The Morning Meeting with Al Tompkins is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas worth considering and other timely context for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.

I doubt that you would be willing to run for office, any office, and endure the accusations, criticisms, accusations and threats that candidates endure these days. Today would be a good time for us all to thank the people, even the people who didn’t get our vote, for offering themselves for public service. Even unsavory candidates serve a function in our political system.  They force other candidates to stake positions, meet the voters and reveal something of themselves.

A Kentucky GOP candidate for Congress received multiple death threats in the days before the election this week. A candidate in Maryland also received death threats. Several of them.

 A man threatened a candidate for Illinois governor saying he would “skin him alive.”  Candidates had their homes spray-painted, and someone fired a shot into a North Carolina candidate’s home. A candidate for mayor in California was constantly attacked for being gay. 

In my many years of being a journalist, I have had the pleasure of getting to know honorable, dedicated, hard-working people who were governors, state senators, mayors and judges. They were fine if they were not making news headlines. They wrote budgets, plowed through committee agendas, fixed sewer systems and heard court cases 

I want to tell you three quick stories to illustrate my point.  

• A governor I covered, told me that he loved his state so much that when his granddaughter was born in another state, he brought a bag of dirt from his state to meet the newborn and dipped the child’s feet in the dirt, so his grandchild’s feet would touch his state’s soil first. He never told the story publicly because he said he didn’t want to make his grandchild a political prop.
• A candidate for president that I covered, routinely finished campaign appearances in ballrooms and convention halls then always made a tour of the banquet staff in the back hallways to shake their hands and thank them. He would not allow us to record those back hallway interactions because, he said, he didn’t want those workers to feel exploited. 
• A Tennessee state senator I knew served on some of the most time-consuming least news-making budget and finance committees. He always wore a suit, usually had a cigar nearby and was beloved by Democrats and Republicans. He championed child adoption and child abuse reporting legislation. He was considered a champion for causes ranging from the environment to education and issues relating to seniors. He advised young legislators, “Always tell the truth. If your word is good, people respect that. If your word is not good, you have wasted your most precious asset.” The last words he spoke on the state Senate floor as he finished the longest senate career in state history were, “Goodbye everybody, be always kind and true. Be always kind and true.”

(Gallup)

Journalists can look at the Gallup honesty and ethics survey and see how the public views us, and I think most of us would say it is an unfair characterization of the work we do and the reasons we do it. People who run for public office would say the same thing about how they rank on the Gallup list.  

Running for office today means some candidates wear bullet-proof vests. And when they are elected, they are accused of stealing elections. Protestors questions their faith. Opponents use clips of their comments out of context. It is widely assumed that people running for office are trying to get rich or gain power to run for some higher office.  

I want to point you to the speech that Ohio Democratic candidate for the U.S. Sen. Tim Ryan delivered:  

“I have the privilege to concede this race to JD Vance, because the way this country operates is that when you lose an election you concede. You respect the will of the people. We can’t have a system where if you win it’s a legitimate election and if you lose someone stole it.”

One way to encourage women with children to run for office

Prior to this year’s election, The Vote Mama Foundation said, “Oregon is the only state legislature in the U.S. with full representation of moms with young kids. Alabama is the only state with no mothers of young children serving in its state legislature. Only 7 states have even half the number of mamas that are needed for full representation, and 23 states have less than a quarter.”

(Vote Mama Foundation)

(Vote Mama Foundation)

The Vote Mama Foundation’s new State of Motherhood report said 5.3% of the country’s 7,383 state lawmakers have children under age 18. (17% of the U.S. adult population is women with children under age 18.) The Vote Mama Foundation is pushing legislation in all 50 states to allow a candidates’ campaign funds to help pay for childcare. The group argues, “Imagine if not one potential candidate at any level of our government had to consider the cost of childcare in weighing their decision to run for office. Imagine if we could break down the institutional barriers to empower a diverse pipeline of working mothers to run for office and win.”

Guns, weed and abortion rights votes

Marijuana was on the ballot in Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota and South Dakota.

• By a 2:1 margin, Maryland voters approved a measure that allows the legal possession and use of cannabis for people 21 and older starting in July 2023.
• With 53% of the vote, Missouri voters approved a measure making marijuana possession and use legal for adults. Also approving legal pot possession: North Dakota with 55% of voters and South Dakota with 53%. 
• In Arkansas, 56% of voters approved marijuana possession, use of cannabis and the commercial sale of cannabis.
• Colorado, which already allows marijuana possession and sale, is deciding whether to allow possession and use of certain psychedelic plants and fungi (psychedelic mushrooms).  
• Oregon voters approved Measure 114, which will require Oregonians to pay a $65 fee for a permit to buy a gun and would ban the sale or transfer of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
• California, Michigan and Vermont all put abortion protections in their state constitutions. Vermont voters spoke with a forceful 77% vote.
• Kentucky voters had a different proposal on their ballot. That constitutional amendment there would have said there is no right to abortion, or any requirement to fund abortion in Kentucky.  So, a “no” vote rejected the ban on abortion rights. In other words, the state constitution will not ban abortion rights in Kentucky. 
• The Montana vote is still being counted. That ballot measure would make an infant “born alive” at any gestational age a legal person. That protection already exists under federal law and would criminalize health care providers who do not make every effort to save the life of an infant “born during an attempted abortion” or after labor or C-section. 

LGBTQ candidates ran well this year

The Hill notes:

A record-shattering 340 openly LGBTQ candidates running in the midterms this year won their elections Tuesday evening in a night full of political firsts for the LGBTQ community.

Transgender candidates claimed history-making victories in state legislative races in Montana, Minnesota and New Hampshire. 

Perhaps 2022 will be the last time this will even be noteworthy. 

The prison labor question on the ballot

Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont all had ballot questions about whether the state should be allowed to force incarcerated people to work. The ballot questions refer to “slavery” or “involuntary servitude.”

Voters in all four states voted to curtail involuntary prison labor. By late Wednesday, Oregon’s vote count showed the anti-slavery ballot initiative was leading “yes” but the race has not been called yet. Here is a link to a page that updates that vote count.

You might be wondering how this could even be an issue since the nation passed the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in America in 1865. The 13th Amendment includes the words, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” So, it is up to individual states to approve or disapprove the use of prisoner labor.

The ACLU says people serving sentences in jails and prisons produced a combined $11 billion worth of goods and services every year and are paid between 13 cents to 53 cents per hour for the work. The ACLU said:

Our nation incarcerates over 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons, and two out of three of these incarcerated people are also workers. In most instances, the jobs these people in prison have look similar to those of millions of people working on the outside: 

• They work as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. 
• They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. 
• They washed hospital laundry and worked in mortuary services at the height of the pandemic. 
• They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, athletic equipment, and uniforms. 
• They cultivate and harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and work in meat and poultry processing plants.

The changing balance of power in state legislatures

So much of our news focus has been on federal government seats but the 2022 elections also are changing the balance of power in state legislatures and, let’s face it, state governments sometimes affect our lives more than the slow-moving Congress. Republicans dominated state legislatures before this election and still hold power in most state House and Senate chambers with a handful of shifts. Some races are still unsettled but will update here. But this much is clear: The number of state governments that are run by one party (governor and both branches of the legislature) is higher than ever. But we do not have a firm number of how many state legislatures will have a veto-proof majority of either party. 

Let me give you two screen captures, one before Tuesday and one that is still filling in:

(National Conference of State Legislatures)

(National Conference of State Legislatures)

The National Conference of State Legislatures’ summary says:

Three Republican-held chambers flipped to blue: the Michigan House, Michigan Senate and Minnesota House.

And yet, as they have since 2010, Republicans continue to absolutely dominate the 50-state landscape.

Going into the election, Republicans controlled 61 legislative chambers to the Democrats’ 37. (Nebraska’s unicameral and nonpartisan legislature is not part of that count, hence the total of 98 chambers. Unofficially, Nebraska’s legislature is controlled by Republicans.)

At the same time states held elections, so too did the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

With the three flips, the count is 58 Republicans to 40 Democrats. It’s a commanding lead, but more change may be coming. Chambers in Arizona, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, all held by Republicans, have not yet been called. The same goes for both chambers in Nevada and Oregon, held by Democrats. Counting votes — especially when elections are squeakers — takes time. (Find NCSL’s list of anticipated legislative leaders for the 2023 session.)

The NCSL says “the number of brand-new legislators (turnover will be high).” 

Tax reforms

Mostly the tax reform measures on this year’s ballots were related to property taxes that relate to exemptions given to select groups. The measures all passed in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas; failed in West Virginia.
Both Florida and Georgia voted on property tax breaks related to natural disasters. The Florida measure, which failed, would have allowed homeowners to improve their properties, allowing flood resistance but not include the improvements on their home’s taxable value. Georgia voters approved temporary property tax changes for areas damaged by disasters.