2018 Midterm Snapshot: Dems Score at the Polls

Phil Murphy, New Jersey Democratic governor-elect

It's been damp, cool and rainy most of the day here in Hamilton, New Jersey.

Reflective, perhaps, of the fact that almost a year ago the lowest American presidential voter turnout in 20 years elected a man who may well be the most unqualified, unpopular, divisive and ethically-repugnant candidate ever elected to the highest office in the land.

But today is another election day, and this morning I felt a measure of quiet political optimism for perhaps the first time since inauguration day back in January.

As I usually do if I'm in the office and don't have an appointment scheduled or phone calls to make, this morning I started off my day at work listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.org.

While I was particularly interested to listen to what other New Jersey voters had to say about election day during a segment when Brian fielded calls from Garden State listeners, his overview of the elections in New York and around the country were informative and got me fired up to cast my own vote.

Knowing it was going to rain, I cut out at about 11:20am to drive over and vote at the local senior citizens center that serves as my local polling place - fortunately it's only a three-minute drive from work so I was there, signed in, cast my vote and was back in the office in about eight minutes.

Now obviously I'm eager to see the lackluster, remarkably unproductive, scandal-plagued era of Republican Governor Chris Christie come to a merciful end, but I think Phil Murphy is the best candidate to represent the changes that most New Jerseyeans want to see.

Overall, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kim Guadagno, Christie's lieutenant governor since 2009, ran a fairly unimaginative and uninspiring campaign.

NJ Republican candidate Kim Guadagno 

With the state hovering dangerously close to the border of fiscal crisis with issues like massive infrastructure spending needs and a looming pension crisis that keeps getting kicked down the road (including by Christie...), Guadagno tried to dazzle voters.

Not with innovative ideas, sound fiscal policy or a plan to boost sagging wages, but with vague promises to cut taxes by eliminating unidentified "government waste".

Which is little more than Republican code-speak for cutting state government jobs and gutting social spending programs - the same kind of "Starve the Beast" nonsense that sent the Kansas economy spiraling into fiscal free-fall under Republican anti-tax fetishist Gov. Sam Brownback.

Aside from Guadagno's divisive xenophobic fear-mongering about immigration, Guadagno followed her notoriously short-tempered boss' unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign tactic and took a hard ideological-right in an attempt to drum up support among the hardcore right-wing conservatives that went for Trump here in New Jersey last November.

Desperate to close the gap between her and Murphy, in the final weeks of the campaign she finally sunk to the level of running bogus attack ads falsely claiming that Murphy's support for making New Jersey a sanctuary state for undocumented immigrants (NJ is one of the most diverse states in America) meant he wanted to shield violent criminals who are in this country illegally.

A simplistic bush-league Republican tactic that's been used by the GOP in campaigns around the country (including by Virginia Republican candidate for governor Ed Gillespie) to try and gin up the irrational conservative paranoia peddled by Trump and his cadre of xenophobic advisers and cabinet members. 

Virginia Democratic governor-elect Ralph Northam
and Republican Ed "Dixie Boy" Gillespie (right)

That same strategy backfired on Gillespie in Virginia tonight too, the former Republican National Committee chairman was soundly beaten by 54% - 45% by Democratic candidate for governor Ralph Northam.

Who, as NBC reported, benefitted from the boost of strong opposition to Republican attempts to destroy healthcare, Trump, and a strong state economy guided by outgoing popular Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe.

Like Guadagno donning the cloak of xenophobia, Gillespie really misread the temperature of Virginia voters.

Especially when he took up a pro-Confederate statue cause in the waning days of the election to try and draw support from Trump voters - as RNC chairman, he was actually fairly moderate and advocated for more inclusiveness.

Frankly I find it remarkable that with all the challenges we face in this country, Trump and his chief of staff John Kelly seem consumed with making a revisionist view of the Civil War and the Confederacy the main domestic focus of a White House trying to pull off a massive tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthiest percentage of Americans by Christmas.

Guadagno never strayed into "Confederate statue territory", but trying to embrace Trump's anti-immigrant hysteria at the last minute backfired for her here in New Jersey too - she won a mere 14% of the Hispanic vote and a paltry 9% of the African-American vote based on today's election results.

There are a healthy amount of Trump voters here in Jersey, but overall Garden State Republicans tend to be more moderate in the mold of my Congressman Chris Smith.

Chris Christie argues with a voter outside a polling
station earlier today

So I think Guadagno resorting to hate and bigotry to boost her sagging poll numbers didn't do much for her image as someone who was going to unify the state and bring something different to the NJ Governor's Mansion.

She's a pretty good communicator with some solid experience as a prosecutor and Monmouth County Sheriff, but regardless of what she did, it was going to be tough for her to get the stench of Christie and Bridgegate off of her.

Did you hear about him getting into a public argument with a NJ voter outside a polling station earlier today?

Believe it or not, Christie is so unpopular (14% approval rate according to one recent poll) that the most unpopular presidential candidate in modern American history is actually has a higher approval rate here in the Garden State.

Aside from the weight of the Christie baggage, Guadagno was also clearly a sounding board for people who might not have been all that excited by Phil Murphy, but hated Trump more and were eager to send a message to the Embarrassment-in-Chief and the Republican Party that tapped him as their candidate.

But the polls are closed in the east and the voters have spoken.

While professional pollsters and analysts will dig deeper into today's election results in the coming days over an election in which strong Democrat turnout led to decisive victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races and the mayoral race in New York City by Bill de Blasio, there's little doubt that the Democratic base is fired up.

From my perspective tonight's results are a clear reflection that a majority of Americans are fed up with Trump and a Republican-majority House and Senate who've yet to pass a single piece of meaningful legislation on behalf of the American people in over nine months.

Next year's midterm elections are a long ways away, and a lot can happen before then, but if today's results are any indication, November 6, 2018 could be a rude awakening for Trump - one he won't be able to shrug off as "fake news" with a tweet.

As I said, I was quietly optimistic this morning, and I'll sleep much more soundly tonight than I did on election night last November.

Reducing the Stigma of Criminal Backgrounds in America

As we all know, genuine systematic change never happens overnight.

Progress only comes in steps, but it's those individual steps, however small they might be, that lay the path to broader change that is lasting, significant and meaningful.

At long last in the United States, we're finally beginning to see unprecedented bi-partisan support from Congress on a major issue that undermines the very definition of the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The massive effort to begin to depopulate American prisons of non-violent offenders and individuals jailed for relatively low-level drug offenses to address the crisis of mass incarceration.

Tackling the prison-industrial complex and the scope of the systematic unequal application and enforcement of local, state and federal laws that feed it is only one part of unraveling mass incarceration in America.

The reintegration of former prisoners back into society to enable them to become productive members of the community must be a priority as well, and slowly but surely those changes are starting to manifest around the nation.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

Just consider the state of Virginia, where last month Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting rights to some 200,000 former convicted felons, enabling them to cast votes in the presidential elections this fall.

Despite outrage from Republicans who've made putting up barriers to the right to vote for students, racial minorities, the poor and the elderly a priority in recent years, surely restoring former convicts's right to participate in the Democratic process is a positive step towards keeping them on the right track.

Across the nation juvenile sentencing laws are being reformed at the state level to ensure that teenagers under the age of 18 are not incarcerated in prisons with adults, denied access to bail or locked up for low-level drug charges.

Like Connecticut, where Democratic Governor Dan Malloy is pushing the state legislature to pass more juvenile justice reforms in a state where reforms in juvenile sentencing that raised the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 and the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana have helped push the crime rate to a 48-year low.

But those kinds of changes, long overdue, are going even deeper.

Last month, on April 4th (the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a memo entitled "Office of General Counsel Guidance on Application of Fair Housing Act Standards to the Use of Criminal Records By Providers of Housing and Real Estate-Related Transactions".

Now that's a mouthful, but it's pretty remarkable.

What it boils down to is that HUD has issued new government recommendations and guidelines to real estate companies, residential leasing / property management companies, and associated vendors (like companies that provide application screening services) on screening individuals with criminal backgrounds for residency applications.

For people like me who process leasing applications for apartments for a living, it means HUD now recommends that we now need to begin looking closer at applicants who may be flagged for having a criminal record and look deeper at the specifics of what that record means - specifically because a disproportionate percentage of those with criminal backgrounds are people of color.

People who have been statistically proven to have been disproportionately targeted by law enforcement, and convicted in state an local court systems, for a range of non-violent offenses based on race and ethnicity.



For example, someone who submits an application for an apartment (or a mortgage) may be flagged for having a criminal record and prevented from renting or buying housing.

But that record may be for a minor drug offense, or a low level misdemeanor related to something like cashing a bad check, or getting into an altercation in a bar - and believe me, those kinds of things affect people of all races.

A criminal background flag may stem from warrants issued for accumulated fines from unpaid parking violations, or the criminalization of procedural vehicular violations, as we saw in places like Ferguson, Missouri.

Unarmed motorist Sandra Bland

Or worse, in Texas where Sandra Bland ended up dying in jail under mysterious circumstances for an illegal lane change - and no one faced legal repercussions for it.

Routine things like that can prevent people from being approved for renting an apartment, even if it happened 5 to 7 years ago - even if those folks qualify with good credit and sufficient income requirements.



If you have the time, read through the HUD memo, it's pretty significant in that it's making a major government policy recommendation that companies now begin to revise policy to take into account the fact that as many as 100 million American adults  (fully one third of the U.S. population) have some kind of criminal record.

The memo also highlights the staggering fact that the approximately 2.2 million people currently incarcerated in American prisons represent 25% of the global prison population - even though the U.S. represents only 5% of the world's population.

Now as some of you reading this know all too well, judicial and human rights activist have been talking about those stats for years.

It's a significant step that HUD is now recommending that private real estate companies begin to take those statistics into account when screening people for residency.

That's a big step for addressing mass incarceration in America, one that reflects an acknowledgment of a troubling reality in this nation.

The stigmatization of a huge portion of the U.S. populace based on systematic bias built into a law enforcement and judicial system that treats people differently not based on the objective interpretation of the law, but on the perception of the race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status of the individual.

Change doesn't happen overnight, it happens in steps, and the HUD recommendations are an important step in dismantling the dehumanizing savagery of the American prison-industrial complex.