Laphonza Butler: Identity Politics on Overdrive

California Governor Gavin Newsom snubs Barbara Lee and appoints Laphonza Butler to fill Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat.

ANN GARRISON

OCT 7, 2023

No one better exemplifies the Democratic Party’s overarching identity politics than California Governor Gavin Newsom. He engineered the appointment of San Francisco’s first Chinese mayor, appointed California’s first Black Secretary of State, California’s first Latino Senator, and now its second Black woman Senator, Laphonza Butler. Butler is also the first Black and LGBTQIA Senator. She is married to a Black woman, with whom she shares a daughter. Nearly all the reporting on her appointment foregrounded her race and sexuality with an abundance of hollow platitudes.

Butler’s liberal Democratic and identitarian credentials, like Gavin Newsom’s, all but glow in the dark. Throughout her career she won the honor of being the first Black, first Black woman, and/or first Black LGBTQIA woman in the positions she ascended to. They include President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Long Term Care Workers, a union of 400,000, then President of the California SEIU State Council.

She was the first Black woman and the first mother to become president of Emily’s List, the American political action committee (PAC) that raises funds to elect Democratic female candidates in favor of abortion rights. That is the office she is leaving to become a US Senator.  Butler also rose from humble origins to the powerful positions she has occupied. Born in Magnolia, Mississippi, she lost her father to heart disease at age 16, and her mother worked as a classroom aide, home care provider, security guard, and bookkeeper.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU).

Identity triumphs aside, what can we expect from Laphonza Butler?

The Sacramento Bee describes Butler as a Democratic Party insider, who has “worked at high levels in almost every place where Democrats are strong: a former top California labor official, president of an influential women’s political organization and adviser to Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and other party luminaries.”

In 2010, as President of the SEIU United Long-Term Care Workers, she helped secure a shared endorsement for Kamala Harris in her successful run to become California Attorney General, and she is understood to have a long-running alliance with Harris. In 2020 she worked as an advisor to Harris vice-presidential campaign.

In 2016, as president of SEIU Local 2015, she endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. Later she was one of the California electors who voted for Clinton in the 2016 election.  Some union leaders celebrated Butler’s appointment, but others expressed alarm, including many who remember her time working with tech giants Uber and Airbnb. 

In 2019, while at SCRB Strategies, a Bay Area consulting firm with strong ties to Newsom and other top Democrats, Butler helped Uber pass California Ballot Proposition 22 to override California Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), which had expanded labor protections for gig workers by defining the difference between an independent contractor and an employee and thereby compelling the companies to reclassify many drivers as employees and provide them higher pay and benefits. Uber and other gig economy tech companies like Lyft and Instacart poured $200 million into passing Prop 22, making it the most expensive ballot proposition in California history at the time.

Newsom just vetoed a bill that would have required human drivers in autonomous vehicles of over 10,000 pounds—from UPS delivery trucks to big rigs—on public roads. The California Labor Federation argued that the driverless trucks are unsafe and that removing drivers will cost a quarter of a million jobs. Butler’s critics said it’s in keeping that the governor would thus appoint someone like Butler, who used her rise to the top of a major union to catapult herself into the jobs with some of the corporations most guilty of degrading labor in the gig economy.

At Airbnb, a multibillion-dollar corporation responsible for pushing up rents and fueling the housing shortage, Butler served as director of public policy and campaigns.

In foreign policy, she has no track record, but the Sacramento Bee wrote that she “is expected to bring stability and reliability to votes confirming judges, approving more aid to Ukraine, and funding government programs.” In other words, she’ll be a “good Democrat.”

Will she run?

The most asked question about Butler’s appointment is, “Will she run in the 2024 election?” She has only nine weeks to decide because the filing deadline is December 8, but it’s hard to imagine that Democratic operatives aren’t huddling with her about this now that Kamala Harris has sworn her in. She will have the advantage of incumbency for only four months before the March 5 primary, but should she win that, she’ll have more than a year by the time of the November 5 election.

California Democratic Congresspersons Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee are all campaigning for Feinstein’s seat, but there are no Republicans in the race yet. Schiff is ahead in both the polls and the fundraising, with Porter in second, and Lee a distant third.

California holds non-partisan, “top two” primaries, meaning that the top two vote getters will face off in the November 5 election. So it’s all but certain that two Democrats will face off after the March 5 primary. The state hasn’t elected a Republican Senator in 30 years.

At first Newsom said that if he had to face the decision to appoint someone to replace Feinstein, he would choose a Black woman but that he would expect her to serve as a caretaker, holding the seat for whomever wins the 2024 election because he didn’t want to “interfere” in that race by giving anyone the advantage of incumbency. However, the optics were bad and he got a lot of pushback. Why stress appointing a Black woman just to keep Feinstein’s seat warm for a year? In the end Newsom did not extract a promise from Butler not to run.

The Congressional Black Caucus urged Gavin Newsom to appoint East Bay Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who represents California’s 12th District, which is much of the California’s urban East Bay, and one of the bluest districts in the country.

Despite claiming not to want to hand the advantage of incumbency to Lee or any of the three candidates already in the race, he ultimately handed it to the little known Laphonza Butler, who may or may not take advantage of it.

Barbara Lee is best known for casting the lone vote against the Patriot Act after 9/11, then opposing the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and she has some distant history with Oakland’s Black Panther Party. She is now, for the most part, a “good Democrat,” but not as good as Laphonza Butler might be. Nancy Pelosi, a close ally of Newsom, has been supporting Russiagate-crazed Adam Schiff.

Newsom is all but certain to be a Democratic presidential candidate, whether in 2024 or 2028, and he has now burnished his identitarian credentials by appointing Laphonza Butler, while avoiding giving the advantage of incumbency to Barbara Lee.  

The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who publishes regularly on the Black Agenda Report. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region.

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Challenge to political maps to proceed with state’s claim Black voting power isn’t diluted

Outcome could upend politics ahead of the 2024 election

BY: JILL NOLIN

A federal trial that could force state lawmakers to redraw Georgia’s political maps ahead of next year’s election will enter its second week Monday.

Five lawsuits have been filed challenging the GOP-drawn maps that came out of a special session in 2021, but this trial features three of them, including challenges from Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, the Sixth District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Black voters across the state.

So far, the action has centered on the attorneys for the plaintiffs who are trying to show that the maps dilute the Black vote and violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. If Judge Steve C. Jones rules in their favor, state lawmakers could be sent back to draw up new district lines.  

This week, lawyers representing the state will have a chance to present their defense of the maps, which they acknowledge were designed to protect the Republican majority but say they are fair to Black voters. They have so far framed the legal challenges as a veiled attempt to elect more Democrats, and they say the alternative district lines offered up by the plaintiffs are overly focused on race.

The state’s attorneys have argued that recent elections undermine claims that Black voters are not able to elect candidates of their choice, pointing to the wins of U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath in the Atlanta suburbs and President Joe Biden and U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in statewide races.

The outcome of the case could prove consequential heading into next year’s election, since Black Georgians tend to vote for Democratic candidates at high rates. Republicans currently hold a fragile majority in the U.S. House, and any Democratic gains in the state Legislature would add to tightening margins under the Gold Dome.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently stood behind Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a surprise ruling this summer that rejected Alabama’s congressional map. A redrawn plan that still did not include a new opportunity district for Black Alabamians was blasted last week by a three-judge panel, which ordered a third-party special master to do the job.

In Georgia, the cases at trial argue a new majority Black congressional district can be drawn in metro Atlanta and that multiple new Black majority districts can be carved out in the state House and Senate maps. 

William S. Cooper, a private consultant who created the alternative map, said he was asked to explore whether the Black population in Georgia was large and compact enough to warrant an additional congressional district. But he said race was just one of many factors he considered. 

“It practically draws itself,” Cooper said last week, describing the task as “very straightforward, easy.”

That district, congressional District 6, is today represented by Republican U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick who won in 2022 after state lawmakers shifted the boundary lines to favor a GOP candidate. The change prompted the previous incumbent, Democratic U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath, who is Black, to challenge fellow Democratic U.S. Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux in the racially diverse 7th District based in Gwinnett County.

As a result, Republicans now hold nine of Georgia’s 14 congressional seats, up from eight under the old map.

The attorneys for the plaintiffs argue Georgia’s political maps dilute Black voting power and do not reflect the state’s changing demographics. The number of Black Georgians grew by about 484,000 people since 2010, with 33% of the state now identifying as Black. Meanwhile, the number of white Georgians dropped by 52,000.

They have put experts on the witness stand who say Black voters are left underrepresented in the halls of power and stuck with a system that is unresponsive to what they argue are Black Georgians’ distinctive needs when it comes to issues like health care access, education, employment and social justice.

“Across every metric I looked at, Black individuals are doing worse than white individuals,” testified Loren Collingwood, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico who analyzed socio-economic data.

Collingwood presented voter turnout results that showed a widening gap between Black and white voters in recent election cycles, though the state argued that the same data also showed Black turnout increasing.

The judge has also heard from Black residents across the state who have launched unsuccessful bids for public office.

Diane Brack Evans, who lives in Jefferson County, has been active in Democratic politics, including three runs for a state Senate seat. But she testified Thursday that she was not so much interested in electing a Democrat as she was in wanting an elected official who would “take an interest in her community.”

Evans shared a personal story about her late sister who had chronic medical conditions but was not eligible for Medicaid coverage and eventually ended up uninsured. Evans let her sister move in and she filled in as her sister’s physical therapist. Her story was not all that unique, she said.

“This is really how it is in this area here,” she said.

Fenika Miller, who also testified for the plaintiffs, is a lifelong Houston County resident who has run twice for the state House as a Democratic candidate – including once against a Black Republican – and is now the deputy national field director for the Black Voters Matter Fund.

Miller was asked by the state’s attorney if the alternative maps would help elect more Democrats. She responded that the maps would allow “more Black voters to have a say in what their representation looked like – regardless of party.” 

This article originally appeared in The Georgia Recorder on September 12th, 2023, of the State News Room network  

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