Saturday, November 07, 2020

In The News (6)

Schumer: ‘Now we take Georgia, then we change the world’ Two runoff elections could decide the balance of power in the Senate ..........  Republican Sen. David Perdue will face off on January 5 against Democrat Jon Ossoff after finishing ahead 49.78% to Ossoff’s 47.9%. Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler will compete against Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock. Loeffler finished with 25.94% of the vote and Warnock finished with 32.89%. Loeffler was sharing GOP votes with the well-known Rep. Doug Collins and fended off three other Republican candidates. Warnock topped six other Democrats who also competed for the seat. ................  After the Democrats maintained control in the House and won the presidency, Republicans are framing the Georgia races  as the last stand between the country and a socialist Democratic agenda. ................. Meanwhile, Democrats have made the pitch that in order for Biden to be effective in fighting the coronavirus, improving health care and rebuilding America's economy, he'll need Democrats in charge of both the House and Senate.  


Democrats are in position to 'take a sledgehammer' to the South's red wall: Juan Williams 'This is radical,' he said ........ After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously said that the South was going to be Republican "for a generation.” ......... Southern politics has been solid red for most of the last 50 years. But thanks to the implosion of the Republican Party under President Trump, Democrats are in position to take a sledgehammer to the red wall that has been the basis of Republican strength in Congress. Over the last month, polls put Democrats within striking distance of flipping U.S. Senate seats in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and even Mississippi (Mississippi!)." 

Juan Williams: Democrats rise in the New South Southern politics has been solid red for most of the last 50 years. .......... Trump’s history of stirring racial division is also a driving force in getting moderate white voters to be open to supporting black candidates. ........ Those white voters, often younger people who have moved to the South in recent years, are more likely than older white southerners to know Blacks, Latinos and Asians as neighbors and co-workers. ......... The glue to bind this new political alliance is a message of racial peace coming from moderate, educated candidates, both black and white, who can’t be easily caricatured by Republicans as crazy left-wingers. ........... “White residents now make up fewer than three in five voters in Georgia, and a wave of migration to the Atlanta area over the past decade has added roughly three quarters of a million people to the state’s major Democratic stronghold.” 

Jill Biden will be historic first lady: Just call her ‘Professor FLOTUS’  she continued teaching at Northern Virginia Community College during the eight years she served as second lady ........... She intends to be the first FLOTUS in the role's 231-year history to pursue her career and keep a paying job while living in the White House and serving as first lady. ............. “The beauty of (being FLOTUS) is that you can define it however you want," she told Vogue in July 2019. "And that’s what I did as second lady – I defined that role the way I wanted it to be. I would still work on all the same issues. Education would be right up there, and military families. I’d travel all over this country trying to get free community college.” .............. "I don’t like to see my son attacked, and certainly I don’t like to see my husband attacked, but to me, these are distractions," she said. “This election is… about the American people....The American people don’t want to hear these smears against my family.” ............. Biden, 69, has a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, and a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware, which she earned in 2007 under her original name, Jill Jacobs. ............ "Teaching is not what I do. It's who I am," Biden said in a pre-speech tweet. .................... At least initially, most of her students were unaware of the full identity of "Dr. Biden" as either a U.S. senator's wife or as second lady, according to an interview with Vogue in March. She asked Secret Service agents to dress like college students and sit unobtrusively out in the hallway, on laptops, and it worked. .................. Biden, born in Hammonton, New Jersey, and raised in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, was getting divorced when she met her husband (she married Bill Stevenson after graduation from high school but they had drifted apart by their junior year at the University of Delaware). .............  According to the story, the then-U.S. senator from Delaware, a widower with two young sons who had lost his wife and baby daughter in a car accident, saw her picture in an ad (she did a little local modeling), and sought her out; their first date was in spring 1975. ............. “Jill is always grading papers,” Obama said. “Which is funny because I’d forget, ‘Oh yeah, you have a day job!’ And then she pulls out her papers and she’s so diligent and I’m like, ‘Look at you! You have a job! Tell me! Tell me what it’s like!’"





Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Biden’s Win, House Losses, and What’s Next for the Left The congresswoman said Joe Biden’s relationship with progressives would hinge on his actions. And she dismissed criticism from House moderates, calling some candidates who lost their races “sitting ducks.” ..............  we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore ............. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat. ...............  the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. ............. if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. ............. If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. .................. We need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country. ............ There’s a lot of magical thinking in Washington ............ So the D.C.C.C. banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing. .................  this anti-activist sentiment .............. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss. .................  the history of the party tends to be that we get really excited about the grass roots to get elected. And then those communities are promptly abandoned right after an election. ..............  so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district. ..............  If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is. ................. The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive. ............... Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do. .............. Is there a universe in which they’re hostile enough that we’re talking about a Senate run in a couple years? ..............  the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.



I had the privilege of being part of a volunteer team who phonebanked Nepali-speaking registered voters in swing states...

Posted by Anil Jung Shahi on Saturday, November 7, 2020

In The News (5)

Meet the contenders for Biden’s Cabinet The president-elect is expected to nominate a mix of progressives, moderates and even a few Republicans as he seeks to satisfy a broad coalition. 
The Election That Broke the Republican Party By lashing themselves to the president’s desperate conspiracies of fraud, GOP officials have undermined their own legitimacy.