Welcome to Radio Free America, Aaron Kleinman’s take on stories that matter in state politics but aren't getting enough attention.
Photo: AP/Al Goldis
On Tuesday, February 3, voters in the Saginaw/Bay City/Midland area of Michigan will decide who the parties will nominate for a must-win state senate special election in April. One of the Democratic candidates, Pamela Pugh, looks like she’d be a weak nominee. She was accused of misspending funds from her nonprofit and her 2024 U.S. House campaign. Her ex-husband had some pretty nasty legal issues. These are problems that lend themselves to being 30-second attack ads, which is why it appears Republicans are funding a shadowy independent expenditure group trying to boost her in the primary.
The group, ProgressiveMI, was founded on November 24 of last year. And since then, it has funded mailers and digital advertisements supporting Pugh. Little public information exists about it, but its treasurer appears to be Republican operative Greg Finnerty and it has ties to Republican consulting firm Majority Strategies, according to the Detroit News. Moreover, if this were an actual progressive group they probably would have sent you five spam texts by now.
The district is light blue. The previous state senator, Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet, won it by 6% before she had to resign after being elected to Congress. Kamala Harris also carried it in 2024, but it was by less than 1%. Democrats have overperformed in special elections across the country over the past year, so they should be the favorites in April. But Pugh’s flaws could cost them the seat.
Maybe Republicans learned from their 2022 experience. In what should have been a good year for them, with an unpopular Democratic president dragging down the party’s favorability ratings, candidates like Kari Lake, Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz cost them winnable seats. So now that they face the headwinds of a Trump midterm, they’re trying to elevate Democrats with significant baggage in the hopes that they can defy history themselves.
And it’s not just in Michigan. For example, there was a concerted right-wing effort to draft Jasmine Crockett into the Texas Senate race. And Republicans seem to be trying to manifest facing Gavin Newsom in 2028. So before you get into the primary voting booth, ask yourself if you’re getting played.
AROUND AMERICA
Last night, there were a pair of special elections in Minnesota, which is still suffering under an unconstitutional occupation by ICE. I’ve seen some people worried that ICE will be used to terrorize Democratic cities close to the midterms. But if that’s the case, it didn’t work in St. Paul. Democrats won the district there by 91%, a 20% improvement over Kamala Harris’s showing there in 2024. That margin is almost unheard of, and it represents an utter collapse of Republican support in the city. And they can’t afford to lose that support — Donald Trump got more votes in the city of St. Paul than he did in all of Crow Wing County, home to Nisswa. In other words, siccing ICE on cities in November would probably backfire.
Remember Vivek Ramaswamy? The most annoying person at Harvard — who later got rich by running pump-and-dump schemes, got fooled into thinking he’d give a speech to the Ohio State football team in the parking lot of a chicken restaurant, called Americans mediocre and helped put in place an extralegal group that gutted the federal government — is now the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to be the next governor of Ohio.
But he’s been floundering a bit as three of his bodyguards were implicated in a fentanyl trafficking scheme and told people struggling to make ends meet to simply make more money. In other words, Ohio Democrats might win the gubernatorial election for the first time in 20 years.
Photo: The Rooster
One of the most promising areas of medical research is around using personalized mRNA vaccines to fight cancer. Just this week, a study found that it can meaningfully reduce recurrence of skin cancer. Unfortunately, Tennessee — home to cutting edge cancer treatment center St. Jude’s — is considering banning those vaccines.
A lot of people are wondering what they can do to keep ICE from terrorizing their neighbors. In Colorado, the easiest thing you can do is vote against Proposition 95, which would require ICE to work in the state, in November. Right-wing activists put this on the ballot because they thought it would help them turn out their base. The wisdom of this strategy remains to be seen.
I agree with the post-2024 assessment that Democrats need more candidates who can go on Joe Rogan. Guys who can chop it up about sports and maybe are a little too bawdy sometimes but have a history of being able to reach young men. So I’m all in on recruiting Luther Campbell to run for Congress. He’s a First Amendment icon, and people who bought Campbell’s infamous album As Nasty As They Wanna Be are now worried about how much their kids’ college tuition is going to cost, so he’ll appeal to swing voters.
Photo: AP/Mark Elias
Last week, we suggested that states follow Minnesota State Sen. Erin Maye Quade’s lead and give states the ability to shut down websites that provide nudification technology, especially because Twitter seems to still be creating nonconsensual pornography. But Republican Arizona State Rep. Khyl Powell is taking an even more aggressive approach and trying to ban pornography altogether. Relatedly, it seems as though Republicans have lost the gains they made with men aged 18-29 in 2024.
Sometimes I like to check up on how right-wing dark money site Center Square is covering state politics, because it shows where the biggest funders of the Republican Party have their priorities. Well, bad news: They want to stop water fluoridation, which has no real benefits other than more rotten teeth.
As states consider ways they can stop ICE overreach and the corruption of the federal government more broadly, a very simple idea has been taking hold: create state law causes of action against corrupt federal officials. This is especially notable now that Tom Homan is going to Minnesota. If he takes $50,000 in a Pizza Ranch bag, then he deserves a trip to Stillwater.
INTERNET STUFF I LIKED THIS WEEK
Stuck inside all day Sunday during the winter storm affecting much of the country, I needed to find a way to entertain myself before football started. Thankfully, a lot of cities, including mine, have live tracking of which streets are plowed. As states and cities think about how to use data to help inform while the federal government uses its platforms to obfuscate, tools like PlowNYC are a neat example of what’s possible. Though I was a little bummed that, unlike other cities, New York doesn’t have rigs with cute names like we see in the Midwest — Snow Bueno and Anthony Sledwards. New York deserves the Plow’em 123!
BOOK CLUB
Photo: Powell’s Books
Last week, I wrapped up the magisterial Reconstruction by Eric Foner. The struggle to create a multiracial democracy continues to this day, and the book is worth reading to understand why the effort to do so in the wake of the Civil War sputtered out. A few particularly relevant notes on it:
When the Supreme Court guts the 14th and 15th Amendments, it’s basically trying to undo the peace settlement of the Civil War. The reason why we have them is because the recalcitrant South needed to agree to universal civil and political rights if it wanted to rejoin the union, and every step away from that vision gives the Confederacy wins it could not achieve on the battlefield.
Reading about Francis Preston Blair Jr. helping sink the Democratic ticket in 1868 by being too bigoted — calling freedmen “a semi-barbarous race” — made me realize that Elon Musk isn’t just a racist today; he would’ve been considered a racist 150 years ago.
HELP ME OUT
Hey, Joe Keery! So sad that Stranger Things is over, but if you’d like to still work in TV, our readers suggested you’d make a great Jim Rockford. You’re a little younger than James Garner was when the original The Rockford Files show started, but I think you’ve got the goods to pull off a J-turn.
Speaking of, what car should the new Jim Rockford drive?
The new Jim Rockford should drive a ...
They don’t make Pontiac Firebirds any more, and a Dodge Charger is too much of an asshole car. But, in a nod to his fellow lovable scamp Bob Ferguson, maybe he should drive a gold Nissan Sentra? They have manual transmissions! I’m kind of stuck on this one, so I’d appreciate it if you could help me out.
