonwhite voters than they received in 2010. Black turnout in Georgia and North Carolina will be especially important: Follow whether the black share of the electorate approaches or exceeds 2012, when blacks represented 23 percent of North Carolina voters and 30 percent in Georgia.

I don't see students, women and Latinos strongly motivated to turnout this polling season; blacks on the other hand might very well show up in numbers greatly exceeding the last midterm. The reason? All the Republican-sponsored restrictive voting laws requiring photo identification and doing away with same-day registration are clearly aimed at diminishing the black vote.

Read Erik Eckholm's excellent synopsis of the GOP's voter suppression efforts, "Election Tests New Rules on Voting":

New rules to limit same-day registration or require photo identification will be in effect in some states, even as their constitutionality is argued in the courts. Most of the changes were adopted by Republican legislatures in the name of electoral integrity, even though evidence of voter fraud was negligible. They are opposed by Democrats who say tighter rules are aimed at discouraging minorities, poor people and college students from voting. All those groups tend to prefer Democrats.

“A significant number of changes are going into effect that will make it harder for millions of Americans to participate,” said Wendy R. Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “In close races, the impact might be larger than the margin of victory.” 

But Republicans say such concerns are overblown. 

“We believe these claims are made for partisan purposes to rile up the Democrat Party base,” said Michael B. Thielen, executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association in Washington. 

Numerous reports of voters facing obstacles have emerged from early voting in Texas and Georgia, among other states. But quantifying the impact of the altered rules is challenging, especially in a midterm election expected to have low turnout. In states like North Carolina, liberal groups hope that public anger over curbed voting opportunities will provoke a backlash that motivates Democratic voters, offsetting possible losses.

Another tactic Dems use to juice turnout is by placing minimum-wage increases on the ballot. Labor reporter Steven Greenhouse weighs in this morning with the informative "Little Opposition Seen in Some Votes to Raise State Minimum Wages":

In Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, binding referendums would raise the state minimum wage above the $7.25 an hour mandated by the federal government. 

These measures are so overwhelmingly popular in some states, notably Alaska and Arkansas, that the opposition has hardly put up a fight.

“These groups have noticed that minimum-wage increases can easily pass — they have seen this in the past few years,” said John G. Matsusaka, executive director of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California. “They can’t get it through the legislatures in these red states, so they do it this way.”

Some Republicans say that the main reason for these initiatives is to mobilize low-income voters to help re-elect embattled Democrats, like Senators Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mark Begich of Alaska. But supporters deny this, saying they are pushing to raise the minimum because so many workers are struggling and because the minimum wage has trailed inflation. 

The measures in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota would set the minimum wage lower than the $10.10 an hour that President Obama has asked Congress to pass, to no avail. The ballot initiatives in Arkansas and South Dakota call for a minimum of $8.50 an hour, while Nebraska’s would go to $9 and Alaska’s to $9.75.

***

Seattle has adopted a measure that will raise its minimum wage to $15 in several stages, while San Franciscans will vote on Tuesday whether to approve a $15 minimum wage. Residents in nearby Oakland will vote on a $12.25 wage.

In a surprising twist, hardly any business groups in San Francisco are opposing the $15 proposal, which is expected to pass easily.

Seattle, where I reside, has one interesting race. Jess Spear, a young climate scientist running as a socialist who was Kshama Sawant's campaign manager (Sawant's victory in 2013 paved the way for increased minimum-wage measures nationally), is taking on Speaker of the House Frank Chopp, an entrenched corporate-friendly Democrat, in the 43rd Legislative District. Spear won't win. But she has run a good campaign, and she has hit Chopp hard and repeatedly, forcing the moribund machine pol to actually defend himself and campaign this time, touting his accomplishments for the district. It is what democracy is supposed to look like and sound like and be like. Going forward, we need more vibrant, youth-oriented third party campaigns.

Immigration Reform Could Be a Longtime Coming

The word from on high as passed down to us little folk at the political action committee meeting Wednesday night is that immigration reform is coming our way fast and furious and it should happen quickly. The messenger, a woman who is plugged in at the state labor council, then added sardonically, "But that's what they said about the healthcare law."

Apropo of this is Steven Greenhouse's story this morning about the AFL-CIO working with the Chamber of Commerce on an immigration overhaul. A sticking point is the guest-worker program; the same sticking point that scuttled Bush's attempt at an immigration overhaul in 2007.

Labor is pushing for a body of experts to determine, based on certain data, how many provisional visas to issue at any one time. Business is fighting back saying that such a system wouldn't work; it would create another unwieldy government bureaucracy unresponsive to employer needs.

Labor unions have urged business to embrace a plan pushed by Ray Marshall, labor secretary under President Jimmy Carter. He suggests creating a commission of experts who would use economic data to determine, for instance, whether 20,000 or 40,000 immigrants should be granted provisional visas to do seasonal work nationwide at shellfish plants, restaurants or apple orchards.

“Instead of a system that works at the whim of any employer, it will be a data-driven system,” said Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Under the current system, he noted, employers have applied repeatedly for new batches of guest workers. A data-driven system would ensure an adequate flow of immigrants to help employers meet seasonal needs, he said.

Mr. McBurney of the hotel association disagreed. “It will never work,” he said. “There are no experts who will know exactly what the economy will need — this was proved by command and control economies. The bureaucracy will never be able to respond to the economy. The economy is a very dynamic thing. Bureaucracies aren’t so dynamic.”

Randel K. Johnson, senior vice president for labor policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, agreed. “We oppose the commission because it would never be able to determine shortages in a timely manner that reflect the always-changing realities of the marketplace.”

One way unions have moved closer to the Chamber is that many have embraced the E-Verify system to screen new hires:

In another important step forward, many labor unions have joined with the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups in embracing E-Verify, a federal electronic system that uses Social Security numbers and other data to verify that newly hired workers are in the country legally. Union leaders have frequently denounced E-Verify as error-prone, a continuing concern. They said it often declared that immigrants with valid papers were not authorized to work.

When I worked at the carpenters local we often went to bat for guys who got tagged by E-Verify; a service representative would walk them through getting a temporary Social Security Card and then fight the employer to accept that as a valid form of identification.

Based on a reading of Greenhouse's story the woman from the state labor council might be right. It could be a new immigration law will be a longtime coming.

Labor's Decline

Organized labor continues to shrink. We're down to 11.3% of the work force, the lowest since 1916; this according to new information reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you read the story yesterday by Steven Greenhouse, you know that the right-to-work law in Indiana and the loss of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers in Wisconsin, both passed by Republican legislatures following Tea-Party fueled triumphs in the 2010 midterm elections, had a lot to do with the significant one-year decline:

Union membership showed sharp drops in Wisconsin, which passed a law in 2011 curbing the collective bargaining rights of many public employees, and in Indiana, which enacted a right-to-work law last February that may have prompted many workers to drop their union membership.

Such laws prohibit requiring employees at unionized workplaces to pay union dues or fees. The bureau’s report showed that union membership fell by 13 percent last year in Wisconsin and by 18 percent in Indiana — both unusually large numbers for a single year.

Barry T. Hirsch, a labor economist at Georgia State University, said an analysis he conducted found that the number of government employees in Wisconsin belonging to a union slid by 48,000 last year, to 139,000 from 187,000, as many public sector workers evidently decided to quit their unions after the Republican-led legislature stripped them of most of their bargaining rights.

Speaking about the nation as a whole, Professor Hirsch said: “I am really surprised that the drop in unionization was as large as it is in a single year, and it was particularly big in the public sector. It does seem you are seeing reductions in some of the states that you might expect.”

For instance, in Indiana, where the right to work law took effect last March, unionization dropped to 9.1 percent from 11.3 percent in 2011. Michigan enacted a similar law last month.

I asked at least four people at the local where I work if they had seen this story. No one had. Not a single person. Greenhouse quotes the chief economist for the AFL-CIO, William Spriggs, who tries to spin the the bleak BLS report by arguing that unionization is up in key states like California, Texas and North Carolina. “'It’s not a simple story that we don’t have our act together,' Mr. Spriggs said. 'I would be more concerned if union membership was down among Latinos and Asian-Americans, because that’s a growing demographic, but it’s up.'”

But it is a simple story that labor doesn't have its act together. Unions have money, at least the internationals and large locals do. Organizers could be employed; things could be turned upside down. But leadership is overwhelming old and overwhelming preoccupied with holding on to the assets it controls. So as the boat sinks the shibboleth for labor is, "Don't rock the boat."

NLRB Ruling on Social Media

Steven Greenhouse, longtime labor reporter for the New York Times, has a frontpage story today about rulings of the National Labor Relations Board striking down overly broad employer restrictions of what workers say using social media. While this is good news for all bloggers and Facebook junkies it is not carte blanche to say anything about the workplace:

The labor board’s rulings, which apply to virtually all private sector employers, generally tell companies that it is illegal to adopt broad social media policies — like bans on “disrespectful” comments or posts that criticize the employer — if those policies discourage workers from exercising their right to communicate with one another with the aim of improving wages, benefits or working conditions.

But the agency has also found that it is permissible for employers to act against a lone worker ranting on the Internet.

The distinction here is between "personal venting" and "concerted activity" to improve wages, benefits or working conditions. To my mind this still gives the employer a lot of leeway to go after someone who is posting critical comments online about his or her job. So be careful.