Last week at a meeting in Louisville, the DLCC’s Board of Directors – made up of Democratic legislative leaders from across the country – voted to admit Tennessee’s Mike Turner as our newest board member.

Representing the 51st State House District (based in Davidson County) since 2000, Rep. Turner is the Caucus Chairman of the Tennessee House Democrats. But his commitment to public service extends far beyond the halls of the capitol. Rep. Turner is also an active member of his family’s church, three local chambers of commerce, and the professional associations representing Nashville firefighters and Tennessee state employees – along with many other community organizations he remains involved with.

Rep. Turner also serves as a local fire captain, and in that capacity he personally participated in the rescue of Nashville residents stranded in the devastating flooding earlier this year. The Tennessee House of Representatives honored his actions with a resolution of praise shortly thereafter, and a local news crew captured images of Rep. Turner wading through neck-deep floodwaters in order to bring residents to safer ground:

Finally, as a Democratic leader in one of the Democratic Party’s most important redistricting priority states this year (both legislative chambers are within just a few seats of returning to Democratic control), Rep. Turner’s guidance and expertise will prove invaluable as the 2010 campaign heats up.

Rep. Turner, welcome to the DLCC.

Sum of Change and Five Steps Forward Media provided live streaming coverage of many of the panels and presentations at Netroots Nation last week.

Their coverage includes a complete video of our Redistricting Panel, which featured State Senator Steven Horsford, a DLCC Board Member and the Majority Leader of the Nevada Senate; Executive Director Bill Burke of the Foundation for the Future; and our own Michael Sargeant, Executive Director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

You can watch the video below or at USTREAM:

We'd like to thank all of our participants for generously providing their time, and we'd also like to thank the Netroots community for helping us shine a light on this critically important issue.

The Family Research Council tried to make hay with our Legislative Priorities Survey, which showed (among other things) that over 80% of our readers and newsletter subscribers consider equal rights "somewhat" or "extremely" important. The FRC headline? "Homosexual Agenda is Low Priority—Even for Democrats." Huh?

They got there, of course, by conveniently forgetting about the 33% in the “somewhat” category. By that standard, this Pew Poll showing that only 48% of Republicans strongly oppose same-sex marriage “proves” that opposing equal rights is low priority for Republicans. (To be clear, the Pew survey was a scientifically constructed poll - ours was a non-scientific, self-selecting survey.)

Now, as anyone involved in politics will tell you, 80% of respondents calling an issue important is pretty close to monolithic. Not quite as monolithic or as intense as our education supporters (who are staring down the barrel at billions in school cuts and hundreds of thousands of laid-off teachers) or our job promotion supporters (because of the recession), but overall support for equal rights was in the same ballpark.

So the FRC's glee was more than a bit puzzling. But it did remind us of a Boston Globe article last week about a university experiment exploring what happens when political ideologues are presented with verifiable evidence that something they believe is false:

The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

"Backfiring" would certainly explain the Family Research Council. They saw a document showing equal rights to be wildly popular among the progressive base, and they thought it proved the opposite. What's more, the FRC is based in Washington, D.C., which approved civil marriage equality last year. Yet faced with such compelling, empirical evidence in his own backyard that equal rights shouldn’t be a big deal, the author of the FRC’s blog post continues to suggest that homosexuality should be considered a mental illness and that gays are “ten times more likely to molest children” than straight people. Both claims have been thoroughly discredited and represent bigotry, plain and simple.

Sorry, but when the DLCC wants scientific commentary, we’ll find someone whose boss didn’t give $82,500 to David Duke or give speeches before racist hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Should no one meeting those strict standards be available, we'll settle for someone with a strong enough grasp of basic arithmetic that they can add two percentages together.

We asked for your opinion, and you responded -- loud and clear.

Thousands of you from across the country answered our call to participate in the DLCC's 2010 Legislative Priorities Survey.

Now that we have the results, we're ready to show Democratic state legislators nationwide what you -- our supporters -- value.

This report will be formally presented to the DLCC's Board of Directors, made up of prominent state legislative leaders from across the country, later this year.

But these are your priorities. We believe you should get the first look.

Click here for a sneak preview of the official survey report for our 2010 Legislative Priorities Survey.

Among other key findings, the economy and job creation are now the top legislative priority of our readers in every region of the country.

More than 60% of you agreed that states should pursue health care reform ideas that go beyond the new federal health care law.

And more than 80% of you agreed that protecting education from recessionary budget cuts is extremely important.

Download the complete report to see the full results for each issue, including comprehensive regional breakdowns.

Part of our mission at the DLCC is to make sure Democratic voters have a voice in their state legislatures, and we were honored to help so many of you make your voices heard.

Thank you for sharing your views and for everything you do to support the Democratic cause.

Sincerely,

Michael Sargeant
Executive Director
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee

Big-ticket primary races dominated the media coverage this week, but there were several under-the-radar results we at the DLCC found interesting.

• Dennis Nolan Defeated: Wouldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Which is to say, if Republican State Senator Dennis Nolan of Nevada hadn’t been caught on tape telling a witness in a sexual assault case that it would be “very financially beneficial” to change her story, and if he hadn’t then posted intimate details about the victim’s sexual history on his campaign website, he might still be the Republican nominee for Nevada SD-09. We still think he should resign.
  
  

• Board Member Karen Bass Nominated for Congress: DLCC Board Member and California Assembly Speaker Emeritus Karen Bass was nominated to succeed Diane Watson in the 33rd Congressional District last night. We wish her the best of luck this November.
  
  

• Veto-Proof Majority Possible in Nevada?: With only 21 members in the Nevada Senate, the 12-member Democratic caucus is in a unique position. They’re only two seats away from losing control of the chamber, but they’re also just two seats away from a veto-proof 2/3 majority. Earlier in the cycle, the former seemed possble, but now (especially with Nolan’s loss above) prognosticators are growing more bullish about the latter. And with Democrats already commanding a 2/3 majority in the State Assembly, the Las Vegas Sun is suggesting that the targeted State Senate races are even more important than this year’s gubernatorial election.
  
  

• Parties Split California Special Elections: A traditionally-Democratic Assembly seat (AD-43) and a traditionally-Republican Senate seat (SD-37) were both filled in special elections last night. Each party’s winning candidate pulled a comfortable 58% of the vote. Congratulations to Assemblyperson-Elect Mike Gatto, who won Assembly District 43 for the Democrats.

Yesterday, Michael Sargeant sat down with David Chalian and Rick Klein of ABC New's Top Line to discuss redistricting and our effort for 2010.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee has been heavily featured in news reports nationwide following the release of our 2010 strategic planning memorandum.

This, of course, is the final election cycle before redistricting takes place. And with November fast approaching, local and national media are starting to take notice of the DLCC’s efforts on behalf of Democratic legislative candidates.

In addition to a lengthy Associated Press article that was picked up by many of the national papers, other media outlets have begun exploring how our strategic choices will effect local races in key states like Texas, New York, Ohio, Nevada, and North Carolina.

We’ve also been the subject of at least one local TV report, by Indianapolis-based CBS affiliate WISH TV:

After a court ruling established marriage equality in Iowa, Democrats (lead by State Senate Majority Leader and DLCC Chairman Mike Gronstal) promised to block any bill to ban same-sex marriage in Iowa. A few days ago, Iowa’s Democratic legislators delivered on that promise, effectively blocking a Republican-sponsored marriage ban for the rest of the legislative session:

What Republicans wanted was the right to pull House Joint Resolution 6 out of a committee so that it would be placed on the debate calendar and avoid a legislative deadline this week.

The effort failed in the Senate where a vote was not taken. However, all 18 Senate Republicans signed a petition circulated by Sen. David Johnson, R-Ocheyedan (…)

The House spent almost 30 minutes on a rarely used “call-of-the-House” in which each of the 100 members were ordered into the chambers to vote unless they were previously excused. The House measure ultimately failed in a 45 to 54 vote that was mostly along party lines.

What’s most striking is that each chamber had just a single Democrat willing to go on record supporting the ban. Every other rank-and-file legislator, including many Democrats facing tough re-election campaigns in conservative districts, stood with Majority Leader Gronstal and House Speaker Pat Murphy on the right side of history.

The good folks over at Bleeding Heartland took a moment to acknowledge the role Leadership played in both results:

Murphy and Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal strongly supported the Iowa Supreme Court's Varnum v Brien ruling, and they deserve a lot of credit for holding their caucuses together today. As Gronstal has promised, Republicans will not succeed in writing discrimination into our state's constitution.

Hear at the DLCC, we couldn’t be more proud of our Chairman and all the Iowa Democrats who stood up for equality this week.

Reliable broadband service is one of the key ingredients for job-creation in the 21st Century, and Sen. Sean Burrage, a DLCC Board Member, is working hard to make sure his rural Oklahoma district doesn’t get left behind.

Last week, Burrage lent his star-power to a meeting between AT&T and local officials in Pryor, Oklahoma to help determine the fastest way get broadband available in Pryor:

Key officials met at City Hall on Monday morning to discuss Internet upgrades in Pryor and surrounding areas.

Senator Sean Burrage, Representative Ben Sherrer and Oklahoma Corporation Commissioner Dana Murphy were among those attending the informal meeting. They joined Mayor Jimmy Tramel, Lucy Belle Schultz, Barbara Hawkins, Bruce Taylor, John Hawkins and others to hear from AT&T representatives.

AT&T Director – Regulatory Jason Constable, and Craig Cromley, Area Manager, were there to discuss broadband service in general and to field questions on how Pryor can be progressive regarding Internet service availability.

As telecommunications evolve, it takes time for the latest advances to reach every part of the country, but Pryor is on its way. Three quarters of the town is now DSL-capable, though upgrading to a 3G or 4G network remains a challenge.

With the benefits of a global marketplace and potential new job development at stake, Sen. Burrage is determined to help Pryor and all of rural Oklahoma meet that challenge successfully.

With the books closed on the 2009 Election (a few important specials notwithstanding), focus is now beginning to shift to the stakes for 2010, which puts redistricting squarely in the spotlight. We're now seeing the first of what will likely be many stories from the national media about next year's election.

Bob Benenson, writing for CQ, offers a particularly good breakdown of what to expect in 2010:

What’s not at all clear now is whether one party will dominate redistricting and have the latitude to go for broke, or whether each party will control maps with comparable numbers of seats, giving the process more of a play-it-safe mood. That’s because, 48 weeks from Election Day 2010, the political climates in the states are far from fully formed, and so it’s too soon to predict the overall winner of the campaigns for the governors’ mansions and statehouse gavels.

To maximize their chances, each party has a related organization — the Republican State Leadership Committee and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee — to provide advice and money to state legislative candidates. The Democratic group plans to spend $20 million or more, and the GOP group plans on spending as much as $22 million on such 2010 races.

At the DLCC, we are ready. We've been preparing for this for some time. But that doesn't mean we won't need plenty of help from supporters like you.

Check out RedistrictingFacts.com to learn more about the process and continue coming to DLCC.org for breaking news and important updates.