Our city allows 16 and 17 year olds to vote in municipal elections but my 17 year old was lazy and didn't register. On the day of the deadline I registered him via the RMV but apparently that doesn't count for the deadline because they don't immediately communicate it to the city. They said I can come to the election commission to try to fix it but don't know if it's worth the time. Although these are elections where one vote has made a difference.
Anyway the big local topic is making a network of protected bike lanes around the whole city and of course people are freaking out about losing a couple hundred free street parking spots. There was a big flame war on our school mailing list which is supposed to be only for school announcements and someone said Well sometimes people who drive to the school need to park when they drive back home.
We don't have many elections atm, but there's a special election for one of the state assembly seats from SF. The frontrunners are one current supervisor and one former supervisor, both well-liked and -connected, both progressive of course, but the former one much more overtly NIMBY.
Two days ago, the supervisors rejected a housing tower with a large affordable share, on a valet parking lot downtown. Not only was it more spurious grounds than usual (so much so the state is investigating), but it was in the district of the current supervisor who's running, and he supported it; usually they defer to the local supervisor's preference. It made a lot more sense when I read that the vote was intended as punishment to him for running.
In a small city on this side of the Bay (not my city), a special election council seat is being vied for by a low-income Black woman who works for a housing land trust, and a white Swedish immigrant who works for a tech nonprofit (very Giridharadas). The latter, who has a hyphenated-on Chinese name by marriage, apparently referred to herself at a forum as "the BIPOC candidate" and cited in a questionnaire her expertise at BIPOC inclusion based on some nonprofit thing-or-other focused on Asian-Americans.
The latter also has a long testy letter to the editor of a local politics blog complaining that the current council elevated one Planning Commission candidate over others because they... knew, had worked with, and liked them. Ma'am, this is a politics?
We have mayor and city council elections, but really everything was already decided in the primary and there isn't the tiniest modicum of doubt as to who will win the general. And any of the top candidates would have been fine in any event. It's nice living in the People's Republic.
That's our nickname! Incidentally the original bar closed but they're reopening as the New Republik a mile away. Marty Peretz lives down the street from us but I don't believe he's involved.
We have a contested mayoral race which should be a safe bet for the Democratic candidate, but the Republicans nominated an obviously unstable racist so I'm still nervous.
We also have a school board spot contested in the general. The incumbent lost the primary and is now running as a Republican (which she can do because she had the most votes in the Republican primary due to write ins). I'm not even going to bother to learn the issues because the main issue is if you lose a Democratic primary and run against the winner, fuck you.
It looks like Boston is going to get an awesome Progressive as mayor.
We have city council (half the seats are up), mayoral, and municipal judges.
Lots of turnover on the council, but I think the nutball quotient is going to go down. My guy is good, and the local paper actually published my LTE in support.
Our mayor is running for a fifth term, and so there are a number of 'you gotta fight the power' types who don't want him reelected. Also a good 35% of the electorate is Republican (nutty outnumbering mainstream) and this may have increased some with annexation. The challenger is a law student and former Marine, who emigrated from West Africa as a child. He's also the subject of numerous sexual harassment claims, the poor handling of which has led 2 law school officials to resign. (He says it's all fake, brought on by minions of the mayor!) The challenger is prickly and combative, and refuses to say what he is going to cut to balance his tax cuts, wants to ship homeless people to California or put them in treatment, and has pronounced our police department racism free. IMO, the challenger shows neither talent nor aptitude for the position, but 'we gotta get rid of King John' may carry the day. I'm knocking doors for the mayor tomorrow morning.
Because of legislative changes, we're electing all three municipal judge positions. Incumbents are very jail and high fine oriented. Three challengers have emerged from the defense community, running as a slate, and proposing common sense changes that will make a huge difference for people charged with crimes of poverty. They might win, but I'm prepared for disappointment on this one.
I'm just about to go out and vote for Eric Adams for mayor which feels like a weird thing to do what with being convinced that he's completely terrible.
As far as I can tell everyone running here (minus the one loser who is trying a doomed write-in campaign) labels themselves with progressive themes, if not outright socalist ones (at least in the DSA sense), so there's actually an annoying lack of heuristic filters to apply.
Re-litigating the battle about whether schools should have re-opened sooner last spring seems to be a major factor, though. Several people I know have put some of the candidates on their shit list because they supported the teacher's union in trying not to reopen very quickly.
(Did the dean of students actually tell the women complaining that they should be wary about filing with the title IX office because if the investigation doesn't support them, they'll have trouble getting admitted to practice? We may never know, because I think her resignation has probably derailed the investigation into that . . .)
12.2 is a thing here too, but I don't remember which was which side.
so there's actually an annoying lack of heuristic filters to apply.
Another reason to focus on housing - it sets apart different progressives from each other.
There was a shooting on my block yesterday afternoon. I'm undecided about whether to become a "Back to the '70s! Something Lou Reed something cheap real estate" hipster or a four-eyed "Public safety is a condition precedent to progress" bore.
Did Lou Reed live to be old enough to become a public-safety bore? I don't remember.
I was just trying to explain him to Sally. "He was the head of the Guardian Angels? No, you don't remember them? They were a vigilante organization... that makes them sound bad. Not that they were much use, but I don't think there were any bad GA stories I remember." I mean, nothing against him, but he's a Republican whose big campaign issue is that he has thirty cats.
17: He only died a few years ago, but I'm pretty sure he never got particularly reactionary.
I was about to make a Guardian Angels joke but then I figured that nobody would remember the name. I had no idea he was still around. I hope he still has the hat.
Stupid recall is going down in flames! Still a few days for ballots to trickle in by mail, but that's very unlikely to change the outcome.
New Jersey has governor and all state legislative seats open to voting. The very boring technocratic Democratic governor will probably win re-election, even though we were NUMBER ONE!!! in Covid deaths per capita until a few weeks ago. Thank you, Alabama and Mississippi! His state Covid policy was to do whatever Cuomo did but with less Powerpoint, and apparently less groping. My local State Assembly incumbents both have four syllable names ending with vowels, and in this very Italian-American district that's what it takes to win. I refuse on principle to vote for the State Senator who named a highway after himself, but he will also win. I believe the expectation is for very few seats to change parties, and for Democrats to remain fully in control.
If there are any issues in the township and local school boards I haven't been able to figure them out.
both have four syllable names ending with vowels, and in this very Italian-American district that's what it takes to win
Nothing wrong with that.
We don't seem to have any elections this November, which feels really unusual. Our race for my council district already has billboards up and candidates door knocking; it was within a dozen votes the last time the seat was open, and the local council member has termed out. I like one of the replacements (she's a city planner for other small cities), and would be fine with any of the three on top so far. But we're far enough out that if there's dirt, it's probably being held for maximum advantage in March.
Nothing too much here. I am interested in the turnout/voting patterns in the whitebread middle/working class precinct I work at on Election Day. It has sadly been a decent bellwether the past few cycles.
I'm not trying to have a deep understanding of NY politics, but from a tiny brief surface look, is it kindof a bummer that James is running against Hochul? Doesn't Hochul seem like a good choice and why make her life hard?
Or is it just good, because awesome women running against each other is a no-lose situation?
Hochul is doing fine, but no one ever intentionally voted for her -- she's Jerry Ford to Cuomo's Nixon (she was elected, but as Cuomo's running mate, not as a political figure in her own right). If she's impressive enough after nine months or so as Governor to win a primary, terrific, but there's no reason for anyone to step aside for her.
23, 24: To be fair, the Burzi-chelli/Tallia-ferro team in the State Assembly has delivered a "wind turbine port" to our district, groundbreaking a month ago. Allegedly, if the project is competed, thousands of well-paid blue collar workers will build gigantic wind turbines there and load them onto barges to to create renewable energy off the Jersey Shore. Seems cool.
Also to be fair, although suitably tetrasyllabic, Tallia-ferro is African-American. He was a slightly famous college football player once.
OK. I don't really have any grounds for an opinion on James v. Hochul (and no need to develop one), so I will continue on this path.
Sounds like even the taxis don't like Sliwa.
Taliaferro is a bit different from most Italian-American names, isn't it? By being the name of an early rich Virginia family, and often pronounced "Tolliver". (Take that, Chumleys.)
I've been working my ass off to get a friend of mine elected to city council. She's an opiate widow, single mother of two, works at a homeless shelter, and is a badass social justice warrior. The other guy had a campaign film that featured him playing golf.
29: Taliaferro turns out to be the last name of several slightly famous football players. Your guy was the fourth I found doing a search (three were black). I did recall his story after reading about it (career ending spinal injury at Penn State followed by a surprising recovery of the ability to walk).
29: Taliaferro turns out to be the last name of several slightly famous football players. Your guy was the fourth I found doing a search (three were black). I did recall his story after reading about it (career ending spinal injury at Penn State followed by a surprising recovery of the ability to walk).
31: "I'm driving here! I'm driving here!"
33: Good luck, Spike. Fingers crossed.
We just have city council, school board, and municipal court judges on the ballot. I've been having a tough time figuring out who to vote for. There doesn't seem to be any candidates running on a pro-covid, anti-critical race theory platform here. That's good, but choosing between school board candidates that all say the same cliches about making the schools work for everyone is difficult.
See if any of them can bring Skyline back to Columbus.
39:. There is a Skyline Chili open less than a mile away from me.
37: Thanks. The race seems to be going through a last-minute mud slinging phase. My candidate's being accused of taking "special interest money" for having an Act Blue account. It's too bad she has to raise funds and not have the inherent independence that comes with, you know, being rich.
So, one of the Republican candidates for county council just died of covid. Got vaccinated but waited too long and was sick the day after he got the shot. I guess nobody mentioned he was sick before he died, so they were just going to vote for a dying guy.
Given the area, I guess they still might vote for the dead guy to get another election. Anyway, it really is remarkable how so many of the people dying of covid this time around look like me if I were trying to look like a tool.
To the extent that the Loudon County bathroome sexual assault thing and CRT may make a difference in Virginia let me just say Fuck You to everyone glossing over the CRT astroturf and giving such heartfelt both sides attention to "cancel cuilture." Jesus fuck.
His style will probably be offputting to many, but Carlos Maza's recitation of who so many of the "concerned bout CRT" parents are is good work and the kind of the thing the big media fucks don't even bother to report. Their approach reminds me of 2008 when the R attention to the stupid New Black Panther thing led to both the Times and WaPo assigning people to cover the RW "beat" because they felt they had missed the story. (of course the only story was that racist like Megyn Kelley and others at Fox and elsewhere were utterly promoting a bunch of hysteria and lies about a nothingburger.)
I shall infect all the threads! No one will stop me!
So far tonight I've had equal numbers of trick-or-treaters and political campaigners at the door.
Trick or treat! I forgot all about it and then someone came to the door. Just the next door neighbors with their 2-year old. Fortunately we had a small bit of candy ... (She will not eat it of course.) First time in a number of years to have any show up.
We had three kids, one of whom was so small I had to remind him that if you hold a lollipop in each hand, you can't grab a piece of candy.
We've had more than 50 so far, and it isn't yet 8.
Amadea was quite insistent that we give out full-size candy, so I got what was in retrospect probably a crazy amount of candy at Costco. No trick or treaters yet, but it's early still. Not sure how many we'll get since this is our first Halloween in the new house, but we got quite a few at the old one and we're now in a more prominent location so I think we'll get more.
I heard the cool people were handing out edibles, but I'm much too cheap to buy that for a stranger's kid. Or a friend's kid. Or my own kid.
It's just a ratchet. First it was just a fun size, then it's two fun size. Then it's grab a handful or full-size. Then they say people are passing out edibles. What's next? $20 bills?
I forgot to tell my candidate about the old "hand out full-sized Hershey bars with your campaign sticker on the back" trick for winning local elections.
We live by the Governor, who gives out full sized candy bars and attracts fleets of minivans from all over the city. We go through many five pound Costco bags of fun size candy trying to keep up with the crowds, so I can only imagine what the Gov's budget must be.
Very few trick or treaters so far! Oh well.
We live in a popular neighborhood. We handed out 18 bags of fun sized candies one at a time, then another 4 bags letting the kids take a handful. When we moved here, I wanted to hand out full sized candy bars but quickly realized that it would be very expensive.
Trick or treater count at this house: zero.
I lost track of how much candy we gave out. About a month ago we bought two Costco bags of candy intended for trick-or-treaters. Over the past few weeks we ate a good fraction of one of them ourselves. On the 29th Cassandane took Atossa to a Halloween event but got the time wrong and arrived just as they were cleaning up, so they gave us some excess candy for us to give out. (Some of it expired in the spring of 2020, but anyways.) Last night some friends who live in areas with less trick-or-treating came over to our house to hang out and one of them brought candy of her own to distribute.
Our visiting friend's excess candy went home with her. We had no excess Halloween candy. Atossa had a good haul from her trick-or-treating. Both she and one friend wound up crying a little after the middle of the expedition about who could hold whose hand. Six-year-olds are very dramatic, apparently.
Sort of on the topic of local politics, a couple police officers in our town are specifically named in a lawsuit filed by Wendy Davis from when the Biden-Harris bus was getting ambushed and harrassed by a Trump train through Heebieville and had to cancel the local event out of safety concerns. Apparently they called 911 a bunch of times and the 911 callers minimized it and the officers joked about it. I hope those fuckers regret their choices.
Oh, maybe this should have gone in the Jan 6th thread. Who can say.
They won't if they have a lawyer with any sense at all.
62: Maybe the person who already discussed it in the Jan 6th thread could say...
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_17813.html#2124325
Will you look at that! If I see them, I'll let them know!
48, 56: This year was quite light for giving out candy -- about the same or even lighter than last year. Maybe 10 groups, most of 3-6 kids, over the course of the night. The first showed up quite late, then there was a minor rush, and after 1.5 hours they were done.
I am such a complain-opus today, but I hate how we Halloween. Our dear friends throw a party. Everyone shows up between 6-7. It gets dark and then we leave. I am jumping out of my skin at this point with the ridiculousness of shuffling 30 people out the door to go trick or treating when we should have left over an hour ago. No one feels any sense of urgency.
We walk down one block to the block with the continuous stream of people. Most houses have their lights out because they don't want to buy $600 of candy. Of the remaining ones, most are out of candy already, due to us leaving SO FUCKING LATE. I get cranky about the whole thing and the kids are bummed that they got so little candy.
Each year I vow that we should just trick or treat separately, on our own empty block where there's the same number of dark houses, but very few trick or treaters, and then show up to the party. But then last year we didn't actually trick or treat, and the year before was raining hard, so it's been several years and I forgot how irritating the whole scene is for me.
I'm not a huge fan of Halloween either. I'd rather just have "buy yourself a bag of peanut butter cups" day every quarter or so.
Both my current house and my last one are/were a quarter mile or so from streets that decorate and are festive and attract huge numbers of kids from all over the place, but few or none spill over to my street (this was a "none" year).
69: Can you hijack the party and have it at your place next year, so you can control the schedule?
Some people like hosting parties, Moby. Granted, I wouldn't have figured LB for one of them.
I guess, but one thing I've noticed is that it's much easier to leave someone else's house than kick them out of yours if you aren't trying to end the relationship.
It's like you've never heard of carbon monoxide alarms.
Fucking election day tomorrow. Almost forgot I have to work it.
I mean, me too. Mostly I'm glad I don't have to deal with anything like that in my life.
I guess I don't know how to set of my CO alarm without like running the car in the garage or something.
75,76: air horn $13. Cuerno de Perro (same thing) a little less.
So, the city and university are now requiring vaccination. I've been thinking about this for like two minutes and come to a conclusion. You aren't likely to get a religious exemption and the easiest* way to get a medical exemption that will stick for those who don't already have one is to get covid.
* If you are emotionally committed to covid being not dangerous.
I got the idea from when Keanu Reeves shoots his partner to thwart Dennis Hopper.
I voted. No one gave me a sticker but the voting was done by scanning paper which seems better.
82: Have they declared covid a medical exemption? I never heard of it being so. Some resisters were trying to make it be. (Even before the research about vaccines being a better protector.)
You aren't supposed to leave the house if you've got active covid, are you?
A friend of mine's office just got hit by the one employee who wasn't vaccinated super-spreading breakthrough infections to literally everyone else who was at work that day.
I should be more grateful for my coworkers.
We have such bad ventilation, but nobody except me ever goes to the office. And you aren't even allowed to if you aren't vaccinated.
So if Republicans control Virginia through 2024 they're just going to allocate the states EVs directly to Trump, right?
Probably. It's apparently what the people want, since I keep hearing the complaint that McAuliffe was too anti-Trump.
He won with the dream Rep combo that McConnell has been preaching. The Trumpist base fired up plus enough affluent white voters ignore the Trumpist part (and non-motivated liberals).
Yuck.
My candidate left it all on the floor and lost by 36 votes. I'm bummed.
Yeah, its a shame how difficult it is to get good people elected.
I'm very sorry, Spike. That sounds awful.
(Also I'm annoyed that I'll have to see Glenn Youngkin's stupid smarmy face for the next four years.)
97: Damnit, I'm sorry.
My two candidates both appear to be losing.
Local races have been pretty good. Our new mayor is someone who I know (a tiny bit) personally, and I supported her campaign with money early on, so if I ever need something... well, I might not get totally ignored. City council is respectable. The school board candidate I voted for lost, but I wasn't deeply attached to that one.
The outgoing mayor is in fine trolling form about the dead-ender who lost the primary and attempted a write-in campaign.
Our dead-ender who lost the primary but stayed in the race ran as a Republican and is getting 30% of the vote, which is a very strong showing for a Republican in Pittsburgh. He came in 2nd in the Republican primary but the winner of the Republican primary, who was the incumbent mayor who lost the Democratic primary, had some dignity.
On the other hand, after running that race as well as she did, she's now an established politician with political capital. Probably the favorite for a State Rep seat opening up next year.
Interesting trivia: the party in the White House has lost 11 of the last 12 VA governor races, going back to 1977.
1. How did McCauliffe get the nomination? I mean, I would have held my nose, but he already had the job and isn't particularly exciting.
2. Do we have any NJ commenters and does anyone know why that is so close?
Locally the YIMBY slate captured a 2/3 majority on the city council.
Stepping through the rounds of counting in a multiple seat ranked choice election is actually pretty exciting.
I can't help but wonder if aggressive public investigations of Trump and his henchmen might have better maintained Democratic morale and cut down on infighting, and prevented the Republicans from making the conversation about CRT and not Trump.
I can't help but wonder if aggressive public investigations of Trump and his henchmen might have better maintained Democratic morale and cut down on infighting, and prevented the Republicans from making the conversation about CRT and not Trump.
Austin voted 2 to 1 against a proposition that would have required the city to hire hundreds more cops at the expense of the rest of the city's budget. So relieved.
It was sponsored by the same Republican org that successfully passed the camping ban last year, so we were a little worried.
How did McCauliffe get the nomination?
He was considered a safe bet over the other option of a young, interesting Black female progressive. Turns out that was a really bad decision.
I think the only thing Democrats can do to prevent fascism at this point is to take over small rural states. Wouldn't hurt to also infiltrate urban police departments too.
Turns out that was a really bad decision.
...that they never, ever stop making.
I think the only thing Democrats can do to prevent fascism at this point is to take over small rural states.
A lot of discussion among liberals takes the form of: The Democrats are screwed unless they [do this completely inconceivable thing.]
Much of the rest of the discussion consists of: The Democrats are screwed unless they [adopt my preferences and disregard the views of voters].
Me, I no longer try to complete that sentence. The Democrats are screwed.
We had a wonderfully complete repudiation of Republicans here. Two years ago, the Rs won 2 of 6 city council seats. This time, none of then got 41% of the vote.
I have worked my way through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief and arrived at "acceptance."
112, 114 -- you guys understand your logical fallacy here, right?
116: Yay! In our increasingly Balkanized nation, the localities are where good things will still happen. When SCOTUS gets around to outlawing abortion nationally (fetuses are citizens, don'cha know) I'm going to be saying, "States rights!"
118: Yes, but who does Terry McAuliffe excite? Did anybody here have a reaction other than weary resignation to his candidacy?
I guess that explains why my fan fiction is not well rated.
115: Okay, then you're left with playing a longer game converting young white people rather than alienating them and hoping the Federalist Society leaves us enough democracy that fascism is short lived.
119 We have a bunch of school board seats up next year, but I'm pretty optimistic. I observed the count last night -- all the way to the end -- and the most gratifying part was at 8:15 pm when all the Republican observers went home, once it became clear that they weren't going to get anywhere on anything. (They'd been swaggering a bit at 7:30). Least favorite was talking with my Dem friend about our upcoming congressional race, and realizing that each of the 3 announced candidates may be no match for Ryan fucking Zinke.
120 One should be very wary of assuming that a candidate would create a context-changing level of excitement in a general election if they couldn't create a context-changing level of excitement in the primary.
That is to say, I doubt that Democrats were going to win Virginia with either of those two candidates; this result was consistent with the last 40 years of VA governor races. But McAuliffe is a model of bland.
MSM complicity in the fake CRT panic is surely a much bigger factor than whether a candidate was 'bland.'
122: Yup. Acceptance. We liberals want an honest history taught in the schools, but any honest history has to include the fact that the US has shit on democracy for the entirety of its existence, and that change for the better -- even change that is obviously necessary -- can take a long, long time, and can be reversed. Millions lived and died in the 90-or-so years between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act.
At this rate, James Carville is never going to stop sending me emails about alarming things in the polling data.
125: Oh, undoubtedly in this race, yes. But the uninspiring bench is a general problem across the party and across cycles.
125: The Democrats are screwed unless they persuade the media to report issues accurately and in the appropriate context.
And no result is ever monocausal.
126 Maybe the answer here is to get less wound up about what is left out of the story in school, and spend more time working to add stuff in through with the culture. As the Sage of NJ put it, we learned more from a 3 minute record than we ever learned in school.
As the Sage of NJ put it, "we learned more from a 3 minute record than we ever learned in school".
Is that about "We didn't start the fire"?
OK, now, I'm finally despairing for the country.
I wanted to post a youtube of the slow version, but nothing popped right up.
Much as I hate to claim him, Billy Joel isn't from NJ, he's ours.
Christina Aguilera is our native singer. Or Mac Miller.
Apparently Joel is to Long Island as Springsteen is to New Jersey? Except that Springsteen isn't nearly as embarrassing.
It's possible this whole derailment happened to avoid me acknowledging something nice about New Jersey.
Earworm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxVu41Vsthg
I suppose I don't think Springsteen is in fact embarrassing (only most of the time), so that could have been phrased better.
Back to our local election, an earlier headline for this story was 'out with the conservatives, in with the socialists' -- https://missoulacurrent.com/government/2021/11/missoula-city-council-6/
142 If you think anything in that link is even a little bit embarrassing for Bruce, you might want to check your settings.
Springsteen leaves me cold (it's not him, it's me, something about his music just hits in a place I don't appreciate at all), but his rejection of Christie's fawning makes me
deeply, spitefully happy.
Except for the one time Obama asked him to hug Christie to give hope to suffering New Jersians. I don't want to presume, but I'm guessing that even Kraab might have considered a sincere and plausibly argued request from the President of the United States in these circumstances.
No, embarrassing to be the Christie kind of fan, in very particular.
Maybe the answer here is to get less wound up about what is left out of the story in school, and spend more time working to add stuff in through with the culture.
This is why I was mad that the sea shanty fad came and went with inspiring any new labor anthems.
Like Steve Bannon said, politics is downstream of culture. If we want to with the politics we've got to figure out how to win the culture.
The problem is we kind of did win the culture but then 30% of the county decided culture was disposable and political power was not.
133: I was trying to think of a "3-minute record" that taught history. Maybe the proto-CRT song, "Only a Pawn in Their Game".
Your loyal New Jersey correspondent has no idea why the election is so close, except that people are annoyed with the national Democratic party and all politics is national.
The governor's race may be less close as mail in ballots are still trickling in. Apparently the plan for counting votes was to make everything appear as suspicious as possible: Democratic strongholds not reporting anything at all for the first few hours, no consistency and no transparency about whether individual precinct totals include mail in votes or not, etc. We have had mail in voting only wince 2020, so no one knows how many to expect or whether there will be party differences.
Locally my tetrasyllabic and job creating state assembly members may have lost their "safe" seats to two women named Beth. State Senator Route 322 Bypass* is losing to a truck driver with no political experience named Durr, which would mean a new President of the State Senate, an improvement unless the majority changes hands. These races may be affected by the mail in votes that haven't arrived yet.
*So called because he renamed the former Route 322 Bypass after himself, and I accept that they have the same name now.
151: You're really, really not a Springsteen fan.
152: Apparently the plan for counting votes was to make everything appear as suspicious as possible
As an added fillip apparently this morning a batch of mail-in votes in Essex County were scanned twice, pushing Murphy to his first lead by a few thousand and then back to behind when they corrected it. (Now up by 15K and per 152 poised to increase that as more mail-ins* are counted.)
*In the precinct I work out, the mail-in/in-person divide seems to have gotten even bigger than last year. Mail-ins ~5:1 D, in-person 2.5:1 R; which resulted in a slight R majority. (One of the "closest in" suburban precincts to go R*.)
*Using the Supreme Court race results. A disappointing loss for Ds.
154: Ah, I see now that they were not double scanned but provided in an EV breakout in addition to being in the total count and some media added them on top. Still providing fodder (not that any was needed).
Apparently Dems are good at stealing NJ and Pres in 2020 not good at stealing VA in 2021 and a bunch of Senate/House races in 2020.
And now a young man has joined the 3 women running for our not quite yet defined congressional seat. Progressive populism, I guess you'd call his position -- he's a big proponent of the progressive excitement theory of politics we see around. I'm happy to vote for whichever candidate wins the nomination, but will mostly sit the race out before the primary, I think.
The primary isn't until June, so that's plenty of time for any of the four of them to show that they can put together a movement within the Dem community that can be scaled up to win the general.
155.1 Wait, are you telling me that media is trash? Oh, how could you?
157: Actually this one just seemed to have been an honest misunderstanding over whether the county had the EVs included in the total.
I ranked 12 candidates in a 9 person race but my #1 choice won on the final ballot redistribution so all that ranking was pointless.
Our machines were new this year (Dominion!), or maybe they had them last year but I didn't vote in person. They're much slower but validate that all your choices are allowed and allow you to correct errors. According to the link above there were no invalid ballots out of 20k+. But they did cause some lines- voting was three separate sheets and each sheet took 20 seconds to accept and there were two machines for the precinct.
Heh, the dead Republican lost. I was assuming he'd win.
At least he didn't live to see it.
When the wingnuts talk about CRT, what they're really talking about is the broader racial/historical reckoning our society has been going through and will continue to go through. The wingnuts have the power to prevent this from being led by teachers in the public schools.
My idea now is that this goes forward sort of on the same model as school prayer. Teachers can't lead it, but students can. Some smart people should start publishing guides for student groups.
We didn't do anything bad and if we did it was a long time ago and if it wasn't, we'll make it worse if you bring it up.
Very common Republican talking point- I wasn't X until you said I was, because if you're going to call me that I might as well do it.
X = homophobic, racist, sexist, etc. Only others have agency, never the "party of personal responsibility."
I have it on a business card.
164: States rights! My (mostly) Maryland-raised kids got very solid history educations, and that won't change, at least in my part of MD.
The nicer suburbs had elections where anti-mask, anti-CRT candidates lost. The sort of new-middle-class suburbs further out did not fare so well.
Dead thread but per 152: Apparently the plan for counting votes was to make everything appear as suspicious as possible
Here's the shitheels at Politico doing their part to provide fodder for the deranged and disingenuous.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has won reelection, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli in a closer-than-expected race in which the Democrat actually trailed during most of the early vote count
169:Ah, did not notice that pattern. In general my read (but might be wrong) that confronted with the local crazy for school boards most places rejected it. I think the CRT scam* works much better as an abstracted other. For instance I think "Loudon County" worked as well or better in other parts of Virginia than Loudon County itself.
*Aided immeasurably by media both-siderism and feral pearl-clutchers on our side. But of course both of those will persist, and when combined with the Radio Rwanda RW media ecosystem must be accommodated and dealt with for any hope of electoral success.
I just saw that Pine-Richland results. Maybe I was over interpreting that.
They had a football thing, which I had forgotten about. I bet letting a coach ignore hazing if the team wins is probably a popular platform.
Update to 152: Our local State Senate surprise is getting a fair amount of national attention, in Slate, New York Mag, etc. State Senator elect Durr has a record of fairly nasty twitter posts, no surprise, and absolutely no plan of what to do as state senator.
Best case result: better odds for progressive legislation, since the replacement Senate President will be a democrat, and probably less oppositional than Senate President Route 322 Bypass. 322 Bypass was surprisingly anti-teacher's union, and generally anti-government employee union, considering that his day job all these years has been VP of the Ironworker's Union (now his only job). Unsurprisingly for a guy who joined the Ironworkers out of high school, he also opposed spending money on state colleges, and generally did not get along with the overeducated Governor Murphy.
Speaking of Governor Murphy, his margin of victory is now over 2%, not all that close, and he's likely to have a better ally as Senate President. Democrats still control both Houses.
In Cincinnati, they call it a three-way.
Anyplace else, it'd be sex. In Ohio, it's cheese and onions.
But raw onions on spaghetti is a bit out there.
Actually, either of those is a four way. The three-way is just spaghetti, chili, and cheese.
I always forget that the pasta is a way unto itself.
Easy mistake since you can't actually order a one way.