In case you’re in the market for some inspiration this morning, I’ll share a bit of the information Mousebumples shared from the Run for Something newsletter.
First all women City Council in a major American city in the country. It’s a woman’s world in Saint Paul! 🌎 pic.twitter.com/AmdmtHQPN4
— HwaJeong Kim (@HJKforWard5) November 11, 2023
Moms for Liberty had a bad cycle — losing nearly everywhere. (You can read more about how they ate shit hard in MSNBC or Salon, among other places.)
Per WSJ, “roughly a third of candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won Tuesday or were leading in contested races, down from 45% in prior races.” The 1776 Project, a comparably dangerous political organization, had a 59% win rate.
Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of Run for Something school board candidates’ won, including every single one of the Run for Something candidates who was up against someone endorsed by Moms for Liberty.
🌸
42 votes in a county race in Pennsylvania in November 2023 decided the conditions of the 2024 election — when I say “to win the big elections, we have to win the small ones,” that’s what I mean. That’s why Clerk Work, which resulted in 77% of our pro-democracy candidates winning, including 15 specifically against anti-democracy opponents, has been so important!
🌸
Their job is to discourage us; our job is to keep working for the world we want.
Totally open thread.
brendancalling
The MFL psychos who took over the Central Bucks School Board in PA—the one going after the LGBTQ+ kids—all lost their races. Bye bye, assholes!
citizen dave
Checked out the 1776 Project website, etc. Man, they REALLY want you to report on a school teaching Critical Race Theory–the pop-up is omnipresent on their website. Their list of candidates is simply a list of various schools. On another news website there is a story, which states that “Assuming all unofficial results hold, the 1776 Project PAC will have seen 68 of its 118 preferred candidates win during the 2023 general election, which amounts to a success rate of about 58%”
The problem is that there seems to be no indepedent verification of any of this–maybe AP has people doing it? I would tend to highly doubt any information put forward by MFL or 1776 Project themselves.
Alison Rose
Imagine that. In the real world, people want candidates who actually care about governing and helping people, not ones who just want to scream and inflict harm as widely as possible.
Mousebumples
Thanks for this, WaterGirl! I love the work that Run for Something does, as it’s great to see young people – and people of color! – running for office.
A few more links to highlight, and hopefully I won’t fall into spam…
Erin Barr beat an incumbent who dropped charges against a minister for solicitation of a minor
Juan Jaramillo is a 30 year old son of Colombian immigrants and is the first Latino elected to the city council in Revere.
Lots of good news, and I’m happy to celebrate our wins – and build on them in the elections to come!
eclare
Thanks for the good news WaterGirl!
Jess
This IS inspiring–thank you! I’m working on developing courses to teach my students how to be engaged citizens and create the world they want to see, and these sorts of stories are great examples of how to do it. Let’s make sure there are more of them!
Alison Rose
@citizen dave:
And of course to these dipshits, literally anyone even mentioning anything to do with race in any context counts as CRT.
eclare
I don’t know if TonyJay is still around
https://x.com/SlenderSherbet/status/1724094813379707298?s=20
Marmot
Thanks for these, WG.
As I complained in a thread after the election, NPR was crediting abortion—and only abortion—for Dem wins. Guess they felt they had to accommodate the bad NYT/Sienna poll.
But clearly, right wing nuts lost big to Dems, full stop.
WaterGirl
Moms for (our) Liberty at the expense of yours.
Marmot
@Marmot:
This poll and the election results are leading me to a weird hypothesis, and I’m wondering whether anybody can provide some detail:
Is it possible that low turnout benefits us now? We have highly engaged abortion-rights voters and pro-democracy voters, while they’re obsessed with idiot conspiracy theories about the uselessness of elections.
lowtechcyclist
@eclare:
Probably tea-time over there.
Barbara
@WaterGirl:
Moms for (our) Liberty (To Decide What Everyone’s Kids Can Read and Learn)
Miss Bianca
@Marmot: Interesting hypothesis – it would be a very complete turnaround in voter dynamics if so. We’ve had a couple election cycles where we have observed this phenomenon, so maybe some savvy election observers are crunching the numbers as we type…
WaterGirl
@Barbara: That works, too.
smith
Didn’t some pundits posit this as one reason the Dems won the GA Senate runoff election in 2021?
WaterGirl
Just a reminder (before I head out for a haircut) that this is a totally open thread.
marcopolo
@Marmot: So Tom Bonier (@tbonier) of Votesmart (election data analysis) looked into this hypothesis and…
A little later he looked at other states:
So these are all from his tweets from Nov 11 if you are on there and want to look at the originals.
SeattlePsyclist
@citizen dave: Let’s all visit the site and report our local conservative religious private schools and colleges for teaching CRT. If they are reporting garbage data, we have an obligation to the truth to make it obviously garbage data.
geg6
@Marmot:
I think there’s some truth to that idea, but I really think the polls are well and truly fucked up and not necessarily because there is any agenda behind them or anything. I just think polling is broken because it hasn’t found a way to adjust to the new world where landlines don’t exist, caller ID does and the youth don’t even actually talk on the phone anymore.
WaterGirl
@Marmot: I’m not sure I understand. Low turnout for the other side always benefits us. Low turnout on our side never benefits us.
I think I must be missing something.
RaflW
@Marmot: It’s definitely one of the risks of centering “elections are rigged” in your party. I’ve seen a handful of Republican officials fret about this, but they’re the rare bird who probably got into office pre-2016, and even then it is just a smattering of them.
And yeah, as I recall the R turnout fell more than D in the GA senate runoffs. Phew.
eclare
@smith:
Yep. TFG said it was useless, stay home. He also said that at a rally about a month ago, “don’t worry about voting, we’ll take care of the votes.” I have no idea how that works, pretty scary.
Another Scott
@eclare: “You just tell them and they believe it; they just do.”
Him telling his brainwashed voters to stay home is good for us, and good for America.
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@geg6:
Plus you have people keeping their number if they move. Good friend moved out of ATL years ago, still has an ATL area code. I doubt that is as much as a factor as people not answering an unknown number, but could swing numbers some.
hueyplong
@WaterGirl: A way to interpret it is that Dobbs has so tilted the landscape that Dems could do their usual low turnout offyear election and still (barely) win. They’ll win by more when the yutes and others show up in force in 2024 as they did in 2020 and as they typically do in presidential races.
Not sure how else to interpret data that says Dems won despite actually doing their typical reduced output in an offyear election.
marcopolo
@hueyplong: Yeah, I’m waiting on some number crunching that says clearly that Indies are now breaking more clearly for D candidates and progressive ballot initiatives than the did prior to Dobbs. And as mentioned prior in this thread, I also wouldn’t underestimate the culture war stuff as having backfired as well. I have seen numerous articles about local school boards who voted MAGA at the height of the CRT/Trans bathroom moral panic in 2021 who thoroughly repudiated it in 2023. Folks had a chance to see how the MAGA folks introduced chaos (and just pure incompetence) into how their schools were run and rejected that.
marcopolo
I am off to the rest of my day, but since this is a Run for Something IDed thread I would strongly encourage my fellow BJers to join me in giving them a small monthly donation. I’ve been tossing them $10/month since Jan 2018 & have been very happy with their work. This comment is a link to their website.
Everyone have a nice day!
opiejeanne
Maryanne Trump Barry, TFG’s older sister who resigned from being a Federal judge to avoid possible prosecution, has died. She was 86.
MattF
OT. This is the careful analysis of SBF/crypto’s various probabilistic errors that I’ve been looking for. There’s some maybe non-trivial math, but it’s in a good cause. I also think there are errors in SBF’s ‘optimization’ ideas and in the hand-waving moral philosophy, but you have to start somewhere.
Alison Rose
Sometimes I wish my cat could talk* because there are things she does for which I’d like explanations. Example: There is a big tree outside our 3rd-floor windows, and we see lots of small birds in it. She loves watching them, of course, but usually just sits and stares silently, with a strained hunger on her face. Occasionally if they’re flitting around a lot, she might paw at the glass a bit, which is adorable. The building is shaped like a wide U, kinda like: |_________| and we are the second to last apartment on one end of the bottom portion, so the little wings can be seen diagonally from our windows. Oftentimes, crows will land on the wing roofs, and when she spots them, she starts making this little squeaky chittering noise. Now, from the distance we’re at, to her mind the crows would seem no bigger than the little finches and chickadees and such in the tree that’s three feet from the window. But for some reason, she always makes those noises at the far-away crows, as though she knows they’re something different, and never makes it at the closer birds. And I just would like to know why. But I guess it is a mystery that shall never be solved.
(*I don’t actually want that because I know she would just tell me to fuck off and/or shut up and/or feed her most of the time.)
Alison Rose
@opiejeanne: I’m sure he is all broken up about it 😑
Baud
@Alison Rose:
If she could type, she’d fit in well here.
Alison Rose
@Baud: She is an honorary jackal.
Lapassionara
@eclare: This “we’ll take care of the votes” comment really scares me. Does he have some plan for putting fake votes into the system?
if he could, he definitely would.
MattF
@Lapassionara: He will just say ‘Take care of the votes’ to someone and ‘someone’ will do ‘something’.
RaflW
@marcopolo: Thanks for the nudge. I just pulled up RFS’s Moms for Illiberty “feel good update” email from this morning, and gave 50 bucks thru that link (I’m sure they track what gets us to give) and following your lead, signed up for $7/mo to boot.
Soprano2
@marcopolo: It’s pretty darn conservative here, yet all the MAGA-types were defeated at the last school board election. Three of them made it onto the board before anyone was that aware of what was happening. Two of them have to run for re-election next year, it will be interesting to see what happens now that they’ve been revealed. I think one of them isn’t going to run again – he was the stealth candidate who ran as a “concerned dad” and didn’t mention his true agenda until after he got elected.
eclare
@Lapassionara:
I know! And of course I know the saying that it doesn’t matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes.
But to pull off fraud at this scale on a national level, when elections are administered by counties, would take a massive operation. And judging by who has been on his team in the past, I don’t see them pulling it off.
Baud
@eclare:
All the swing states this time except GA are run by Dems. And GA has proven itself recently.
Soprano2
@eclare: Sure, but the problem is it doesn’t have to be national – it only has to be in a few states. It is scary that he said that.
Soprano2
@Baud: This is true, but that doesn’t mean they can’t try something in conservative counties. They’re so dumb they’d probably get caught, but still it’s not great.
eclare
@Baud:
Thanks!
Gvg
@Alison Rose: if she was ever a feral or stray she hates crows, especially if she was a kitten outside. They eat kittens given a chance. Mama cats keep the babies under cover. My neighborhood has a bunch and they are tiresome, but you don’t want to be caught attacking them because they remember peoples faces and harrass them for years afterwards. My cats make that noise through the screen too. They were ferals I managed to tame.
Josie
@Soprano2: It could be that his handlers are telling him something to keep him calm.
ETA: Well, maybe not calm, but under control, more or less.
BethanyAnne
I was watching Rachel Maddow on Seth Meyers talking about her new book, and I loved when she said this:
Seth: “What did you learn about anti-Semitism from researching this story?”
Rachel Maddow: “Thank you for asking that. It’s been a really interesting thing for me personally. I feel like the thing that I have come to understand by looking at the way it operated in other time periods, not just looking at it in other countries, but looking at it in our own country, is that when people are telling you something about a minority group that says they’re not just bad, there’s not just things about them that you shouldn’t like, but they’re evil, that they are secretly powerful, that they’re the reason that things are bad.
That sort of toxic conspiracy theory about a minority group has a purpose. It is always to make us think that we shouldn’t be in a democracy. Cause right, a democracy is that we all decide things together. That’s the basic idea of it. You have to put a seed in people’s mind that there are some people among us who aren’t just bad, they’re dangerous, and they are out to get us, and we need to be protected from them. And therefore we can’t have a democracy, because we can’t have those people voting too. And we need a government that’s going to protect us from those dangerous people.
That’s the purpose of those not just stereotypes but those dangerous conspiracy theories about disfavored minority groups. And that form of anti-Semitism is part of fascism. It’s part of authoritarianism. It’s part of trying to make us give up our democracy. And it’s evil, and it’s pernicious, and it keeps repeating itself. And it ought to be a big red flag to all of us. It’s not just about hating people. It’s about getting us to undo democracy. And we shouldn’t stand for it.
BethanyAnne
@Alison Rose: Oh, my little Louie cat was chirping “ek ek ek” at all the birds in the big apartment back yard last week. And his sister used to chirp at the squirrels in a previous apartment. It sounded to me like “Want! Waaaaant!”
Soprano2
@BethanyAnne: I think the recent example of Rwanda would be a sufficient case for how dangerous “othering” is.
Hoodie
@marcopolo: One thing I’ve yet to see in any large way is tying the Dobbs to the stakes of 2024 presidential election. If Trump gets elected, he’ll likely appoint two younger reactionary judges to replace Thomas and Alito, and Kagan and Sotomayor are not exactly young. They could lock in a corrupt, right wing court for decades.
This gets to the heart of the matter that Biden will have to run a somewhat negative campaign. He can talk about accomplishments, but that is a tough sell because of recency bias/false memory regarding things like gas prices and inflation in general. Trump is uniquely vulnerable as a unhinged lunatic. Add to that the potential for what he would do to women in a second term.
Fear is usually the stock and trade of GOP campaigns, but the Dems should consider its usefulness in this campaign because the right has become so openly insane. A lot of these people are just downright weird and/or unpleasant. You see them in a school board meeting and that comes across more clearly. The recent failures of groups like MFL may be linked more to people figuring out that they’re a bunch of busybodies and nutcases rather than any particular policy dispute.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I had a buddy in college who was is Marine. He posted on Veterans Day a picture of his wife and drumph. I know it’s real because it’s been shared several times over the years. It just makes my blood boil.
eclare
@BethanyAnne:
Great answer. In other words, call people who vote against you vermin.
eclare
@Soprano2:
I mentioned Radio Rwanda in a thread this morning. Vermin are pretty close to cockroaches.
eclare
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
That is so disappointing. And infuriating. Posing with an asshole who has no respect for the military.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@eclare: I am so tempted, the next time I come across a loud-and-proud Trumpist, to give them a fish-eye stare and then calmly state, “So that’s what a traitor looks like.”
Geminid
@RaflW: In November, 2020 Senator David Perdue beat Jon Ossoff by 88,000 votes, 2,462,000 to 2,374,000. Libertarian Shane Hazel’s 115,000 votes kept Perdue below 50%, so the election went to a Jan.5 runoff.
On January 5, Perdue’s vote fell to 2,214,000, a dropoff of 248,000. Ossoff’s vote dropped only 110,000 and he won by 51,000 votes. That was due to hard work by Georgia Democrats, but also to disgruntled Trumpers staying home to own the RINOs.
Raphael Warnock’s vote is hard to compare from election to runoff because he ran in a jungle primary, but Warnock ran 20,000 votes ahead of Ossoff on January 5.
The conventional wisdom was that Warnock and Ossoff would lose because Republicans typically do better in runoffs, but not this time. Those two Senate wins transformed what would have been a frustrating and unproductive first two years for Biden into a success, with passage of the American Recovery Act, Infrastructure, CHIPS+ and IRA bills.
prostratedragon
Overtaken by events:
One of the things that could help us save ourselves is that these people are not well-coupled with reality.
Freemark
John Cole has a good take on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court election.
Baud
@Freemark:
Threw me for a loop for a second.
WaterGirl
@Freemark: No wonder he doesn’t answer his email, he is busy crunching numbers!
Alison Rose
@Freemark: Marriage really agrees with John, he’s looking at least a decade younger!
Another Scott
@Alison Rose:
Obligatory Cat comic meme.
Cheers,
Scott.
BruceFromOhio
Our little fascist enclave sent the 1776 drones scuttling away. Even some of the Republicans hated them. There are apparently limits.
Good for St. Paul !
BruceFromOhio
@Alison Rose: Ok good one, you all had me going there for a moment.
BruceFromOhio
@Marmot: I don’t know about low turnout per se but anything that keeps the wing nuts at home on election is just fine by me.
Marmot
@marcopolo: Thanks, bruv. I’m now thinking that Dems aren’t strong just in low-turnout elections — I mean, to the exclusion of high-turnout elections — but that maybe we’re stronger in low-turnout elections than we used to be.
I know this thread is dead, but thought I’d come back around to it.
eclare
@Another Scott:
Hahaha…
Alison Rose
@Another Scott: A classic :P
rikyrah
truth
CLAP CLAP CLAP
Gin & Tonic
@eclare: You don’t have to go back 30 years for examples. It’s happening every day on russian Telegram channels.
Another Scott
Yay Run for Something! :-)
Meanwhile, AI isn’t the only way to create fake images… PetaPixel.com:
Cameras lie, even when not being purposefully deceptive. Video cameras moreso. But even beyond that, it’s far too easy these days to create things that are not real.
Gotta keep one’s wits about one when looking at things…
Cheers,
Scott.
trnc
Yup, happy to see the Klanned Karenhood assholes being run out of town.
Marmot
@WaterGirl: Sorry. For my purposes, a “low-turnout election” equals an off-year election, like a non-presidential or non-congressional election.
RaflW
@Geminid: The impact of Warnock and Ossoff on the federal bench is immense. I sure hope Joe Biden gets to appoint judges for 5 more years, because our courts still need lots of housecleaning. ie: there’s plenty more GWB judges who should be thinking about retirement. And a few Trumpers who should (but won’t) be impeached.
wjca
Why stop there? If you have home school types who are showing up at school board meetings to cause trouble, report them as well.
wjca
And he will be furious that all those “loyal” local election officials who were going to “do something” turn out to have been fictions served up by his minions. (Not that he will admit to any error on his part, of course. Only the best people…,)
eclare
@Gin & Tonic:
True
eclare
@RaflW:
Text from Joe today that he is up to 150 federal judges.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, TFG doesn’t take his cues from Africa.
Matt McIrvin
Adam’s “this was only ever defeated with bullets” line really had me down.
The civil rights movement is an interesting and 100% apropos example, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people still got killed. Nonviolence still means being willing to get your own allies murdered, which is terrifying and people had valid objections to that. And the argument’s there that the credible threat of armed rebellion was always in the background and necessary for progress.
But it wasn’t all-out war and the good guys didn’t have to burn the South down a second time.
Czar Chasm
Wish that was the case here: The official Moms for Liberty here in Fluvanna County, VA (barely) lost, while their unofficial one won handily. Unfortunately, that means that the makeup of our school board shifts very rightward. We were one of multiple counties in our region where this happened.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: I might agree with him that ENTRENCHED fascism was only ever defeated with bullets. We aren’t there yet. We still have the power to vote, however compromised it has been. Biden won fair and square in 2020. People were dancing in the streets when TFG was defeated. We still have the strong opportunity to defeat fascism by peaceful, democratic means.
WaterGirl
@Marmot:
Now that I understand, and agree with. So do the Obama bros, if I am recalling their recent podcast correctly.
WaterGirl
@Marmot: Oh. I was not reading it that way.
WaterGirl
@Czar Chasm: Ugh, sorry to hear that.
Have all the votes been counted in your election? Last week it looked like you got a very respectable amount of votes, just not quite enough to win?
Marmot
@Matt McIrvin: That got me down too. Sometimes his approach is what I’d call high-handed.
Omnes pointed out the example of Spain, and I’d maybe add Portugal, though I don’t know much about their return from authoritarianism. Chile? Argentina?
sab
Anybody know anything about Matriots? They try to sound like an alternative Emily’s List, but the ones I have met in meatspace seem more like Moms for Liberty.
sab
@sab: Although our local candidate member is also a Progressive Democrat.. And rhey certainly are not racist. But plenty of Right to Lifers on board.
Weird outfit. Apparently all you need to be is a woman. No concern about policy because they are all over the place.
TEL
@eclare: The first reply is comedy gold!
“I intend to re shuffle the cabinet, moving the tinned tuna and chicken to the front, the can of worms will be moved to the back”
Wag
@WaterGirl: Low turnout or our side doesn’t matter because we won even with low turnout? Would the margin of victory have been even sweeter had turnout been higher?🤷♂️
WaterGirl
@Wag: The original commenter later clarified that “low turnout election” was their shorthand for the midterms or other elections that typically get a low turnout.
JAFD
Dumb questnion on dead thread, but would appreciate knowing what Pennsylvania county was the site of the 42-vote victory ?
Thanks very much!
Ramona
@Alison Rose: I watch YouTube videos of several people whose cats have learned to press buttons that say words recorded by their owners. The cats ask for catnip and cuddles and some even seem to compose rough sentences. The latest cat I’ve been watching is called Todd.
Czar Chasm
@WaterGirl: Regretfully, that’s the ballgame: There aren’t enough absentee votes to make up the gap. The candidates that ran on our side are going to be doing a post-mortem soon, and we’ll figure out how to do better in the next round of local elections, which will be in two years.
Marmot
Correcting myself.
@Marmot: Definitely not Portugal. Authoritarian, but not actually fascist, overthrown by a military coup.