Brief Stop in US’s Only Muslim City Before 9-Week Election Sprint
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Today’s update includes:
- The nine-week election sprint begins after a quick break in Detroit and Dearborn.
- Three states to watch: Alabama, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, where races could have national implications.
- Massachusetts moves toward abortion until birth as Virginia voters prepare to decide on a constitutional amendment to decide the same in November.
- Our new six-question WIFFC Guidance Survey asks candidates and voters where they stand on churches, women’s sports, ActBlue, the WI AG proposing stripping a tax exempt status, data centers and abortion.
During our final three-hour break before the nine-week wind sprint to Election Day, we left town to listen to Anika Nilles pound out Rush songs (https://youtu.be/G1xFNCMuf2g?si=7bLAsYMfBMddBdXP) we were singing as teenage conservatives, and this week we are back in Alabama.
They played “Anthem” only at the first of the two Detroit shows, including the line written just six years after the liberal music culmination of Woodstock:
“Begging hands and bleeding hearts / Will only cry for more.”
Granted, Geddy was more of an agnostic than a faith-based guy, and those lines were written by the late, great drummer Neil Peart, but he did say he read the Bible many, many times.
ALABAMA: Expect Much Higher Black Turnout Now that Landslide Ivey is Not Running
In Alabama — the one state where Freedom and Family Action has endorsed candidates this year and will soon endorse another — one of the biggest questions is turnout.
Former U.S. Senator Doug Jones faces Tommy Tuberville in a race that will NOT be like Kay Ivey’s 67% re-election. At the same time, Alabama’s newly redrawn 2nd Congressional District features Democratic Congressman Shomari Figures against Republican State Representative Rhett Marques in a race that could become nationally important if control of Congress comes down to just a few seats.
The key in both races could be turnout.
Some people do not understand just how much turnout can change depending on whether voters believe an election is competitive. When Gov. Kay Ivey — a personal friend from years ago when I helped organize turnout for her first upset statewide win and she later headlined my Skeet Shoot for FarmPAC — was winning governor’s races with 59% in 2018 and 67% in 2022, Black turnout was naturally going to be much lower, particularly in areas with transportation issues. There simply was not the same incentive for campaigns and outside organizations to spend enormous amounts of money identifying and low propensity liberals the polls.
That will not be the case this year.
My big message to any pollster looking at Alabama is this: if you are using 2022 Black turnout levels for your 2026 sample, double it when you poll this year or you could be embarrassingly off.
As noted in our previous post about our team’s wins in minority districts throughout Alabama, as well as Shreveport, Louisiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, we understand Black turnout and the kinds of elections in which it rises or falls. We expect it to be high this year.
If control of Congress is close, Alabama’s 2nd District could even be a tie-breaker.
We will again be heavily on the ground in Alabama, while also looking at church outreach and talking with those encouraging our Alabama team to establish an actual Alabama Faith & Freedom 501(c)(3), modeled after the Wisconsin Faith & Freedom 501(c)(3) I personally left Alabama to establish before Trump’s 2024 race.
MASSACHUSETTS: Can Republicans Unite After Tuesday?
In Massachusetts, the immediate question is whether Republicans can quickly unify behind the winner of Tuesday’s primary.
Despite millions of dollars spent, the momentum that seemed to be building through late May appears to have stalled during an extraordinarily long primary that will leave the Republican nominee only nine weeks to make up a huge deficit against Democratic Gov. Maura Healey.
After millions of dollars have been spent, Mike Minogue currently leads Brian Shortsleeve among likely Republican primary voters going into Tuesday’s primary, but Healey leads Minogue by 20 points and Shortsleeve by 19 points in hypothetical general-election matchups.
That means whoever wins Tuesday is on a very tight timeline to bring the party back together and begin finding hundreds of thousands of additional voters – the reason September primaries are so tough.
We have not been in Massachusetts since the hour-long radio interview we emailed out earlier this summer. During that interview, I laid out what I believe would have to be a central part of any Republican strategy: finding a couple hundred thousand additional votes, particularly in the Rhode Island media market and South Coast communities where the fishing industry is such an important economic and cultural force. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k-YrdBwQJjqkIiYYXgMxCpLEJ_HLeppAbu9fEP3QI34/edit?usp=sharing
The math is tough, of course. I have estimated that a Republican nominee should be able to start with roughly 1.2 million votes but would need to approach 1.5 million to seriously challenge Healey. Many of those extra votes would need to come out of the Rhode Island media market in the southern part of the state, where Trump really did work with conservatives to save the huge fishing industry.
But something else has happened in Massachusetts in recent weeks that has sounded alarms among pro-life advocates all over the country: a new abortion law that takes effect November 8 and, in our view, opens the door to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
Michigan, Dearborn and the Nine-Week Sprint
Michigan certainly wasn’t flyover country Friday night.
Rush was finishing the second of two shows at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, while just a few blocks away at Comerica Park, Tarik Skubal — winner of the last two American League Cy Young Awards — was pitching against his longtime Tigers team for the first time since being traded to the Dodgers. He received a warm ovation from the Detroit crowd before throwing six strong innings in a 2-1 Dodgers win.
I return from the quick trip to see the team with the best record in baseball, our Milwaukee Brewers, tonight with my wife on what will likely be the last break before the nine-week sprint to canvass hundreds of thousands of doors by Election Day.
We spent Friday in Dearborn, Michigan, which will soon be the first major U.S. city with a Muslim majority. Tiny Hamtramck, Michigan, a few miles away, is currently the only majority-Muslim U.S. city.
Michigan could also elect America’s first Muslim U.S. Senator — Abdul El-Sayed.
Shops close briefly for Friday, as the three religions that believe in the God of Abraham — Islam, Judaism and Christianity — have successive holy days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. After the coming election, our Board Chair Pastor Paul Hoover and our team hope to attend the 22nd Annual WallBuilders Pro-Family Legislative Conference with legislators from across the country. The conference will also give us an opportunity to get a better understanding of the Quran and Islam in America with leaders like Glenn Beck, and a leader we hosted near Green Bay last year – David Barton.
Being in Dearborn brought back memories of two weeks before Election Night 2024, when I received a call from a high-level political contact thanking WIFFC for turning out so many conservatives in Wisconsin but telling me Trump would still fall short there. We were happy to prove that prediction wrong.
However, he then correctly told me they had pulled ahead in Dearborn and believed that meant Michigan — and ultimately the six other battleground states — would go Republican.
Two years later, the bellwether for the midterms across the U.S. could once again be focused on both sides of Lake Michigan.
Michigan features the U.S. Senate race between Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers. Across the lake, Wisconsin has one of the nation’s only currently close races for governor between Democrat David Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany, as well as the attorney general’s race between Democratic incumbent Josh Kaul and Republican Eric Toney.
Control of both chambers of the Wisconsin Legislature is also at stake, in addition to one of the congressional races we are watching most closely. If control of Congress is close, WI-3 and AL-2 could be among the deciding districts.
Massachusetts To Start Allowing Abortion Until Birth
Massachusetts currently permits abortion after 24 weeks, just two weeks later than Wisconsin’s current law.
That changes November 8.
Under the newly enacted law, as long as the abortionist who stands to charge $15,000+ for an abortion in the last few weeks of a pregnancy can simply state that abortion is in the health interests of the mother, the procedure can be performed until birth. And as any parent knows, every pregnancy causes at least some distress that could impact the health of a mother enough to check that box.
The issue is not limited to Massachusetts. Virginia voters will consider a constitutional amendment this November addressing abortion, and one of our donors put the stakes — and the connection to another rapidly emerging issue — this way:
“Despite the flowery and misleading ballot language, to me, this is about politicians trying to change the Virginia Constitution to prohibit doctors or anyone from placing any restrictions on a woman aborting a nine-month-old living human baby, while those same politicians continue to give tax breaks and place no limits on new data centers across Virginia. If Virginians agree with me that we need more life and fewer data centers, they should vote NO on November 3.”
Whether talking about late-term abortion or the enormous energy and water demands of data centers, both issues raise a basic question that voters increasingly want their elected officials to answer: What kind of growth and what kind of life are our laws designed to protect?
Until 2022, almost half of Americans supported a law stopping most abortions — something like stopping 2,970 abortions a day while allowing the 30 that resulted from rape or incest.
When pushes were made in 2022 in places like Kansas to pass laws without those exceptions, views shifted enormously — so that now only one-third of Americans would stop at least those 2,970 abortions a day, while one-third in “the new middle” would support laws only to stop late-term abortions, and one-third on the left want no restrictions — like the new Massachusetts law.
If the one-third on the left wins the referendum on the ballot in Virginia in November, it would be a huge blow to pro-life efforts everywhere.
Those developments helped shape two of the questions in our new Wisconsin Faith & Freedom Coalition Guidance Survey: one on the rapidly expanding data center issue and another on whether Wisconsin should follow Massachusetts’ new approach to late-term abortion.