Louisiana voters have just passed an amendment to the state constitution to clarify that nothing in it protects the right to abortion in the state. Given the current makeup of the courts, and, notably, a new anti-choice justice on the Supreme Court, it is a clear step toward preparing for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, which would make abortion access a state issue rather than a federal one. If that happens, Louisiana, it seems, wants to waste no time in banning it. 

As such, the following language will be added into Louisiana’s constitution: “To protect human life, nothing in this constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.” Three states—Tennessee, Alabama, and West Virginia—have similar constitutional language. 

Only three abortion clinics remain in Louisiana, and, as of 2018, the state had the third-highest poverty rate in the nation—20 percent of its residents live below the poverty line, which makes them much more likely to need access to abortion services. Just this summer, Louisiana was involved in a closely watched Supreme Court case over abortion burdensome abortion restrictions, June Medical Services v. Russo, in which the court ultimately upheld precedent and the status quo was preserved for the time being. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has defeated his Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison, bringing an end to a record-shattering challenge to one of Donald Trump’s most loyal henchmen.

To say Harrison entered the race as an underdog would be an understatement. He’d worked for House majority whip and kingmaker Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) before chairing the South Carolina Democratic Party, but was otherwise unknown outside of the state’s small Democratic circles. That posed a challenge in a GOP stronghold like South Carolina. In Harrison’s own summation: “Running against a guy who has 95 percent name ID, and your name ID is less than 20 is, you know, even more difficult,” Harrison told me last month.

But all that time in Democratic politics left Harrison with the suspicion that his fellow operatives had overlooked the potential for Democrats to succeed in South Carolina—especially with the support of Black voters, who were often overlooked in the electoral process. Stacey Abrams, after all, had come close to winning the Georgia governorship in 2018; Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) had done the impossible with a broad coalition of Black voters—a coalition brought together with guidance from Harrison, who had advised the campaign in his capacity as a Democratic National Committee associate chair. “The votes are here,” Harrison says. “The question is, can we change the mentality?”

Graham, too, was showing signs of fallibility. As I wrote in my Mother Jones cover story about Harrison earlier this year:

Over three terms in the Senate, Graham had cultivated a reputation as a staunch conservative who delivered bipartisan agreements on immigration and climate change—part of his identity as self-described “political wingman” to Arizona Sen. John McCain. (McCain had affectionately referred to his close ally as “Little Jerk.”) But three years into the Trump presidency, Graham, who said during the 2016 election that he wished Republicans had kicked Trump out of the party, has become one of the president’s main sycophants. The reversal has earned him a particularly brutal impersonation from Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon, whose sweaty Graham explains in a recent sketch that “even my bodily fluids are trying to distance themselves from me.”

The about-face had been a constant source of irritation for liberals who watched as Graham, as I wrote on Tuesday, “defended his president against an impeachment vote, shuttled a late-breaking conservative SCOTUS nominee through the confirmation process, and toed Trump’s line on COVID-19.” Harrison latched onto that to raise staggering amounts of money from donors across the country:

Harrison, meanwhile, followed in his wake like an ActBlue ShamWow, absorbing liberals’ frustrations in dollars and cents. The Democrat has raised a whopping $109 million; $57 million of it flowed in from July through September alone, shattering the record for the highest quarterly fundraising total of any US Senate candidate. The mammoth amount allowed Harrison to get advertisements up on television as soon as it became unsafe for him to campaign in person. “It was important for folks to get to know who I was,” he says.

Despite Harrison’s own insider bona fides and the race’s national attention, the Democrat tried to stay focused on South Carolina. When I joined Harrison on the campaign trail last fall, he made scant mention of his opponent, only doing so in front of MSNBC-watching audiences in the Charleston suburbs who craved it. Instead, Harrison, like Democrats elsewhere, focused on health care, the economy, and, in these last few months, the Republican’s COVID response:

He wouldn’t take the bait, for example, when I asked him whether he thought Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) embrace of Graham, both literally and figuratively‚ at the conclusion of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation had hurt his case. “That’s water under the bridge for me,” Harrison tells me. “I try to leave the Washington, DC, stuff—there are enough pundits to talk about that.” He pivoted back to Graham’s failure to deliver for his state: How was it that Graham was able to rush through a Supreme Court justice but couldn’t pass a COVID-19 relief bill with the same urgency?

The Supreme Court vacancy, of course, helped resuscitate Graham’s campaign. The Senate Judiciary successfully shuttled Amy Coney Barrett to confirmation just weeks before November 3, carrying out a top Republican priority in a series of hearings that portrayed him and his colleagues as measured and reasonable.

Harrison came up short, but regardless, he achieved what he set out to do: “Getting people to believe” that the Democratic spirit “is alive and well in the South,” as he put it last fall. Close confidantes and Democratic allies would whisper that a respectable performance would be its own victory. His race, in Harrison’s estimation, “dramatically changed the trajectory of Democrats running in South Carolina, and I hope it means running in the South in general,” he told me. “This perception that we should just give up on the region, I hope we have dispelled that.”

New Jersey and Arizona just became the 12th and 13th states to legalize recreational marijuana use.

New Jersey voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that would allow the possession and use of recreational weed for people aged 21 and over. Arizona approved a similar ballot measure which included language allowing people convicted of marijuana-related crimes to petition to have their criminal records expunged.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) has defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner in Colorado’s Senate race, according to projections by several media outlets.

Hickenlooper began his Senate campaign after a failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019. His win marks a victory for Democrats in their effort to reclaim the Senate majority.

At 7 p.m. ET, the polls closed in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia. CNN immediately called Indiana for Trump, which is not a surprise. Eventually they’re going to call Vermont and Virginia for Biden (probably) and Kentucky and South Carolina for Trump (again, probably). 

That leaves Georgia, the hour’s big kahuna. The Peach state is predicted to be a nail-biter. We might not know final results tonight, but we might! It depends on the margin.

In addition to the presidential race, there are also two competitive Senate races in Georgia: Jon Ossoff versus David Perdue, and a special election which is likely going to go to a runoff.

We’re also watching South Carolina’s hotly contested Senate race, where Lindsey Graham is facing a surprisingly tough challenge from Jamie Harrison. My college Kara Voght has been on this race all year. Read her latest dispatch while we wait for more votes to be tallied.

Did you already know all of this? I’m really just trying to fill the dead air until we have some interesting race calls. DON’T CHANGE THE CHANNEL. Stay here together with us, the Mother Jones Election Blog, your friend. 

Tonight we will have top news from all your favorite Mother Jones staffers.

As a wise Florida man (Tom Petty) once said, the waiting is the hardest part. Here are some activities to keep you busy until election results start to roll in.

• Scroll through Twitter. A lot of people there have a lot of opinions, but no one actually knows anything. Getting your blood boiling is a nice way to pass the time.
• Buy a sandwich, or better yet, make one yourself. It is, after all, National Sandwich Day. Vote in our Recharge sandwich poll about whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
• Go grocery shopping. It’s prudent to have your pantry stocked in the event of civil unrest. Just kidding! But you’re going to want to have a bottle of vodka in your freezer no matter what. Or Kentucky bourbon—it’s more American.
• Open a book. Stare at the page for a few minutes before turning on the TV.
• Head for the mountains and live off the grid. Make no plans to return.
• Engage in whatever petty fights you’ve been putting off. The cable company charged you twice, but you haven’t gotten around to having them fix it? Now’s the time to listen to that horrible music while you wait on hold.
• What do people you went to high school with look like now? Check Facebook to find out.
• Throw bread into an open body of water.
• Might I interest you in Wikipedia?
• Sit outside while you wait for Sun-In hair lightener to work its magic on your soon-to-be-golden locks. Try not to think about the absurdity that such a warm sunny day should fall on a Tuesday in November. Let the phrases “human-caused climate change” and “catastrophic environmental collapse” nestle themselves deep in your subconscious, to emerge only when a wildfire starts lapping at your front lawn.
• Start drafting your submission for Shouts & Murmurs. You really have a shot this time.
• Oh, yeah, maybe vote, if you haven’t already. Today would be a good day to do that.
• Have Mother Jones’ 2020 election blog open in another tab; we’ll be feeding you all the updates you need to know.

This post was brought to you by the Mother Jones Daily newsletter, which hits inboxes every weekday and is written by Ben Dreyfuss and Abigail Weinberg, and regularly features guest contributions by our much smarter colleagues. Sign up for it here.

President Donald Trump wants the winner of the election to be declared on election night and doesn’t want any votes to be counted after. But that’s not how it works. Never has been.

In this video, our colleague and voting rights expert Ari Berman lays waste to five of the biggest myths about vote counting being spread by the president and his allies in this final sprint. 

Our voting rights expert @AriBerman lays waste to five of the biggest lies being spread by Trump and his allies about how your vote is counted.

Here are the facts. pic.twitter.com/udY8NELqvg

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 3, 2020

Here are the facts:

1. Votes will continue to be counted after Election Day in every state.

Between in-person, mail-in, overseas, and military voting, it takes time to add up millions of ballots and ensure a correct count. Plus: Republican state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are delaying the start of the counting process for mail-in ballots, a move that Trump and his supporters appear eager to exploit to manufacture a false narrative of illegitimacy, paving the way to a contested count.

2. The president has no control over how votes are counted.

Election results are counted and certified at the state and local level. No matter what Trump and his lawyers say tonight, it’s the states and localities that determine how votes are counted. Keep following Mother Jones and other reputable outlets for the real news. And ignore the president.

3. Ballots can arrive after Election Day in many states.

Eighteen states have laws that allow ballots to arrive after Election Day to take mail processing time into account. Twenty-nine states allow military ballots to be received by election officials after Election Day. These extended deadlines are especially critical right now, given Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service this year.

4. No state certifies a winner on Election night.

There’s a difference between the “projected winner” of a state that you might hear on television or social media, and a “certified winner.” The calls from the networks are preliminary calls and are made with incomplete data. States may take days or weeks to officially certify the results.

5. The president has no authority to declare himself the winner.

Axios reported that Trump may prematurely declare himself the winner on election night if his early returns are favorable. Legally, that means nothing: Elections are certified at the state and local level, electors from the Electoral College don’t even meet until December, and the new Congress doesn’t accept the results until January.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has been taking Fox News down a notch—through his appearances on Fox News.

The onetime Democratic presidential candidate has been a frequent guest on Fox News in the final weeks of the election, cutting through the network’s sycophantic coverage of President Trump while delivering a zinger or two along the way.

Buttigieg sees his appearances on Fox as an opportunity to share a liberal viewpoint with the network’s largely conservative viewers. “People are tuning into that network in good faith,” he said during an appearance on The Tonight Show. “How can I be mad at a voter or a viewer for not supporting my perspective if they’ve literally never even heard it? So it’s my job to get that perspective out there.”

Listen to some of Buttigieg’s takedowns below:

.@PeteButtigieg has spent the election's 11th hour… on Fox News?

Buttigieg has frequented the conservative network in the final weeks of the election. “People are tuning into that network in good faith,” he told @FallonTonight. "It’s my job to get that perspective out there.” pic.twitter.com/0umWGU9mkv

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 2, 2020

In a sea of states with strict restrictions on reproductive rights, Colorado has long been something of a sanctuary for women seeking abortions. But that could all change starting tomorrow, when voters in the state consider a ballot measure that would ban abortion after 22 weeks. Polling data says the outcome is currently “too close to call.” 

Colorado is one of seven states that does not ban abortion at a specific point in pregnancy. While the ballot measure does allow for abortions past 22 weeks in cases where the pregnant person’s life is in danger, there are no exceptions built in for cases involving rape, incest, or fetal abnormalities. 

Now, before anyone starts hollerin’ and getting upset about allowing “late-term abortions”—not a real medical term, folks!—let’s back up and talk about why women could need abortion access after 22 weeks gestation. Often, abortion later in pregnancy is a gut-wrenching decision made by families that wanted a child, but something has gone wrong—there’s a fetal abnormality that could not have been detected until after the 20th week, or the pregnancy is becoming a health risk to the person carrying the fetus. It is not something done on a whim. Abortions after 20 weeks are often prohibitively expensive, and can cost $15,000 or more. That’s not including the travel expenses to get to one of the just seven states where this kind of care is legal. “People from a couple dozen states every year come to Colorado to access services because they can’t get them in their home state,” says Elizabeth Nash, a state policy expert at the Guttmacher Institute. “If this ban were to be successful, all those people—and Coloradoans—would have to find another place to go.”

And while we’re on the subject of disinformation surrounding abortion, one of the groups financially supporting the ballot measure is called End Birthday Abortions Colorado. So-called “birthday abortions”—abortions that allegedly occur on the due date—are not a thing. This idea, which brings to mind President Trump’s lies conflating abortion later in pregnancy with infanticide, is crafted to feed off an emotional response; it has no basis in reality. 

As Dr. Rebecca Cohen, a Denver-area doctor who provides abortion care, told the Colorado Sun: “People don’t walk into a hospital at 38 weeks and ask for an abortion. It does not happen. And no one is forced to have an abortion or provide abortion care. A physician is never obligated to do what someone is demanding and it is not something that they would do.”

The last four anti-abortion ballot initiatives considered in Colorado were soundly voted down—three of the four were efforts to classify an embryo as a person, and the fourth was an “informed consent” proposition that came with a 24-hour waiting period and mandatory counseling. The last one was in 2014; all lost by at least 30 percent of the vote. 

Four years ago, on the Friday before the election, I had a party at a bar in New York to commemorate that the most crazy stressful bizarre election of our lives was finally about to be over. “We’ve almost made it through,” was the idea. Of course, a few days later the election didn’t go as everyone expected and the four years since have been anything but serene.

This Friday is very different—so, we’ll go no more a roving, so late into the night. Even if we were allowed to have parties because there weren’t a spiking pandemic, most of the people I know are too stressed out to go anyway. But that sentiment—”this specific strand of unbearableness might be about to end”—remains; the heart be still as loving, and the moon be still as bright.

How will you spend this weekend? At ease? Beneath the rocking trees? Mourning the old glad days before you knew what evil things the heart of man could dream, and dreaming do?

Right now, our model thinks Joe Biden is very likely to beat Donald Trump in the electoral college.

Panicked? 

This year, [two pollsters who correctly predicted 2016] believe that polls could again be undercounting Trump’s support. The reason is “shy” Trump voters—people reluctant to share their opinions for fear of being judged. Though the “shy voter” idea is thrown around a lot by both Trump supporters and Democratic skeptics, Kapteyn and Cahaly have specific insights into why, and how, Trump support might be going undetected.

Calmed?

[Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss whether there is] any reason to believe that “shy Trump voters” could provide the president with an upset win on Election Day. (The evidence suggests there isn’t.)

Nervous?

Lawyers for Donald Trump and Joe Biden are poring over arcane federal law to prepare for the possibility that a close or contested election might trigger two little-understood and barely tested scenarios.

Fearful?

“We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.”

Would you like to have your fears assuaged?

[E]xperts stress that Trump does not have the power to circumvent the nation’s labyrinthine election procedures by tweet. Elections are administered by state and local officials in thousands of jurisdictions, most of whom are experienced professionals with records of integrity. There are well-tested processes in place for dealing with irregularities, challenges and contests. A candidate can’t demand a recount, for example, unless the tally is within a certain margin, which varies by state. “The candidates themselves have almost no role in this process,” says Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a top Justice Department official in the Obama Administration. “While people may make claims to powers and make threats about what they may or may not do, the reality is that the candidates don’t have the power to determine the outcome of the election. It’s really important that voters understand that while a lot about our system is complicated, this isn’t a free-for-all.”

Precarious?

Yes, the Polls Could Be Wrong. But That Could Help Biden, Not Just Trump

Fired up?

Americans Say They’re Fired Up To Vote—Especially Democrats

Excited?

What I am wondering is if this will be one or the rarest species of national elections—a wave election in a presidential year ending in a zero, meaning it will reverberate for a decade thanks to the coming redistricting.

Would you like to consider the future?

Throughout his presidential campaigns and presidency, Trump has banked on the calculation that his cult of personality can overpower popular concerns about his trashing of democratic values and practices. He won that bet in 2016, and in the years since he has done much to undermine the rules of the republic. That makes the 2020 election a referendum not only on Trump but on the vitality of American democracy. The harm Trump has done is not irreversible, but the lessons from other nations show that countering this erosion will entail smart and strategic efforts on the part of those with power and of those citizens who give a damn.

Would you like to consider the future of the GOP?

November 3 is an off-ramp from the road to oligarchy. But whether Trump wins or loses, the Republican evolution into authoritarianism will go on. Even if his presidency ends in complete ruin and repudiation, Trump has given his party something it never had before: the performance of a despot—bullying his rivals, criminalizing anybody who challenges him, violating the law with impunity. They have a taste for it now. They will crave more.

Would you like to consider how the GOP is failing to consider its own future?

[T]heir relationships to the party now flow through a single man, one who has never offered a clear vision for his political program beyond his immediate aggrandizement. Whether Trump wins or loses in November, no one else in the party’s official ranks seems to have one, either.

Or maybe you’d like to set all of that aside and remember one key important thing:

Now all we have left is the people. The voters, for all their failings, may prove more trustworthy than their supposed guardians. They may deliver us by delivering an irrefutable landslide to Biden. Or, failing that, by going out into the streets in an American version of “people power” to foil the plot against their democracy. A republic, if we can save it.

That last one seems good!

This post was brought to you by the Mother Jones Daily newsletter, which hits inboxes every weekday and is written by Ben Dreyfuss and Abigail Weinberg. It regularly features guest contributions by our much smarter colleagues. Sign up for it here.

We are days out from what could be the most high-stakes election of our lifetimes. If Trump loses, will he go quietly? Which parts of the constitution will he trample on the way out? If Trump wins, how much more can American institutions take—and what recourse will Congress have to hold him to account?

I got the chance this week to pose all these questions and more to a real expert on this stuff, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, during a special Mother Jones live event this week. Early in his career, Raskin was an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts and he served as general counsel of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. (One piece of trivia: Raskin once represented Ross Perot when he was frozen out of the 1996 presidential debates.) He’s a member of the judiciary and oversight committees, where he has investigated the Trump administration’s politicization of the census, white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, and the mistreatment of immigrants in for-profit detention centers.

Raskin didn’t hold back during our conversation about how to heal the country in the coming months, describing the Republican Party as “a mass religious cult surrounding an organized crime family.” He noted: “A failed state, that’s where we are right now. A failed state is one that doesn’t protect the population against disease, against random gun violence, against people getting into office and using it as an instrument of money-making and private corruption. We’ve become a banana republic under this guy.”

We’re bringing you my (lightly edited) conversation about Raskin’s democratic fixes and the long walk back to sanity for today’s bonus episode of the Mother Jones Podcast. Take a listen below.

And you can re-watch the full livestream here:

If you support access to abortion, you’re probably pretty freaked out about Amy Coney Barrett joining the nation’s highest court this week. There are plenty of ways to channel your angry energy—like, as the Cut aptly suggests, donating to an abortion fund, though you probably didn’t think one of them was focusing on…the Arizona state legislature. But as a new phase of the battle over abortion rights in the United States heats up, reproductive rights groups are paying special attention to statehouses like in Arizona, where Republican strongholds are vulnerable and the vast majority of extreme abortion restrictions are born. 

Flipping statehouses is a game that Republicans have long been playing—resulting in, among other dangerous policies, more than 450 abortion restrictions since 2010. Democrats have played it, too, to a certain extent; Planned Parenthood counts Illinois’ progressive stance on abortion rights among its victories at the state level. But reproductive rights advocates are hopeful that much larger changes are within grasp. The 2018 midterms offered a glimpse of progressive momentum when Virginia’s legislature turned blue for the first time in nearly three decades, and lawmakers there have since been rolling back abortion restrictions and expanding access. As Elizabeth Nash, the state policy expert at the Guttmacher Institute, points out, even Texas’ notoriously anti-abortion legislature has mellowed a bit; when a wave of abortion bans in 25 states swept across the South and Midwest in quick succession last year, Texas was conspicuously not among them. “We’re seeing investments in [state elections] beginning to be made in part because of the threat at the federal level, and in part because it looks like now is a time when legislators might be shifting to being more moderate or even progressive,” Nash says. 

This year, advocates consider Arizona a top target—along with North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania—as Democrats are within three seats of flipping the state Senate, and within two seats of flipping the House.

Arizona has passed a deluge of abortion restrictions over the past decade. Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, an abortion provider with Camelback Family Planning in Phoenix, says keeping up with the burdensome restrictions passed year after year has been difficult for her clinic and her patients. Once, charts were a quarter of the size they are now. “We have to ask the patient, ‘Why do you want to have an abortion?’ No other procedure has a physician asking a patient, ‘Why do they want to have a colonoscopy?'” she says. “All this ridiculousness that doesn’t add anything to the patient’s safety or helps them in any way, it just creates burdens for them.” The state has a 24-hour waiting period in place between issuing state-mandated, medically inaccurate counseling and an abortion procedure, as well as an ultrasound requirement, a ban on telemedicine, and a host of unnecessary, expensive regulations that clinics must adhere to in order to maintain licensure. 

According to Kelley Dupps, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes Arizona, the reproductive health care organization’s political arms have been ramping up their investment in the state over the past several years, both to gain another Democratic US Senate seat and to flip the state legislature. The work has escalated this year with a $2.6 million program to reach at least 600,000 Arizona voters.

Planned Parenthood Votes Arizona and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona, two branches of the organization that work on voter education and political lobbying, have been using phone and text banking, online engagement, and digital ads to broadly educate voters about what’s at stake in this election—reproductive rights, as well as immigrant rights and access to health care, to name a few issues.

Planned Parenthood Votes has been partnering with local social justice organizations to continue to build community on the ground. Dupps points back to Arizona’s passage of SB 1070 as a galvanizing force that began a decade-long organizing effort that brought together Planned Parenthood’s political arms and local progressive groups, many of which are Latinx-led. My colleague Fernanda Echavarri wrote recently about the rise of Latinx organizing in the years leading up to 2020:

Many of the young Latinx organizers trying to get out the vote were galvanized in April 2010, when Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed one of the nation’s most extreme anti-immigrant bills. SB 1070 required police officers to ask about the citizenship status of anyone they stopped and suspected might be in the country illegally. It also made it a crime not to produce legal residency documents when asked to do so by a cop or to have an undocumented person in your car or home. The law wreaked havoc on Latinx communities statewide, especially in Maricopa County, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio delighted in using it to intimidate and harass residents.

One such group is LUCHA, or Living United for Change in Arizona, which, as Fernanda notes, is dedicated to “help[ing] protect the Latinx community in Arizona” and “defend[ing] [its] existence.” Over the past several years, LUCHA and Planned Parenthood Votes have held bilingual town halls to discuss health care and a rally to support Democrat Mark Kelly’s US Senate candidacy.

Planned Parenthood Votes has also joined up with Jews for Justice—another progressive nonprofit with many Latinx staffers, which uses the values of the Jewish faith to seek social justice—for some voter registration work. Eddie Calderon, the campaign organizer with Jews for Justice, says the group has seen particular success registering people who are experiencing homelessness, which, he notes, is a population that is largely Latinx in Arizona. He and his colleagues have been distributing hygiene kits, masks, and water in homeless encampments—a crucial service considering the triple-digit heat wave that has steadily plagued the state from April through mid-October—and educating folks about their voting rights. “You don’t have to have a legit address, you can put the cross streets of where folks stay…it’s been really interesting to see that some folks didn’t know that they can even register to vote,” he says. Dupps and Calderon say the groups naturally play off each other because of their shared dedication to immigrant rights, so they have some of the same volunteers.

Reproductive rights advocates say there’s no denying the energy on the ground right now. Goodrick says she has never seen this kind of mobilization, that she’s gotten more calls and texts and mailers than ever, and the election is a constant topic of conversation. Dupps attributes Planned Parenthood’s momentum to years of relational organizing in the state, meaning they are working with Arizona voters to recruit their friends and family. “It’s awesome to be able to engage with [voters] and talk about our issues and have that kind of trust because we’ve been doing the work for the past six, seven years, and not just going to communities every four years, or every two years here in Arizona, when we need them to vote; it’s all about building community,” he says.

All this energy is, of course, dovetailing with a fierce battle for president in the state, and the heated race for a US Senate seat between Kelly and Republican Sen. Martha McSally. Democrats also hope their organizing will pay dividends past 2020 and into 2022, when Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s term expires. 

As for the statehouse, “Republican and Democratic strategists agree it’s most likely Democrats will win the state House, but Republicans will retain control of the state Senate—though a full flip is certainly possible,” according to Politico. 

“I’m feeling really hopeful. I’m feeling optimistic at this point,” Goodrick says. “We’ll see, but I don’t see any harm in being optimistic. It’s kind of fun for a change.”

A few months ago, hunkered down in the middle of the pandemic, I spent several days paging through old newspaper stories about a new group of immigrants from Central America who were showing up at the US border and asking for political asylum. They were fleeing civil wars and right-wing death squads, but when they got to the United States they were almost always turned away. “Economic migrants,” the Reagan administration called them, equal parts derisive and dismissive.

There’s long been cruelty, xenophobia, and racism built into the US immigration system. What’s different about the Trump administration is its total embrace of these horrible legacies—and the damage it’s willing to do to people from all walks of life, simply because they aren’t US citizens.

This week, Mother Jones is producing a series of stories detailing the ways in which Donald Trump and his obsessed senior adviser Stephen Miller have gone about weaponizing our already-broken immigration system. My colleagues Fernanda Echavarri and Noah Lanard have busted their asses over the past several years detailing the daily and cumulative damage wrought by the administration, and the past few days have been no different. Today, we published their collection of enraging, heartbreaking first-person interviews with immigrants whose lives have been upended by Trump’s crackdown, including a Salvadoran asylum seeker picking garbage in Mexico, an Indian coder afraid to unpack his boxes, and an Iraqi woman choosing between food for her baby and her husband’s green card. It’s truly can’t-miss reading.

But that’s not all. Noah also wrote about a stunning government report decrying family separation, the invasion of personal rights, untold illegal searches and seizures, and the “despotic powers of the administrative agency.” Sound familiar? Thing is, the report is from 1931. Meanwhile, I took some of that research from months ago and combined it with the personal narratives of two indigenous human rights activists from Guatemala to tell the story of how asylum is dead in the United States—and how the myth of American decency died with it. And tomorrow, we’ll look to the (dystopian) future, when a second Trump term promises to be even more repressive, vindictive, and Millerian in its scope and tenor.

It’s such an honor to work alongside dedicated, thorough reporters like Fernanda and Noah, as well as empathetic, whip-smart editors like Aaron Wiener and Tommy Craggs, who helped shape and conceptualize this package. If you’d like to see more of this kind of deeply reported, well-crafted journalism, please consider donating to nonprofit Mother Jones today.

This post was brought to you by the Mother Jones Daily newsletter, which hits inboxes every weekday and is written by Ben Dreyfuss and Abigail Weinberg. It regularly features guest contributions by our much smarter colleagues, like Ian. Sign up for it here.

The anonymous Trump admin official who wrote a scathing 2018 New York Times op-ed criticizing the president—and followed it with a whole book, A Warning—has revealed themselves. It’s…Miles Taylor.

Wait, what?

Miles Taylor served as chief of staff to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and the reason you know his name is because earlier this year he very publicly came out against Trump and starred in a series of videos for Republican Voters Against Trump.

Twist?

In 2018, Trump was reportedly apoplectic about the op-ed, even floating the possibility on Twitter that the suggested internal resistance constituted treason.

This is a sort of confusing twist. On the one hand, Taylor has already spoken out publicly, so he gets points for that, but on the other hand, why didn’t he just come out as the writer when he first started blasting Trump? 

Taylor expanded on his reasoning in a Medium post published Wednesday:

Much has been made of the fact that these writings were published anonymously. The decision wasn’t easy, I wrestled with it, and I understand why some people consider it questionable to levy such serious charges against a sitting President under the cover of anonymity. But my reasoning was straightforward, and I stand by it. Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling. I wanted the attention to be on the arguments themselves. At the time I asked, “What will he do when there is no person to attack, only an idea?” We got the answer. He became unhinged. And the ideas stood on their own two feet.

One thing is for sure: He’s going to sell a lot of books.

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Ah, the signs of autumn in California: red-flag fire warnings, a looming drought, and high winds blowing political leaflets down the street like tumbleweeds. Normally, I would have recycled the stray election mailer I picked up in my driveway the other day, but this one caught my eye. Beneath photos of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the “Coalition for Literacy Newsletter” featured large endorsements for and against state propositions—most of which directly contradicted the California Democratic Party’s own positions. Next to a photo of a little girl, the mailer explained that it had been sent by “a non-profit organization devoted to promoting literacy in our schools and communities.” Huh? What the heck does telling Californians how to vote on ballot measures have to do with encouraging more kids to read? 

Nothing—and that’s the point. This particular kind of junk mail has been a feature of California elections for decades. Under state law, candidates and campaigns may pay to appear on “slate mailers” that flood voters’ mailboxes in the weeks before Election Day. The consultants and organizations behind the mailings usually have no official connections to parties or advocacy groups and hide behind innocuous sounding names like the Coalition for Senior Citizen Security, Millennials for Effective Government, Hometown Voter Guide, or Woman’s Voice. 

The mailers are a relatively inexpensive way for campaigns to reach lots of voters—and create the impression that they have broad support. It’s not clear how much impact they have; like a lot of direct mail, most are probably ignored. Landslide Communications, the producer of Women’s Voice and other fliers, touts a testimonial from someone who said one of its mailers “was the only one he observed a voter actually take to the polls.” A political science study from the late ’90s found that “Slate mail can be persuasive, at least in elections where voters lack alternative sources of information.” 

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then California’s pay-to-play mailers are an open marriage of convenience. In 2018, Woman’s Voice’s gubernatorial pick was a Republican assemblyman who had been accused of sexual harassment. As CalMatters reports, the current crop of slate mailers includes the Committee to Protect the Political Rights of Minorities, a front for a consulting firm run by the head of the state NAACP; the COPS Voter Guide, which opposes a tough on crime proposition backed by law enforcement groups; and the Voter Education Coalition, which supports the lawmaker who wrote a labor law regulating gig-economy companies like Uber and Lyft—and also promotes Proposition 22, a ballot measure that would undo that very law. 

Slate mailers must disclose who’s paid them for endorsements. Yet there’s a twist: They may also picture or list candidates and campaigns that haven’t paid to be promoted. By name-dropping a well-known or popular politician, mailers may signal that they represent a partisan slate—which explains why Biden and Harris are on the flier I scooped up—and why a slew of local progressive candidates had paid to be listed alongside them.    

These unsolicited mashups can be misleading. Earlier this month, Californians received a mailer called the “Feel the Bern, Progressive Voter Guide,” which endorsed Biden and encouraged them to vote yes on Proposition 22. Sen. Bernie Sanders angrily tweeted that he had no connection with the voter guide and asked Uber and Lyft “to publicly denounce the deception.” Campaign finance records show that the mailers were produced by a group in Long Beach that had received $20,000 from the Yes on 22 campaign. (So far, the Yes campaign, which has spent nearly $200 million, has spent nearly $900,000 on slate mailers.)

Looking into the Coalition for Literacy, I found that—shocker!—it is not simply an educational nonprofit that dabbles in political advertising. In 2019, according to its tax filings, it donated $20,000 worth of books. Yet in 2020 it has taken in nearly $2.5 million for its endorsements and mailed more than 5 million pieces of mail. As a 501(c)4 group, it is allowed to engage in political activity; however, its articles of incorporation, filed with California’s secretary of state, say that it “shall not participate or intervene in any political campaign (including publishing or distributing statements) in connection with any candidate for public office.”

My peek under the astroturf also revealed some skeletons. The Coalition for Literacy operates out of an office in Torrance, California, that’s also been listed as the address of other slate mailers such as Budget Watchdogs, Educate Your Vote, Coalition for California, and the California Voter Guide. Tax and business records list Timothy Carey as one of the organization’s chief officers. In 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle caught some candidates off guard when it reported that the “direct-mailing whiz” they’d paid for mailers had been convicted of child molestation in 1992. (A few years earlier, Carey sued someone who had told his clients about his criminal record.) 

In the midst of an election year when we’re drowning in undiluted streams of digital misinformation, shady mailers feel almost like quaint throwbacks. Like pumpkin spice, they’re a seasonal annoyance: Just when you’re sick of seeing them everywhere, they’re gone… until next time.

I live in New York City and in August I requested an absentee ballot to vote in this election. It arrived in early September, but there was a problem: like thousands of other Brooklyn residents, mine had a printing error on the return envelope. By the time they sent out a new one, I had left the city to visit my family out West. I set up USPS forwarding but…it still isn’t here. I would very much like to vote in this election and have been scouring for ways to do it. (For instance, there is a Federal Write-In Absentee ballot but it’s only for Americans living outside the country; I am merely outside the state.) I’ve been scrambling to post offices and sending emails to election boards—I’ve asked the NYC BOE for comment and will update this if I get a response—but so far…no dice.

Which is to say, voting in America is hard. Harder than it should be. It’s hard in liberal cities where the conservative “war on voting” isn’t at play. In New York’s case, the Times reported yesterday on the profound systemic rot at the heart of the election board.

In one sense, my specific problem is my own fault: I am in another state from where I requested the absentee ballot. But in another more real sense, had there not been a massive printing error with the first ballots, it wouldn’t matter.

I have an idea for a voting experiment that no one seems to like but me: Backup Default Voting. If you’re registered to vote and are registered with a political party and you do not vote through mail or in person, then after the polls close and all the absentees are counted, they should count you as a vote for your political party’s candidate. It wouldn’t work in primaries and it wouldn’t work in lots of situations. But the act of voting is a mechanism for conveying your will as a citizen. In the past, voting was the best and only way of conveying that will, but we do not live in the past. If I can’t sort this ballot problem out in Brooklyn, they’ll tally me as value-neutral in the election. But I’m not, and they don’t need to do that. I have registered with a party. I have signaled my preference in some way. There is no reason to assume I am value-neutral. Of course party affiliation isn’t an eternal contract. If you don’t want to vote for the candidate of your affiliated party, you can always vote however you want! Same as ever. But if you’re sick, or busy, or in another state, or locked in a box, or being chased by a fox, they should use your party affiliation to infer your intent. (And you don’t have to register with a party if you don’t want to!)

It would create some logistical problems. You’d need a system to account for people who move or die, but everyone who votes has a Social Security number and I think it could get worked out. You could even include a system where people have to reconfirm their party affiliation every X number of years. And if you don’t vote, there is no reason to assume you don’t have an opinion.

On one hand this comes down to a philosophical question: Is voting a civic duty or a civic right? It’s both, of course. But just because I can’t get back to New York by Tuesday doesn’t mean I forfeit my right in this democracy. Or it shouldn’t anyway.

No one thinks this idea is good but me, but I think it’s a good idea. Some political scientists should do some research on it! Maybe it’s not even constitutional, but it seems like the Supreme Court is sort of making that up as it goes lately.

Speaking of which…read this.

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Exactly one week before the most important election of our lifetimes, the Mother Jones Podcast team did something it has never done before: A live show.

Join host Jamilah King for this special livestreamed taping of the award-winning weekly podcast, featuring a cast of Mother Jones specialists telling you exactly what you need to know about this final sprint: the tide of disinformation, threats to your voting rights, what we’re seeing on the ground in battleground states, and the next phase in the fight for America’s future.

With democracy on the line, this is your chance to join the Mother Jones virtual newsroom. We’re almost there. It’s now or never.

This livestream was taped Tuesday, October 27, 2020, at 4 p.m. E.S.T. Watch on repeat above.

Guests: Nathalie Baptiste, Ari Berman, Ali Breland, David Corn, Fernanda Echavarri, Pema Levy, Tim Murphy, and Kara Voght.

Reports circulated yesterday that the Proud Boys—or at least people claiming to be in the violent far-right hate group—were emailing voters and pressuring them to vote for President Trump. The evidence that the emails were actually sent by the Proud Boys was pretty thin, and tonight the US officials announced that it was, in fact, an Iranian election interference operation targeting Democratic voters in multiple states.

The news, announced by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Chris Wray in an ad-hoc news conference Wednesday night, included the additional revelation that both Iran and Russia had “obtained” US voter registration data, although further details remain unclear.

“We have confirmed that some voter registration information has been obtained by Iran and separately by Russia,” Ratcliffe said. “This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos, and undermine your confidence in American democracy.”

The emails that appeared to be sent from the Proud Boys warned recipients to “vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you.” The messages were “designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump,” Ratcliffe said Wednesday, without elaborating on how the messages would damage the president. Vice News reported earlier in the day that some of the emails also apparently included a video claiming to show hackers manipulating ballots. Ratcliffe said the claims in this video “are not true.”

While the extremist group has publicly championed President Trump—and he has told them to “stand back and stand by“—Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, who is also the Florida state director of a pro-Trump Latino group, almost immediately denied any Proud Boys involvement in the emails when news broke on Tuesday. Vice News quoted Tarrio as calling the email campaign a “fucking bold face lie” on Parler, a social media platform popular on the political right. “Whoever did this needs to rot in prison,” he said.

Many questions remain about what exactly the US intelligence community has uncovered. In addition to the claims that Iran’s efforts supposedly damage Trump, voter data is publicly available in some states and the officials did not elaborate during the press conference on what it means that Russia and Iran obtained some voter registration data. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the officials’ suggestion that hackers obtained “privileged data, and also possibly penetrated electronic systems to detect how people were voting” was perhaps an attempt to “create the appearance of an election breach.”

John Hultquist, the senior director of analysis for Mandiant Threat Intelligence, a cybersecurity firm, said in a statement after the press conference that the news “marks a fundamental shift in our understanding of Iran’s willingness to interfere in the democratic process.” He noted that “while many of their operations have been focused on promoting propaganda in pursuit of Iran’s interests, this incident is clearly aimed at undermining voter confidence.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency declined to answer additional questions Wednesday night. An FBI spokesperson referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment further.

Clearly, our president is having a Normal One. Today, he unleashed a tweetstorm in which he dunked on the very lukewarm “October surprise” of Hunter Biden’s laptop, made fun of the 79-year-old Dr. Anthony Fauci for throwing out a less-than-perfect first pitch at a Washington Nationals game, and called Chris Cuomo a name so offensive to the CNN anchor as to have sent him into a public tirade in the past.

Internally, Trump has kept up his schtick of lying and denying any discord among his staff as he makes a last-ditch effort to convince swing-state voters to sign up for another four years of chaos and misery.

It’s going to be an exhausting two weeks ahead of the election. Buckle up.

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In a press call on Sunday, Senate Democrats stressed that the best way overcome President Donald Trump’s effort to undermine the integrity of the upcoming election is voting—and voting early.

Democrats organized the call to discuss a new report that makes clear that the winner of the presidential race may not be known on election night because it will take time to count mail-in ballots, which are expected to favor Democrats. “That is okay,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). “The key thing is we’re going to count the votes.”‘ 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) emphasized the same point. He also focused on Trump’s baseless claims that the election is being rigged against him. “I think that almost everybody in America now knows that Donald Trump lies a lot,” he said. One of Trump’s worst lies, Sanders continued, is that there is a massive amount of voter fraud in the United States.

Sanders pointed to an op-ed from last month by Benjamin Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer. “The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud,” Ginsberg wrote. “At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged.”

As Mother Jones’ Pema Levy has written, Sanders has taken a leading role in warning that America’s democracy is in danger in this election:

With this speech [at the Democratic National Convention], he not only signaled his concern, but put himself forward as the ambassador for these fears. By bridging between the wonks on Twitter and the voters, and using his own popularity among the party’s left to ring alarm bells, Sanders is setting himself up to hold those in power accountable with—he hopes—a mass of Americans mobilized behind him.

The Democrats’ report divides states into four groups based on when ballots need to be received by and whether those ballots can be processed before the election. In swing states like Arizona and Florida, ballots need to be received by Election Day and can be processed in advance, meaning that it’s more likely that the winner of those states will be known on election night. At the other end of the spectrum is Pennsylvania, which does not permit advance processing and counts mail-in ballots that are post-marked by Election Day but arrive later.

The need to even put out the report is indication of just how bleak things have become under Trump. One line simply states, “Democrats support free and fair elections.”

Read the report below: