Roundup: 2023 Elections Were a Big Deal
Extremists on the right are taking the results rather poorly
Yesterday, I lumped all the election results together in a couple of paragraphs. Republicans lost in more places by more votes than were predicted. Key races were lost and won. Today, I’ll catalog some of those victories to give readers a true sense of just how big a deal they were.
The biggest deal for San Diegans was the election of Monica Montgomery-Steppe to the County Board of Supervisors. Results available Wednesday afternoon gave the soon-to-be ex councilmember a 61-39 lead. As the first Black woman to be elected as a Board member, she’ll give Democrats a 3-2 majority on the (technically) nonpartisan board.
Montgomery Steppe will be sworn in by early December and serve through January 2027. This will leave her San Diego City Council seat vacant, mandating a special election next year to replace her.
The city’s election rules prohibit appointments when an elected leader steps down with one year or more left in their term. Once her departure becomes official, the City Council will hold a public hearing prior to officially calling for a special election. The odds are it will coincide with next year’s March 5 primary.
City residents, should no candidate get more than 50% of votes in the primary, will face a second special election, since local ordinance mandates a run off within 90 days of a primary.
Activist Shane Harris is the only potential candidate I’ve seen talking about running. The Union-Tribune says city staffer Chida Warren-Darby and Montgomery Steppe’s chief of staff, Henry Foster are also being mentioned as showing interest.
For decades, the Supervisors were top dogs in a moribund bureaucracy. Term limits and demographic changes caught up with them, and in recent years a ‘service the people first’ mentality has taken hold. Given Montgomery-Stepp’s record on the San Diego City Council in getting things done while keeping to her principles, I believe we can expect smart management and an empathetic ear in the months ahead.
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Already there’s some serious 2024 bullshitting coming from people who ought to know better. The next time around at the ballot box is a year away. President Biden, according to the voices in some very important dudes’ heads, should drop out running for a second term because of the 2023 general election results in some local contests.
Things in the country won’t be the same as they are now; in fact they could be better if some of those newly elected Dems get to work right away. And any president whose future would be dictated in polls is going to be a weak leader.
Ohio’s Issue 1 was the marquee contest, and the results confirmed the notion that abortion is a hot button, bipartisan issue.
As the Washington Post reported,
Preliminary exit polls had 1 in 5 Republicans and nearly two-thirds of independents backing the amendment, in a striking illustration of abortion rights’ popularity across party lines. With most of the vote counted late Tuesday, Issue 1 was projected to pass by a 10-point margin, while another ballot measure to legalize the recreational use of marijuana was projected to pass, 56 to 44 percent.
Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s long shot presidential hopes dimmed on Tuesday (he said later in the day that he would not run in 2024) as Democrats won both chambers of the Virginia legislature, despite $30 million in PAC money on the GOP side thrown into the contest..
Danica Roem made history by becoming Virginia's first openly transgender state senator. Scott Jenkins, the far-right MAGA sheriff in Virginia, indicted for allegedly offering weapons to people in exchange for campaign donations, has lost his reelection bid. (Maybe this scam seems familiar to San Diego County voters)
Gov. Youngkin tried to rally voters behind Republican legislative candidates by advocating for what he hoped would be perceived as a middle-ground approach: a proposal to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy with exceptions for rape, incest and situations where the mother’s life was at risk.
It didn’t work.
The question of whether a GOP trifecta in Richmond would go further (given the influence of extremists in the party) did work for Democrats as a campaign issue.
Apparently, anti-abortion advocates are going to repeat their election strategy in 2024.
Via the Associated Press:
The governor “thought he was going to give a playbook to Republicans, but he actually gave a playbook to Democrats on how to help voters connect the dots between candidates and their abortion policies,” said Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly known as NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Several anti-abortion groups signaled that how they respond to the string of losses will be among the most crucial political discussions for Republicans heading into 2024. One thing seems certain: They plan to leverage their clout within the party to make sure the fight for abortion restrictions remains a priority for their candidates.
It’s not like Republicans lost every election on Tuesday. The governor of Mississippi was re-elected by a big enough margin so running out of ballots in predominantly Black districts is not likely to be the cause. None-the-less, it happened.
Kentucky and Mississippi elected Republican Secretaries of State and Attorney Generals. Louisiana now is a GOP trifecta, with the Governor and both legislative branches soon to be considering inane idiocy.
In Michigan, the cities of East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak opted to institute ranked choice voting in local races.
Referendums aimed at policing encampments won in Boulder City Colorado and Spokane Washington. I can only hope that someday the lords of post capitalism are the ones being hunted by law enforcement.
Boulder County Colorado, Santa Fe New Mexico, and Seattle Washington all directed funding for homeless humans from tax revenues.
The state Supreme Court race in Pennsylvania went for Dems, as absentee ballots by young voters (18-35) more than doubled from last election.
Tucson Arizona, Boise Idaho, Indianapolis Indiana, Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Erie County & Allegany Pennsylvania, all voted in Democratic executives. Manchester New Hampshire, and Suffolk County New York, went with GOP leadership.
Moms for Liberty, the billionaire funded, book banning, CRT hatin,’ so-called parents rights group had a very bad night. They directly endorsed or promoted school board candidates in six states — Alaska, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia — and lost the bulk of those races, with the exception of two in Alaska. Some right wing candidates who asked the Moms to keep a low profile also lost.
Exonerated “Central Park Five” member Yusef Salaam won a seat on the New York City Council, he was one of the people for whom Trump demanded the death penalty. After a 40 year hiatus, a Republican was elected to a NYC Council Seat from the Bronx.
In New Jersey, Republicans went with a sure-to-lose triple bill, namely sex education standards and abortion, along with toeing the line on Dear Leader's paranoia about voting by mail. It cost them five seats in the state senate and failed to move the needle on a sure-thing takeover of the assembly. Their best candidate for flipping that body ended up losing in a district that was +35 for Trump in 2020.
Extremists on the right are taking the results of the 2023 elections rather poorly.
Trump is blaming an “Axis of Idiots” (DeSantis, McConnell, Youngkin, Kemp) for the Electoral "Shellacking"
House Republicans hoped to take some sting out of the bad news by announcing they will subpoena Hunter and James Biden. Oh, wow.
North Dakota State Representative Brandon Prichard is advising his Ohio counterparts to simply ignore the results on abortion.
Newsmax aired former senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) complaining that young people turned out because there were “sexy things” on the ballot like abortion and marijuana. He warned: “[P]ure democracies are not the way to run a country.
From Right Wing Watch:
On Wednesday, Republican Rep. Bob Good of Virginia appeared on the “Victory News” program, where he declared that in the wake of these losses, Republicans must become even more uncompromising and extreme on the issue of abortion.
“We are right on every issue; the Democrats are wrong on every issue,” Good proclaimed. “That’s why they frantically cling to abortion as the only issue that they think may work for them, and in some cases it has demonstrated that it does.”
Of course, insiders of the MAGA bubble believe Democrats had to cheat to win. From Right Wing Watch:
Ohio voters enshrined protection for reproductive rights in the state constitution in yesterday’s election, so Ohio-based right-wing activist Dave Daubenmire did what everyone of the right does whenever they lose elections now: “Vote Yes did not win in Ohio last night. It was cheated.”
Far-right pastor John Amanchukwu has a question about America in the wake of the Ohio election: “Are we worse than Hamas?”
Jason Rapert fumes over Republican losses in elections around the country yesterday: “The future of America is on the line and Christians are the only block of voters left to Save The Nation from the current march to the bottom of the pit of hell being led by the Democrat Party in our nation. … If we continue to slaughter babies, idolize the profane, promote sinful homosexual lifestyles, abandon our support for Israel, and reject God – America will fail and cease to exist as we have known it.”
There are ballots remaining to be verified or counted in many districts, but the lessons that should have been learned in this election are there for all to see. Democrats need to keep the focus on abortion and other targets of cultural warriors by embracing the energy wielded by citizen activists.
Republicans will be seeking to validate the old saw about insanity being defined as doing the same thing over and over again. They’ll stick with Trump even if he’s convicted of crimes for the simple reason that MAGA owns the infrastructure of the GOP.
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Short Stuff Leading to Good Reporting
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The Supposed Volunteers Keeping Major San Diego Venues Staffed Are Often Paid Under the Table and Below Minimum Wage Some outstanding reporting by Voice of San Diego
What started as a win-win for professional sports teams and charities has now morphed into a system where some supposed volunteer groups are providing a cheap, off-the-books labor source to third-party concession companies, a Voice investigation found. These concession companies partner and profit share with venue owners and operators, like the Padres, which sometimes rent publicly-owned facilities, like Petco Park, from taxpayers.
Voice spoke to dozens of sources inside the world of concessions at major venues, including six different workers, who’d been paid low, under-the-table wages by supposed charities. We agreed to withhold their names because they were minors at the time or because they were adults, who feared retaliation. We identified at least three different groups paying people to work inside multiple venues across the region, under the guise of volunteering.
I agree with @LorenaSGonzalez's desire to see these operators prosecuted. But I’m confident our county District Attorney is too busy chasing Antifa and ignoring the Proud Boys to be bothered with a little thing like wage theft.
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Please get Ramaswamy off my TV, and other debate thoughts Via Public Notice
There were audible groans from the audience when Ramaswamy turned his fire on the other candidates by describing both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis as "Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels,” and he got even more unhinged from there. Ramaswamy used a question about Ukraine to launch into a vicious diatribe that sounded as though it was written by Putin himself, lowlighted by his smear of President Zelenskyy — who’s Jewish — as “a Nazi.”
The task of trying to cut Ramaswamy down to size mostly fell to Haley, who responded to his harangue against Zelenskyy by saying, "Putin and President Xi are salivating at the thought that someone like that could become president.” Haley also snapped at Ramaswamy after he brought up that Haley’s daughter uses TikTok, telling him “leave my family out of your voice” and calling him “just scum.”
But Ramaswamy saved the most bonkers stuff for last. He used his closing statement to push a QAnon-inspired conspiracy theory about President Biden not really being in charge, and insisted that Michelle Obama may step in for him and run for president next year.
He then closed out his night by pushing more unhinged conspiracy theories on CNN.
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You’ve just lived through Earth’s hottest 12 months on record Via the Washington Post
Using what is known as attribution science, the analysis found that billions of people around the world have recently experienced extreme heat waves that likely would not have been as intense or as long-lasting if fossil fuel emissions had not warmed the planet so dramatically over the past century and a half.
It focused on temperatures so extreme, they are at least three times more likely today than they were before the Industrial Revolution. During the past year, 9 in 10 people experienced at least 10 days of such heat, the analysis found. Nearly 3 in 4 people endured it for 30 days or more.