Down-Ballot Deep Dive with Daniel Nichanian

Rebecca talks to Daniel Nichanian, founder of The Appeal’s Political Report, for a deep dive into some of the most important down-ballot stories from the 2020 election — from ballot measures to state and local races that will shape policymaking in 2021 and beyond. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

We all lived a lot of lives last week, as Election Day met Groundhog Day, Bill Murray style. Now that we’re all back to breathing again, and hopefully Steve Kornacki has gotten a well-deserved nap… given the outsized attention on the top of the ticket (for good reason, given what was at stake) — we at Off-Kilter have been especially eager to dig into what happened down-ballot, on key ballot measures as well as in the thousands of races for District Attorney, sheriff, governor, mayor, and other state and local offices that, while often overlooked, are critical to much of the policymaking that will be taking place in 2021 and beyond.

This week, Rebecca is joined by Daniel Nichanian, better known by many as @Taniel on Twitter — the founder of The Appeal’s Political Report and the author of a slew of detailed resources tracking the 2020 election results at the state and local level including whatsontheballot.com.

This week’s guest:

• Daniel Nichanian, founder of The Appeal’s Political Report (@taniel)

For more of Daniel & team’s election tracking & coverage:

• Check out whatsontheballot.com, Daniel’s comprehensive 2020 election tracker
• Here’s The Appeal’s tracker of the races and ballot measures where criminal justice was on the ballot this year (plus their coverage of lots of those races)
• Here’s more on Oregon becoming the first state in the U.S. to legalize drugs
• Here’s a snapshot of the states that decriminalized and/or legalized marijuana in some form last week
• And here’s a roundup of Daniel’s election-week tweeting (follow @Taniel for lots more where all this came from)

TRANSCRIPT:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

Sights to hit the clock by the end of the day

Hot from downtown into the hood where I slave

The only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t safe

I spend most of my time working, tryna bring in the dough…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

Well, we all lived a lot of lives last week as Election Day met Groundhog Day, Bill Murray style. Now that we’re all back to breathing again, and hopefully Steve Kornacki has gotten a well-deserved nap…given the outsized attention on the top of the ticket (and obviously for good reason, given what was at stake) we at Off-Kilter have been especially eager to dig into what happened down-ballot on key ballot measures, as well as in the thousands of races for District Attorney, sheriff, governor, mayor, and other state and local offices that, while often overlooked, are critical to much of the policymaking that will be taking place in 2021 and beyond. And I couldn’t think of anyone better to help walk us through the 2021 down-ballot results than my friend Daniel Nichanian, better known by many as Taniel on Twitter. He’s the founder of the Appeal’s Political Report. He’s also the author of a slew of incredible resources tracking the 2021 election results at the state and local level in particular, including WhatsOnTheBallot.com. You can find that and his other cheat sheets, trackers, 50-state maps, and a whole bunch of other rich election summaries and coverage from the Appeals Political Report, Daniel and his whole, team all on our syllabus page OffKilterShow.medium.com. Let me say that one more time. OffKilterShow.medium.com. And we’ll be tweeting a whole bunch of them out from OffKilterShow as well.

Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time. And I hope you got a well-deserved nap as well.

DANIEL NICHANIAN: Oh, it’s great to be here. And it’s been great to have a chance since Saturday to look away from the presidential election and look towards all of the things that you just mentioned that were also happening a week ago.

VALLAS: Well, and that’s a big part of what we really wanted to do, right, given that obviously, the stakes could not have been higher in this particular presidential election. Obviously, we now know that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now the president elect and the vice president elect of the United States. Deep sigh as I say that: reference to the breathing before being something that feels very good again. But meanwhile, while the House of Representatives appears to be remaining in Democratic hands, control of the U.S. Senate, of course, as folks will know who’ve been following will be determined by a set of hotly-contested runoffs on January 5th, 2021 in the state of Georgia, a state that also has gotten a lot of attention this past week.

But as I mentioned, up top, far less attention generally gets paid to the races and the issues that are farther down the ballot. And so, before we get into the thick of all of it — and there’s a lot to get into — I kind of want to just give you a chance to talk about why it’s worth spending time paying attention to all of this so-called down-ballot stuff. What’s the importance of state and local elections to policymaking in the grand scheme of things?

NICHANIAN: Right. That’s a great question, because I think a lot of I’m sure everyone who is a listener of this podcast really cares about a lot of the policy issues, substantive issues that you cover on this podcast. But of course, for many issues — in particular, criminal justice, things related to transportation, to all sorts of issues relating to urban planning — the county level, the municipal level, the state level is going to be particularly important. And of course, that applies to any issue. But I’m just naming some that are particularly important when it comes to the state and county level. Of course, the state and county level will also impact what’s happening at the federal level through the question of who’s going to control the process of drawing the maps over the next few years that are going to decide the U.S. House races, right? And obviously, we all know how important that was over the past 10 years. The fact that Republicans have had such big victories in 2010 really set the stage for their control of the U.S. House for years at the federal level.

And so, through the resources you named — and thanks very much for that generous introduction — through the resources you named, what I’ve tried to do is really pull in various sorts of threads together. Because I think one obstacle to people being able to follow this is that there isn’t necessarily a clear platform, right, for people who care about criminal justice, for instance, which is really the work I do at the Appeal, who care about criminal justice and mass incarceration questions, that are really questions that are shaped at the level of the counties by DAs, by sheriffs, at the level of state, state laws to be able to pay attention to all of the movement, all of the reforms that are being passed at the state and local level through a national perspective, right? We’re really dealing with a mosaic of state laws, of jurisdictions that are all kind of moving in part in the same direction, in part in different directions. And so, a lot of my work is trying to help pay attention to these different threads and kind of get a bigger picture sense of what’s going on.

VALLAS: And we’re going to get a chance to dig into lots of the different dimensions of that, including some of the particular offices that you’re mentioning, like District Attorney, which I don’t know that anyone focuses on nearly as much as you do, but it feels like the right place to start. And actually, in you and I talking a little bit about how to structure a conversation that could be incredibly far-ranging. Once folks will get a chance to look at WhatsOnTheBallot.com, they’ll get a sense for how much you have been tracking and the sheer volume of information. But when you and I were talking a little bit about like, where do we really start, it was you who said, you know, you kind of have to start with voting and the right to vote itself. Which was on the ballot in some places this year, including in California, via something called Proposition 17.

But it also feels really important to sort of acknowledge that the 2020 election came against the backdrop of an array of states newly having put in place voter eligibility expansions for the first time. People may be familiar, probably most of all, with Florida’s Amendment 4, which re-enfranchised 1.4 million people with felony convictions in that state. Obviously, a little bit disappointing, given that the Florida Republican legislature stepped in and kind of tied that one up and said, hey, people actually have to pay fines and fees, effectively like paying a poll tax, before they can get their right to vote back. That got a lot of attention in the context of the 2020 election and rightfully should have as, in my opinion, one of the largest and most successful efforts at voter suppression that we’ve ever seen, courtesy of Republicans in Florida. Let’s make no mistake. But there’s a lot that didn’t get attention in terms of the right to vote and how it showed up in the 2020 election. Talk about California and where else we need to really kind of have some takeaways.

NICHANIAN: Right. When I think of the bright spots of elections, it’s important to think of, you know, we saw the scenes of engagement by voters, right? In some places it favored Republicans and some places favored Democrats. But that in and of itself is a very important feature of what happened in 2020. And I immediately then think of the hundreds of thousands of voters in a number of states that were eligible to vote for the first time because of reforms that were adopted just over the past few years to expand the right to vote for people with felony convictions. So, Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey, just recently, since 2019, all three of them restored the right to vote to any adult U.S. citizen who is not incarcerated. So, in all three states, this was the first general election where, as long as you were not incarcerated, you had the right to vote. Earlier than that, a lot of people outside of prison were still stripped of the right to vote. And so, there was a lot of organizing that went into that. There was a lot of activism, and there were a lot of people who were themselves impacted, who were pressuring, lobbying state lawmakers to change those laws and allow more people to vote.

And then in Washington, D.C., this was the first general election since the City Council restored the right to vote to any adult citizen who’s had a conviction, including if they’re in prison. So, D.C. joined Maine and Vermont as the three places in the U.S. where you never lose the right to vote. This meant that there were people in prison from D.C. who got to vote. And so, I immediately think of those people on the organizing who went into the different reforms and what it meant and what it means for people to be able to vote, right? And so, you’re right that California joined that group of states that enacted new reforms. And I’m leaving some red states out that had more incremental but very important reforms like Iowa and Kentucky that I want to mention as well. But California was voting on Prop 17, as you said. And what Prop 17 did is, just like Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey, it allows people on parole to vote in the future. Which means that in California as well now, anyone who is not presently incarcerated will have the right to vote going forward.

So, two quick things. One is this does not affect the rights directly for the people who are incarcerated in California. But a lot of the proponents of Prop 17, including the group Initiate Justice, which really played a big role behind it, have vowed to continue pressing forward to restore the right to vote to all. And the second thing that’s very important is that one reason why the right to vote for anyone who is not incarcerated is very important is that it removes a lot of the confusion that is deliberately entertained in states that have very complicated voting rules. And we are seeing that in Florida, right?

So, in Florida, because of what the Republicans did in 2019, voters have to figure out whether they owe a fine and fee, and the state doesn’t really provide that information. And so, and that’s the case in a lot of places where there is a set of rules for people who are not incarcerated to navigate what type of felony convictions do they have, or what type of fees and fines do they have? How many years has it been since they’ve left prison? A lot of different rules that keeps people not voting, even if on paper they’re eligible. So, that’s why it’s very important for places like California to at least have gotten to the point of enabling everyone outside of prison to vote. And I will note that the referendum passed by a very large margin, I think around 20 percentage points, around 60/40. So, you know, speaks to a very large support around that issue.

VALLAS: And for anyone is wondering about Florida, what ended up happening. There aren’t, I have not been able to obtain direct numbers to date, but estimates from the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition who championed and really led the way on Amendment 4 on a bipartisan basis — that ballot measure was really championed despite that Republican legislative act to block re-enfranchisement — their estimate is that 50,000, just about 50,000 of the 1.4 million Floridians who were re-enfranchised by Amendment 4 (at least theoretically, if not in practice because of that fines and fees blockage) about 50,000 were able to vote: a massively successful effort, given how much organizing happened after that unfortunate act by the legislature. But it really kind of gives you a little bit of a sense of what Daniel’s talking about here, right, as you think about those numbers.

NICHANIAN: Right.

VALLAS: And then when you start to think about the overall ways that they can change outcomes, right? The last count I saw was that Joe Biden lost Florida by about 400,000 votes, right? So, I think folks can probably do the math.

Daniel, I want to take you next to another piece of really what I view as kind of one of the biggest under-covered election stories of 2020. And that is a resounding rejection of the War on Drugs, also through ballot measures, and many of them in pretty unlikely states. Talk to us about the ballot measures that we saw in Oregon and other places taking huge steps forward towards legalizing and decriminalizing drugs.

NICHANIAN: Right, right. That was really, the reason is we kind of maybe one of the main stories outside of obviously the presidential election right now is not just the number of measures that passed, but that every state-level measure that I was aware of that had to do with curbing the War on Drugs was adopted, and all of them by quite comfortable margins. So, what I have in mind is, for one, four states chose to legalize marijuana: Arizona, Montana, South Dakota, and New Jersey. They all voted to legalize marijuana. In Arizona in particular has had a set of harsh laws for how to deal with marijuana possession. And this really is a sea change for how these states are going to deal with marijuana going forward.

We have questions now as to how exactly they’re going to deal with questions of funding, how exactly they’re going to deal with past convictions expungement. I know that is something that you’ve covered a lot, you’ve talked about in the past. But expungement obviously is going to be very important given how many people’s lives are impacted and weighed down by past criminal records, right? And so, that’s a question going forward.

And Oregon, you mentioned, maybe is the biggest story in this category, because for the first time, a state has chosen to decriminalize drug possession. So, going forward in Oregon, low-level drug possession will not be a criminal charge. It will still not be legal. It will be subject to a civil infraction, which itself, is going to have to be watched because law enforcement will continue. And that can lead to the sort of encounters that we know can lead to problems and can be unequal. But in terms of the national conversation, the fact that, by a very large margin, Oregonians chose to say yes to that, to say yes to a very new approach to drug possession, is not going to, it could reset the conversation a bit in the sense of putting a new set of options in kind of the mainstream of American policy. It’s this option that is already implemented in other places in the world. Portugal is the example, is the country that the Oregon measure emulated and related to most. But within the U.S. that’s really a new, that’s really going to be a new kind of step, a new milestone.

And, yeah, that’s going to be fascinating to watch, especially because we saw in other types of elections — and we can talk about that more — but when we look at the elections in particular, we see there as well candidates who promise to approach the War on Drugs very differently did well. So, this isn’t just something that happened in Oregon or in the states with marijuana. This is really a new conversation that has been happening around the country.

VALLAS: And it’s really worth reiterating that, right? Folks might be listening, and I want to be really clear so no one glosses over this. What Oregon did is not just about marijuana. It’s about drugs across the board, right? Talk a little bit more about that Portugal approach. You actually wrote a whole piece on this, given that it was the inspiration and the model for Oregon. And I know a lot of folks who listen to this show work on and care deeply about the effort to decriminalize and to legalize and are very interested in it not just being marijuana as sort of the tip of the spear anymore. Talk, if you would, just a little bit briefly about that Portugal approach. How does it work?

NICHANIAN: Right, right. So actually, a writer, Zach Siegel, wrote that article for us that people can find on The Appeal. So, the Portugal approach was to decriminalize drug and push some of the funding, push some of the attention to other sorts of prevention, treatment, and health approaches. And studies have shown that that has been successful in shrinking the problems that have come, like overdoses that obviously, the U.S. has to deal with as well. But you’re absolutely right that what is specific about Oregon, and what might be potentially surprising to people who haven’t followed some of the state and county debates on this, is the extension of the conversation from marijuana to the broader set of issues that come with the War on Drugs.

So, as I’m sure many are familiar with, we’ve seen now a number of states choose to lower the level of penalties for any kind of drug possession. So, I think off the top of my head, we’re at roughly five states that have chosen to make all drug possession a misdemeanor instead of a felony in the U.S., including this has been a bipartisan situation in terms of which states have done it. Oklahoma is among them. Colorado is partly among them. And that is important, right, in terms of what has been happening. And obviously, Oregon goes a step further in not treating drugs as a matter for criminalization at all.

And what’s interesting is that this builds on a number of prosecutors in recent years, as I was just saying, who have said, who have run and won on, saying that they will not file criminal charges against drug possession. So, one example, Boston’s DA Rachel Rollins in 2018 had a list of charges that she was planning to not file criminal charges on, to not prosecute if elected, and drug possession was among them. And the argument that’s really central, and for instance, the Austin DA a week ago won on a similar platform. And what they’re saying is that the health system, all sorts of systems that have, that should have something to do with addiction and substance use issues for people who want or need assistance, those systems have failed us. They’re not funded enough. They’re not available for many, many people, whether because of health access, insurance access, whether because of the stigma associated with addiction. And as long as that failure is not treated, it’s not up to the criminal legal system to pick up the slack and be complicit in the harms of criminalization because no one else is picking up the slack.

And that’s, for instance, exactly what the new Austin DA, José Garza, told me a few months ago when I asked him about his desire to not prosecute drug possession. He used the metaphor of a rug. He said the criminal legal system is a rug under which we are pushing issues like substance use and addiction that should be taken charge of by other systems outside of the criminal legal system to the extent that they have to be taken charge of. And that his refusal to prosecute is part of pushing other systems to really step up. And that’s what Oregon could do as well.

VALLAS: And just staying with some of these ballot measures as well, because obviously, marijuana legalization, including legalizing medical marijuana, that was on the ballot in a number of states as well. Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, South Dakota, all of those in the legalizing camp, all yeses. Mississippi, South Dakota in the medical marijuana camp. I mean, these are states that people are probably hearing and going, what?! Are you kidding? Because, you know, not the ones that people might’ve expected to be hearing. But truly, truly a wave, I think, that is somewhat undeniable and hopefully will be trickling up to the federal level as well, where we seem to be sort of behind what the states are and have been doing. Where do things go from here with this debate? This is something you’ve been watching for quite some time and trying to bring a lot of focus to these kind of local movements as we’ve seen progress and as we’ve seen — and we’ll get into this next with the DAs — but as we’ve seen that all of this stuff really is good politics.

NICHANIAN: Yeah. I mean, I’m struck when you’re saying that. But if you just look at the list of ballot initiatives that passed in redder states or states that went for President Trump last week, you will see a lot of ballot initiatives that are considered progressive, sort of typically are positions that Democrats would champion, right? So, I don’t want to necessarily overstate this point. The point isn’t that every liberal policy is popular in red states. That’s not I’m saying at all, of course. But when you look at South Dakota legalizing marijuana, when you look at Mississippi that legalized medical marijuana, when you look at Florida that voted by 20 percentage points to increase the minimum wage, when you see results like that, it again, as we’ve often seen, raises some questions about what is fueling the gap between the results of some of these referendums and the results of the presidential election or the federal elections, right?

And in terms of what’s next, I think specifically, you were asking about drug policy. I think it’s going to be — So, I think I have kind of two questions looking forward. One is, what waves the Oregon measure makes when it comes to drug possession writ large, right? I think it’d be interesting to see whether other states, either through initiatives or through referendums, attempt a similar approach. It will also be interesting to see whether other states emulate the other approach I was saying, which is a more incremental approach of trying to lower really the sentencing levels and charging levels for drug possession. You know, there are other conversations that have started in recent years, like safe injection sites. There’s a lot of conversation, debate around that in Philly, for instance, and elsewhere in the country, that have really come up insistently and that will be important to track.

Separately, obviously, the movement to legalize marijuana has been on a very different track. It’s you know, to some extent it’s worth keeping it separate. We we are likely to see new states pick up the conversation about whether to legalize marijuana. So the two that come to mind immediately are New York, where Governor Cuomo has talked about legalizing marijuana for a bit now, and it has not happened. And New Mexico is another one where we might see join, New Mexico could join that list. Progressives actually strengthened their positions a bit in the New Mexico state government. Marijuana legalization is expected to be on the agenda as a result.

VALLAS: And I don’t want to lose track of a couple of kind of far less sparkly, but really core components of pieces of what you said, right — they always get a lot less attention — but how something gets designed, right? It matters a lot, how the policy actually ends up working. You mentioned are records cleared, right? Are we just legalizing or decriminalizing, or are we also dealing with this huge number of have people who end up having criminal records that would no longer exist prospectively and are now facing life sentences to poverty that no judge ever handed down. Really important questions and features as we watch this. As well as where funding ends up going, something you always make a point of paying attention to in your reporting and have been doing today.

But, Daniel, I can’t wait another minute before getting into DAs because you’ve brought up DAs multiple times. This is, in a lot of ways, kind of the meat and potatoes of a lot of your work. I want to come back to some more of the ballot measures in just a little bit. There were ballot measures on a lot of issues we want to tick off as well. But it feels really important to get into some of the most important and most underappreciated state and local races that have anything to do with criminal justice and which are responsible for effectively putting criminal justice on the ballot in a bunch of additional races, if not in the form of ballot measures, last week as well. Scores of candidates, as you were noting, have been running explicitly on criminal justice reform. Talk to me about District Attorneys, and in particular, why you first got so interested in lifting up DA races as a core part of not just understanding electoral politics, not just understanding local politics, but understanding the politics of criminal justice. Why do we need to be talking about DAs?

NICHANIAN: Yeah. So, DAs are perhaps the most influential and powerful officeholders perhaps in the U.S. to which we don’t pay enough attention. And by pay enough attention, I think there’s increasing attention to the awareness that they exist or the kind of decisions they make. But we still don’t pay enough attention to the policies that they’re putting in place beyond maybe the most emblematic decisions that they make that maybe draw the most attention, and why they’re making it. What set of ideological priors, policy preferences, blindnesses to certain inequalities and racism are leading to these decisions and policies that have a humongous impact, right?

So, a lot of the increase in incarceration can be traced back to policies and harsh policies that DAs have implemented when they didn’t need to, when implementing other set of policies was within the toolbox of things that they were able to do. So, for a very long time, the tough on crime norms of how one wins elections, the sort of conversations that were happening around criminal justice made people maybe lose sight of the range of policies that DAs could implement. Because it just seemed obvious that this is how you win an election. You win the election by promising to put everyone away and lose the key, right?

And to some extent, there is one expectation that that’s how you win elections. But that’s really not been the case in DA races over the past few years. And a lot of that has to do, of course, with organizing by Black Lives Matter activists around questions of law enforcement, and by extension, around the questions of how DAs deal with the police, and more broadly, with all of the activism and the organizing against racism in law enforcement, against racism in the criminal legal system, and just against a staggering, staggering scope of incarceration in the country. And in some DA elections this year, it was very visible that the dots were being connected between the decisions made by the prosecutors and why incarceration in certain counties, certain states, is so much higher than elsewhere. So, I’m thinking of places like L.A. or New Orleans that have particularly high incarceration rates. And that was really at the heart of the elections for DA in a way that didn’t used to be the case, certainly.

So, the reason I’ve been interested in this, not that my personal trajectory is what’s important here, but I think it’s frustrating when you care about an issue and when you care about the change that certain officeholders can do, it’s frustrating to see it invisible. It’s frustrating to see that to the extent it’s visible, it’s not doing justice to the contrast and in the policies and the politics of what these people could be doing. And it’s frustrating to see the collapse of local media, which would be the most key, which would obviously be a set of media actors that would be able to cover these elections. So, that’s sort of the things that I try to work on to draw the contrast in the policy conversations in DA offices and specifically in DA elections. And I think again, this year, just as in 2018, 2019, we saw a fair amount of change in the conversation around these elections.

VALLAS: Well, so, tell us a little bit about it. I mean, this is a lot of what you’ve been paying attention to for years prior to 2020. But now there’s a ton of races where folks have been running not just on that usual tough on crime set of talking points, as you said, but actually explicitly running for District Attorney, mentioning things like wanting to bring about criminal justice reform and using very, very different narratives about who the people are who are involved in the criminal justice system and why. What are we learning about the politics of criminal justice through how these races are changing?

NICHANIAN: Right. I think what’s fascinating, first of all, and I think when I tell this to people, I think the extent of it can come as a surprise. The idea that tough on crime politics or that sort of framing, not just in the bluest areas, but also blue and purple areas and some conservative areas, the idea that emphasizing a tough on crime law and order message as just how these people are running is just not really the case anymore, at least in elections that are contested and that feature candidates. In fact, it’s a bit the inverse. It’s harder to find now a candidate, even an incumbent, that hasn’t really promoted reform. It’s hard to find anyone who’s running without at least some signaling or some veneer of talking about reform or talking about alternatives to incarceration or talking about a desire to not have people sit in jail just because they cannot afford bail. The fact that these people are not necessarily putting in place the practices and policies to change any of this is definitely the problem! But the fact that the conversation is now being played in that very different, through that very different prism of what these people are doing to bring about alternatives to incarceration, to lower the incarceration rate is really a fascinating development in recent years.

And so, just this year, again, there’s definitely been some places where the conversation has moved in that direction very significantly in terms of just size and in terms of potential importance going forward. The DA race in L.A. was definitely kind of the defining clash of 2020. Because first of all, just because it’s a county of 10 million people. So, I think that just alone puts it on top of everything else, because that’s as big as 40 states, I think. And so, the DA there, Jackie Lacey, was running against a progressive challenger, George Gascón, who was the DA of San Francisco up until last year when he moved down to L.A. where he was from originally and announced that he was going to run against the incumbent. And a lot of very important contrast on sentencing, on the death penalty, on the size of the prison population, on the role that DAs are going to play at the statewide level, on the positions they’re going to take on reform, was really at stake in the L.A. race that was won eventually by Gascón a week ago.

And what’s interesting there is Gascón explicitly said he wanted to run for DA in Los Angeles to bring the national movement of reform prosecutors to L.A. That’s also very, very new. If we had had this conversation three, four years ago, there wouldn’t have been a national movement of reform prosecutors the way there is now that Gascón could have pointed to and said he wants to bring it to L.A. But now he was talking about people in Philly, people in Boston. I already mentioned Rachel Rollins earlier. And we saw that same approach, this kind of idea of people running for prosecutor with an avowed and central goal of reducing the incarceration rate. Also decreasing the adjacent ways in which criminalization can give people a criminal record that is going to weigh them down, of course, way beyond the time that they spent in prison, that has really been at the center of a lot of these DA elections.

So, I already mentioned that the election in Austin, I think that’s a very interesting election. What’s interesting there, beyond the fact that José Garza took on this idea of not prosecuting certain behaviors because they shouldn’t be up to the criminal legal system, beyond taking that was [unclear] José Garza himself has the background of an advocate. He himself is an immigration rights attorney, he used to be a public defender, and he ran for DA with that experience, with that background, saying that the outsider perspective is going to be relevant to bringing about the sort of changes that the DA office in Austin needs.

What’s also interesting is that the relationship between a DA’s office and criminal justice reform groups is really changing as a result, right? So, in New Orleans, it’s been a city where a coalition of groups have very actively come up with a platform of how to pressure the DA and what the DA candidates should agree to. Because the DA in New Orleans has had a particularly carceral record. He’s a Democrat. He chose to not seek reelection this year. And what’s been interesting is to see all three DA candidates who were running adopt a number of the position from the platform of those activists. Even if some of them were taking on many fewer positions, they still clearly were engaged in an effort to look sympathetic to reform advocates. And that’s just a transformation in the politics of these offices and in the primacy of taking into account the need to reduce incarceration and also criminalization.

VALLAS: Now, I want to just warn anyone who’s worried that, oh, my God, there’s all these things. Daniel’s mentioning all these things. How am I going to keep track of these? All, as I said before, links to Daniel and his team’s fabulous resources are available on our syllabus page, which is at OffKilter.medium.com, a cheat sheet at WhatsOnTheBallot.com, all of it is in there. And there’s way more than what we’re getting into here. But no need for folks to be taking copious notes about who was that name he mentioned in Los Angeles or Austin?! All of this stuff is worth tracking.

Since you mentioned George Gascón, I also want to just give him a shout out. Actually, he was one of the champions of and for automatic expungement, which became the law of the land for certain offenses in California statewide last year on the heels of the Clean Slate movement that we’ve been seeing in red, blue, and purple states. And Gascón, one of the biggest champions from within law enforcement, then in his role as San Francisco District Attorney. So, just sort of showing the connection across issues and where these people pop up in different points of the spectrum of criminal justice issues.

Daniel, I want to move on to some other ballot measures, but I want to just —

NICHANIAN: May I just add one interesting thing is, one other thing that that he did, George Gascón, over the past few months, is he and Chesa Boudin and a few other DAs announced that they were going to form a progressive alliance of prosecutors in California that are going to pressure the state Assembly and state Senate to pass more progressive criminal justice reforms, in opposition to the traditional DA Association in California, which has been very, very opposed to criminal justice reforms. And we have seen that in a few other states where there’s this new alliances. And that really will change the game, not just at the level of the county, but at the level of the state, because if suddenly, state Senators and state Assembly members don’t have to look over their back for law enforcement officers to kind of unite against them and speak against criminal justice reform as they’ve been so prone to do, that can change the conversation in some places and make it easier for criminal justice reforms to pass at the state level.

VALLAS: And just a huge part of how that whole landscape is changing. And I really appreciated your acknowledgment too of people now taking up office who previously have been the outside agitators pressuring folks in office to make changes. All of this, obviously, wholesale changes the dynamic on how policy is getting made, who’s at the table, and whose voices are being heard.

We’re going to end up running out of time a lot sooner than I wish that we were. But I want to get to a few other ballot measures and then a couple of other items before you turn into a pumpkin or a proverbial pumpkin anyway, Daniel. And there were some really, really, really important other ballot measures beyond the marijuana and drugs pieces that we we hit on earlier. Staying with criminal justice for just a little bit, there was actually a tremendous amount of really, really good news on policing in terms of ballot measures in a range of states and localities, many in the form of civilian oversight boards. Talk a little bit about that and some of the other kind of key issues that we’ve seen advancing or failing in the states.

NICHANIAN: Right, right. You know, in the wake of the protests that were renewed after the murder of George Floyd in May, a lot of cities chose to put some ballot initiatives on the ballot, just kind of in the summer, in that moment where City Councils were meeting and deciding how to respond. And a number of important cities put on the ballot the idea of creating oversight boards with independent authority to issue, subpoena, and compel the police to cooperate. And they all passed. I am not aware of a ballot initiative on that that failed. So, there was one in Portland, in Philly, in San Diego, in Columbus, Ohio, and a few others that were also a referendum, kind of inspired also by the summer’s protests to ban facial recognition in Portland, Maine.

I think one question with civilian oversight boards is accountability is very important, but there’s been a lot of institutional obstacles to that, including in how the police responds to oversight boards. In a number of cities, the police have already signaled that they will either sue against the ballot initiative or that they consider the ballot initiative to break the contract of the police union with the city. So, we are already seeing that in Portland. We’re already seeing that in Ohio. And so, that’s going to be interesting to follow a, whether the police union can strike them down. And two, to the extent that they exist, what strength are they going to have? How much are they going to be, how much, what impact are they going to have in practice when it comes time for investigations, right? There’s a reason that a lot of the demands of the activists have to do with shrinking the size of law enforcement, shrinking unions, and shrinking the power of the police to act with impunity even when rules are in place.

VALLAS: Another area that we could spend an entire episode on, and maybe we’ll need to down the road, probably with some of our friends at EPI, the Economic Policy Institute. They’ve been doing tons of coverage on this, of course, is workers’ rights and labor. Many examples of that showing up on the ballot, maybe not as many as we’ve been talking about as in criminal justice reform, but a few really notable ones, including a $15 minimum wage in a couple of places, some paid leave. Talk a little bit about some of what we saw for workers on the ballot.

NICHANIAN: Right. I mean, I think the labor rights is one area where we have actually seen unions and labor manage to make progress in red states through the ballot initiative. So, I’m thinking of Florida you just mentioned, the minimum wage increase in Florida. I’m thinking a year ago, you may remember, or a couple of years ago, when the unions put the right to work, quote-unquote “the right to work” law that the Republicans had passed in Missouri, they put on the ballot as a veto referendum, and voters rejected it by a huge margin. On the other hand, maybe the biggest ballot initiative this year that passed is California’s Prop 22, which was the ballot initiative sponsored by a lot of companies that use gig economy workers like Uber and Lyft to not classify their employees as employees. And that passed. And I think the consequences of that are going to be huge. [chuckles] And I think you’re right that there could be a whole episode just on Prop 22.

VALLAS: I want to note also as folks are sort of ticking their scorecards here, right, Colorado’s the place that has done paid family and medical leave through a ballot measure. Really, really exciting to see that advance. But I also just want to note, and I know there’s a ton you could say about this, Daniel, there were other initiatives that really don’t kind of get reduced all that clearly to a talking point or that they don’t really fall under specific issue spaces. And so, they don’t get nearly as much attention, but they have a lot to do with how policymaking happens and how the democratic process works. One of those is an initiative that you described as the initiative to make initiatives harder as a trend that we’ve actually seen in some places. There’s also rank choice voting, which is another. But talk a little bit about that, initiatives to make initiatives harder category and anything else in the democracy sphere.

NICHANIAN: Right. [chuckles] So, it’s been a theme. I think I’ve mentioned a few times how in Republican-controlled states — and by Republican-controlled I mean, red states, but also states where Democrats cannot gain power because of the way in which the maps are drawn, right — that the initiative process has been an avenue for progressive changes. We saw Florida. We were mentioning Amendment 4 and voting rights at the beginning of our conversation. Michigan expanded voting rights as well in 2018 with automatic voter registration and other things that were actually very important this year in the presidential race. And so, in some places, what we’ve seen is conservatives or Republicans try and change the rules of ballot initiatives to make it harder for ballot initiatives to be put on the ballot in the future or just succeed, kind of as closing the door to one of the last possible avenues for progressive change.

So, Florida and Arkansas and North Dakota all had a ballot initiative that would’ve made future ballot initiatives harder to pass in different ways, either through requiring some geographic distribution among counties that would make it harder for progressives that tend to be more concentrated or requiring initiatives to pass twice. And all three of those initiatives I mentioned failed this year, which is important to note in terms of keeping the imagination of what’s possible in those states open in the future. There’s also a lot of bad initiative possibilities in Mississippi, which actually is probably the state with the highest level of adults who are not allowed to vote due to felony conviction. That also is a state where a ballot initiative in the future is doable, possible. And that will also keep the door open in Florida in particular, to measures like the increase of the minimum wage in future elections.

VALLAS: And just hugely important to watch, obviously, given that clearly, there is growing awareness that when you put popular policies on the ballot, they often pass! And that can end up being very scary for people who are hoping to prevent certain types of policies from moving forward and who are afraid of putting those kinds of questions to the voters and allowing that kind of, one of the closest forms of direct democracy that we actually still have in this country to allow those kinds of changes to take place at the state and local level. That goes hand in hand with, obviously, conversations about state and local preemption, where you actually have this recent trend, also something that could be its own episode altogether of Off-Kilter and actually, I think a couple of years ago was, back when this was just starting to trickle up in states and become a trend. But of Republican-controlled states taking action to preempt or stop the progressive localities within their states from doing things that would exceed what they’ve put in place as statewide ceilings, rather than allowing states to do their own thing and kind of step above a state floor. The minimum wage obviously being perhaps chief among them.

Daniel, we’re going to run out of time, but folks are probably wondering why haven’t we talked much about state legislatures? There maybe wasn’t quite as much news on that front as there was in so many of the other different down-ballot components we’ve been spending a lot more time on. But it’s still worth kind of taking stock and maybe closing with that as a little bit of another piece of important information. And so, I’ll ask you the question in the following way for you to sort of help wrap us up with that component as it overlays on everything else we’ve been talking about. Which is, taking stock of what we know so far about last week’s election, where are there going to be more opportunities or maybe fewer opportunities in the states for progressives to push the policy agenda that we have been seeing folks trying to push at the federal level for sure and stymied for the past four years, but pushing at the state and local level with increasing momentum and increasing resources in recent years.

NICHANIAN: Right. There were kind of two goals that Democrats had at the state level. One was to stop Republicans from being able to do whatever they want in some very large states by taking away the Republican trifectas: places like Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. And there, that’s probably one of the most disappointing aspects of the election for Democrats is their inability to flip a chamber away from Republican control. There’s still some possibility in Arizona, but we haven’t seen the final results, but probably not. So, Republicans will retain control of the states I mentioned, for instance.

But then I think the flipside of that is that Democrats kept control of all of the states that they newly gained in 2018 and 2019, in some places, really doing a lot of new types of reforms in places like Colorado, places like New Mexico. And those states will, of course, also bigger states like California that were not really on the radar as possibly flipping. And so, it’s kind of a status quo election at the state level. And in some places like New Mexico or Rhode Island, we seem to see progress for the progressive side of the party. So, it will be interesting to track what new opportunities that opens up for reforms going forward, while also tracking what is happening in states that are still going to be run by Republicans.

VALLAS: And there’s unbelievable amounts of information that we didn’t get to, believe it or not, if you’ve been listening this whole time. We’ve made it to almost an hour, and there are pages and pages of analysis that are still things that you could dig into that we haven’t even scratched the surface of. So, one more plug for all the resources that Daniel and his team have been producing. If you’re looking to get up to speed on issue-specific content as well as hyper-local content, what happened last week, WhatsOnTheBallot.com is a great place to start. But you can find the rest of the things that Daniel and The Appeal’s Political Report team have been pulling together at OffKilterShow.medium.com. We’ll also, as I said, be tweeting them out from @OffKilterShow as well. And if you’re not already, obviously, you need to be following Daniel Nichanian on Twitter. You can find him @Taniel, t-a-n-i-e-l, on Twitter. Just a total font of ongoing content and updates when he’s not taking that rare nap.

Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time and for all of this just really, really rich down-ballot analysis that otherwise, election after election, really seems to get so much less coverage. It’s really, really, really fantastic and deeply appreciated.

NICHANIAN: It was great to chat with you.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back

I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just tryna get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪