Welcome to Radio Free America, Aaron Kleinman’s take on stories that matter in state politics but aren't getting enough attention.
(AP Photo/Steve Helber)
“Fish, Family and Freedom.” That was U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola’s tagline when the Alaskan became one of Democrats’ top overperformers in 2022. In the lower 48, Democratic politicians like Ben Cardin, Ed Markey, Caleb Frostman and, uh, Graham Platner have leaned into support for fishing as a way of shoring up their bipartisan bonafides.
After all, fishing is the second most popular outdoor hobby but one that is coded conservative; President Donald Trump loved to brag about the support he got from his beautiful boaters in 2020. But there’s an opening for Virginia Democrats to peel away some of those apolitical fishermen if they’re willing to buck a Canadian multinational corporation to protect a fish you’ve probably never heard of: menhaden.
You don’t eat the menhaden; it’s too small and oily for humans. But it’s a dietary staple for the fish that you do eat. That means when there’s more menhaden, there’s more delicious seafood and more saltwater fishing fun. Win-win-win, right?
Well, it is for everyone except for Cooke, Inc., parent company of Omega Protein, which catches over 100 million pounds of them from Chesapeake Bay every year to process into supplements and animal feed. As a result, the population of the most important fish in the sea has declined 90% in the past 30 years.
Virginia House Bill 1048 would change that. It would put a moratorium on catching menhaden in Chesapeake Bay (the only place where juvenile menhaden can grow into adulthood) and force Omega Protein to send its vessels into coastal Atlantic waters to meet their catch quotas. The bill would cost the company more, but it would also help build the Atlantic’s menhaden population back up.
“If you were to ask any fisherman out there, they know about the menhaden problem” says Steve Atkinson, chairman of the Virginia Saltwater Sportfishing Association. For years, they’ve been trying to get Virginia to join Maryland in protecting Chesapeake Bay’s menhaden population. But Omega Protein is a big political donor with expensive lobbyists, and they look to be winning right now.
HB 1048 hasn’t even had a hearing yet, but the deadline for bills to pass the House in order to be considered by the Senate is in two weeks. Virginia Democrats have a chance to get a big, resonant policy win for voters who may lean Republican but are aligned with their values. If not, it’d be the one that got away.
AROUND AMERICA
Republicans got more bad news this week as they blew another high profile special election, this time in Fort Worth and its suburbs in Texas. Democrat Taylor Rehmet won by 14% in a seat that Trump carried by 17% in 2026, one of the biggest overperformances anywhere since the 2024 election. And based on an analysis of the voter file from Ross Hunt, this wasn’t a case of Republicans staying home — it seems like Sen.-elect Rehmet won a number of Trump voters. And Tarrant County has been a hotbed of right-wing politicians and organizing over the past few decades, so it’s not like they can’t get their voters out for low turnout elections. If they can’t win a low turnout election there, then there’s a lot more to worry about than losing a state Senate seat.
Michigan Democrats nominated Chedrick Greene for a critical state Senate special election Tuesday night. As we noted last week, Republicans were supporting the campaign of Pamela Pugh, who had some serious baggage that they could exploit in the general. But it appears like primary voters saw through the ruse this week. Greene will face Republican Jason Tunney in the April special election.
I really doubt that the latest Trump attempt to sow doubt over the results of the 2020 election goes anywhere. (It seems like Tulsi Gabbard is doing some busywork because she’s been cut out of the foreign policy loop for, uh, reasons. But a new bill out of Georgia really could cause some damage, as it would force the state to implement dual electronic and hand-counting systems ahead of the 2026 election, which would almost certainly make counting ballots take longer and foment post-election chaos. The threat in Georgia isn’t coming from Trump; it’s coming from the state government.
Screenshot of the Polybius website
Speaking of threats to democracy, cultural critic/theorist John Ganz launched Polybius, which tries to quantify the threat of authoritarian consolidation in America on an ongoing basis. The good news is that right now, we’re similar to South Korea, which means a democratic bounce-back seems likely. His analysis is that the regime does not have the capacity to consolidate and thus relies on grotesque spectacle to cow people to think it’s happening. In other words, when you engage in doomerism, you’re doing Trump’s work for him.
Republican legislatures love making it harder to get ballot propositions in front of voters. But in Utah, it’s backfiring on them. They’re trying to get voters to repeal an initiative that led to fair voting maps being implemented by a court, and they’re falling well short of the signature requirements that they imposed. They have a Plan B, though. More on that next week.
Republican lawmakers across the country have also been introducing bills that would have their states invest in crypto. This seems like it’s taking your tax dollars and handing it off to scammers, and it comes in light of news that the son of a politically connected insider stole $40M worth of crypto from the U.S. Marshals’ seized assets wallet. Stealing your money is a lot harder to do that when it’s invested in index funds.
Source: GIPHY
A number of other Republican lawmakers are trying to pass laws that would have states invest in gold and silver, which seems like an historically bad decision right now. Democrats really have a chance to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility from people who seem to make financial decisions based off of Ron Paul’s newsletters from the ‘80s.
INTERNET STUFF THAT I LIKED
Photo via Dan McQuade on Bluesky
Philadelphia writer Dan McQuade fought cancer to a draw last week, and I was distraught until I started reading his old articles and was cracking up through the tears. He joins Kaleb Horton and Mike Fossey as Internet posters that we lost too soon, and that’s just over the past few months.
Internet culture is by its nature ephemeral, which means that the people who contribute so much to it can pass without people knowing how much they contributed. That’s why I’d like to suggest that we need some sort of Posters Valhalla, where greats like those three can be remembered for what they gave to the world. They were important, and people deserve to know who they were.
R.I.P. Dan. If you’d like to help his wife and toddler son, you can do so here.
BOOK CLUB
Photo via Penguin Random House via Amazon
Short story collections usually leave me nonplussed — a lot of the time, they’re a bunch of ideas that an author can’t quite spin into a novel, so they leave some spare bits around for us to sift through. Not Mariana Enriquez in Things We Lost In The Fire, though. She knows just how to ratchet up the tension in this horror-inflected, fully realized collection. Check it out if you want the person next to you in the coffee shop to wonder why you’re sweating from reading a book.
HELP ME OUT
Okay, so you all think that Jim Rockford should drive a vintage Pontiac Firebird in the new Rockford Files. Hard to argue with the choice!
But while we’re on the topic of cars, I’ll let you in on a little project I have. I have a theory that Dodge Charger drivers are the worst, so I started tracking how many tickets they have through the New York City website How’s My Driving. But after three months, I need a control group. So who should I compare them to? Nissan Altima drivers? Ford Mustang drivers? Tesla Model Y drivers? Hit reply and tell me what you think!
