Retired Harvard B-School Professor to Black People: Own Your Anger and Grief To Combat Brutal, Systemic Racism

In his latest podcast, retired Harvard professor Steven Rogers departed from his usual format to focus on “the business” of helping Black people respond to the alarming number of casualties from police shootings.

“I do not believe there is any value at this time to tell Black people to suppress their anger and hurt until the voting booths open in November,” asserts Rogers, discarding recent statements made by numerous Black politicians and entertainers. “My advice is that Black people should be authentic and own these feelings. Continue to march and protest.”

In dealing with the “multi-step grieving process,” the leading Black business authority and BlackEnterprise.com contributor urges African Americans to “not let any one hoodwink you into trying to skip important steps in the process of grief when a Black man has been lynched by a white cop.”

Rogers usually uses his incisive, witty “Lessons on Black Excellence in Business” podcast to offer advice on areas such as startup financing, operational excellence, and strategic management. A recent episode aptly titled, “Say it Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud…And I’m Angry And Hurting“—merging the lyrics from R&B legend James Brown’s 1968 classic with a statement from his daughter and co-host, Ariel, that echoes the sentiment of Black people nationwide—was designed to help listeners cope with the painful history of brutal and systemic acts of racism.

He shares his own unshakeable anguish over examples of inhumanity: “I still hurt and grieve from hearing as an 11-year-old my mother crying in her bedroom 52 years ago when the news reported that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. I still hurt and grieve from attending a church service at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, 100 days after a white man murdered nine black parishioners during a prayer service meeting in 2015. And I still hurt and grieve from the photo that I saw of a black family—a father, a mother, and two children—lynched, hanging from a tree by their necks when I visited the lynching museum last year in Montgomery, Alabama.”

In the podcast, Rogers suggests listeners engage in four actions to help African Americans find spiritual upliftment, combat racism, and gain economic empowerment. For instance, he encourages them to “love the Black community” by patronizing those firms that develop products and services that benefit Black consumers and donate to Black causes. “Remember the greatest private sector employer of Black people are Black-owned businesses.”

from Black Enterprise https://ift.tt/32u4s1s

5 Ways Black Real Estate Investors Can Increase Returns As Business Shows Little Progress in Boosting Diversity

Real estate investing has long been a proven approach to helping individuals become their own bosses, build wealth, and achieve financial independence.

In fact, an immense 90% of millionaires reportedly made their fortunes by investing in that asset class.

But little progress has been achieved in the Black real estate investing community, with investors continuing to experience a lack of diversity and overall opportunities afforded to them, a new study by Millionacres shows. A Motley Fool firm, Millionacres is a real estate investment service.

In August, Millionacres surveyed more than 650 people about diversity in the real estate investing world. Five percent of the respondents identified as Black or African American. The real estate world encompasses  many categories, including rental properties, real estate crowdfunding, commercial real estate, real estate stocks, REITs (real estate investment trusts), flipping houses, and second or vacation homes to name a few.

Among the most startling survey findings is that 7 out of 10 Black investors feel that their race affects their real estate investing opportunities. Here are other top findings of what the Black real estate investing community has to report about diversity:

• Nearly 63% say racial diversity is lacking or severely lacking in the real estate investing community.
• About 56% believe that their race affects their real estate investing returns.
• Around 48% think that early financial education (including information on real estate investing) for under-represented groups would help with lack of diversity.

To reverse matters, Black respondents offered feedback on what should be done about the lack of diversity in the business. Fourteen percent recommend more online content and resources specifically for underrepresented groups. And 11% suggest government intervention on behalf of underrepresented groups.

The findings are also significant from a financial viewpoint. For instance, the combined value of every residential home in the United States alone was $33.6 trillion by late 2019, according to real estate and rental marketplace Zillow.

Real estate investor Lisa Phillips says the 70% of Black investors who feel that their race affects their real estate opportunities is startling to some but very accurate. She says it means that most Black investors are actively navigating the racial burden of trying to invest in addition to the complexities of building a portfolio. “The consequences of that is a much higher burden to obtain just even the same results of bridging the wealth gap,” she says.

Phillips says it is a big deal because it shows that Black investors need to ensure they are deliberately going to sources for funding, education, and opportunities, such as funds and investment groups that understand these nuances. These are generally Black-owned investment platforms that will speak to these issues in a way that mainstream real estate investing platforms cannot articulate. She added this is one way of ensuring the racialized component does not inhibit the accessibility of the Black investor.

So what needs to occur to get more African Americans involved in real estate investing nationwide?

A best-selling author of Investing In Rental Properties For Beginners, Phillips says she personally has found success in training Black investors in a culture of targeting undervalued Black communities, ethically and responsibly (not gentrifying). This way, she added, the cost of entry is a lot lower with homes that run anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000, offering a much lower startup cost.

And if more Blacks were involved in real estate investing, it could potentially help them and their community economically.

Phillips says she has seen investors go from one rental property to 10, and are now major players in the local REIAs (real estate investing associations) and active politically and judicially as homeowners. “We have also seen a pooling of resources, noting which banks are Black investor-friendly (meaning, more likely to give a mortgage loan), as well as which cities and municipalities are investor-friendly,” she says.

“Also, having investors in vulnerable low-income minority neighborhoods who are sensitive and conscious of not escalating rents in order to not displace residents, is having a positive effect individually on streets—this is really grassroots level, which are the best way to get change in my opinion—on our own, not waiting for government or outside validation.”

For Black investors looking to get higher returns from the investing world, Phillips offered some tips:

1. Focus on word of mouth recommendations for banks, lenders, appraisers, real estate agents, educators, investment groups, etc.

2. Focus on portfolios that align with your pocketbook. If you have $10,000 to invest in a property, focus on properties that cost $20,000 to $50,000, generally in minority neighborhoods, and learn how to ethically invest in long-term rentals for relatively low down payment amounts but extremely high cash flow.

3. Ensure you are receiving guidance and education from investors who understand and can speak to navigating the racialized components of getting funding and implementing strategies.

4.  Learn how to find these low-cost markets, be it an hour’s drive away or a plane trip away, and learn how to successfully manage them through long-distance investing so you can easily achieve great deals without having to manage it hands-on.

5. Show up in the energy so you can create the business that you have always wanted, and financial freedom, and give back and stabilize communities at the same time.

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11 ways to fix America’s fundamentally broken democracy

Zac Freeland/Vox

A plan for the democratic revolution America needs.

The United States has a president who received nearly 3 million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent. Currently, over half the country lives in just nine states, which means that less than half of the population controls 82 percent of the Senate. It also means that Republicans hold a majority in the Senate despite the fact that Democratic senators represent more than half of the American people.

Intentional efforts to make it harder to vote, such as voter ID laws, are increasingly common throughout the states — and the Supreme Court frequently approaches such voter suppression with indifference. Gerrymandering renders many legislative elections irrelevant — in 2018, Republicans won nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Wisconsin state assembly, even though Democratic candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote. Wealthy donors flood elections with money, as lawmakers spend thousands of hours on “call time,” dialing the rich to fund the next campaign.

And looming over all of this is the problem of race. In some states, Republican lawmakers write voter suppression laws that target voters of color with, in the word of one federal appeals court, “almost surgical precision,” knowing that a law that targets minority votes will primarily disenfranchise Democrats.

Congressional Democrats are acutely aware of many of these problems. And they’ve devised some fairly aggressive plans to combat these attacks on the franchise.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

President Trump and Vice President Pence stand smile towards delegates during the first day of the Republican National Convention on August 24.

Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris are applauded the Democratic National Convention in Wilmington, Delaware on August 20.

The first bill House Democrats rolled out after they took charge of the House in 2019 was the “For the People Act,” which would be the most significant voting rights legislation since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 if it were to become law (that bill is often referred to as “HR 1,” its official designation in the House’s internal system for keeping track of bills). A companion bill, HR 4, would strengthen the Voting Rights Act and restore many parts of the law that were neutralized by the Supreme Court.

As several voting rights advocates told me, these two bills represent a hard-won consensus among Democrats, and among the voting rights community more broadly, on what must be done to shore up American democracy. It’s “taken a long time to build consensus” around this package of proposals, according to Wendy Weiser, head of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice and one of the advocates who helped build that consensus. And the two House bills that emerged would likely be the most comprehensive voting rights legislation ever enacted by Congress.

And yet, if enacted, House Democrats’ voting rights legislation would still fall short of addressing the major challenges facing our democracy. The bills do little, for example, to address Senate malapportionment. And nothing to prevent the Electoral College from handing the presidency to popular vote losers.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

From left, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) attend a press conference to unveil the “For The People Act” on March 27, 2019.

If Democrats’ polling leads hold through November 3, they might have the majorities they need to fix much of America’s broken democracy. But to do so, they will have to think big — even bigger than they are already thinking.

Below are 11 reforms that Congress could enact in a potential Joe Biden administration. Many of these reforms are included in legislation the House passed. But the list also rather pointedly includes solutions for problems that are not adequately addressed by these two bills.

Some of these proposals may seem radical, but the ambition of these proposals speaks to the scale of the problems facing us. American democracy is fundamentally broken. And it needs a radical overhaul to ensure that the United States has free and fair elections in the future.

It all begins with securing our right to vote

The first batch of ideas all aim to do one thing: secure our right to vote. Voter suppression — from voter ID laws to polling place closures to voter roll purges — have compromised many Americans voters’ rights. Strengthening our democracy begins with restoring and bolstering those rights.

1) First things first: Get rid of the filibuster

If elected president, Biden could potentially do more to protect the franchise than any chief executive since Lyndon Johnson. Or, Biden could end up with few, if any, legislative accomplishments.

It all comes down to what a Democratic Congress could pass. Should Democrats win a majority in both houses, eyes will turn to the Senate, which will have to choose between unraveling the filibuster — which typically prevents any legislation from becoming law unless it is supported by 60 senators — and unraveling hope that major voting rights legislation, or any other big progressive legislation, will become law.

To win a filibuster-proof majority, Democrats would need to get to 60 seats from the 47 they currently have — and even if they get that (which is highly unlikely), that would only mean that they had enough votes to pass legislation supported by the most conservative Democrat in the Senate. Barring a historic electoral calamity for the GOP, the Republican Party will have enough votes to filibuster any voting rights bill that reaches the Senate floor, unless Democrats vote to strip away the filibuster.

There are signs that Democrats are starting to understand this problem. At Rep. John Lewis’s (D-GA) funeral in July, former President Barack Obama called for eliminating the filibuster, which he called a “Jim Crow relic,” if necessary to enact voting rights legislation. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), once one of the most vocal Democratic defenders of the filibuster, now appears likely to vote to kill it if Republicans use it to sabotage a Biden administration. Biden himself signaled support in July for filibuster reform if Senate Republicans are too “obstreperous,” although his advisers have cast doubt on the prospect.

The success of a Biden presidency could rest on whether the Senate has the votes to make Republican obstreperousness irrelevant.

2) Stop voting rights violations before they happen

A perennial problem in voting rights litigation: When a state enacts an illegal restriction on the franchise, it takes courts several years to strike that law down. In Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill (2019), for example, the Supreme Court allowed a lower court decision invalidating an unconstitutional racial gerrymander to go into effect. But that was after the state held several elections using these illegal maps.

As Lisa Cylar Barrett, director of policy for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund told me, we need a “mechanism that allows for the screening” of voting laws “before elections happen.”

Which brings us to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 required states and localities with a history of racial voter suppression to “preclear” any new voting rules with the Justice Department or with a federal court in Washington, DC. The idea was to catch efforts at voter suppression before they disenfranchise voters, and before a state can run an election using racist rules.

But the Supreme Court effectively deactivated Section 5 in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). Though the Court’s 5-4 decision in Shelby County did not strike down Section 5’s preclearance regime altogether, it did invalidate the formula the Voting Rights Act used to determine which states are subject to preclearance.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Leaders from Congress joined civil rights icons to rally as the Supreme Court prepared to hear oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder on February 27, 2013.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Residents from Alabama stand in line outside the Supreme Court for a chance to hear oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder on February 27, 2013.

HR 4 is the House Democratic proposal to address Shelby County. It lays out a new formula: jurisdictions with “fifteen or more voting rights violations” in the previous 15 years, or states with “ten or more voting rights violations” if at least one was committed by the state itself, will be subject to preclearance under the regime laid out in the bill.

One problem with this regime is that preclearance is only as good as the officials who oversee it. A Justice Department led by Attorney General Bill Barr is likely to rubber stamp voter suppression laws that benefit Republicans, as could Trump-appointed judges.

Yet, as Franita Tolson, a law professor and vice dean at the University of Southern California, told me, “there have always been bad actors.” And yet, she argues, ”preclearance was still effective in the Reagan years” and “it was still effective in the Bush years.”

Tolson says the fact that states have to submit new voting laws for approval has a “substantial deterrent effect,” because they are less likely to even attempt to obtain preclearance for the most egregious acts of racial voter suppression. And even if states do obtain preclearance for a bad law, the preclearance process is burdensome in and of itself.

Which raises another important aspect of HR 4 — in addition to laying out a formula governing jurisdictions that are automatically subject to preclearance, the bill also makes it easier for federal judges to require states to preclear new laws if states or localities are caught violating voting rights.

Currently, judges may only do so if a jurisdiction violates the 14th or 15th Amendment rights of voters — violations that typically can only be established if the state intentionally engaged in racial voter discrimination. HR 4 allows judges to impose preclearance on states and localities that commit “violations of the 14th or 15th Amendment, violations of this Act, or violations of any Federal law that prohibits discrimination in voting on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”

In practice, that means that a jurisdiction could be subject to preclearance if it enacts a law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color,” even if the plaintiffs challenging this law cannot prove intentional discrimination.

Just as significantly, the possibility that a jurisdiction might be subjected to a burdensome preclearance regime if it engages in racial voter suppression may deter it from attempting to do so.

3) Eliminate registration as an obstacle to voting

At least 21 states plus the District of Columbia permit voters to register to vote on the same day that they cast their ballot — thus effectively eliminating the need to register in advance as an obstacle to the franchise. Nor is same-day registration a particularly new reform. Maine, Minnesota, and Wisconsin adopted it in the 1970s. Three more states — Idaho, New Hampshire, and Wyoming — adopted same-day registration in the mid-’90s.

One benefit of eliminating registration as an obstacle to voting is that it prevents voter purges that can change the outcome of an election. In the lead-up to the 2000 election, for example, Florida hired a private contractor to identify ineligible voters on the state’s rolls. The contractor eventually came up with about 100,000 names that it claimed were names of dead voters or voters who were ineligible because of a felony conviction.

But the list was deeply flawed and misidentified many eligible voters. One local election supervisor realized just how flawed the list was when he recognized the name of three voters who were wrongly flagged as ineligible: one of his co-workers, the husband of a different co-worker, and his own father. African Americans, a group that preferred Democrat Al Gore over Republican George W. Bush by more than 9 to 1, were particularly likely to appear on the flawed purge list.

Bush would go on to win Florida — and with it, the presidency — by just 537 votes, according to official tallies.

The HR 1 legislation contains several provisions that would help prevent a repeat of this incident, and that would otherwise prevent registration from being an obstacle to the franchise. Among other things, it requires states to offer same-day registration in federal elections. It automatically registers voters who provide relevant information to their local Department of Motor Vehicles or other agencies listed in the bill. And it forbids certain types of voter purges.

4) Make it as easy as possible to vote

Thirty-nine states plus the District of Columbia allow early voting — meaning that voters can vote in-person prior to Election Day. All but nine states either automatically mail ballots to all registered voters, or allow any voter who wishes to vote absentee to request a ballot.

In ordinary times, these reforms help ensure that voters are not disenfranchised because they cannot take time off work on Election Day, or because they will be away from home on that day. And in the midst of a pandemic, they help ensure that polling places do not become vectors for the spread of Covid-19. They limit the number of voters who vote in person, and spread out those voters who do cast an in-person ballot over several days.

HR 1 would require all states to offer early voting for at least 10 hours a day, and for at least 15 days prior to Election Day. Notably, this includes weekends — some states have attempted to cut Sunday voting, a day that is particularly popular with African American voters, because Black churches frequently organize voting drives immediately after Sunday services.

The legislation also requires states to allow all voters to vote absentee.

Additionally, HR 1 says states that require voters to present ID at the polls generally must also accept “a sworn written statement, signed by the individual under penalty of perjury, attesting to the individual’s identity and attesting that the individual is eligible to vote in the election.”

Voter ID laws are a common obstacle to the franchise, but they serve no legitimate purpose. Although proponents of such laws often argue they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, voter impersonation at the polls is so rare that it is virtually nonexistent.

5) Stop running elections on the cheap

Many state election officials face a “dramatic funding gap” thanks to the pandemic, Weiser, the lawyer with the Brennan Center, told me. Numerous states expect a crush of absentee ballot requests from voters who wish to avoid physically going to polling places where they could contract Covid-19. And the workers who staff polling places tend to be older retired voters, who are especially likely to stay at home out of fear of becoming sick.

Solving these problems requires money — money to hire staff to process absentee ballot requests, money to hire people to sort and count those ballots once they are cast, and money to pay poll workers enough that people actually want to take the job. And right now, that money isn’t there.

Even after the pandemic is over, however, Weiser warns that the United States has ”always run on a shoestring.” Especially now that we are facing “more and more hostile foreign government affiliated actors,” states need adequate funding to secure our elections.

A Democratic Congress, which has few constraints on its ability to borrow money during a period of low inflation and even lower interest rates, would be well-positioned to provide those funds.

6) A tax credit for all voters

In Australia, over 90 percent of eligible voters typically cast a ballot in federal elections. The nation achieves this feat by turning Election Day into a celebration, where voters gather at community barbecues to eat what are often referred to as “democracy sausages.” But Australia also uses a stick to encourage voting — nonvoters can be fined about $80 Australian dollars (about $60 in US currency) if they do not cast a ballot.

If a similar proposal were enacted here, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, it would enhance the voice of Americans who are often underrepresented in US democracy.

“The country’s politics typically places the interests of older Americans over the interests of the younger generations,” for example, because older, more financially stable voters are more likely to cast a ballot. Similarly, a universal duty to vote “would also help ensure increased political participation in communities of color that have long confronted exclusion from our democracy.”

One possible argument against fining nonvoters it that such fines could impose a hardship on the poorest Americans (although, in the long run, federal policy would likely grow much more favorable to low-income Americans if voting were mandatory). Realistically, moreover, the current Supreme Court is unlikely to allow a mandatory voting law in the United States. In NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the first major Obamacare case to reach the justices, the Court famously invented a distinction between laws that regulate people already engaged in a particular activity, and laws that regulate “inactivity” — that is, laws that compel passive individuals to act in a way they would prefer not to act.

With five Republican justices, the Court could easily import this distinction into the voting rights context.

Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

A voter registration table in New York City on August 9.

But NFIB also provides a potential path forward if Congress wants to incentivize voters to show up at the polls without relying on fines. NFIB upheld a provision of Obamacare that required most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay higher taxes as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax. And Congress’s power to reward certain behavior with favorable tax treatment is extremely broad. It can use tax credits to encourage people to drive hybrid cars, or even to encourage them to have more children. Barring an extraordinarily partisan decision from the Supreme Court, Congress should also be able to use tax credits to encourage people to vote.

In that vein, instead of fining voters $60 for not voting (or whatever amount Congress deems appropriate), Congress could provide a refundable tax credit of $60 to everyone who casts a vote. As a bonus, Congress could make this a renewable tax credit — meaning it would be available to the poorest Americans who pay little or no income tax.

Making American democracy more democratic

Beyond protecting our right to vote, policymakers need to think bigger to ensure that every voter has an equal say in shaping our government. There are major structural reasons why America’s political system has ground to a halt and produced outcomes that don’t seem to reflect public will. What follows are ambitious solutions, but we need ambitious thinking to fix a democracy in serious disrepair.

7) Fix Senate malapportionment

The United States Senate is simultaneously one of our most anti-democratic institutions, and one of the most powerful bastions of systemic racism in our political system.

According to 2019 census population estimates, the state of California has nearly 40 million residents. The state of Wyoming, meanwhile, has fewer than 600,000 residents. Yet each state receives two senators. In practice, that means that each resident of Wyoming has 68 times more representation in the Senate than each Californian.

This malapportionment has profound partisan implications and profound racial implications. In the current Senate, Democrats control a majority of the Senate seats (26-24) in the most populous half of the states. Republicans owe their majority in the Senate as a whole to their crushing 29-21 lead in the least populous half of the states.

Meanwhile, white voters are over-represented in the smaller states that benefit from Senate malapportionment, and non-college educated whites — a demographic that is trending rapidly toward Republicans — are especially over-represented in these states. The Senate, in other words, effectively gives additional representation to white Americans, and dilutes the voting power of people of color.

Democrats have rallied behind a partial solution to this problem — statehood for the District of Columbia. The Democratic House voted to make DC a state in June, and Congress has the power to make DC a state through ordinary legislation. Accordingly, if Democrats control the House, the White House, and a (filibuster-free) Senate, DC statehood is likely to happen fairly quickly.

Yet, while admitting a heavily Democratic, majority-minority city like DC into the union would help mitigate many of the problems with the Senate, it would hardly overcome them. Among other things, while admitting DC would reduce Black under-representation in the Senate, it would also increase the power of white college grads.

Data for Progress

More radical solutions are possible, for example, breaking up larger states such as California into smaller states. Absent such solutions, the Senate will continue to over-represent white conservatives and potentially even become a permanent bastion of Republican Party power.

8) Allow the states to neutralize the Electoral College

The popular vote loser has become president in two of the last five presidential elections.

Nor is this problem likely to fix itself. A recent study by three University of Texas researchers found that a Democrat who wins the presidential popular vote by 3 percentage points still has about a one in six chance of losing the Electoral College. There is a small chance that a Republican president will be elected even if the Democratic candidate wins the popular vote by as much as 6 points.

Michael Geruso, Dean Spears, and Ishaana Talesara

Congress cannot abolish the Electoral College on its own — the college itself is written into the Constitution — but it can help hasten its irrelevance.

A proposal known as the National Popular Vote Compact would allow the states to effectively neutralize the Electoral College. It works like this: A bloc of states that control a majority of electoral votes all agree to allocate those votes to the winner of the national popular vote. That way, no matter who wins each individual state, a majority of the Electoral College will always vote for the popular vote winner.

Currently, 15 states plus the District of Columbia, which combined control 196 electoral votes, have signed onto the compact. The compact will take effect once a bloc of states that control at least 270 votes sign on.

But there is a catch. The Constitution provides that no state may enter into a compact with another state “without the consent of Congress.” Though there is a plausible argument that the National Popular Vote Compact does not require such consent, it is uncertain how this argument will fare in court.

Congress could avoid this problem altogether, however, by preemptively giving consent to any compact that seeks to neutralize the Electoral College’s ability to place popular vote losers in the White House.

9) Stop gerrymandering

States must redraw their legislative districts at least once every decade, to ensure that each district has roughly the same number of people. That means the party that dominates the election prior to a redistricting cycle can often entrench its own power by drawing maps that neutralize many of the other party’s voters.

That’s more or less what happened in many states after Republicans had an unusually strong performance in the 2010 elections. In Pennsylvania, for example, President Obama won the state by more than 5 percentage points in 2012 — the first election held under the new Republican gerrymanders — but Republicans still won 13 of the state’s 18 US House seats. In Michigan, Obama won by nearly 10 points, but Republicans won nine of 14 House seats.

Unlike the problems of Senate malapportionment and the Electoral College, however, congressional Democrats have rallied behind a potent solution to gerrymandering, at least in federal elections.

Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

Demonstrators protest against gerrymandering in front of the Supreme Court on March 26, 2019.

The HR 1 legislation would require nearly every state to use a 15-member redistricting commission to draw US House districts. This commission must include equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and independents, and at least one member of each party and one independent must approve final maps. If the commission cannot draw maps or if a state refuses to appoint such a commission, then congressional maps will be drawn by a panel of three federal judges.

It’s not a perfect solution. It’s possible that, despite considerable safeguards written into the legislation, commissioners sympathetic to one party or the other may gain control of the commission. It’s also possible that a state may decide to forgo the commission and take its chances with the courts — especially if the majority party in that state believes that the local federal judges are loyal partisans.

But it’s a much better solution than leaving redistricting to state legislatures, bodies that, by their very nature, will very often be captured by a single political party.

10) Public financing for candidates

Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United v. FEC (2010) have largely gutted our ability to keep wealthy donors from having a disproportionate impact on elections. The most commonly cited concern about money in politics is corruption, because the need to raise money forces politicians to ingratiate themselves to big donors if they wish to remain in office. But money in politics also has an equally pernicious effect on how lawmakers spend their time.

As former Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) wrote shortly before he retired from Congress in 2016, “I’ve spent roughly 4,200 hours in call time, attended more than 1,600 fund-raisers just for my own campaign and raised nearly $20 million in increments of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000 per election cycle. And things have only become worse in the five years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.” Members of Congress spend a simply astonishing amount of time raising money, and that’s time they can’t spend doing their actual job of informing themselves about the bills they will vote into law.

One way to mitigate this problem is public financing, which provides additional funds to candidates who agree to certain restrictions on their ability to raise money from large donors. HR 1 would create such a regime for House candidates.

Under the legislation, qualified candidates receive six dollars for every one that they raise from most donors who give $200 or less. Thus, the bill makes it easier for candidates to get elected to Congress without relying on the wealthiest individuals to fund their campaigns. It also potentially allows them to spend less time on fundraising, freeing them to actually do their job.

11) Prevent Trump’s judges from sabotaging voting reforms

Any voting rights law is likely to receive a tough hearing from a Supreme Court that has only gotten more conservative since Shelby County. And any law enacted by a Democratic Congress could be struck down by overly partisan federal judges. Republicans have proven quite adept in shopping for federal trial judges who will strike down progressive laws on the thinnest legal arguments. And Trump has filled the federal bench with hardline conservatives, many of whom would be happy to strike down a law that makes it easier for voters of color — and for Democratic-leaning voters in general — to cast a ballot.

But Congress is hardly powerless against such judges.

While the Constitution created the Supreme Court, it only provides for “such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Thus, because lower federal courts are entirely creations of Congress, Congress may determine the scope of any lower court’s jurisdiction.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Trump greets Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after the State of the Union address on February 5, 2019.

It could, for example, strip courts that are known to be stacked with Republican partisans of jurisdiction to hear any lawsuit challenging new voting rights legislation. It could also require all such suits to be brought in the federal district court in DC — thus ensuring that any decision blocking such legislation would appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, where reactionary judges likely to toss out voting rights laws for partisan reasons can be outvoted by their more numerous colleagues.

Alternatively, Congress could create a new court — call it the “United States Court for Voting Rights Appeals” — and route any lower court decision challenging a voting rights law to that Court, which would be filled with new judges appointed by the sitting president.

Congress’s ability to shape the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction is far more uncertain, and the Court’s own decisions on this point are not a model of clarity. It is unlikely that a Republican Supreme Court would allow a Democratic Congress to strip its authority to hear certain lawsuits altogether. But Congress might be able to impose limited restrictions on the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction.

It might, for example, strip the Supreme Court of its power to stay a lower court decision enforcing a voting rights law while that case is still being litigated in lower courts. This act of Congress wouldn’t prevent the Supreme Court from striking the voting rights law down after the case is fully litigated in trial court and by an intermediate appeals court. But it could prevent the Supreme Court from immediately stepping in to block new voting rights legislation from ever taking effect.

In any event, a Democratic Congress will need to think hard about how to deal with partisan judges if it doesn’t want its laws to be quickly sabotaged by those judges. And that means thinking creatively about how to prevent judicial partisans from reviewing those laws.

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The ways Democrats could retake the Senate majority, explained

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks during a press conference following the weekly Senate Republican policy luncheon on June 30 in Washington, DC. | Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images

The battle for control of the Senate is fierce, less than two months from Election Day.

Control of the Senate could be within Democrats’ grasp this November. But they’re going to have to fight for it.

A once-narrow Senate map has dramatically expanded for Democrats this year, and Republicans have few options to expand their majority. Though some things have improved for the GOP since the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, they are still saddled with a controversial incumbent president at the top of their ticket and a turbulent and uncertain political climate.

“It will not be a news flash to say the Senate is very much in play,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told Vox. “There are numerous Senate races that are essentially margin of error races right now.”

Many Republicans were in a full-blown panic in the spring and early summer months as the pandemic forced a once-booming US economy to shut down. Coronavirus cases are gradually declining, and the economy has started to recover over the summer — with the unemployment rate falling from 14.7 percent in April to 8.4 percent in August. Still, millions are out of work and new Covid outbreaks are popping up in Midwestern states as schools and colleges have begun to reopen.

National and battleground polling shows the presidential race between Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump has largely remained stable over the past few months, with Biden maintaining a substantial lead in national polling and a smaller lead in key battleground states that could decide the election for the White House. With the virus still not under control and racial tensions boiling over in multiple cities, polling this summer has shown the vast majority of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction — a potentially worrying sign for Trump and the GOP.

“It’s an extraordinary flip of the mood in the country in a short amount of time ... that portends change,” Republican pollster Neil Newhouse recently told Vox. “Whether [voters] hold Trump or Republicans in the House or Senate accountable or not, they’re still going to vote for change.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Majority Whip Sen. John Thune leave after the weekly Senate Republican policy luncheon in Washington, DC, on May 12, 2020.

Democrats need to win back at least three seats to reclaim the Senate majority, but they are also defending Sen. Doug Jones in deep-red Alabama, where Trump has a 28-point net approval rating. If Jones loses, that means Democrats need to win four seats and the White House (where their party’s vice president could vote to break ties in the Senate), or net five seats without the White House advantage.

Overall, Senate Republicans are defending more turf: 23 seats (mostly in red states), compared to the 12 Senate Democrats who are up for reelection. Before the coronavirus hit, four states looked highly competitive for Democrats: Colorado, Arizona, Maine, and North Carolina. Now several more seats are in play for Democrats — including Montana, Iowa, and Georgia, and Democratic candidates have even put other reach states like South Carolina in play. Republicans, meanwhile, are going on offense in just two states: Alabama and Michigan.

“There remain multiple paths to the majority for Democrats,” said Cook Political Report Senate editor Jessica Taylor. “I would give Democrats a slight edge, [but] there are plausible scenarios where Republicans can retain their majority.”

Still, Taylor added, with Trump’s grip on the White House uncertain and House Democrats expected to keep — and maybe even expand — their majority in the lower chamber, the Senate is Republicans’ last “firewall.”

The battle to keep it will be a knock-down, drag-out fight.

Senate races are also a referendum on Trump

Some Republicans operatives are projecting a lot more calm and confidence than they were during the early months of Covid-19.

“I think things have improved significantly over the last month for Republicans,” Tim Cameron, a Republican strategist and a former chief digital strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the 2014 and 2016 cycles, told Vox.

Specifically, Cameron pointed to tightening battleground state polls between Biden and Trump and a wave of spending by the NRSC and McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund super PAC. Republicans also averted a potential nightmare in Kansas when US Rep. Roger Marshall won his August primary against former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, whose controversial record could have turned off moderate voters and put the normally safe Republican Senate seat at risk.

Still, one Democratic strategist shrugged off the Republican argument that the political winds are shifting in their favor: “I think it’s hard for Republicans to say with a straight face the environment is better and dump $5.5 million into Kansas.”

Republican pollsters and operatives Vox interviewed also acknowledged that the electoral fate of many GOP senators is tied to that of President Trump and said that polling in the presidential race has remained fairly stable, beyond some “slight tightening.”

“The presidential race has a significant impact on the control of the Senate,” Newhouse told Vox. “In areas where the president is doing well, Congressional and Senate campaigns look good; in areas where the president is more challenged in an individual state, it’s more uphill for Republican candidates.”

A few months ago, the political ground turned upside down with the first Covid-19 wave and subsequent shutting down of the American economy. Even though the economy has recovered somewhat over the summer, 1.7 million new unemployment claims were filed the week of August 22 alone, suggesting the recovery is slowing and millions are still out of work. The booming economy Republicans were hoping to run on in 2020 is no more.

A lot of the same GOP senators who swept into office during the Republican wave of the 2014 midterms are now staring down tough reelection battles in states that have rapidly diversified in the past six years. Senators who had once tied themselves closely to Trump are starting to put themselves at arm’s length from the president.

These incumbents are walking a tightrope; they can’t win without the president’s loyal base, but they also need independent and swing voters who may not like Trump. While many of these senators are trying to run on the strength of their brand in their home state, the contentious political climate of 2020 may make that challenging to pull off.

“Can they do it again given the stamp Donald Trump has placed on the Republican Party in the last four years? I don’t know, and neither does anybody else,” Ayres said. “That’s a fine line to walk in a highly polarized electoral environment, but it’s necessary if they’re going to win, and many Republicans have accomplished that feat in the past.”

Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images

President Donald Trump speaks on the fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention with a speech delivered before a live audience on the South Lawn of the White House.

Democrats, meanwhile, are running a playbook that was successful in many 2018 House races: backing moderate candidates and focusing on health care and jobs in the middle of a pandemic that has millions of newly unemployed people losing their health insurance along with their jobs. Democrats will highlight Medicaid expansion as an issue in states that didn’t expand it, including North and South Carolina, Kansas, Georgia, Texas, and Alabama. They’re already going after North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis (R) for his role in rejecting Medicaid expansion when he was leading the state legislature.

Biden and Democratic Senate candidates alike are hoping that message will appeal to disaffected suburban voters — especially women — who voted for House Democrats in 2018.

“If Republican candidates are able to hold their own with white women, they’re going to do well,” a Republican pollster told Vox. It’s not going to be an easy task; suburban women drove Democratic victories in 2018, and Biden is outpolling Trump among women by double digits.

“It’s a very challenging year for our side of the aisle,” the pollster added.

Even as Trump is focusing his reelection message on maintaining “law and order” in some cities that have seen riots over the summer to those women, Democrats are betting voters may care more about things like schools tenuously reopening — some virtually — due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The Trump campaign is trying to make an issue of the riots that have coincided with some of the racial justice demonstrations, and we will see if that has a significant effect,” Ayres said. “But as a general rule, factors that affect people personally and directly have more political import than factors that affect somebody else.”

With a tsunami of money being poured into Senate races and a deluge of news in an uncertain environment, political operatives in both parties are clear-eyed: The Senate battleground will remain incredibly competitive until November.

Here’s where the Senate map stands so far.

Democrats’ four biggest opportunities: Colorado, Arizona, Maine, and North Carolina

Even though Democrats have expanded their reach to other states including Iowa and Montana, “we also remain focused on the states that take us to a majority and have not taken our eye off the ball on that front,” a Democratic operative told Vox.

Colorado

Who is the Republican? Sen. Cory Gardner, first elected to the Senate in 2014. Gardner reliably votes with Trump and Republicans, although he has split with the Trump administration on issues including marijuana decriminalization and immigration reform.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) talks to reporters following the weekly Senate Republican policy luncheon in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill June 09, 2020 in Washington, DC.

Who is the Democrat? Former Gov. John Hickenlooper, who led the state from 2011 to 2019. Hickenlooper cuts more of a centrist profile, but he presided over some progressive changes in his state, such as marijuana legalization and gun control laws including universal background checks in Colorado.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report rates this a toss-up. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates it Lean Democratic.

What’s the background on the race? Election forecasters believe Colorado is one of Democrats’ likeliest pickup opportunities for one big reason: There aren’t many Republicans left in the state. Colorado is diversifying, its suburban voters are a prime demographic for Democrats, and recent polls show many of these voters do not like Trump. As of August, Biden held a double-digit lead over Trump, state polling averages showed.

“The moderates are being run out of the party, top to bottom,” said David Flaherty, who runs the Colorado-based Republican polling firm Magellan Strategies. “It’s really a math problem for all [GOP] candidates, not just Cory Gardner.”

Public lands, health care, and gun control are all big issues in the state. Hickenlooper has consistently polled ahead of Gardner throughout the spring and summer. Still, Colorado Democrats and Republicans alike say Gardner’s political prowess shouldn’t be underestimated and expect the race to be competitive.

Arizona’s special election

Who is the Republican? Sen. Martha McSally, who narrowly lost her 2018 race to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. McSally was appointed to fill the seat of the late Sen. John McCain in 2018.

Who is the Democrat? Mark Kelly, former US astronaut and husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the former US representative for Arizona and gun control activist.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball rate it Lean Democratic.

What’s the background on the race? This race has shifted in Democrats’ favor recently, but it will remain competitive throughout the fall, Democrats and Republicans alike tell Vox. Once seen as a more moderate Republican House member, McSally tied herself closely to Trump in 2018 but lost her race against Sinema by a razor-thin margin. Since she was appointed by Arizona’s Republican governor to fill McCain’s seat in 2018, her favorability ratings with voters have been low. Kelly currently has close to a 9-point lead there, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average — however, the race has tightened in recent weeks in part due to a barrage of negative advertising.

Kelly has a history in the state and vast financial resources: He has been raising gobs of cash, and has now outraised McSally by over $15 million, according to data from OpenSecrets. Arizona certainly isn’t as liberal as Colorado, but it has an interesting electoral mix of Latino voters who voted more liberal in Democratic primaries, as well as a heavy concentration of older voters who as a bloc seem to be gravitating toward Biden in the presidential race. The state is emerging as a key battleground in the race for White House and Senate alike. And McSally — having lost one Senate race — needs to prove she can win this one.

Maine

Who is the Republican? Sen. Susan Collins, in office since 1997.

Who is the Democrat? Maine Speaker of the House Sara Gideon.

Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Maine Speaker of the House Sara Gideon talks to the press in her office on July 3, 2017.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball both rate this a toss-up.

What’s the background on the race? The last New England moderate Republican left in the US Senate, Collins is facing what’s shaping up to be her toughest reelection yet. Her reputation as an independent senator willing to break from her party has taken a hit in the Trump era — given her vote for a GOP tax bill, her key confirmation vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and her vote to acquit Trump during his impeachment trial. Collins is now the most unpopular senator in the country, according to Morning Consult, even more so than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Gideon has benefited from that, fundraising millions in her race and getting up on television. Despite attacks from Republicans, Gideon has a single-digit lead in public polls.

Collins is trying to run a race independent of Trump, focusing instead on the federal money she’s brought back to her home state over the years. She hasn’t yet said if she supports or will vote for the president in November. With Trump still popular in conservative rural northern Maine (an area Collins is from and badly needs for reelection) and despised in the liberal southern part of the state, Collins is walking a tightrope on the president. She’s outrun Republican nominees for president before, but many are watching to see if this year is different.

“She’s in this really difficult space; this happens for a lot of moderates across the country,” said Dan Shea, a political science professor and pollster at Colby College in Maine. “The question is, what does she do in that difficult space?”

North Carolina

Who is the Republican? Sen. Thom Tillis, elected to the Senate in 2014 and former speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives.

Who is the Democrat? Cal Cunningham, a former North Carolina state senator and veteran.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball both rate this a toss-up.

What’s the background on the race? North Carolina is considered a true swing state in the 2020 presidential election and Senate race because of its changing demographics and swing suburban voters outside cities like Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte. Senate races in North Carolina are often razor-thin; Tillis won his seat in 2014 by just 46,000 votes — or a single percentage point. Public polling throughout the summer has shown Cunningham with a slim lead, but the presidential race between Biden and Trump there is essentially tied.

As Tillis aligns himself with Trump, Democrats aren’t just planning to seize on his record in the US Senate; they are also delving into his tenure leading the North Carolina state House, where he opposed Medicaid expansion and was part of a Republican effort to reduce the state’s unemployment benefits — two things now hurting North Carolina residents out of work. The incumbent has also been weakened by the few times he has crossed Trump, such as his opposition to the president’s border wall declaration, which has softened his support among the most conservative voters.

Cunningham, an Iraq War veteran, is running a campaign laser-focused on health care — including improving the Affordable Care Act and expanding Medicaid in North Carolina. Republicans believe the state is still fundamentally right-leaning, but suburban voters could make it more competitive this year.

Republicans’ two pickup opportunities: Alabama and (maybe) Michigan

Alabama

Who is the Democrat? Sen. Doug Jones, who won a surprise victory in a 2017 special election against Republican Roy Moore.

Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) speaks with the press following a vote in the Senate impeachment trial that acquitted President Donald Trump of all charges on February 5, 2020, in Washington, DC.

Who is the Republican? Former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report rates this Lean Republican, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates it Likely Republican.

What’s the background on the race? The 2020 election is a test of whether Doug Jones’s 2017 win was an aberration or a testament to newfound Democratic strength in the South. The fundamentals of the race clearly favor Republicans; Alabama loves Trump, and the president’s net approval rating has been higher there than any other state. Jones is a moderate Democrat who emphasizes his bipartisan record, but he also hasn’t tried to fit the mold of a conservative Democrat — Jones voted to remove Trump after impeachment and voted against Kavanaugh.

Republicans are feeling confident with Tuberville, who certainly is no Roy Moore, whom four women accused of preying on them when they were teenagers. “Alabama, as far as I’m concerned, is a Republican seat,” a Republican strategist told Vox. “Roy Moore is not going to be the nominee, and I think that was Doug Jones’s only hope.”

The question is whether the GOP is feeling a little too confident. Despite some public polls showing a double-digit race favoring Tuberville, Jones’ campaign says their internal polling shows the race much closer, within striking distance of the Republican. And while the Republican primary in Alabama was largely a contest of who was more loyal to Trump, Jones doesn’t plan to let Tuberville off the hook over accusations of fraud stemming from of shuttered a hedge fund Tuberville once co-owned.

“There’s a lot that I know that they don’t,” Jones told Vox in a recent interview. “I’ve seen the changes that Alabama has gone through. I know what’s going on on the ground, and Alabamians have always had an independent streak.”

Michigan

Who is the Democrat? Sen. Gary Peters, elected to the Senate in 2014 and a US House member before that.

Who are the Republicans? Businessman and veteran John James, who unsuccessfully challenged Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow in 2018.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball both rate this Lean Democrat.

What’s the background on the race? Peters, a long-serving House member before being elected to the Senate in 2014, is up for his first Senate reelection. He keeps a fairly low profile compared to other senators, focusing on issues like health care and jobs for his Upper Midwest state.

Earlier polls showed a potentially competitive race shaping up, and James — seen by many as a rising star in the GOP — received hype from Republicans for being a strong fundraiser. But money alone may not be enough to flip the Michigan Senate seat. Michigan will be one of the most closely watched states of the presidential election, and that is sure to trickle down to the Senate race. Although Trump won there by a razor-thin margin in 2016, public polling throughout the summer shows Peters in the lead, and the state is also trending for Biden. The Trump campaign pulled its television advertising from Michigan earlier in the year, a sign it may see more opportunity in other states. Democrats, for their part, feel Peters’s record of winning his House races will translate to his Senate seat.

“He’s been through tough elections and proven he can outperform,” a Democratic strategist told Vox. “Gary knew this was always going to be a tough race and walked into the election prepared.”

Other Republican pickup opportunities are limited

Beyond their likely pickup in Alabama and attempt to make Michigan competitive, Republicans are looking at precious few other offensive opportunities this year. In Minnesota, former US Rep. Jason Lewis (known for once complaining that it was no longer socially acceptable to call women “sluts”) is challenging Democratic Sen. Tina Smith after losing his House seat in 2018. New Mexico also has an open Senate race, where longtime Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Luján will face off against Republican Mark Ronchetti, a former meteorologist. Republicans got the candidate they wanted in Ronchetti, but Luján is a well-known entity in New Mexico and the state is considered fairly blue. Both races are rated Solid Democratic by Cook and Likely Democratic by Sabato.

Democrats’ “expand the map” states: Montana, Iowa, and Georgia

Montana

Who is the Republican? Sen. Steve Daines, elected in 2014. Daines served as the at-large US House member from Montana before that.

Who is the Democrat? Term-limited Gov. Steve Bullock (a brief presidential contender in the 2020 Democratic primary).

Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock speaks at the Iowa State Fair on August 8, 2019.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report rates this a toss-up. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates it Lean Republican.

What’s the background on the race? It takes a certain kind of Democrat to be competitive in Montana politics; Steve Bullock is that Democrat. He’s a popular Democratic governor who has put bipartisan cooperation with Montana’s Republican state legislature at the forefront of his campaign. Montana voted for Trump by 20 points in 2016, but the state has an independent streak and reelected Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in 2018, despite an all-out blitz Trump launched against him.

Issues likely to be at the forefront of the race include Covid-19, public lands, and the state of the US Postal Service under Trump. Bullock recently announced he was suing US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for mail delays impacting Montanans who rely on rural mail service, and Daines is part of a bipartisan Senate group pushing a bill to give the Post Office $25 billion (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell so far isn’t allowing that bill to the floor).

“It’s a red state, but it’s a very elastic state,” said election forecaster J. Miles Coleman of Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In other words, even if Montana votes for Trump in 2020, voters could split the ticket and also elect Bullock to the Senate. Public polls throughout the summer show a very close race between Daines and Bullock, and the DSCC is upping its independent expenditure spending this fall in hopes of flipping the seat.

Iowa

Who is the Republican? Sen. Joni Ernst, elected in 2014. Ernst is a veteran and former Iowa state senator.

Who is the Democrat? Businesswoman Theresa Greenfield.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball both rate this a toss-up.

What’s the background on the race? Ernst — a combat veteran and the first woman Iowa has sent to Congress — is up for her first reelection. Republicans saw Ernst in a good position at the beginning of the summer, but national Democrats think Iowa could be ripe for flipping, and are pouring money into the state to go on offense there while Republicans are spending to defend the incumbent. Iowa is still seen as a fairly conservative general election state, but Democrats were able to win a couple of key congressional districts in 2018, and Ernst’s approval rating fell 10 points in the past year, according to a March poll from respected Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer.

Greenfield is a real estate developer in Des Moines and has Iowa roots; she grew up on a farm as the daughter of a crop duster. As Vox’s Li Zhou wrote, Greenfield has emphasized issues including health care and strengthening social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security (she raised her family on Social Security survivor’s benefits after her husband was killed in an accident on the job). Greenfield is also going after Ernst’s past claims to curb wasteful spending in Washington — though she’s since voted to support major tax cuts that have added to the national deficit. The coronavirus will likely also play a major role in the race; Iowa has recently emerged as a new hot spot, driven by outbreaks at some reopened universities in the state.

Georgia

Who is the Republican? Sen. David Perdue, a former businessman elected in 2014 and a close ally of Trump’s.

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) heads to the Senate floor before the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump starts for the day on January 30, 2020, in Washington, DC.

Who is the Democrat? Former 2017 congressional candidate Jon Ossoff.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report rates this a toss-up, while Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates it Lean Republican.

What’s the background on the race? Earlier in the year, Perdue’s seat was considered less competitive than the Georgia special election with Sen. Kelly Loeffler, but new polling shows the race there could be tighter than expected. Two August polls show the race between Ossoff and Perdue is essentially a dead heat, and Cook moved the race from Likely Republican to Lean Republican to toss-up. Those are sobering evaluations for the GOP and Perdue.

Georgia is yet another traditionally Republican state where the demographics are slowly getting more favorable for Democrats. The Atlanta suburbs are attracting a lot of college-educated voters who are moving away from the GOP. Unlike Loeffler, Perdue is not dealing with a serious primary challenger on Election Day, but he’s facing similar dynamics with Georgia’s shifting demographics. The suburbs outside Atlanta are a particularly tricky spot for the GOP, and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s narrow loss in the governor’s race in 2018 spooked Republicans. As the incumbent, Perdue has the upper hand, and Democrats will have to spend and organize heavily in Georgia in order to make it truly competitive in November. But the tightening poll numbers on Perdue’s race make it one very much worth watching.

States where Republicans are less comfortable than they’d like to be: South Carolina, Kansas, and the Georgia special election

Georgia special election

Who are the Republicans? Sen. Kelly Loeffler, named to replace retired Sen. Johnny Isakson in 2019, and Rep. Doug Collins.

Who are the Democrats? Rev. Raphael Warnock and entrepreneur Matt Lieberman (son of former Sen. Joe Lieberman).

What are the odds? Cook Political Report rates this Lean Republican, while Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates it Likely Republican.

What’s the background on the race? Loeffler is in a better position than she was a few months ago. She seems to have recovered from initial blowback for allegations that she dumped millions in stock and subsequently bought stock in a teleworking company after being briefed on coronavirus in the Senate (Loeffler said the stock sales were made without her knowledge).

In a normal election cycle, a GOP senator could likely survive Georgia’s changing political winds, but there’s an extra dash of weirdness in this special Senate election to replace Isakson. Rather than a straightforward Republican versus Democrat contest, there will be an all-party primary on Election Day. The presence of Doug Collins, a Trump ally in the House, could be a massive thorn in Loeffler’s side. If no one wins a majority in November, the election could go to a January runoff where the top two candidates would compete. The DSCC has endorsed Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, but Matt Lieberman — the son of former Sen. Joe Lieberman — is also a Democratic candidate.

South Carolina

Who’s the Republican? Sen. Lindsey Graham, in his Senate seat since 2003. Once a noted Trump critic, Graham has turned into one of Trump’s allies in the Senate.

Who’s the Democrat? Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party.

Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Senate candidate Jaime Harrison sits with Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden (C) and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) (R) on the South Carolina statehouse steps during the King Day celebration at the Dome March and Rally on January 20, 2020, in Columbia, South Carolina.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report rates this race Lean Republican, while Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates it Likely Republican.

What’s the background on the race? A few months ago, South Carolina was on few people’s lists of competitive Senate races. And it still isn’t competitive, really. But Harrison has emerged as a strong contender and a fundraising juggernaut. He brought in an eye-popping $14 million in the second quarter, which means he’ll have enough money to see himself through election day without needing much help from national Democrats. Even though Graham has been outraised by his Democratic opponent in the last couple of quarters, he still has a slight overall cash advantage.

Black candidates have already found considerable success in House primaries in a year that’s been defined in part by nationwide protests against longstanding police brutality. Harrison isn’t necessarily as liberal as House candidates like Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones (his state is notably more conservative), but he’s running a playbook focusing on expanding Medicaid and getting more help to those laid off by or otherwise vulnerable to Covid-19. He also could benefit from a competitive House race in South Carolina’s First Congressional District, which Democrats flipped in 2018 and are defending this year. Even though Graham has represented his state for nearly 20 years, his switch from Trump critic to ardent Trump ally could be problematic for swing voters in South Carolina.

Kansas

Who is the Republican? With longtime Sen. Pat Roberts retiring, US Rep. Roger Marshall won an August primary, defeating controversial former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Who is the Democrat? Dr. Barbara Bollier, a state senator and former moderate Republican who switched parties in 2018.

What are the odds? Cook Political Report rates this Lean Republican, while Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates it Likely Republican.

What’s the background on the race? For months, the prevailing conventional wisdom about the Kansas Senate race was that the only way Democrats could make it competitive was if Kobach emerged as the Republican nominee. Republicans ended up getting their preferred candidate in the primary with Marshall, a conservative if far less controversial member of Congress. Even though Republicans have the advantage in a conservative Midwestern state, polls show the race between Marshall and Democrat Barbara Bollier is tighter than expected to begin with.

Democrats like what they see in Bollier, a doctor and former moderate Republican in the state Senate who recently switched parties. She built up a substantial war chest while Republicans were duking it out in the primary, and an August SurveyUSA poll showed her just 2 points behind Marshall in the general election race.

Still, Bollier will have an uphill climb. “You can be a strong candidate as a Democrat and lose statewide, because it’s Kansas,” Miller said. But one sign Republicans think she’s competitive is a fresh $5.2 million ad buy in Kansas from the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership fund super PAC. Republicans aren’t sleeping on Kansas just yet.

Tough-to-flip red states that still could be interesting to watch

The remaining races Cook rates Likely Republican will all be interesting to watch but difficult for Democrats to actually flip. These states include:

• Alaska, where Sen. Dan Sullivan is facing independent candidate Al Gross, who’s backed by the DSCC. Gross is an orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisherman whose Alaska credentials include shooting a grizzly bear in self-defense. With the highest number of independent voters of any state, Alaska Senate races have a habit of being competitive, and voters aren’t necessarily likely to toe the party line. Sullivan is still favored to win reelection by Cook and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, but some polls show a potentially competitive contest. This race is one to watch.
• Texas, where Sen. John Cornyn will compete against veteran MJ Hegar. Hegar ran and lost a House race in 2018 after generating a lot of buzz for a viral campaign ad focused on her service. Turning Texas blue (or at least purple) has long been a dream of Democrats, but the state is massive, expensive, and difficult to win. Hegar could be aided by a number of competitive House races in Texas, and some polls show the Senate race tightening. Cornyn is a longtime senator and a former member of McConnell’s leadership team.
• Kentucky, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is up for reelection and fighter pilot Amy McGrath is raking in millions of dollars to see if she can unseat him. Even though Democrats nationwide despise McConnell and his approval rating is rocky in his home state, he’s the most powerful man in Congress and has long built up a brand of bringing lots of federal money to his home state. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed him 5 points ahead of McGrath. While McGrath fundraises impressive sums, McConnell will be extraordinarily difficult to actually beat in a state where Trump has a 17-point net approval rating.

All these races will cost millions of dollars, but the fundamentals in each of the states favor Republicans. At this point, while Democrats would certainly like to emerge victorious in any of these states, they’ll likely focus their efforts on the other, more plausible paths to a Senate majority they now have on the map.

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