[ Put the mainstream Democrats aside. After the midterms, more
left-wing insurgents are going to the House, Bernie Sanders has two
strong allies in the Senate, and progressive ballot measures passed
everywhere. Election night was a good night for the Left.]
[[link removed]]

THE 2022 MIDTERMS WERE ONE OF THE BEST ELECTIONS THE LEFT HAS HAD IN
MEMORY  
[[link removed]]


 

Branko Marcetic
November 15, 2022
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Put the mainstream Democrats aside. After the midterms, more
left-wing insurgents are going to the House, Bernie Sanders has two
strong allies in the Senate, and progressive ballot measures passed
everywhere. Election night was a good night for the Left. _

Summer Lee speaking at the 2022 Netroots Nation gathering on August
22 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania., (@SummerForPA / Twitter)

 

Even the most dispiriting election results in the last few years have
had important bright spots for the Left, and this year’s deeply
unusual
[[link removed]] midterm
election result is no different. In a cycle that transformed overnight
from predictions of a Democratic bloodbath to widespread Republican
despair, the Left has achieved some major victories that shouldn’t
be overlooked.

Resizing the Squad

The major top-line success for the Left this election is the addition
of several new insurgent candidates who, like “the Squad” of 2018,
were backed by progressive outside groups — notably the Working
Families Party (WFP) and Justice Democrats — with little or no
support from established party networks. The total of such members now
rises to twelve, after four such insurgent candidates sailed to
victory in safe blue seats for which they won primaries earlier this
year. This year’s crop is Summer Lee (PA-12), Greg Casar (TX-35),
Delia Ramirez (IL-03), and Maxwell Frost (FL-10).

This group is notable, among other things, for its seriousness
commitments to left-wing policy.

Take the thirty-three-year-old Casar, a three-term Austin City Council
member who this March romped to victory in a four-way race with more
than 60 percent of the vote. Though hailing from an affluent family,
Casar was politicized on the left in college and became policy
director for the Austin-based Workers Defense Project, where, among
other things, he helped mobile-home residents organize.

 

In his first few years on the Austin City Council, Casar successfully
led the push to raise city workers’ minimum wage, and also authored
ordinances that outlaw requirements for disclosure of jobseekers’
criminal histories and that mandate paid sick leave for workers. (The
latter triggered years of furious business efforts to kill the
measure, which finally succeeded in 2020, when the state supreme court
struck it down.) He was particularly active in the fight over
Austin’s notorious housing affordability issues, and successfully
spearheaded measures to top up the city’s affordable housing fund,
provide assistance to tenants thrown out of demolished rentals, raise
subsidies for affordable housing, mandate units in new developments
for low-income renters, and put in place a sixty-day eviction
moratorium at the start of the pandemic.

In Illinois, housing affordability issues also loomed large for Delia
Ramirez in her four years in the Illinois statehouse. Ramirez,
thirty-nine, whose working-class upbringing as the daughter of
immigrant parents partly drove her decision to run, had pushed for
bolder action on the affordability issue from the beginning. In 2019,
she called for a sixfold increase to the affordable housing funding
proposed by Governor J. B. Pritzker, and she teamed with a Republican
colleague to propose a tax credit for affordable housing construction.
Ramirez’s emergency housing assistance bill, which temporarily
stayed some foreclosures, sealed eviction records into 2022, and
allocated money for renters and homeowners struggling during the
pandemic. It was ultimately signed into law by Pritzker in May 2021.

Other successes included leading the charge in 2019 to codify abortion
rights statewide, regardless of federal law, and spearheading a
provision expanding Medicaid to undocumented immigrants, making
Illinois the first state in the country to do so. In the primary for
Illinois’s Third District, Ramirez ended up trouncing her nearest
rival, a two-term alderman who racked up major endorsements, by a more
than 40 point margin.

Similar issues animated Lee, the thirty-four-year-old two-term state
representative who narrowly won a five-way race to become the first
black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress. Hailing from the
former steel town of Braddock — which was governed for thirteen
years by fellow Berniecrat and now senator-elect John Fetterman —
Lee had already taken on the establishment twice and won. She’d
knocked off a ten-term incumbent and member of a Pittsburgh political
dynasty in 2018 to become one of four candidates backed by the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to enter the statehouse that
year, and put away an establishment-backed challenger to win
reelection two years later.

Once in the House, Lee faced an uphill climb owing to more than a
decade of GOP control of both chambers of the Pennsylvania General
Assembly. In an unfriendly legislature, she protested and used her
bully pulpit to get her political priorities on the table. These have
included a COVID moratorium on evictions and police reform
legislation. The latter was advanced during the 2020 George Floyd
protests, when she used parliamentary pressure to force the GOP
leadership to take up the measure. As a result, Pennsylvania now has a
far from perfect but landmark misconduct database for police hiring.

The victories of these insurgent candidates are especially important
in a house that will have a slim, possibly single-digit, majority,
meaning Republicans and significant numbers of corporate Democrats
will likely collaborate on a host of retrograde policies that will
need to be blocked.

Squad-Adjacent Victories

The other major headline-grabbing victory for progressives was that of
John Fetterman, who decisively won his Senate race in Pennsylvania
with a populist campaign. True, he did move to the center on certain
issues — most notably fracking, which he’d once deemed
[[link removed]] “a
stain on our state,” calling for a moratorium — but flip-flopped
in order to be competitive in a state that has been officially called
[[link removed]] “the Saudi Arabia of natural
gas.” Still, with maybe one exception, Fetterman appears to stand to
the left of every other Democratic Senate candidate this cycle,
backing sentencing reform, marijuana legalization, moving toward
universal health care, raising taxes on the rich, and enacting a $15
minimum wage, among other things.

That one exception is Vermont representative Peter Welch, who easily
won the race for the Senate seat vacated by retiring Senator Patrick
Leahy. A Bernie Sanders ally since the Vermont socialist’s days as
mayor of Burlington, Welch has long
[[link removed]] been, and
remains, a full-throated advocate for Medicare for All and lower
prescription drug prices, and cosponsored the Green New Deal
resolution. Despite an outrageous scandal
[[link removed]] that
saw Welch pushing to protect opioid makers’ interests while trading
stocks in those same companies, his addition to the Senate, together
with Fetterman, will help tilt the upper chamber somewhat to the left,
and will give the usually isolated Sanders two progressive allies.

Also winning in Vermont, this time in a race for the US House, was the
leader of its state senate, Becca Balint, who was endorsed by Sanders
and the Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal en
route to taking the House seat previously held by Welch. Balint
likewise ran on backing Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and
has won plaudits
[[link removed]] for
helping to codify abortion rights at the state level, negotiating a
solution to a pension crisis with unions at the table, and working to
end qualified immunity for police (though only a watered-down bill
[[link removed]] on
the issue ended up passing). Balint also fought
[[link removed]] for years
[[link removed]] to
raise Vermont’s minimum wage to $15 and to put in place paid family
and medical leave, but both were repeatedly vetoed
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the state’s Republican governor after passing in the legislature.

Fetterman and Balint were both endorsed by WFP, which had a
particularly good election cycle after making its first concerted
foray into races at the federal level. WFP knocked on an estimated
four hundred thousand doors in Pennsylvania, as well as holding a
thousand-person phone bank there on Election Day. Other major races it
was involved in, like Karen Bass’s mayoral bid in Los Angeles, have
also gone its way.

Success for Socialists

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had a pretty good election
night too. The group has consistently gotten more and more of its
members elected at the local and state levels in every election since
2016.

This cycle, sixteen of DSA’s thirty endorsed candidates
[[link removed]] won their elections.
Though three of those winners were House incumbents Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Rashida Tlaib, most of the losing
candidates fell in primary elections earlier in the year.

DSA candidates Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martínez beat
incumbents in the Los Angeles City Council seats they ran for,
promising to deal with the city’s homelessness crisis through more
affordable housing, and stressing preventive measures over
incarceration to deal with crime. The organization estimated it
knocked on more than thirty-five thousand
[[link removed]] doors to get
Soto-Martínez elected in the primary and another fifteen hundred
[[link removed]] in
the general. It continues the organization’s success in reshaping
[[link removed]] the
city’s politics, with the DSA-endorsed Nithya Raman having already
won a seat on the council two years ago.

Wisconsin is getting its first socialist state assembly members in
more than three decades in the figures of Darrin Madison and Ryan
Clancy, who similarly stressed public investment and mental-health
funding as a solution to crime, as well as measures like boosting
affordable housing, funding public transit, progressive taxation, and
better wages and conditions for workers. Elizabeth Fiedler and Rick
Krajewski will enter the Pennsylvania statehouse on similar platforms,
including backing a ban on fracking.

Colorado likewise will see two more DSA-backed members in its
statehouse: Javier Mabrey, an anti-eviction advocate who campaigned on
tenants’ rights, and affordable housing in particular, and Elisabeth
Epps, who, like Hernandez, is a prison abolitionist, and the founder
of a nonprofit paying out cash bail for those too poor to afford bond
in Denver. New York has likewise elected Sarahana Shrestha
[[link removed]] and Kristen
Gonzalez
[[link removed]] and
to its state assembly and senate, respectively, with the latter
further entrenching socialists’ political influence in Astoria,
Queens
[[link removed]],
where they have officials at every level of elected office.

Rounding out the list are Erika Uyterhoeven, who made treating
affordable housing as a right rather than a commodity central
[[link removed]] to her
reelection campaign for the Massachusetts House, Gabriel Acevero in
Maryland, where he had waged a high-profile battle to allow the public
to access police misconduct records, and Rachel Ventura, who heads to
the Illinois’s state senate calling
[[link removed]] for
a tax on stock trades while lowering property taxes and promising to
reduce wealth inequality and invest in infrastructure and renewables.

Not on the DSA’s list but victorious was Anthony Quezada
[[link removed]],
who will sit on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and has
promised to use the position to protect and expand the county’s
public health system, its natural resources, and tackle homelessness.
Quezada’s win builds on the significant gains
[[link removed]] the
socialist movement has made in Chicago over the past half decade or
so.

One clear theme running through all of these candidates is a focus on
homelessness, tenants’ rights, and affordable housing, likewise a
top priority for socialist slates in both New York
[[link removed]] and Chicago
[[link removed]] in
recent years. While socialists may struggle to enact big-ticket
priorities like universal health care at the state and local levels,
housing is a policy area they can more easily intervene in directly.
Given the surge in housing costs all across the country ― and, as
we’ll see, the victories of ballot measures aimed at dealing with
these crises ― this is clearly a potent and winning issue.

Progressivism on the Ballot

Ballot measures were another front on which DSA saw success. Six of
the fourteen votes the organization endorsed ended up going its way.

Voters defied
[[link removed]] the
restaurant industry in Washington, DC, to pass Initiative 82, which
mandates that tipped workers get paid the district’s minimum wage
regardless of what they make in tips. The public also voted down
draconian abortion restrictions in both Montana and Kentucky, and
voted overwhelmingly in favor of Illinois’s Workers’ Rights
Amendment (WRA), which would write into the state’s constitution
[[link removed]] a
ban on right-to-work laws while guaranteeing the right to organize and
collectively bargain. One wrinkle: the WRA at this point is just short
of the 60 percent of votes on the measure that it needed to pass under
one optional set of procedures; its fortunes now rest on getting 50
percent approval from everyone who voted in the election.

There were mixed results in Portland, Maine, where DSA had success
[[link removed]] passing
progressive ballot measures in 2020, and where it pushed three ballot
measures
[[link removed]] this
year. Initiative B, which would have put restrictions on short-term
rentals to halt the growth of Airbnb and similar businesses, lost with
55 percent of the vote going to the no side. Initiative D, which would
have raised the minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025 and let tipped
workers get the same rate of pay as everyone else, only got 38 percent
of the vote. But initiative C, which puts into place a ninety-day
notice for lease termination and other tenant protections, passed with
54 percent of the vote.

Results were similarly mixed in California, where a Pasadena measure
setting up rent control and eviction protections is narrowly winning
[[link removed]],
with votes still being tallied, and a San Francisco measure to move
mayoral elections to presidential election years has passed, while
another to tax owners of vacant residential units is currently lead in
the count. An added property tax to fund the City College of San
Francisco failed, as did a new business tax in the city to fund
childcare for preschoolers, while an empty homes tax in Santa Cruz is
currently trailing. It was a similar story in Colorado, where a tax on
landlords to finance an eviction defense fund was sturdily rejected.

Looking beyond ballot measures pushed by DSA, affordable housing
was everywhere
[[link removed]],
particularly in California, which is years into a severe housing
crisis. Los Angeles passed a mansion tax, Berkeley passed an empty
homes tax, and Oakland created an affordable housing fund. Beyond
California, similar measures passed with sometimes huge majorities in
Austin, Columbus, Kansas City, Palm Beach County, Charlotte, and
Buncombe County, North Carolina ― places all situated in red states.

In fact, this election continued the trend
[[link removed]] of
voters in red states expressing support for progressive politics.
South Dakotans finally approved
[[link removed]] Obamacare’s
Medicaid expansion, becoming the seventh state to do so by ballot
measure, two years after they voted to legalize recreational weed.
(That last one was blocked by the courts afterward, though, and voters
have now rejected it
[[link removed]] at
the ballot box in a second vote.)

Nebraskans voted to raise their minimum wage from the current measly
$9 and hour to $15 by 2026, two years after voters in Florida ―
which just handed Republicans a major win ― did the same. Though
more of a purplish state, 54 percent voters in Nevada similarly chose
[[link removed]] to
raise the minimum wage to $12 by 2024 and eliminate the stipulation
that lets employers pay workers less if they have health insurance, at
the same time that they just threw out their Democratic governor and
are close to doing the same to one of their Democratic senators.

Other high-profile measures that won were Arizona’s Proposition 209
[[link removed]] (with
72 percent of the vote), which sets limits on the collection of and
interest rates on medical debt, and Massachusetts’ Fair Share
Amendment
[[link removed]],
which raises taxes on millionaires to pay for public investment.
Meanwhile, Missouri voted 53 percent to legalize recreational
marijuana, the only of four conservative states (Arkansas and the
Dakotas being the others) to do so this year. With Maryland doing the
same, weed is now legal in half of the United States
[[link removed]],
which should hopefully force some rethinking around the Biden
administration’s so-far conservative
[[link removed]] approach
[[link removed]] on
the substance. Colorado, meanwhile, has decriminalized psychedelics.

Relatedly, Tennessee, Oregon, and Vermont all voted with robust
majorities to finally outlaw involuntary servitude for those convicted
of crimes — thus closing an exemption that was written into the
original Thirteenth Amendment of 1865, which abolished slavery in the
United States. In fact, conservative Tennessee voted in favor of doing
so by a much wider margin (a hair under 80 percent) than liberal
Oregon (55 percent). Louisiana, meanwhile, voted firmly to keep it in
place. And in Alabama, voters decided to ratify the state’s
rewritten constitution, which, among other things, takes out racist
language
[[link removed]] providing
for segregated schools, poll taxes, and a ban on interracial marriage,
which were invalidated by courts long ago.

No Red Wave From the Crime Wave

These results point to another notable trend. While Republicans and
the Right more generally have seized on the issue of crime ― pushing
liberal officeholders to the right
[[link removed]] on
policing in the process, and fomenting genuine backlash
[[link removed]] against
some left-wing candidates over the issue of cutting police budgets ―
the midterms were far from a rebuke of progressive ideas on criminal
justice.

Progressive prosecutors won all over the country, including in red
states, despite a Republican messaging strategy
[[link removed]] going
into the election that targeted them as stand-ins
[[link removed]] for
Democrats’ supposedly soft-on-crime policies. Perhaps most
head-turning was the win of Kimberly Graham, who ran for district
attorney in Polk County, Iowa, on ending low-level marijuana
convictions and eliminating cash bail for many nonviolent offenders.
Graham trounced her Republican opponent, a thirty-year “tough on
crime” incumbent, by 14 points, one of the few
[[link removed]] Democrats
to survive a red wave that did come to Iowa.

Reformist prosecutors likewise won in Dallas, San Antonio,
Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, and Minneapolis, where George Floyd’s
murder at the hands of police had sparked the massive racial justice
protests of 2020. There public defender Mary Moriarty likewise beat a
“tough on crime,” police-backed Republican on a platform of
launching a police accountability division, becoming the lead
prosecutor for Hennepin County, in which Minneapolis sits.

Zooming out to wider Minnesota, Sanders ally and attorney general
Keith Ellison survived a stiff challenge from a corporate lawyer and
political novice who spent the campaign attacking
[[link removed]] him
over crimes the Minnesota AG’s office largely isn’t responsible
for prosecuting. Ellison, who had led the high-profile prosecution of
the police officer who killed Floyd and was accused by his opponent of
supporting defunding the police, presented
[[link removed]] himself
as “the people’s lawyer,” stressing his record on consumer
protection and corporate accountability, while also pointing to his
prosecutions of violent crimes.

The new insurgent members-to-be all have records of standing up to law
enforcement, whether Frost’s participation in the 2020 protests,
Casar’s push to reallocate funding
[[link removed]] from
the Austin Police Department, or Lee holding up the state legislature
to get police accountability taken up. Meanwhile, despite being
hammered on crime by Dr Oz, Fetterman narrowly won
[[link removed]] among
those who saw it as their top issue — this for a candidate who has
taken broadly progressive positions on marijuana, sentencing reform,
and dealing with nonviolent offenders. Hernandez and Epps show that
even candidates who self-identify as abolitionists can win races.

Socialist candidates often had a carefully crafted message on crime,
running less on defunding the police than on police accountability,
noncarceral sentences for nonviolent offenders, and promising to
address the recent rise in crime rates through social investment
[[link removed]].
Of course, not every criminal justice reformer won. A reformist
candidate lost in Plymouth County, Massachusetts; Alabama
voters expanded
[[link removed]] the
list of crimes one can be denied bail for; and scandal-plagued
sheriffs still won reelection
[[link removed]].

Crime remains a tricky issue for the Left. But broadly, progressive
stances on criminal justice, particularly when it comes to treatment
of low-level offenses and holding bad cops to account, clearly
continue to have purchase among voters ― or at least aren’t
automatically electoral poison.

Sacrificing Palestinians

Unfortunately, some left-wing victories came at the expense of the
cause of Palestinian justice. Having watched another Sanders ally,
Nina Turner, get both of her congressional campaigns sunk by a flood
of outside spending from pro-Israel groups, several candidates moved
to the center on Israel and Palestine.

Fetterman vowed
[[link removed]] to
“lean in” on the US-Israel relationship, and said he was “not
really a progressive in that sense,” saying he was “dismayed” by
the Squad’s vote
[[link removed]] against
Israeli missile defense funding last year. He was endorsed by
Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), the group that defeated Turner,
which put together a six-figure mail program
[[link removed]] to
help him beat Mehmet Oz.

In Texas, Casar took himself out of the running for Austin DSA’s
endorsement after upsetting members by publicly distancing himself
[[link removed]] from
the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement
[[link removed]],
and pledging his commitment to US military aid to the country,
prompting one AIPAC donor to remark
[[link removed]] it
was “a very good example of how [the spending] is working.” In
Florida, Frost disappointed
[[link removed]] the
Palestinian activists he had stood with early on by modulating his
position on the conflict, reportedly
[[link removed]] explicitly
as a way to keep DMFI from entering the primary. Elsewhere,
progressives Marie Newman and Andy Levin were defeated in their
primaries thanks in part to DMFI money.

One notable exception was Lee in Pennsylvania, who overcame big AIPAC
spending in both the primary, where a deluge of AIPAC-funded negative
ads saw her massive early lead vanish, and the general election. But
Lee only survived the first race thanks to an all-hands-on-deck
intervention by progressive outside groups like Justice Democrats at
the last minute, which depleted the resources they had to spend on
other races. The organization’s executive director, Alexandra Rojas,
has pointed to this
[[link removed]] to
stress the need for progressives to get serious about the money race,
something that would not just help candidates win but prevent them
from taking centrist positions for fear of being outspent.

A Good Result

The socialist movement has had to swallow its share of bitter losses
in the electoral arena these past few years, like Bernie Sanders’s
2020 Democratic primary defeat and Buffalo mayor Byron Brown’s
victory over India Walton
[[link removed]].
But the reality is that every election since 2016 has brought with it
new, important victories for the Left.

Between Fetterman’s Senate win, the new insurgents in the House, and
the spate of state and local wins around the country, the 2022
midterms have surely been one of the most successful elections for the
Left over the past six years. Now the question is what those who have
won elected office do with their newfound power and stronger numbers.

_Branko Marcetic [[link removed]] is
a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case
Against Joe Biden [[link removed]]. He
lives in Chicago, Illinois._

_The new issue of Jacobin is out now. Subscribe today
[[link removed]] and get a yearlong
print and digital subscription._

* midterm elections
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