The future's in the air
Can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change
The Scorpions
At no point in my writing past did I think I could quote a Scorpions song but today, it felt fitting as the wind of change has brought in A LOT of change in the last few weeks. Three topics today: the primary race in Colorado and ‘dark pools’ funding trojan horses, Jackson v. Dobbs implications on midterm elections, and the Supreme Court ruling today against the EPA that massively roles back federal overreach on carbon emissions without a specific legislative mandate (sounds like CDC, OSHA and abortion…. make a real law, and the Courts will determine if the law is legal, not create the ‘law’ from the bench).
On Tuesday, both Joe O’Dea and Heidi Ganahl won their Republican primary for Senate and Governor. Both were contested by extreme right candidates. Both races were for the privilege of running against Democrats that didn’t have a primary challenger. And, in both cases, the last 10 days of the campaign, a substantial amount ($7 mm and $3 mm, respectively from what I can source) poured into their opponents coffers from dark pools such as ProgressNow Colorado, among others.
On its face, it (these ads) looks like an attack ad — one trying to convince people participating in the June Primary not to vote for state Rep. Ron Hanks for U.S. Senate. The ad calls Hanks too conservative for Colorado, saying he wants to ban abortions, build the border wall and increase access to guns among other things. It uses similar language to one that targets gubernatorial candidate Greg Lopez.
So how would an attack ad prop a candidate up?
“You're certainly not going to appeal to the other side. So, in this case, I think this is a more targeted message — where you're trying to paint somebody as conservative, which to the one side is a bad thing, to the other side, that's a good thing. The question is, to the swing voter, what does that mean?” Duber-Smith said.
“Two things: massive name ID and basically a sales job that he's a conservative targeted to conservative audiences,” Penry said.
The group Democratic Colorado is spending $780,000 on the Hanks ads while the Colorado Information Network IE Committee is spending another $688,000 on the Lopez commercials.
I’m not going to trace the source of all the dark money: it is, by definition meant to be very, very hard to track. But one of the supporters of Ron Hanks (who sent out a mailer) was ProgressNow, an organization that was also a vocal supporter of Jared Polis in 2013. On June 28th after the primary, ProgressNow said this:
“Joe O’Dea has already promised to eliminate the Department of Education. Personhood and anti-abortion activists are lining up to support him, and O’Dea aligned himself with Ted Cruz on gun safety after yet another horrific mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas,” said Loflin. “And if the way Joe O’Dea has treated his workers is any indication, Colorado cannot trust Joe O’Dea with the economy, and we definitely cannot trust him in the Senate.”
Odd that they would support his more extreme opponent.
Elections are all about the narrative and that narrative is controlled by media spots. Jared Polis put $1 mm of his own money into his School board campaign. His role was featured prominently in the book “The Blue Print” which detailed how the Democrats turned a red/purple state in 2004 to a blue state (and host of the Democratic convention) by 2008. He put more than $23 million of his own money into the Governor’s race in 2018, despite raising barely $400,000 of total money from outside donors. In 2022, he is expected to spend upwards of $40,000,000, having already contributed $5.9 mm to date for an uncontested primary.
Even better? For the media campaigns, many of these dollars are then spent on ads on left leaning networks during sporting events (NBC, ABC, CBS) who then take the dollars and are able to pay the salaries of their news anchors and staff, who then run hit pieces on Republicans for the 2 years between elections and say wonderfully glowing things about the Democratic incumbent. Facebook, Google, Twitter, the major networks and print news media ALL rely on advertising for the bulk of their revenue generation.
The great news this week is that it didn’t work. Could it mean that maybe, just maybe, we are getting to the stage of the pandemic where everyone looks at the existing politicians, their historical choices and actions, the results (COVID is still here, right?) and kicks them all out in favor of somebody that shares a rational view of the world? From my fingers to God’s inbox…
This from the New Yorker “hit piece” on Ron DeSantis. As it turns out, the truth isn’t a hit.
When I asked Republican activists and operatives about the rise of the school issues, they told a very similar story, one that began with the pandemic, during which many parents came to believe that their interests (in keeping their kids in school) diverged with those of the teachers and administrators. As Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, put it to me, parents who were in many cases apolitical “became concerned about these overwrought lockdowns, and then when they asked question after question, there was no transparency about them, which led them to pay more attention when their kids were on Zoom. They overheard things being taught. They asked questions about curricula. They were just stonewalled every step of the way.” The battles regarding the covid lockdowns, Roberts told me, opened the way for everything that came after. “This is the key thing,” he said. “It started with questions about masking and other aspects of the lockdowns.”
Both parties right now are trying to answer the question of how fundamentally covid has changed politics. “From 2008 to 2020, elections were decided on the question of fairness—Obama ’08, Obama ’12, and Trump ’16 were all premised on the idea that someone else was getting too much, and you were getting too little, and it was unfair,” Danny Franklin, a partner at the Democratic strategy firm Bully Pulpit Interactive and a pollster for both Obama campaigns, told me. But the pandemic and the crises that followed (war, inflation, energy pressures) were not really about fairness but an amorphous sense of chaos. “People are looking for some control over their lives—in focus groups, in polls, once you start looking for that you see it everywhere,” Franklin said.
Both parties had shifted, in his view. Biden had sought to reassure Americans that the government, guided by experts, could reassert its control over events, from the pandemic to the crisis in energy supply. Republicans, meanwhile, had focused on assuring voters that they would deliver control over a personal sphere of influence: schools that would teach what you wanted them to teach, a government that would make it easier, not harder, to get your hands on a gun. A moral panic about gender identity might seem anachronistic, but it served a very current political need. Franklin said, “It’s a way for Republicans to tell people that they can have back control of their lives.”
November will be interesting. I’m thrilled for Heidi who is a wonderfully balanced, moderate and energetic candidate. Jared Polis is going to have his hands full.
Speaking of November, I want to very very briefly touch on the Jackson v. Dobbs decision that ruled that states CAN make laws about abortion restrictions. New York, Colorado and California have zero restrictions. Texas on the other hand, limits abortion to 6 weeks. The precedent in question was Roe v. Wade, which by now you have read EVERYWHERE, used the 14th amendment and a few cases prior to it’s ruling in 1973 to extend privacy laws to say that states COULD ONLY regulate in the 3rd trimester. To be clear, the 14th amendment doesn’t even use the word privacy and nowhere in the Constitution can you find the word abortion. To get there, the court in Roe did some serious creative thinking.
As I and many others have said, even RBG thought Roe v. Wade was judicial activism and thought abortion should have been premised upon equality, not privacy. Nonetheless, the courts have struck down the precedent and the net result of Jackson v. Dobbs will be that politicians will have to take a position and will be required to act with respect to abortion. There is no hiding behind the Supreme Court any longer.
Candidates may choose to explicitly run on passing abortion restriction laws OR removing abortion restriction laws. The voters will then determine how important this issue is to them versus estate taxes, climate change, freedom of speech, rule of law, state supremacy, inflation, homelessness and education and they will vote with the candidate most aligned. Abortion will be on the ballot every single year until the subject is resolved at each state’s level by the judgement of the majority.
The reality is- the states that have abortion restrictions have them because the majority want them. One may choose not to like that answer, but judges should rule on existing laws, not bend interpretations to bypass the will of the people. November will put abortion on the ballot, and I think many democrats will find it simply isn’t a popular position outside deeply blue states. For good or for bad, that is democracy.
And finally, on the same topic, today, the Supreme Court dealt another massive blow to federal overreach through administrative agencies who far surpassed their mandates (think CDC, OSHA, FDA’s great work on trial data for the 6 months - 5 year old vaccines and variant approvals). This time, West Virginia’s case against the EPA was victorious. Said the Supreme Court
Given that precedent counsels skepticism toward EPA’s claim that Section 111 empowers it to devise carbon emissions caps based on a generation shifting approach, the Government must point to “clear congressional authorization” to regulate in that manner. Utility Air, 573 U. S., at 324. The Government can offer only EPA’s authority to establish emissions caps at a level reflecting “the application of the best system of emission reduction . . . adequately demonstrated.” §7411(a)(1). The word “system” shorn of all context, however, is an empty vessel.
Such a vague statutory grant is not close to the sort of clear authorization required. The Government points to other provisions of the Clean Air Act—specifically the Acid Rain and National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) programs—that use the word “system” or “similar words” to describe sector-wide mechanisms for reducing pollution. But just because a cap-and-trade “system” can be used to reduce emissions does not mean that it is the kind of “system of emission reduction” referred to in Section 111. Finally, the Court has no occasion to decide whether the statutory phrase “system of emission reduction” refers exclusively to measures that improve the pollution performance of individual sources, such that all other actions are ineligible to qualify as the BSER. It is pertinent to the Court’s analysis that EPA has acted consistent with such a limitation for four decades. But the only question before the Court is more narrow: whether the “best system of emission reduction” identified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority granted to the Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. For the reasons given, the answer is no.
You're becoming a valued source of thought to me and I thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. Reading them sometimes caused dismay, but I love seeing the truth shared!