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[You’all: I’ve been gone, obviously, for a few months, which I hinted at in June. I’ve basically been working on a new project: JUST TRANSITION FOR ALL, a global effort to make sure millions of workers don’t get screwed in the decarbonization process to save the planet. You can check it out here and, please, sign up to the subscriber-only newsletter. The project explains why writing here might be more sparse but I couldn’t let this moment pass...]
I’m going to show you, with data, a full-proof roadmap to making the Republican Party a rump party in every state in the country, including the entire southern swath from so-called “red” Florida all the way west to Texas and up the eastern seaboard through the Carolinas—and why this road map will never happen. You will not hear about this any other place because the way politics is generally discussed is so damn superficial.
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If this is thought of as a national roadmap (it doesn’t have to be national), it would start with the declaration by the candidate for the presidency, Rosie the Riveter: “I will accept your nomination under one condition—it shall be the position of the party in its (typically useless ) platform that every single state party will spearhead a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $20-an-hour, to take effect on the day I am sworn into office and I will campaign in every state on that issue alone. And where a state party refuses to make this its singular focus, it will be the policy of the national party that every single office holder in that state party will be removed and replaced. I will make this initiative my signature, overriding issue of my campaign as a matter of morality and smart economics.”
I’m making this point today wth essentially the same analysis I made after the 2020 election about Florida, inspired today because of the background noise of the still-to-be-decided Senate race in Nevada. At this moment (Thursday morning, November 10th), the Democratic incumbent, Catherine Cortez Masto, is trailing the Republican by about one percent or 15,000 or so votes; keep that vote gap in mind. Aside: my guess is that she will eventually win by a vary narrow margin once the outstanding heavily-Democratic, mail-in votes are counted.
But, the real point is something else. On the Nevada election ballot was a proposal to raise the state minimum wage from the current $10.50-per-hour to $12-an hour in less than two years. You never heard of it? Well, that’s probably because you only watch CNN or read The New York Times—neither of which spends more than iota of time on anything but the horse race and gossip.
Here is the language:
STATE QUESTION NO. 2 - MINIMUM WAGE AMENDMENT
Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended, effective July 1, 2024, to: (1) establish the State’s minimum wage that employers must pay to certain employees at a rate of $12 per hour worked, subject to any applicable increases above that $12 rate provided by federal law or enacted by the Nevada Legislature; (2) remove the existing provisions setting different rates for the minimum wage based on whether the employer offers certain health benefits to such employees; and (3) remove the existing provisions for adjusting the minimum wage based on applicable increases in the cost of living?
Unless something dramatic happens, the ballot measure will pass; as of yesterday, it was winning 54 percent to 46 percent. I went to look at the vote totals, by county, for the measure, as of close of business November 9th; I doubt the total will have changed much since yesterday to make a fundamental difference for our discussion today.
Without exception, in every single county, the ballot measure OUTPERFORMED Masto’s total. In fact, in Clark County, the largest county by population (which, naturally, includes Las Vegas), the ballot measure was, as of yesterday, outpacing Masto’s total by more than the amount she trails her opponent in her race—336,721 supporting the ballot measure versus Masto’s total of 302,953 (again, those totals have shifted slightly since yesterday with a clutch of new ballots counted).
In the second largest county, Washoe (which includes Reno), although the ballot measure was losing slightly, the “yes” vote was 61,487 versus Masto’s vote of 60,625. Nevada has a bunch of very sparsely populated counties—for example, Eureka, Esmeralda, Storey—in which a total of a few thousands votes were cast. Still, in close elections, every margin matters. And, again, in every single county, Masto received fewer votes than the ballot measure.
The logical conclusion: did not matter if you were a Democrat, Republican or independent, voters were enthusiastic to embrace something that would boost their wages even if they did not support Masto. Duh!
This is not an isolated instance. Right after the 2020 election, I did an analysis with the title “A Full-On Populist Biden Would Have Won Florida”. As I wrote:
What really grabbed my attention in the Florida results was a relatively unremarked upon, at least nationally, Florida victory—the passage of Amendment 2, which will raise the state minimum wage to $15-an-hour by 2026. (Side point for now: keep in mind that $15-an-hour, though a huge leap above the putrid federal minimum wage of $7.25-an-hour, is still below what the minimum wage, federal or state, should be…at least $20-$22-an hour).
The vote on the initiative was overwhelming: 6,377,444 in favor (60.8 percent) and 4,111,094 opposed (39.2 percent) [votes are as of November 11th 2020]. That is a winning margin of over 2.2 million votes.
The presidential election results: Trump 5,658,847 (51.2 percent) versus Biden 5,284,453 (47.9 percent). That is a winning margin of just 374,000 plus votes out of more than 10.9 million votes.
I decided to look county-by-county at the Florida Trump vs. Biden race compared to the Yes-No vote on Amendment 2. In virtually every county, Amendment 2 outperformed Biden’s numbers—in some cases, by a lot (20-70 percent)—and that was true in counties that voted for Trump and even in counties where Amendment 2 lost but still tallied more votes than Biden.
You can go over there and check out the details—I have every county listed and the vote totals.
BIG PICTURE: I am going to bet that every time a statewide ballot initiative has been on the ballot in any state that it did better than any statewide candidate running at the same time, for either major party, including Democrats.
It’s obvious to me why: people respond to proposals that will make their life better. It doesn’t matter how one self-identifies in a political party sense.
It’s practical. And… progressive—as in making “progress”, not just spouting rhetoric.
NOW THE BAD NEWS: here is why this will never happen.
First, national political discourse makes it almost impossible to focus the attention, for any length of time, on actual policy. Transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”) are entirely not interested in policy, they don’t read and, to be honest, when it comes to those who claim to be political journalists, based on my close-up experiences with a lot of them, they are generally not very smart (with a few exceptions); it’s just a career path dictated by pleasing others and having access.
Second, I am not one of the knee-jerk folks (you know, the genuises who came up with the dumbest political slogan in recent memory, “defund the police”) who say there is absolutely no difference between the two parties.
But, the Democratic Party is riddled with a cadre of sycophants, operatives and elected functionaries who have only one goal: to keep power for themselves and pocket really handsome salaries.
No matter how many times they fail, the cost to them is zero—they keep their jobs (I’ll write more about this when I have time).
The way they usually keep their jobs is to make the large-dollar “liberal” donors happy—and those big donors generally have zero interest in pushing for livable minimum wages because higher wages for workers means, in the minds of large-dollar donors, lower profits for corporations.
That entire circle believes in the sanctity of American Exceptionalism, and the main tenet of American Exceptionalism is the beauty of the so-called “free market”—which is violently opposed to dramatically higher livable minimum wages because somehow such an idea is an affront to the “free market” and to the profits scooped up by operating an economic system that is based on wages that people can’t live on.
Of course, this is truly dumb economics: you can’t have a functioning society in which the vast majority of people can’t pay their bills.
But, ideology and greeds always win out over common sense.
So, you see, when people in the Democratic Party cry about Florida turning “red”, I roll my eyes: you made it so. There is a straightforward different path but that is not on the agenda.
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