This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 5 episode of “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi.”
There are fewer than 90 days until the midterm elections, and I’m going to ask you to look away from the shiny object in this week’s news cycle — Tuesday’s dramatic conclusion of Democrats’ primary for Michigan’s Senate seat — because when you scratch just below the surface, you’ll see a series of results from across the country that tell a story about how each party is going into these fast-approaching elections.
Despite a lot of hot takes about how ugly and damaging the Michigan Senate primary was for Democrats, the takeaway from Tuesday was that Republicans are facing a real challenge.
To understand this, you need to look southwest from Michigan to Missouri, which also had a primary on Tuesday.
Under Amendment 4, the initiatives put on the ballot by the Republican-controlled Legislature would not be held to the same threshold. And that is the tell that this was about silencing voters.
In Missouri, voters like their ballot measures. In recent years, they have used them to enshrine the right to abortion, to raise the minimum wage, to expand Medicaid and to legalize marijuana and sports betting.
But on Tuesday, voters actually rejected a ballot measure, one that would have made it harder to pass future ballot measures. Amendment 4 would have required proposed ballot measures to achieve a majority, not statewide, but in each individual congressional district of the state, in order to pass. In the end, this was rejected by 80% of voters (and ironically, rejected in each congressional district).
Amendment 4 was a plan hatched by Republican state legislators to limit the power that their own constituents hold at the ballot box. Abortion rights, minimum wage, medicaid expansion, marijuana — none of those previous ballot measures would have passed under Republicans’ proposed threshold.
However, under Amendment 4, the initiatives put on the ballot by the Republican-controlled Legislature would not be held to the same threshold. And that is the tell that this was about silencing voters.
Something very similar played out next door in Kansas, where voters rejected an amendment put on the ballot by the Republican-controlled Legislature that would have required the popular election of state Supreme Court justices rather than the current process, in which the governor appoints them and they later face a retention vote.
There are valid arguments both for and against the popular election of judges. But this ballot measure was not about that principle. It was about undermining one specific ruling by the state Supreme Court, as well as the expressed will of Kansas voters.
In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion, and Republicans have gotten creative in looking for ways to overturn that decision, even after residents overwhelmingly voted to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right in 2022. After that vote, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach suggested popularly electing justices as a way to “slowly and quietly” advance anti-abortion judges.
But on Tuesday, voters denied the “slow and quiet” attempt, and they did it swiftly and loudly: 61% voted against the referendum.
And while Republicans engage in harebrained schemes to divert the will of the people, voters far and wide are begging them to focus instead on the economy. A new Reuters-Ipsos poll found that 48% of Americans said the cost of living was their top issue when deciding who to vote for in November.
That doesn’t bode well for Republicans. On that very issue, President Donald Trump has an approval rating of 23% — 70% disapproved. Asked which party has a better plan to deal with the cost of living, Democrats had an edge over Republicans, 35% to 27%, though 28% said they didn’t know.
On some level, Trump knows this is his political problem, because he went on a West Coast swing in recent days to promote his economic agenda.
But true to form, in a speech in Las Vegas on Wednesday, he dismissed the issue.
“More Americans are working in the United States right now than at any point in the history of our country,” Trump said. “You don’t hear that. I saw polls today on television. They say, ‘Donald Trump polls on the economy aren’t good.’ The economy is the greatest economy we’ve ever had by far … They’re fake polls.”
A few fact-checks: In a country like the United States, which has seen consistent population growth, the workforce also grows over time; this is not the greatest economy we have ever had; they are not fake polls; and while the economy is good for a specific part of the population, the vast majority of wage-earning Americans are suffering.
On the other side of the aisle, if the Democrats have one single coherent issue they are all laser-focused on — moderates, progressives, democratic socialists and all — it’s affordability. They did just experience the most bruising and expensive primary of the entire season on Tuesday, but even so, they are coalescing.
Shortly after the race was called for her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, Rep. Haley Stevens released a statement telling voters that although Republicans want Democrats “to come out of this primary tired and divided, so their billionaire backers can come in and let multimillionaire Mike Rogers walk away with this Senate seat,” she was “not going to let that happen.”
Allison Detzel contributed.
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