Archives for 2024

Repeat after me: North Carolina is in play.

North Carolina is a voter-suppressed state, and BIPOC Youth are going to make a difference.  We’ll find in just a month or more, but they may make not just “a difference”, but THE DIFFERENCE.

Ballot Curing in North Carolina

Our partners in North Carolina (NC Black Alliance and NCAAT in Action) have, with our help, flooded North Carolina campuses with canvassers and “ambassadors” to register, educate, and turn out the newly-energized BIPOC youth vote.  With their other in-state partners, they’re working together to avoid duplication of effort.  This fundraiser will also continue to support this effort.

But mostly with this effort we are helping with Election Protection in NC.

Our NC partners predict that there will be 150,000 ballots in November that need “curing” to correct minor things that must be fixed in order for a person’s vote to count.  Not a typo:  150,000 ballots!

There is so much work to be done post-election in order for people’s votes to count:  identify, contact, and assist voters whose ballots are challenged as deficient by the Republican voter-suppression juggernaut.

Here’s an NPR article explaining “ballot curing.

In an election likely to have razor-thin margins, these challenged votes could change the outcome! 

We’ll have separate thermometers for NC Black Alliance and NCAAT in Action.

Key Candidates in North Carolina

There is a lot of money sloshing around in North Carolina.  So we asked our NC partners for a short list of candidates who could really use our money and whose election would make a difference in the lives of North Carolinians and protect the state from its corrupt and overreaching Republican party.   They had one question for us:  Candidates at what level?   My answer was “any level; we want to support the most strategic races.”  Based on their recommendation, it clear that their focus was on the courts.

Allison Riggs – NC State Supreme Court Justice (KEEP)

The seven-justice NC Supreme Court has a 5-2 Republican majority.  The MAGA court threw out a voting rights case and allowed the legislature free reign to gerrymander the state.  Justice Riggs is a social justice attorney who was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper, and is up for partisan reelection against a Republican challenger who ruled that life begins at conception while on the Court of Appeal.  More about Judge Riggs here.

Carolyn Thompson – NC Court of Appeals  (KEEP)

Incumbent Judge Thompson is also up for partisan re-election.  She is African-American and focused on victims of domestic violence while in private practice.  As a state legislator, her opponent, Thomas Murry, tried to exempt NC from the ACA and pushed draconian voter ID laws.  More on Judge Thompson here.

Raymond Smith – Challenger, State Senate (FLIP!)  

Raymond Smith is an African American Gulf War veteran and former NC state Assembly member.  Smith was drawn out of his district (total coincidence, I’m sure!)  so he is running to flip a Senate seat in the Goldsboro area and shatter the Republican super-majority.  Let’s hope the Republican power move backfires on them.  His opponent, with the Republican-sounding name of Eldon “Buck” Sharpe Newton III is Chair of the Judiciary Committee.  Good ‘ol Buck championed outlawing public mask wearing in protests and shepherded a performative measure limiting voting rights to citizens.  More on Raymond Smith here.

We trust our engaged and on-the-ground NC partners to recommend candidates, but we’ll also revisit other potential candidates in NC and elsewhere after Q3 fundraising totals are released (shortly).

Again, no thermometers just yet, but I wanted to let you know about one of the directions we’ll be heading to this week.

There’s just too much going on for a *single post.

*Not if I want anyone to actually read it, that is.

North Carolina Is In Play!Post + Comments (31)

I talked with our Four Directions peeps this morning to let them know that we had completed our latest $30k fundraising for Four Directions AZ.  And I let them know that we are about to embark on another round of funding for Four Directions MT, because I’m tired of all the “Jon Tester can’t win” gloom, which is bullshit.  I believe that you fight hard, and the chips will fall where they fall.  No regrets.

I also let them know that I got pissed off at Josh Marshall’s nay-saying about Nebraska, dismissing the likelihood of a win even though the latest polls show them as neck and neck – so we’re about to do another round of fundraising for Dan Osborne, the Independent who has the incumbent on the ropes.

I was thinking of calling the upcoming efforts for Jon Tester and Dan Osborn “The Senate’s not dead yet!“, or possibly “A Flip and a Keep!”

Our friends at Four Directions have put me in touch with the someone close to the Dan Osborn campaign, who in turn is putting me in touch with the Field Director for the Osborn campaign.  So this looks to be a great opportunity for us to help with this Senate race in a very boots-on-the-ground way!

I’ll give you all an update after we talk.

My name is Dan Osborn. I'm an independent labor leader running for Senate in Nebraska. I'm down only 1 point to Republican incumbent Deb Fischer! This could be the upset of the decade.

Check out our NEW ad. 👇 pic.twitter.com/TRIdjTp8EI

— Dan Osborn (@osbornforne) September 24, 2024

In the meantime: this is the same ad, but not on twitter.  If you find this on YouTube, let me know.

https://app.frame.io/presentations/523bf80a-0db4-4eca-a9e4-6b2e66da3fef

Here’s a great article:

Princeton Election Consortium  (aka Sam Wang)

But then, enter Nebraska.

The Nebraska race escaped my attention until several close polls came up. There are not many surveys, but Republican incumbent Senator Deb Fischer only leads her challenger, independent Dan Osborn, by a median of 2 percentage points. That is rather amazing, considering that in 2018, she won re-election by 19 points. What’s going on?

First, Senator Fischer is pretty low-profile. She has not made much news during her time in the Senate. She did not cast aspersions on the honest conduct of the 2020 Presidential election, which distinguished her from her election-denier colleagues. That might make her a bit bland by current Republican standards.

Dan Osborn is an interesting candidate. He’s a steamfitter by trade, and became well known in 2021 for leading a successful strike at a Kellogg’s plant in Omaha. This year he competed for the Democratic Senate nomination – but then turned it down. Walking away from the Democratic Party is probably good for one’s reputation in Nebraska. And he’s gotten the support of the Legal Marijuana Now Party (LMN), which has ballot access in Nebraska but withdrew its candidate to make way for Osborn.

Osborn trails narrowly by a median of 2 points (see FiveThirtyEight, which provides our data feed).

But in one survey, when respondents were read his biography and Senator Fischer’s, he jumped to a 53%-39% lead. So he has considerable upside potential.

I don’t know if he can go the distance; that might be tough for an independent. Recall that in the 2014 Kansas Senate race, Greg Orman ran as an independent and kept things close, as I wrote at NewYorker.com at the time, but he faltered at the end. But for now, Osborn might be a game-changer.

Also, great job hitting our goals for Arizona – for Four Directions and Worker Power!

Anyway, no thermometers yet but I wanted to let you know about one of the directions we’ll be heading to this week.

We’re also going back to North Carolina this week, which I will tell you about in a separate post.

Open thread!

Heads Up – Enter Nebraska – In a New WayPost + Comments (51)