Can Pot Save The Democrats?

Last night I interviewed Lee Rogers on KPFK, the Los Angeles Pacifica station. The show will run tomorrow evening. As you probably know, unless this is the first time you've ever read DWT, Rogers is a progressive Democrat running for Congress in the northwest corner of L.A. County-- Santa Clarita, the Antelope Valley and Simi Valley. After nearly losing to Rogers last cycle-- followed by some come-to-Jesus-moment polling-- arch-conservative incumbent Buck McKeon recently announced he would be retiring from elective politics.

CA-25 has come a long way but still leans a little red, especially in regard to turning out Democratic voters in midterm elections. The rearview mirror oriented Cook Report rates the PVI an R+3. Obama beat McCain under the new boundaries 124,377 to 123,454 but lost to Romney 4 years later 125,258 to 120,701. Rogers is engaged in a tough three-way jungle primary with two Republicans, Tony Strickland and Steve Knight, each trying to prove he's more of a right-wing, bigoted extremist than the other. Republican voters can sort that out among themselves, but Lee Rogers still needs a way to get Democrats to the polls June 3.

Rogers is an internationally prominent surgeon who strongly and articulately backs medical marijuana legalization. Why? Neither one of us uses it. But Rogers has been a big advocate for ending prohibition way beyond what California allows today. It isn't one of his big issues-- he's campaigning on jobs, healthcare, raising the minimum wage, protecting and expanding Social Security and comprehensive immigration reform. But, ironically, marijuana legalization could be of paramount importance in his race, where turnout in the June 3 primary is crucial. Consider this from Alex Seitz-Wald:

A new poll, conducted by a Democratic and Republican polling firm in partnership with George Washington University, suggests voters would be overwhelmingly more likely to go to the polls if they could vote on a ballot measure to legalize marijuana, something Democrats may want to keep in mind as they work to boost turnout.

Facing a tough map and perennial low turnout in midterms, Democrats are hoping to minimize losses in this year's elections by enticing their voters to the polls in any way possible, which in some states includes marijuana liberalization. At least six states are expected to have marijuana questions on the ballot this year.

Colorado and Washington, which each had referenda to legalize the drug on the ballot in 2012, saw the youth share of the vote jump between 5 and 12 percentage points that year over 2008, even as it increased only marginally nationwide.

The GW Battleground Poll of likely voters, conducted by the Tarrance Group and Lake Research Partners, asked voters how much more or less likely they would be to go to the polls "if there was a proposal on the ballot to legalize the use of marijuana."

The top response: "Much more likely," an option selected by 39 percent of respondents. The next most popular choice was "somewhat more likely," which garnered 30 percent of responses. Just 13 percent said they'd be somewhat or much less likely to vote, and 16 percent said it would make no difference.

Together, when rounded, that suggests that 68 percent of likely voters would be more likely to go to the polls if they could vote on a measure to legalize pot.

A breakdown of the numbers provided to National Journal shows liberals are more enthusiastic than moderates or conservatives, with 76 percent saying they would be more likely to vote if marijuana legalization were on the ballot, compared with 64 percent of conservatives and 61 percent of moderates.

"These numbers provide even more evidence that marijuana reform is a mainstream issue and that smart politicians would do well to start treating it as such," says Tom Angell, the founder of the pro-legalization group Marijuana Majority. "More politicians might want to find reasons to start saying good things about this issue."

Of course, Rogers isn't the only progressive Democrat running who wants to end prohibition. “Politicians, and I know a lot of them, tend not to seek out controversy,” said Daylin Leach, a state senator in Pennsylvania who is running for an open congressional seat in suburban Philadelphia and who has made legalization a central plank of his campaign. “You know the Wayne Gretzky line, ‘I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it will be.’ Well, most politicians want to skate where the puck already was.”

Leach introduced a bill in the Pennsylvania Senate this year that would have legalized marijuana. Passage remains unlikely, but if there were a secret ballot, he said, “it would pass overwhelmingly.” A conservative lawmaker who was publicly opposed to the bill, Leach said, told him privately, “I hope it passes so I can stop smoking pot in my living room and start on my front porch.”

The state senator is in a crowded field, but if he wins, he will join a small cadre of members of Congress who are backing full legalization. A bill introduced this year to decriminalize marijuana and turn regulatory power over to the states has 10 Democratic co-sponsors, and Republican Steve Stockman, who announced Monday that he was running for the Texas Senate seat now held by Republican John Cornyn, supports a bill mandating that the federal government respect state marijuana laws.

“We shouldn’t put people in the criminal justice system for smoking a plant which makes them feel giddy,” Leach said. “We are now requiring everyone, including our kids, to buy pot from behind the local bowling alley from someone they have never met before, instead of going into a state store in a strip mall, as you would to buy a bottle of vodka.”

The 2014 candidates’ pro-pot stance appears mostly to be a way for them to distinguish themselves in primaries where the candidates largely share the same views, particularly on social issues. In Maryland, for example, the candidate pushing legalization, Heather Mizeur, also is vying to be first openly gay governor of the state and is running a campaign designed to appeal to liberals and young people. Mizeur rejects “old paradigm assumptions about conventional wisdom and what is and isn’t safe to do in politics,” she said. “I am a candidate who never plays it safe. I always stand up for what I believe in. In the past, politics has been about catching up to where people are.”

This is, in part, a guest post Bellows did for DWT just over a month ago:

A few years ago, as executive director of the ACLU of Maine, I was discussing marijuana policy with a prosecutor. As we debated, he started reminiscing about his days as a pot smoker. At that point, I had to tell him that I’d never smoked pot due to my severe asthma. He thought this was funny, but I was troubled by the hypocrisy. When the prosecutor who is locking people up for marijuana laughs about his own use, something is terribly wrong. And when our last three U.S. Presidents have acknowledged marijuana use at the same time that poor kids-- particularly young males of color-- are getting thrown in jail for the same activity, we need change.

As a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, I support marijuana legalization. We need to end the war on drugs and reform our criminal justice system, and we cannot afford to wait. The United States incarcerates more people in total and more people per capita than any other country in the world, and the racial disparities are alarming. Even in my home state of Maine, which is the whitest state in the union, blacks are 2.1 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. Government spends billions of dollars each year enforcing counterproductive drug laws, which are truly the New Jim Crow. The economic and human rights costs are enormous.

Our limited public resources would be much better spent investing in drug treatment facilities and community education in a regulated system that promotes community health and safety. Instead of spending billions on a prison industrial complex, we could invest those funds in education, prevention and rehabilitation.

We should treat drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal one. Mainers have been using medical marijuana safely now for over a decade. I met a senior citizen recently whose wife just died of lung cancer. He told me that marijuana was a necessary part of her palliative care. His daughter risked arrest time and time again to bring them marijuana in her mother’s last months. Medical marijuana patients all across the country have similar heart-rending stories.

Maine is already a leader on marijuana policy. Maine voters overwhelmingly approved medical marijuana, first in 1999 and then again in 2009. Portland citizens just voted in a landslide to approve the recreational use of marijuana in small amounts for adults over 21. Now is the time for federal reform. We need a commonsense approach to drug policy based on science and liberty; we need to end prohibition. With your help, I will be a voice in the United States Senate for sensible drug policy.

Another Democratic Senate candidate, Jay Stamper, has a great deal of appeal to principled libertarians in South Carolina who detest Lindsay Graham's Big Brother/NSA-backing stands. Republican elected officials in the state are notorious drunkards and coke-heads… and hypocrites. This morning, Jay took it right to them: "I think it's time for politicians to put down their scotch and sodas and vote to legalize marijuana. Prohibition of marijuana, like alcohol before it, serves only to enrich and empower violent criminal cartels that turn our cities into war zones and corrupt our public institutions."

If you'd like to help Shenna Bellow's and Jay Stamper's campaigns, you can do it here. And Heather Mizeur's is here. Lee Rogers and Daylin Leach can both be found on this page.