Revolving Door Project | RDP Work Round-Up: Pre-Election Edition

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It’s time for another edition of an RDP Work Round-up to keep our loyal newsletter readers up-to-date with our blog posts. With the election less than a month away, now is the perfect time to look back at the polls, punditry, and policy debates that have dominated our news feeds lately. But first, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the devastating hurricanes affecting the south east.

Supercharged Hurricanes Due To Climate Change Highlight The Need For Disaster Relief

Hurricane Helene has devastated communities from Florida to North Carolina, leaving hundreds of thousands without power and killing at least 223 people. Hurricane Milton is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico and will soon make a historically destructive landfall in Florida.

While FEMA is on the ground providing food and water assistance, monetary relief payments, and other basic necessities, the Trump campaign is spreading misinformation and putting people at risk. This is nothing new. Trump is a notorious climate change denier. We’ve written about his administration’s disastrous stewardship of FEMA, and Project 2025 indicates the broader MAGA movement is serious in its skepticism of FEMA.

These are the types of issues we wish the media would ask about in primetime interviews and debates. The job of a president is to staff and manage executive branch agencies, and the ability to effectively administer disaster relief is a sign of whether they’ve done a good job. Asking candidates and their vice presidents how they would fund FEMA and work to mitigate climate disasters is much more salient than whether a candidate has shot a gun or attended the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. These are distractions from the real problems affecting livelihoods today.

Polls: The Good, The Bad, and the … Betting?

In the lead up to any elections, polls are bound to dominate a large portion of the conversation. Here at RDP, we mostly focus on the opinion polls that provide insights as to the most pressing issues that voters want a candidate to address.

The Good:

Our Jacob Plaza has been keeping our readers up to date on polls from both centrist and leftist outlets. The results overwhelmingly show a desire for a corporate crackdown: strong antitrust laws, enforcement actions against bad actors, less corporate influence over the government. A Tech Oversight Project survey showed 80% support for government action against corporate monopolies and 89% agreement among Democrats that corporate lobbyists and executives had too much influence. Our Henry Burke wrote about a Blueprint poll, a firm backed by billionaire Lina Khan-hater Reid Hoffman, both on our blog and in HackWatch with Dylan Gyuach-Lewis. Despite Hoffman’s personal agenda, Blueprint’s polls consistently show that populist economics are popular with swing state voters.

This is consistent with our prescription in September 2023: a Harris-led corporate crackdown is both good policy and good politics.

The Bad:

Unfortunately, some pundits are relying on less scientific evidence to push an agenda. Our Kenny Stancil wrote about the numerous methodological shortcomings of a Heatmap survey purporting to show majority support for Joe Manchin’s permitting reform bill. Rather than an insightful survey, it’s just another instance of supply-side liberals trying to engineer support for a bill that would be a step backwards in the fight against climate change.

The Betting:

If poorly designed polls weren’t bad enough, we’ve also seen an increasing number of neoliberals turn to election betting markets for insights on the state of the race. If that doesn’t sound ridiculous enough on its face, read these two pieces from Henry on the unreliability of gambling sites as political weathervanes.

More Housing, Less Gouging

Ever since ProPublica’s bombshell reporting price fixing in rental markets facilitated by software company RealPage, RDP has sounded the alarm about the need for federal action to protect tenants. Other pundits, however, have either ignored or mocked the issue. Our Julian Scoffield wrote about Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell’s stubborn refusal to mention RealPage despite its role in inflating housing costs. Henry Burke and Andrea Beaty wrote about Matt Yglesias’ anger that folks like us discuss the pernicious effects of price fixing rather than solely the (real) need to build more housing.

In a separate blog, Andrea covered the FTC’s enforcement action against Invitation Homes, the largest single-family home landlord in the country, for a litany of violations that exploited tenants. It’s a case in point that while the YIMBY desire for more housing is correct, it’s wrong to insist that we needn’t address other housing issues as well.

Oil Industry Malfeasance Abounds—Where is Congress?

In September, I wrote for Common Dreams about the inexplicable lack of subpoenas and oversight hearings of the oil industry. The last year has seen a price fixing scandal by ex-CEO of Pioneer Scott Sheffield and a quid pro quo between Trump and oil execs for a rollback of environmental regulations in exchange for campaign contributions. The Senate Committees on Energy and Natural Resources and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works have been silent. While the Budget and Finance committees sent letters to industry leaders, they have refused to comply. Rather than induce cooperation through subpoenas, the Committees merely sent more letters asking nicely. It was a weak-willed, wholly inadequate response to blatant corruption.

What happens when corruption goes unpunished? More corruption! Andrea wrote about yet another instance of collusion in the oil industry, this time between John Hess, CEO of Hess Corporation, and OPEC. The FTC unearthed the collusion and banned Hess from sitting on the board of Chevron following the merger of the two companies. That’s now two instances of collusion (that we know about) within six months. It’s the perfect time for Congress to hold the industry accountable through investigations and subpoenas that force these executives to testify under oath.

Independent Agency Spotlight Update

One of our ongoing projects is our Agency Spotlight where we keep track of appointments to leadership positions at independent federal agencies. Despite their importance, the goings-on at these agencies are often underreported, making it easier for corporations to have outsized influence. That’s why we do our best to keep an eye on who’s being nominated and how they’re voting. In September, our Toni Aguilar Rosenthal updated the spotlight, highlighting 17 new nominations since May. Toni also urged the Biden administration to ensure that key nominees to the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Farm Credit Administration (FCA) make it through the confirmation process.