Tag Archives: polls

Court Strikes Down Arkansas Voter ID Law

by ConnorT10mv Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s restrictive voter ID law, ruling that it violated the state’s constitution. The unanimous decision, which comes just days before early voting begins in the state, could impact a Senate race considered key to a Republican takeover of the Senate.

Arkansas’ law, enacted in 2013 after the Republican-controlled legislature overrode the Democratic Gov. Mike Beebee’s veto, would have required voters to show a government-issued photo ID at the polls. Studies have shown that photo ID laws disproportionately burden minority and poor voters, making them less likely to vote. The state Supreme Court ruled that the voter ID law imposes a voting eligibility requirement that “falls outside” those the state constitution enumerates—namely, that a voter must only be a US citizen, an Arkansas resident, at least 18 years of age, and registered to vote—and was therefore invalid.

The court’s ruling could help swing in Democrats’ favor the tight Senate race between Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor and his opponent, Republican Rep. Tom Cotton.

After the Supreme Court gutted a section of the Voting Rights Act last year, Republican state legislatures around the country enacted a slew of harsh voting laws. Since the 2010 election, new restrictions have been enacted in 21 states. Fourteen of those were passed for the first time this year.

Arkansas was one of seven states in which opponents of restrictive voting laws filed lawsuits ahead of the 2014 midterms. Last week, the Supreme Court blocked Wisconsin’s voter ID law. A federal court last Thursday struck down a similar law in Texas—only to have its ruling reversed this week by an appeals court. The US Supreme Court recently allowed North Carolina and Ohio to enforce their strict new voting laws.

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Court Strikes Down Arkansas Voter ID Law

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Mitch McConnell Can Barely Form a Coherent Sentence About Obamacare Now

by TarahPfeiffer Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mitch McConnell came prepared with a soundbite. The Affordable Care Act, the Republican Senate minority leader declared during a debate Monday, is “the worst piece of legislation in the last half-century,” and needed to be pulled out “by the roots.” But when it came to actually getting rid of the law—specifically Kynect, his state’s popular new insurance exchange, and the associated expansion of Kentucky’s Medicaid rolls—McConnell’s tough talk began to fade.

“With regard to Kynect, it’s a state exchange, they can continue it if they’d like to,” he said. He went on: “With regard to the Medicaid expansion, that’s a state decision, the states can decide whether to expand Medicaid or not.” When asked, once more, if he supported the state’s decision to create Kynect and expand Medicaid, McConnell finally conceded, “Well that’s fine, yeah. I think it’s fine to have a website.”

McConnell, one of his party’s loudest voices against Obamacare, could barely put together a sentence when pressed on the specifics of what he’d do about it. And he isn’t alone. At a Senate debate in Arkansas on Monday, GOP Rep. Tom Cotton, who is challenging Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, talked tough about repealing “Obamacare,” but when asked directly, declined to say whether his state’s version of Medicaid expansion, known as the “private option,” ought to get the boot. (In not answering the question, he did manage to say “Obama” 13 times in two minutes.) This has been Cotton’s approach to the question for months now, and it’s not hard to see why he’s so cautious—the private option was approved by a Republican-controlled state legislature and even has the backing of his party’s gubernatorial nominee, former Rep. Asa Hutchinson.

And in Iowa on Saturday, GOP state Sen. Joni Ernst, who is seeking the Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Tom Harkin, was asked by a man who had received insurance through the Affordable Care Act about how she’d propose to keep him insured after the law is repealed. She ignored the question.

The GOP is still poised to win big in November. McConnell, Cotton, and Ernst all lead in the polls. But four years after the passage of Obamacare, Republicans are finding it harder and harder to say what they really think about it.

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Mitch McConnell Can Barely Form a Coherent Sentence About Obamacare Now

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Chart of the Day: Democrats Have a Big Headwind to Overcome In Midterm Elections

by Anderso7849 Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

This is nothing new to regular readers of the blog, but the chart below from the Washington Post very nicely illustrates the Democratic Party’s midterm woes in a nutshell. In every demographic group that tends to support Republicans, more than 60 percent are highly likely to vote. Conversely, in every demographic group that tends to support Democrats, fewer than 50 percent are highly likely to vote. That’s a very tough headwind to overcome. Just imagine what liberals could accomplish if they actually bothered to go to the polls.

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Chart of the Day: Democrats Have a Big Headwind to Overcome In Midterm Elections

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This GOP Senate Candidate’s Company Paid Millions to Women in Discrimination Cases

by ElmaVillanueva Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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With Republicans trying to avoid a repeat of 2012’s Todd Akin disaster and retake the Senate, the Georgia GOP establishment was happy to see David Perdue, a self-funded businessman, leading in the polls ahead of Tuesday’s Senate primary. Compared to gaffe machines such as Rep. Paul Broun, who has pushed personhood for zygotes, and Rep. Phil Gingrey, who defended Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment, the former Dollar General CEO seemed unlikely to introduce fraught gender issues into the general election—where Michelle Nunn, the likely Democratic nominee, is polling well against the GOP field.

But Perdue’s record on women’s issues—specifically, whether women are entitled to equal pay for equal work—is far from clean. In 2006, three years into Perdue’s four-plus years as Dollar General’s CEO, federal investigators at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that female store managers who worked for the company he ran “were discriminated against,” and “generally were paid less than similarly situated male managers performing duties requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility.” A year later, separate from that investigation, thousands of female managers who were paid less than their male counterparts joined a class action suit against the company—which Dollar General eventually settled, paying the women more than $15 million.

“Dollar General has set up a pay system which permits stereotypes about men and women to be used in judging their pay, performance, and salary needs,” female Dollar General managers claimed in sworn statements. “This includes stereotypes about men being the breadwinner, head of the household, or just more deserving because they are men.”

The case began on March 7, 2006, when Janet Calvert, the former manager of a Dollar General in Alabama, sued the company for paying her less than male managers. Dollar General, which was still under Perdue’s leadership, tried and failed to prevent other female employees from joining Calvert and suing as a class. By 2008, more than 2,100 current and former employees had joined a certified a class open to women who worked as store managers for Dollar General between November 30, 2004 and November 30, 2007. (Perdue was CEO from April 2003 to summer 2007.)

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This GOP Senate Candidate’s Company Paid Millions to Women in Discrimination Cases

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Update: What Do Critics Mean Who Say Obamacare "Isn’t Liberal Enough"?

by RobinLeflore Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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I periodically drone on about the laziness of polls that ask a simple approve/disapprove question about Obamacare. The problem is that a lot of people say they disapprove because Obamacare isn’t liberal enough. These are folks don’t necessarily disapprove of the concept of national healthcare in general or Obamacare in particular, and shouldn’t really be counted among right-wing opponents of the law.

A couple of weeks ago, a Kaiser poll gave us a slightly deeper glimpse into all this. They asked the disapprovers why they disapproved, and it was clear that some of them had lefty criticisms of the law, not conservative criticisms. But the evidence was still a bit fuzzy.

Today, Mark Blumenthal goes further. In a recent HuffPo poll, about 9 percent of the respondents said they opposed Obamacare because it wasn’t liberal enough. Then, in a follow-up question, they were asked, “In your own words, what do you mean when you say the health care law is not liberal enough?”

The results are on the right. There’s still some ambiguity here, but I’d classify several of the responses as likely left-wing criticisms. Adding up the percentages, I get 6 + 4 + 15 + 4 + 4 + 3 = 36 percent. That’s a little less than half of those who had a response.

So, very roughly speaking, in future polls I’d guess that about half of the “not liberal enough” folks are basically supporters of Obamacare but want the law to go further. It might even be more than that, but it remains hard to parse the motivations behind all of these responses with precision. Is “too complex” a liberal or conservative criticism? How about “lack of choice”? Hard to say.

In any case, this adds some context to the whole debate about Obamacare critics who say it’s “not liberal enough.” It’s also an object lesson against assuming too much ideological coherence from survey respondents. A larger survey with a bigger sample size and a little more structure to the questions would be welcome.

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Update: What Do Critics Mean Who Say Obamacare "Isn’t Liberal Enough"?

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

by BettinaYLPM Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

How big is the midterm penalty for Democrats? Eric McGhee tells us in handy chart form. Given President Obama’s current approval rating, his model says Democrats would have a 75 percent chance of holding the Senate if this were a presidential election year. But in a midterm, Dems have only a 10 percent chance:

Ed Kilgore writes about this a lot, and warns Democrats not to get too mired in fruitless efforts to attack the “enthusiasm gap.” After all, the kind of people affected by enthusiasm are the kind of people who are likely to vote anyway. A loud populist message might thrill them, but it won’t do much to affect turnout among minorities and the young, who typically have more tenuous connections to politics. Instead, Democrats should focus on old-fashioned efforts to get out the vote. Or, more accurately, brand new rocket science efforts to get out the vote:

There’s plenty of evidence that turnout can be more reliably affected by direct efforts to identify favorable concentrations of voters and simply get them to the polls, with or without a great deal of “messaging” or for that matter enthusiasm (no one takes your temperature before you cast a ballot). Such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are the meat-and-potatoes of American politics, even if they invariably get little attention from horse-race pundits. Neighborhood-intensive “knock-and-drag” GOTV campaigns used to be a Democratic speciality thanks to the superior concentration of Democratic (especially minority) voters, though geographical polarization has created more and more equally ripe Republican areas.

….If that’s accurate, then the most important news for Democrats going into November is that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is planning to spend $60 million on data-driven GOTV efforts specially focused on reducing the “midterm falloff” factor. The extraordinary success of Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign in boosting African-American turnout for an off-year election will likely be a model.

Messaging matters. But in midterm elections, shoe leather matters more, even if it’s mostly digital shoe leather these days.

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

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In a Radical Shift, California Police Chiefs Push for Regulation of Medical Marijuana

by Georgeysm Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones


Maps: Will Your State Be Next to Legalize Pot?


How Industrial Pot Growers Ravage the Land: A Google Earth Tour


The New Marijuana Service Industry


When Republicans Love Legalized Pot


How to Get a Pot Card (Without Really Trying)


The New Dealers


Welcome to the Amsterdam of the Rockies

California was the first state to legalize medical marijuana, but like the pimply-faced stoner dude you may have known in high school, it hasn’t had the healthiest of relationships with Mary Jane. The Golden State differs from most others with medical pot laws in that it doesn’t actually regulate production and sale of the herb. Instead, it lets cities and counties enact their own laws—though in practice most haven’t. The result has been the Wild West of weed: Almost any adult can score a scrip and some bud from a local dispensary, assuming, of course, that it hasn’t yet been raided and shut down by the feds.

But all of that might be about to change. The California Police Chiefs Association (CPCA) recently announced support for a bill that would put the state in the business of regulating the medical pot trade. Though you’d think cops would have pushed for such a thing decades ago, the reality is quite the opposite: The CPCA and other law enforcement organizations have, until now, opposed pretty much every reform to California’s medical marijuana system for fear that anything short of completely abolishing it would legitimize it.

The CPCA’s change of heart “is a huge for us,” says Nate Bradley, executive director of the California Cannabis Industry Association, the state’s marijuana industry trade group. Bradley agrees with his police adversaries that tighter regs would legitimize medical marijuana, which is why the CCIA has pushed for them since the group’s inception four years ago. Bolstering his case, the US Department of Justice last year announced that it would no longer raid dispensaries in states that it believes are regulating them adequately—a formulation that seemed to exclude California. New rules issued last month by the Obama administration allow banks to accept funds from pot dealers, but only if they’re licensed in the state where they operate.

So why are California’s drug warriors reversing course? “We could no longer ignore that the political landscape on this issue was shifting,” the CPCA explained in a letter written jointly with the League of California Cities. Polls and changing federal policies suggest that medical pot reform “could be enacted,” and that “without our proactive intervention, it could take a form that was severely damaging to our interests.”

The bill that law enforcement groups are backing, SB 1262, is flawed, but it’s something that “we can work with,” says Bradley, who previously worked as a cop in California’s Yuba County. Advocates of medical pot don’t like how the bill constrains the ability of doctors to recommend marijuana, outlaws potent pot concentrates such as hash oil, and puts regulation in the hands of the Department of Public Health, rather than the Department of Alcoholic Beverages Control.

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In a Radical Shift, California Police Chiefs Push for Regulation of Medical Marijuana

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Opposition to Obamacare Remains Under 40 Percent, the Same as Always

by LesterCook Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Greg Sargent points us to the latest CNN poll on Obamacare today, one of the few polls that accurately judges public attitudes on the subject. Instead of just asking whether people support or oppose the law, CNN asks if their opposition is because the law is too liberal or not liberal enough. The latter aren’t tea partiers who hate Obamacare, they’re lefties and Democrats who mostly support the concept of Obamacare but want it to go further. Counting them as opponents of Obamacare has always been seriously misleading.

I went ahead and charted CNN’s poll results over time, and they’ve been remarkably stable. Ever since the law passed, about 40 percent of the country has opposed it, while more than 50 percent have either supported it or said they want it to go even further. This goes a long way toward explaining the supposedly mysterious result that lots of people oppose Obamacare but few want to repeal it. The truth is that actual opposition has always been a minority view. Polls routinely show that only about 40 percent of Americans want to repeal Obamacare, and there’s nothing mysterious about that once you understand that this is also the level of actual opposition to the law.

Sargent has more here, including some interesting internals and crosstabs.

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Opposition to Obamacare Remains Under 40 Percent, the Same as Always

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VIDEO: Meet the Olympic Workers Still Waiting for Payday

by DonnyLangston Posted on February 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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In November, Milenko Kuljic left Bileca, his rundown town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for Sochi. He was lured by a recruiter who promised he’d make about 2,000 Euro ($2,700) a month building infrastructure for Sochi’s winter Olympics .

Kuljic says he began working for a major construction company overseeing work at some of the games’ most iconic venues, where he says he never got anywhere near the amount of money he was promised. Instead over two months of working, he says he was only given the equivalent of about $1000 for basic living expenses. living in a dormitory with pay-to-use showers, sharing four toilets with some 200 other workers. All the while, he says his employers promised to eventually pay him in full.

At the end of the two months, he was suddenly arrested, detained for a week, and then flown home with 122 other workers from the Balkans on a flight chartered by the Serbian government.

Hundreds of other guest workers from all around the world feared a similar fate, and fled Sochi without pay to avoid arrest, and the arguably worse punishment it would bring: a 5-year ban on returning to Russia as a guest worker.

It was Kuljic’s second time seeking work in Russia. The first time, he says no one cared about workers, like him, who lacked official work permits: “I suspect that they told the authorities about us so that they wouldn’t have to pay the money they promised.”

Kuljic’s experience is far from unique. Of the approximately 96,000 workers who helped build Sochi’s Olympic buildings, parks, and infrastructure about 16,000 were migrant workers, according to Human Rights Watch. Most hailed from former Soviet countries, primarily Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan, as well as from communities—like Kuljic’s in Bosnia—where families rely on money sent by workers abroad.

For years, such workers put up with rampant xenophobia and exploitative conditions—overcrowded housing, paltry and unsavory food—in pursuit of a decent wage in Russia. But this fall, with just six months left until the games, thousands of migrants were rounded up and deported. In October alone, according to Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS), over 3,000 workers were expelled from the Krasnodar region, which includes Sochi.

Migrants to Russia face routine discrimination, as nationalists blame them for taking work from employable Russians. Polls have shown that two-thirds of Russians believe immigrants are prone to crime, and, whether or not they came legally or illegally, want to reduce their numbers in the country.

As non-Russian workers flooded Sochi, such anti-immigrant sentiment escalated—and was encouraged at the highest levels of government.

“It would be very easy for people of other nations to take over this land,” Alexander Tkachev, the governor of the Krasnodar region, declared in August of 2012. “We have no other choice: we will squeeze them out, restore order, ask for documents…so that those who are trying to come here on illegal business understand that maybe it’s better they don’t come.”

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VIDEO: Meet the Olympic Workers Still Waiting for Payday

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Judge Strikes Down Pennsylvania Voter ID Law

by Melissa Robin Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a victory for access to the polls, a state judge struck down Pennsylvania’s voter ID law today. Rick Hasen tells us what it means:

This is a clear victory for opponents of voter id laws, with a finding that:

the implementation of the voter id law violated the law’s own promise of liberal access to voter id
the implementation exceeded the agency’s authority to administer the program
the voter education efforts were woefully inadequate
as a whole the Pa. voter id program violated the Pa. constitutional’s fundamental right to vote.

In this regard, it is important to note that the court rejected Pa’s argument that the law was aimed at preventing voter fraud. The judge found that the state presented no evidence the law was necessary either to prevent fraud or to keep public confidence in the fairness of the election process.

(Reformatting mine.) You should read the whole thing, including Hasen’s big caveat: the judge didn’t rule that voter ID was a violation of equal protection and did rule that the law wasn’t motivated by an attempt to disenfranchise minorities or Democratic voters. Because of this, it’s not clear if the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will affirm this decision.

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Judge Strikes Down Pennsylvania Voter ID Law

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