Over the past year, many Republicans have repeatedly claimed that education has run amok under Democratic control and that parents need more say in the classroom. There have been debates over school closures, masking, transgender students competing in school sports, and how teachers talk about race, gender and sexuality.
You could say that education has become something of a wedge issue — in other words, an issue that parties use to try to divide the opposing party to shake loose new voters. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with political science professors Sunshine Hillygus and Patrick Egan about the history of wedge issues and how they have shaped U.S. politics.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or bydownloading it in iTunes, theESPN Appor your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts,learn how to listen.
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.
By April 2020, President Donald Trump, elected in part because of his pledge to challenge the Washington establishment, had tired of the pandemic advice being offered by his health experts. He began feuding directly with Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease doctor, including on the efficacy of drugs such as hydroxychloroquine in providing quick, silver-bullet-esque treatments for covid-19. Trump always pledged a miracle — warm weather, hydroxychloroquine, monoclonal antibodies — that would assure people they could live their lives as normal. That meant conflicting with the experts, a tension that his base embraced.
A year later, the anti-expert instinct Trump had fostered began to show in a different context. States with more Joe Biden voters began seeing much higher rates of vaccination than states that had preferred Trump. The former president’s advocacy was halting and constrained, recognizing that there was more political value in standing against the “so-called experts” than in trying to persuade people to protect themselves against the virus. So his most fervent supporters went looking for more miracles. Florida embraced those antibody treatments. Others began to hype the drug ivermectin.
There was never any evidence that ivermectin was particularly effective at treating coronavirus infections. A smattering of studies suggested that there might be some benefit, but they were limited in scale. By March 2021, the Food and Drug Administration was warning that it hadn’t found any demonstrable benefit from taking the drug to treat covid. But then the delta variant of the coronavirus began to spread, causing particular devastation in states that were less vaccinated and, relatedly, had shown more support for Trump. So many people in those areas sought out ivermectin, convinced that some cure existed beyond the highly effective vaccine promoted by the Biden administration and the “experts.”
We now know with a great deal of confidence that ivermectin does not show any appreciable benefit in treating covid-19. In fact, “volunteers who took ivermectin in the first three days after a positive coronavirus test turned out to have worse outcomes than did those in the placebo group,” as the New York Times reported.
What we don’t know is how many lives might have been lost because of the politicization of ivermectin as an anti-establishment alternative to treatments that did prevent death.
There is no real question that right-wing political leaders touted ivermectin specifically as a way to score partisan points. Consider Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) rhetoric last December.
“Ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, & other treatments are saving lives,” she wrote on Twitter. " …[O]ur response to #COVID19 should be working towards ending obesity, promote covid treatments that are proven to work, & stop the politically driven mass hysteria.”
“Allow people to choose natural immunity or vaccines, w/o discrimination,” she added. Her account was later suspended for repeatedly sharing coronavirus misinformation.
That formulation — vaccines vs. “natural immunity” gained by catching and recovering from the virus — is key. To justify rejecting effective vaccines, you need to both denigrate the vaccines’ efficacy and propose an alternative. That was the role ivermectin played: It was hyped as something you could take to feel better in the event you caught the virus. Then you get “natural immunity” and you’re covered as well as if you had been vaccinated — if you lived.
The challenge, of course, is that many people didn’t live. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about 163,000 people died during the delta surge because they weren’t vaccinated. Those deaths were disproportionately in places that had preferred Donald Trump in 2020.
The effect of encouraging people to rely on ivermectin was the same as asking them to rely on wishing upon a star: Some would live and might credit ivermectin for their survival. But that was simply coincidental. Those who might have lived had they been vaccinated were not around to instruct people that ivermectin didn’t work.
This was the central problem. People believed this. That includes some legislators, certainly; just because you see something as politically useful doesn’t mean you are doing so cynically. Using a large platform to amplify claims about an unproven treatment, though, would have the predictable effect of people taking it seriously. So we saw myriad cases in which patients or families, convinced that ivermectin was miraculous, suedmedicalinstitutions to force the administration of ivermectin. Hospitals were reluctant, given that, unlike wishing on a star, there were potential negative effects of taking the drug. (Poison-control centers noted an increase in calls about ivermectin.)
Those convinced that the drug worked — hearing it from trusted politicians or podcast hosts — saw conspiracy. The establishment was rejecting ivermectin because it wasn’t profitable, they argued. Or they were doing the bidding of vaccine manufacturers. Even the inefficacy of ivermectin was explained away: Hospitals weren’t administering enough! There was always some reason that could be constructed to explain why The Establishment was trying to suppress ivermectin, and those reasons were never that it wasn’t proven to work and that it risked serious side effects.
It’s important to emphasize how ivermectin correlated to politics. Research published last month showed that counties that supported Trump strongly in 2020 were those that saw more ivermectin prescriptions written in the final months of that year, as attention began to turn to the drug. Google searches for ivermectin in August and September of last year were far higher in a number of metropolitan areas that had backed Trump by wider margins in 2020.
Some of this is a function of ivermectin’s approved use in agriculture: rural areas would be expected both to show more support for Trump and to have more animals needing a drug like ivermectin that targeted parasites. But this was also the period in which ivermectin searches surged, so it’s clearly also linked to the pandemic.
Politics both drove and followed the fixation on ivermectin. Right-leaning political leaders and conservative media figures hyped ivermectin as an alternative to vaccination and their followers believed them. Then, conservative political figures responded to the outrage of the base at the pushback on use of the drug with legislation forcing it to be made available. Earlier this month, USA Today wrote about state legislators who seized on the issue to pass laws mandating the prescription of ivermectin when desired, even as the lack of utility of the drug was becoming more obvious.
Others have gone further. A candidate for attorney general in Wisconsin is pledging to launch homicide probes targeting doctors who didn’t prescribe ivermectin. It’s not just believing the hype, it’s leveraging the false confidence in ivermectin for political benefit.
We will never know how many Americans who might have lived had they been vaccinated decided against it, trusting that drugs such as ivermectin would keep them alive. We do know, though, that there was a concerted effort to convince people that ivermectin would do so, an effort that intertwined with partisan rejection of government expertise. We can say with confidence that the atmosphere of disinformation about ivermectin led to people dying who would otherwise have lived.
We know how deadly covid has been. We’ll never know just how deadly this rhetoric was.
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April 01, 2022 at 12:58AM
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Analysis | Ivermectin is the signature example of politics trumping health - The Washington Post
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Announcement from National Editor Matea Gold, Deputy National Editor Philip Rucker, Deputy National Politics Editor Dan Eggen and Politics Breaking News Editor Donna Cassata:
We are thrilled to announce that Mariana Alfaro will take on a new role as co-anchor of Post Politics Now, a new live analysis approach to political coverage set to debut April 4.
Mariana will lead Post Politics Now during the afternoon and evening hours each weekday, partnering with fellow co-anchor John Wagner, who will host the live file starting each morning. Together, under the direction of Politics Breaking News Editor Donna Cassata, they are tasked with making Post Politics Now a marquee element of our political coverage for the 2022 midterms, the 2024 presidential election and beyond.
Post Politics Now will provide live, up-to-the-minute analysis to guide readers through each day’s news cycle. It will showcase lively visual features such as videos, photos and graphics as well as insights from reporters across the newsroom and opportunities for readers to interact with Post journalists.
Mariana first joined The Post in 2019 as a researcher for “The Daily 202," our flagship politics newsletter. There, she wrote about U.S. government and had the opportunity to file analysis pieces from Mexico and El Salvador. She joined the Politics breaking news team last fall as part of the newsroom’s Opportunity Year program, and she’s spent the last few months covering a range of political stories — from a widely read story on Ginni Thomas attending the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally to contributing extensively to the live blog of Biden’s first State of the Union address, to pieces on newsmakers in Washington and state politics.
Mariana, who is Salvadoran Mexican, lives in Washington with her maltipoo, Dallas. In her spare time, she likes to run, cycle, practice French, and listen to Bad Bunny and Dua Lipa’s discography on repeat.
Mariana’s first day in her new role was Monday. Please join us in congratulating her on her new assignment.
After the disastrous Iowa caucuses in 2020 and years of grumbling before that, the Democratic National Committee entertained a draft proposal that would shake up which states vote first on the presidential primary calendar. Ultimately, the proposal wasn’t considered at the DNC’s meeting in March, but the conversation isn’t going away. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates which states should vote first.
They also look at a new survey suggesting that most Americans think “The West Wing” and other political TV shows accurately reflect how politics works. And FiveThirtyEight contributor Laura Bronner joins to discuss where public opinion stands on accepting Ukrainian refugees after the White House announced last week that the U.S. would admit up to 100,000.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or bydownloading it in iTunes, theESPN Appor your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts,learn how to listen.
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.
After feigning a desire to keep an open mind about Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he “cannot and will not” support her.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said he “sadly” can’t support her because she has not embraced the constraints of “originalism” in her judicial philosophy. That’s a laughable statement, given that the current right-wing justices on the court who supposedly embrace such views have rewritten Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and roll their eyes at the restraints of stare decisis.
In a sense, these statements are more revealing than the utterly irrelevant and disingenuous lines of questioning that Republicans posed to Jackson in her confirmation hearings last week (e.g., What are her thoughts about a grade-school book that supposedly exemplifies “critical race theory”? How does she define “woman”?). Republicans, in their staunch opposition to Jackson, are not just playing to a enraged base; they are projecting that they refuse to let the other side exercise power when it wins.
Recall, this is the party that denied then-Judge Merrick Garland a hearing at all when President Barack Obama nominated him for the court. Now they say President Biden literally “cannot” get his choice, even though his nominee falls well within the mainstream of judicial thought, is more qualified than current justices and exhibits near-miraculous composure. There is no point at which Republicans will show deference to the victorious opposition.
That’s a problem that goes way beyond the Supreme Court. Democracy functions only with restraint, good-faith application of procedural rules and devotion to the principle that the other side gets to govern when it wins. That concept is now an anathema to the GOP. As Thomas Zimmer has written for the Guardian, “Many Republicans agree that the Democratic Party is a fundamentally illegitimate political faction — and that any election outcome that would lead to Democratic governance must be rejected as illegitimate as well.”
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That view of illegitimacy often stems from Christian nationalism. As Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, explains, “A worldview that claims God as a political partisan and dehumanizes one’s political opponents as evil is fundamentally antidemocratic.” He tells me, “A mind-set that believes that our nation was divinely ordained to be a promised land for Christians of European descent is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion and equality of all.”
Fact checks found no inconsistencies in Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's sentencing record in regards to child-pornography cases. (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post, Photo: The Washington Post)
Such thinking is evident in the recently revealed texts between then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, after the 2020 election. When Ginni Thomas urged Meadows to pursue tactics to overturn the election, Meadows responded by explaining that “the King of Kings” was on their side, casting their political opponents as “evil.” Such logic, Jones explains, “dissolves the restraint of moral principle, cultural norms and even the law.”
If one is convinced God wants only one side to govern, then democracy falls by the wayside. That’s not even the subtext of the Meadows and Thomas messages; it’s out in the open. This outlook, Zimmer writes, comes from “mixture of deeply held ideological convictions of white Christian patriarchal dominance, of what ‘real America’ is supposed to be and who gets to rule there, and the cynical opportunism with which these beliefs are enforced.”
Christian nationalism cannot be separated from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection or the absolutist politics of today’s GOP. As David French, the evangelical Christian writer and former Republican, candidly acknowledges in the Atlantic:
One of the most dangerous aspects of the effort to overturn the election was the extent to which it was an explicitly religious cause. January 6 insurrectionists stampeded into the Senate chamber with prayers on their lips. Prominent religious leaders and leading Christian lawyers threw themselves into the effort to delay election certification or throw out the election results entirely. In the House and Senate, the congressional leaders of the effort to overturn the election included many of Congress’s most public evangelicals.
They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal; they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness and even outright delusion represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square.
Jones recalls that, according to PRRI’s August 2021 survey, “compared to those who do not hold a White Christian nationalist view of the country, White Christian nationalists are more than three times as likely to say the election was stolen from Trump, more than three times to believe they may have to resort to violence to save the country, and are four times as likely to be QAnon believers.” An astounding 25 percent of Republicans subscribe to the insane QAnon conspiracy theories. (No wonder pedophilia played such a prominent role in Jackson’s confirmation hearings.)
Republicans have replaced the give-and-take of politics with religious zeal — the politics of absolutism. If God is on your side and the other side represents an existential threat, surely you wouldn’t let truth, comity, fairness or decency slow you down. In the grand scheme of things, what’s a little character assassination of a trailblazing Black female judge?
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March 28, 2022 at 11:33PM
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Opinion | The GOP is increasingly viewing politics with the zeal of religious absolutism - The Washington Post
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Dickerson discusses why Black mayors matter to Black citizens, the ways AAMA impacts and assists small-town mayors, and the current state of Black political power
Photo by JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VERHAEGEN/AFP via Getty Images
Bakari Sellers is joined by CEO of the African American Mayors Association (AAMA) Phyllis Dickerson to discuss why Black mayors matter to Black citizens (7:14), the ways AAMA impacts and assists small-town mayors (9:50), and the current state of Black political power (11:19).
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March 26, 2022 at 10:12AM
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This political newcomer believes his foreign policy background makes him the best candidate to fill Devin Nunes’ seat - YourCentralValley.com
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Last week we speculated about some perhaps “dark horse” presidential candidates on the Republican side. This week there is another, plus a whole buffet of politics. This is what I count on for job security. Let’s “brunch” on that this week.
“President Chris Christie?” – Many people are just assuming that former President Donald Trump is going to get a “third bite at the apple” with the presidential nomination in 2024. But speaking this past week in New Hampshire, former Gov. Chris Christie (R) New Jersey was sounding increasingly like a candidate to take on Trump: “No one is going to give the Republican presidential nomination of 2024 away without competition. Just not gonna happen. And it shouldn't happen. Nobody has earned the pass in my opinion.” Of Trump’s loss in 2020, Christie said, “It's over, and we need as a party to move forward. We can't look backwards; we can't be a party of vindictiveness and vendettas. We can't be a party of settling scores for me. We have to be a party of creating opportunity and inspiration for us.” He and Trump have been friends and foes at various times over the years, so it is an icy relationship. I say Christie is in.
“Biden Bottoms Out” – While President Biden went to Europe to discuss the Russian-Ukraine War with our NATO allies, he was really needing a political boost at home. This week a Reuters-Ipsos Poll showed Biden’s approval rating had dropped to 40 percent, the lowest of his presidency. The nation is facing a forty-year high rate of inflation, and staggering prices at the gas pump, a lot of which is driven by Russian behavior. So, is it fair Biden shoulders the blame? No, but every American president faces the same dilemma. You take the credit when things go well, (even if you had nothing to do with it). And you take the blame when things go bad, (even if something out of your control such as a Russian invasion is really driving the impressions of you). All presidents are at the ebb and flow of current events, some of which you can shape, and some which you can’t. You run for office knowing that risk.
“Supreme Court Nomination Hearings” – The hearings are what we have become accustomed to over the years. The party in power speaks favorably of the nominee, and the opposing party tries to find nuggets in the judge’s record and rulings to say things such as, “She’s weak on crime!” But if you have the votes, the rhetoric does not really matter. On Friday, rebellious Senator Joe Manchin (D) West Virginia, who has torpedoed several Biden appointees and bills, came out in support of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the U.S. Supreme Court. “Her wide array of experiences in varying sectors of our judicial system have provided Judge Jackson a unique perspective that will serve her well on our nation’s highest court. During our meeting, she was warm and gracious. On top of her impressive resume, she has the temperament to make an exceptional jurist.” With Manchin in, so too, is Judge Jackson.
“January 6th Capitol Riots, Chapter 94” – Okay, I am not sure if this saga is really at chapter 94, but we have to be close. Now comes confirmation that Virginia Thomas, a long-time DC staffer and lobbyist, was messaging White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, encouraging the fight to overturn the election. Now, Ms. Thomas is entitled to advocate for her beliefs that the election was “stolen.” The problem, potentially, is that she is also the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarance Thomas, with the high court potentially having review of the case (which it did not hear). Were any laws broken? Were ethics violated? Doubtful, but the optics look horrible. It just smells bad to average folks, and I get that.
“Hunter Biden’s Laptop” – Well, in fairness, Democrats have their own optics problems. The continuing curiosity with the FBI’s look-see over presidential son Hunter Biden’s laptop computers must be concerning inside the White House. The question is, did Hunter leverage his dad’s contacts and influence, to help financial dealings with Russian and Chinese business interests? Did he? I do not know, but as with the Thomas dealings, does it pass the smell test? That is what a free press is obligated to look at.
“In Memoriam - Madeleine Albright” – Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright died this week at the age of 84. She was a pioneer in so many ways. Her parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the U.S. in the 1950s. She was a long-time academic who became U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Bill Clinton, who then elevated her to be the first female Secretary of State in U.S. History. Her dad, Josef Korbel was a Czech diplomat and college professor who was fleeing Russian aggression and oppression aimed at his homeland and at Jews. Here is some trivia: Professor Korbel later taught and mentored at the University of Denver. And who was his star pupil? None other than our second female Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Wow! Now that’s a resume!
“Albright’s Candor – For the Good” – Albright never minced words and could be blunt, more than diplomatic. I’ll always remember two of her most famous quotes, one of which I liked, and the other where I disagreed. When Cuba shot down two private American planes in 1996, Cuba claimed they did so with cojones (balls, in English). To which Albright scolded, “This was not cojones. This was cowardice!” People loved it, especially coming from a female diplomat. Crude yes, but raw and honest, and frankly, on point. It even became a popular T-shirt!
“Albright’s Candor Goes South” -- The Albright quote I did not care for in 2016, was the suggestion that all women should vote for Hillary Clinton for president. “There’s a special place in hell for women that don’t help each other,” said Albright. Really? We’re getting to more parity in politics. Women continue to grow their numbers in the House and Senate. For the first time ever we’re about to have a 5-male, 4-female Supreme Court. Yes, much of this is long overdue, but the notion we should cast votes solely based on gender is archaic. It is what so many women have rightly fought against. Still, on balance, I tip my hat to the pioneering Albright! She was, as we say in the press, “good copy” for so many years. Rest in peace, Madame Secretary!
What are your thoughts on President Biden and his low approval ratings? Can he survive, or bounce back? Just click the comment button to let us know!
Mark Curtis, Ed.D., is Chief Political Reporter for the seven Nexstar Media TV stations serving West Virginia, its five neighboring states and the entire Washington, DC media market. He is also a MINDSETTER™ contributing political writer and analyst for www.GoLocalProv.com and its affiliates.
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March 27, 2022 at 01:27PM
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The World of Politics is Spinning Like Crazy – “The Sunday Political Brunch” - GoLocalProv
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ORLANDO, Fla. – With Florida’s legislative session behind us, lawmakers could soon return to Tallahassee to hammer out some key items that still need to be addressed.
News 6 political expert Dr. Jim Clark joined anchor Justin Warmoth on “The Weekly” to talk all things Florida politics, including a possible special session focused on the troubled property insurance market.
“Premiums are going up and homeowners are having to scramble to get insurance in some cases,” Clark said. “This has become a statewide problem that somehow the legislature needs to address, but there are no easy fixes.”
Clark also discussed the Sunshine Protection Act that passed in the U.S. Senate, the ongoing feud between Gov. Ron DeSantis and Disney, and the potential court battle over redrawn Congressional districts in the state.
Watch the full interview in the video player above.
RICHMOND — Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who took office in January with no experience in government, has relied heavily on a Richmond insider who knows his way around the Capitol — and works for free.
Matthew Moran puts in long hours as Youngkin’s director of policy and legislative affairs, but the only paycheck he collects is from two political consulting firms. He is on a paid leave of absence from Creative Direct, where he’s a vice president, and an affiliate in which he has an ownership interest, Link Public Affairs.
Neither firm employs registered lobbyists, but Link runs public affairs campaigns designed to influence legislators through such things as TV ads and polling.
While other Virginia governors have had unpaid advisers — and Youngkin himself has a second volunteer at his service — Moran’s situation is especially unusual, because he works full time for the administration with a state title, but without upfront disclosure that he’s a volunteer on someone else’s payroll.
Critics say the arrangement presents a conflict of interest and creates a loophole around Virginia’s revolving-door laws, which prohibit certain paid state employees from lobbying for a year after leaving their jobs.
“At no time did anybody in that administration from the governor on down publicly announce that that guy was on the payroll of a private consulting company,” Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax) said in an interview Friday. “The whole thing just smells.”
Moran declined a request to be interviewed but issued a statement through Youngkin’s press office defending the arrangement.
“I am on leave from all companies and as a result do not have clients with business before the Governor or state government,” Moran said in the statement. “I formalized this arrangement with counsel’s office and I am fully committed to my service to the Governor and the people of Virginia. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to serve the Governor and work on behalf of the Commonwealth.”
Moran’s statement did not provide a reason for the unpaid arrangement. Three people with knowledge of his situation said he had agreed to serve the administration for only a few months, just long enough to guide Youngkin through his first General Assembly session.
Moran’s stay might be extended, because the legislature adjourned March 12 without completing work on the two-year budget and a handful of high-profile bills, according to the three, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share his plans. Youngkin has called a special session for April 4.
Moran’s willingness to work for the state for free could help him win favor with the governor as he decides what firms will handle his political work. Youngkin, whose win in a seemingly blue state made him a national GOP sensation and the object of 2024 presidential speculation, is in the early stages of establishing what is expected to be a hefty political operation.
Axiom Strategies, the political consulting firm engaged for his campaign, has continued to advise Youngkin since he took office — also for free, an arrangement that an Axiom official said was not unusual for the period between an election and the establishment of a sitting governor’s political action committee.
Youngkin’s campaign PAC, Virginia Wins, filed paperwork this month to change its name to Spirit of Virginia. Youngkin disclosed the new PAC on Wednesday to explain who was funding a TV ad he had launched to nudge lawmakers to accept his plan for tax cuts. Details about who will run the PAC were not disclosed.
“If [Moran] was motivated by a desire to cash in on his connection to the new Governor, he would have hung up his lobbying shingle on Jan. 14 right after his successful Youngkin campaign and transition,” Richard Cullen, Youngkin’s chief legal counsel, said in a statement. “He would have been the hottest guy in Richmond. But Matt did the opposite and to his financial detriment.”
Youngkin has another volunteer helping his administration: Aubrey Layne, who was secretary of finance under Gov. Ralph Northam (D), has been an unpaid adviser to his successor, Stephen E. Cummings. Layne, who also served as secretary of transportation under Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), has advised Cummings on a part-time basis while working as a senior executive for Sentara Healthcare, a large health system with interests before state government. Layne did not respond to a request for comment.
The administration announced at the start that Layne would not be paid. That was also the case for businessman Robert Sledd, who volunteered as an economic adviser to Republican governor Robert F. McDonnell after Senate Democrats, upset by Sledd’s intention to remain on the boards of three corporations, balked at approving him for a Cabinet post.
“After reviewing the law, the ethics rules and precedents of other administrations, I made a determination about the proper way to work as a volunteer in the Governor’s office,” Cullen said in a statement that Youngkin’s press office issued Friday along with Moran’s. “My legal analysis was the same for both Mr. Moran and Mr. Layne. It’s important for administrations, regardless of the party in power, to have the ability to attract talent and expertise as is the case here. Both Mr. Layne and Mr. Moran have added value in their respective duties without cost to the taxpayer and we have been transparent about their roles.”
Moran’s volunteer status was disclosed only recently, following inquiries from the media. In response to a Freedom of Information request from The Washington Post earlier this month, Youngkin’s office released a spreadsheet with salaries for Cabinet secretaries and other top officials. Moran’s was listed as “$0.” The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported on Moran’s status Friday.
Moran has worked in Virginia politics for a decade. After managing a campaign for one rural delegate and serving as legislative aide for another, he rose quickly to spokesman for House Speaker William J. Howell (R-Stafford) from 2012 to 2016 and chief of staff to Speaker Kirk Cox (R-Colonial Heights) from 2018 to 2019.
Moran was Cox’s top strategist — also as a volunteer — during his unsuccessful bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination last year. He later joined Youngkin’s campaign and transition and was widely expected to return to private political consulting — a relatively new venture for him — once Youngkin took office.
Described variously in official state documents as a deputy chief of staff and director of policy and legislative affairs, Moran has been a key adviser to the new governor. Moran starts each weekday at a 7 a.m. huddle with Youngkin and a handful of other top aides, all of them state employees making at least $170,000 year.
Since January, Moran has helped Youngkin navigate an unfamiliar Capitol, charting a course that has mixed feel-good stunts with hardball power plays. Whether the governor was bestowing his trademark campaign vests on a pair of Democratic foes or threatening to oust about 1,000 Democratic appointees from state boards, Moran has had a hand in the strategy.
And while results have so far been mixed, Moran has been in the middle of it all, including the governor’s biggest win to date: getting a bill to make masks optional at K-12 schools through the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“He was certainly my go-between with the governor’s office,” said Del. Marcus B. Simon (D-Fairfax). Any legislator with a bill on the ropes with the administration has had one option, Simon said: “The way to find out what was really going on was to go find Matt Moran.”
That such a prominent member of the administration is not a state employee is “beyond odd,” Simon said.
“Matt did this probably reluctantly,” Simon said. “It’s clear he wanted to keep one foot in his new professional life, but I think he’s always a good soldier and his commonwealth needed him, his governor needed him, and they came up with this funky relationship. … But the problems it creates — and the appearance and the actual conflicts — are really hard to excuse.”
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March 27, 2022 at 01:35AM
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Matthew Moran, top aide to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, earns money from political firms, not the state - The Washington Post
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Which elements of the Build Back Better Act, which the West Virginia senator felled late last year, could he support in a revived, slimmed-down package? That’s an important question. But the bigger question, Senate Democratic sources have been telling the Surge this winter, is: When is he ready to vote on a revived, slimmed-down package? And it looks like he may finally be ready to go. According to E&E News, Manchin “views the April-May Senate work period as a new goal to reach a deal” on a measure, which he hopes would narrowly focus on energy, prescription drug prices, and deficit reduction. This all still sounds easier in theory than in practice. Yes, there is a lowest common denominator between Manchin and other Democrats in Congress. But a few issues. First, he is insistent that some revenue come from raising corporate tax rates, something Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has rigidly opposed. Second, his earlier offer on the climate section of the bill is no longer on the table, and he’ll push for increased domestic oil and gas production as a trade for clean energy programs. Third, and most importantly: Good luck keeping this thing narrow. This reconciliation bill is likely Democrats’ last opportunity to pass major tax and spending legislation without Republican votes for years. Each member, and each interest group, is going to want its cut, still. We remain skeptical.
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March 26, 2022 at 04:46PM
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Republicans are facing a political nightmare in the Missouri senate race. - Slate
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Marianne Burke can pinpoint the moment she knew Democrat Terry McAuliffe was in danger of losing the Virginia gubernatorial race to Republican Glenn Youngkin.
It was late September, and McAuliffe and Youngkin were facing off in a final televised debate, discussing school curricula and library books related to race, gender identity and sexuality in Loudoun and Fairfax counties, where clashes over what students are learning and COVID-19 protocols made national headlines.
“We must demand that they include parents in this dialogue,” Youngkin said, adding that school systems were “refusing to engage with parents.”
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe countered.
When Burke and her husband relocated from South Carolina to the Washington, D.C., area, they, like many other families, chose Fairfax County, Virginia, for its award-winning school system. Even though their three children graduated in 2010 and 2013, Burke, now in her 60s, started going to school board meetings again several years ago, amping up her attendance over the past year to show support. She knew how McAuliffe’s statement would sound to some of the angry parents she’d met there.
“We were watching the debate and I said to my husband: ‘This is it. He better explain what he means,’” Burke, a Democrat, said in a recent interview.
Burke said she knew what McAuliffe meant. The message it sent, though, was that “parents weren’t important, that these high and mighty people think they knew better than parents, so therefore parents need to butt out and let the government take care of things,” she said.
Youngkin cut an ad centered on McAuliffe’s statement. McAuliffe said in a response that Youngkin was “taking my words out of context.” McAuliffe closed out his campaign at a rally with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, at a time when 20 to 35 percent of Democrats believed unions had made it more difficult to reopen schools, according to Education Next polling.
It was a good year for Republicans in a state that has two Democrats in the Senate and last backed a Republican for president in 2004. McAuliffe ended up losing to Youngkin by two points after leading opinion polls for most of the race, just one year after President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump there by 10 points. Republican Winsome Sears won the lieutenant governor’s race by 1.5 points, becoming the first Black woman elected to a statewide office.
“I knew that it was going to make it, at least, very close, and I’m not surprised that he lost,” Burke said.
Republicans believe they can replicate Youngkin’s success in November’s midterm elections by promoting the GOP as the party of parents’ rights — and that it’s a message they will tailor to both energize the base and try to win over independent or politically ambivalent parents who are exhausted by pandemic-related school disruptions and learning delays.
Voters listen as Glenn Youngkin speaks during a “Parents Matter Get Out The Vote Rally” in October 2021 in Culpeper, Virginia. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Virginia was one of just a couple states that held off-year elections in November for statewide positions, so its governor and lieutenant governor races were closely watched. Political strategists consider it a possible preview of the 2022 midterm elections, when all 435 House of Representatives seats are up, along with roughly a third of the Senate, and 36 states and territories will be picking governors.
It’s always difficult to compare electorates between a presidential year and an off-cycle year because turnout varies so dramatically: Overall turnoutin Virginia was 20 percent higher in 2020 than in 2021. Virginia’s suburbs swung in Youngkin’s favor as compared with Trump in 2020, and Youngkin also did better with White voters, particularly those without college degrees and women.
There was also a “silver surge” among voters older than 65 that one analyst wrote “fundamentally undermines the conventional wisdom that COVID-19 protocols in schools and fears about Critical Race Theory in curriculum determined the outcome of the election.” (Burke pointed out that you don’t have to have school-age children to be concerned about public education.)
Suburban White women are a coveted voting bloc in American politics — and attempts to woo them almost always center around moms. In the late 1990s, they were called “soccer moms.” During George W. Bush’s administration, it was “security moms” worried about terrorism. “Wal-Mart moms” helped elect President Barack Obama. In 2018, “Panera moms” factored into Democrats retaking the House. This year, Republican strategist Sarah Longwell is calling them “COVID moms,” though she noted that the bloc could more accurately be named “COVID parents.”
Proponents and opponents of teaching Critical Race Theory attend a school board meeting in Yorba Linda, California in November 2021. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
Public schools have long been political battlegrounds. The current iteration of the educational culture wars are state-level Republican bills to restrict transgender students’ ability to play sports; prohibit discussion of sexuality or gender identity in schools (Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill); or ban the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) — a 40-year-old academic framework used for examining institutional racism that is not taught in K-12 schools but became a bogeyman for conservatives after The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” and other efforts to reexamine the country’s racial history.
While these social issues might fire up the GOP base, school districts’ varying responses to COVID-19 — either by closing schools to in-person instruction for periods of time and instituting remote learning, or continuing to require masks after more general state- and city-wide mask mandates are lifted — have created another group of parents feeling voiceless in their children’s education.
Post-Virginia focus groups conducted by the polling firm used by Biden concluded: “School closures + COVID policy were a bigger factor than CRT” but the latter “taps into these voters’ frustrations.”
“Many swing voters knew … that CRT wasn’t taught in Virginia schools. But at the same time, they felt like racial and social justice issues were overtaking math, history, and other things … we should expect this backlash to continue, especially as it plays into another way where parents and communities feel like they are losing control over their schools,” the pollster said. Separate polling released this week by Grinnell College showed that 64 percent of adults believe public schools are on the “wrong track” in terms of what they are teaching. While 69 percent of adults, including 71 percent of White adults, said it was essential to “teach respect for people of different races,” just 49 percent, including 52 percent of White adults, said they trusted schools to teach about racism.
It’s a concern that Republicans have noticed. When Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds delivered the Republican rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address last month, she said voters were “tired of politicians who tell parents they should sit down, be silent and let government control their kids’ education and future.” Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee brought up “parental rights” this week in her opening statement at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
Drawings of children wearing masks adorn a hallway at a Connecticut school in September 2021. (John Moore/Getty Images)
“Republicans at the local, state and federal level are standing with the parents,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said recently.
“We’re going to keep fighting against these disruptions to family life caused by rules and mandates that are not at all based in science,” he added.
Longwell, the GOP strategist, is in a political universe of Republicans who oppose Trump and works to elect candidates who have spoken out against the former president. One of the things she studies in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona is whether “college-educated, suburban voters who didn’t like Trump but were right-leaning in their orientation … are they permanently realigned with Democrats, or were the Democrats renting them for a vote because they hated Donald Trump?” She also conducted post-election focus groups in Virginia to try to answer that question.
Longwell called McAuliffe’s line about how parents did not belong in schools a “fatal mistake.” “I would say a fair number of these people are not hyper partisan about this, they’re just deeply frustrated … and when you’re really frustrated, you want to throw out the people who are in charge,” she said.
Though elected school board officials are the obvious first step — voters in uber liberal San Francisco recalled three in part over pandemic management — political strategists expect COVID-19 education disruptions to factor in other city races like for mayor, as well as statewide gubernatorial elections, for statehouse seats, and even in U.S. congressional races, despite them having limited impact on local schools.
A president’s party typically loses congressional seats in midterm elections, and Democrats are trying to hold onto their slim House majority and their control of the evenly split Senate. With much of Biden’s domestic agenda stalled, including a $1.8 trillion economic package aimed at helping working women, they will need a message that energizes its base to turn out, as well as hold onto some of the crossover voters and independents who backed Biden after souring on Trump. Biden has signaled he believes Democrats can run on a strong economy. Privately, many Democratic strategists worry that the party does not have a midterms message ready for frustrated parents.
“My big picture takeaway is that [Virginia voters] were open — there wasn’t a single one who regretted their vote for Biden. However, there is a deep level of frustration from these voters that I think is going to cause a lot of backsliding in 2022, and cause them to not permanently realign with Democrats, despite the fact that it was on the table,” Longwell said.
Rory Cooper has watched this play out in his Fairfax neighborhood, a place where he said “neighbors who had Biden signs in their yard also had ‘open the schools’ signs in their yard.” Cooper is a political strategist who has worked for a GOP House majority leader and now considers himself a “reluctant Republican.”
Cooper’s three kids are in the Fairfax schools in 6th, 3rd and 1st grades. The youngest is “halfway through 1st grade and he’s never in his life had a normal school day,” Cooper told The 19th in late February. March 1 was the first time he could “go to school and spend an entire day without a mask on. I’ve watched him experience kindergarten on a laptop. He had a teacher who did the best she could and she was great, but it’s hard to watch,” he added.
At first, Fairfax parents did what they could to juggle remote school with working from home. The “inflection point, where even the parents who were being patient said ‘no, forget this,’” Cooper said, was in February 2021, when Virginia prioritized the vaccination of teachers but unions still opposedreturning to in-person learning. Many parents mobilized. Cooper started watching school board meetings and spoke at a couple. They were “able to push them to a hybrid model in late spring of 2021” that consisted of no school on Mondays, with two days in person, and two days virtual, he said. Fairfax returned to a normal schedule in fall 2021.
Students walk to their next class at a California school in August 2020. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
The parents who wanted to reopen schools formed the Fairfax County Parents Association. Cooper described the permanent parental lobbying organization as a “violently nonpartisan” one that stays out of the curriculum debates.
“When you get between a mama bear and her cubs, it doesn’t matter what their partisan inclinations are. All politics end up personal, and this was the most personal thing in their lives,” Cooper added.
Liesl Hickey is a mother and cofounder of N2 America, which advocates for center-right policies affecting the suburbs. The organization rolled out an ad campaign about school reopenings last year, and another about masking in schools last month. Hickey said she predicts parents will remember the after-effects of remote learning — potential mental health issues, cognitive delays — in November congressional races in places including suburban Atlanta, Denver, Detroit and even Southern California.
“The thing about this issue is it is cutting across ideological lines,” Hickey said. “I think that these parents are going to fuel a Republican tsunami.”
The midterm elections are still eight months away. In February, Democratic governors in California and New Jersey — where Gavin Newsom survived an October recall election and Phil Murphy eked out a narrow win in November, respectively — announced they would lift statewide mask mandates, jumping ahead of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance. Other governors quickly followed as opinion polling showed “fatigue and frustration” among voters who believed COVID-19 had become endemic and said it was time to return to some version of normal, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In Longwell’s recent focus groups, concerns such as inflation and Ukraine are top of mind for voters, and she said the best-case scenario for Democrats is that by November, voters see COVID-19 as being under control, schools are open, and families are vacationing. Maybe then, she said, Democrats can “stanch what is otherwise shaping up to be a blowout.” But, she cautioned, “when it comes to schools specifically, to parents with kids … the disruption in education is causing lasting problems … so as long as people are grappling with the consequences of this, it’s likely to show up in voting behavior.”
The past two years have left Angie Schmidt, a married mother of two in Cleveland, Ohio, feeling politically unmoored. Schmidt, who writes about transportation and urban planning issues, said she was previously an “apologist for the Democratic Party” — the kind who would canvass or donate money to get candidates across the finish line. But now she and some of her progressive friends feel “totally demoralized.” She wrote about her experience for The Atlantic.
In the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, which is 64 percent Black and where 42 percent of children live below the poverty line, school board members are appointed, not elected, and meetings are “not set up in a way that’s empowering to parents,” Schmidt said. She got long COVID-19. Her child’s online kindergarten last year often had only a couple of students participating. She estimates she lost about six months of income during the 2020-2021 school year, when she was juggling working with her now 1st grader and preschooler at home. There were just five days of school in January. “It’s just for about a month-and-a-half now I’ve been able to work regularly,” she said in mid March.
A student returns to school after classes were canceled while the city sparred with the teacher’s union over COVID-19 safety measures in Chicago, in January 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Schmidt said she watched as teachers’ unions “dug in their heels” and felt like parents “didn’t have a similar organizing entity.” She cites Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, as the “only person who stuck out their neck” to urge Cleveland to reopen its classrooms.
Schmidt says throughout the pandemic, mothers were expected to be an “unpaid, contingent, essential workforce.” She often felt “toxicity” and “sexism” coming from her own side of the political aisle when she spoke up about reopening schools. “It’s not just the leaders, it’s some of the [Democratic] base … I think there was this habit, throughout the pandemic, of refusing empathy for being impacted by the restrictions, anything short of death was not worth acknowledging,” she said.
While Schmidt still agrees with Democrats on “almost everything … I read the ‘1619 Project,’ and I liked it, I do feel a bit more aligned with independents on certain things now,” she said. “I’m fatigued of the partisan, acrimonious, grudge match and I feel like [Democrats] have gotten a little out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns.”
“This has really taken the wind out of my [political] sails. I’m still healing from this,” she added.
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