We begin today with Jahd Khalil, Margaret Barthel, and Brad Kutner of National Public Radio reporting on the multi-faceted off year elections being held today in the commonwealth of Virginia.
Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee and former congresswoman, has maintained a lead in polls since very early in the race over Republican nominee Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.
But this year, while voters' top concerns are energy prices, housing affordability and jobs, the rest of the race has become a referendum on everything from political violence to redistricting. [...]
The challenges facing Virginia's 320,000 federal workers and hundreds of thousands of federal contractors came long before the Oct. 1 government shutdown. Earlier this year, during Elon Musk's DOGE efforts, thousands of Virginians were laid off.
Democrats in the commonwealth hope that voter anger over the firings and furloughs will carry them to victory on Tuesday night. On the campaign trail, Spanberger talks about sticking up for federal workers in the face of the "chaos from Washington." At a campaign event Thursday, Spanberger put it this way: "The stakes of this election are serious." [...]
Democrats in the Virginia legislature threw another wrench into the campaign last week by calling a surprise series of meetings after North Carolina became another state to redraw its congressional map to favor the GOP at the behest of President Trump.
Marisa Lagos of KQED, San Francisco’s public radio stations, looks at the expected success of Proposition 50, the referendum to change redistricting in California.
Both the Public Policy Institute of California and UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies found a majority of voters ready to support the ballot initiative, which would temporarily change California’s congressional maps in an attempt to give Democrats more seats in Congress.
IGS found support for the measure at 60% for likely voters, while the PPIC poll found 56% of the electorate backing it. The surveys found just 1% to 2% of voters undecided. [...]
The IGS poll also identified differences in how voters plan to cast their ballots: Democrats were motivated to vote early, said DiCamillo, and are outpacing Republicans two-to-one in returning their ballots early. Meanwhile, a whopping 70% of Republicans — who have been encouraged to vote early by the No campaign, but urged by Trump not to use vote-by-mail — say they will vote in person on Tuesday.
Despite this being an unexpected, off-year special election with just one question on the ballot, DiCamillo said a staggering 71% of voters reported being aware of Proposition 50 and its implications.
Emma Goldberg of The New York Times writes a fascinating story about New York City’s history with “democratic socialist” and adjacent elected officials.
“Socialist ideals have played a powerful role in this city,” Mr. Dinkins, dressed in a sharp suit and striped tie, told a council meeting of the Socialist International in October 1990. “Public education, a strong and vibrant trade union movement and many great cultural institutions are products of the socialist movement.”
Historically, he’s right: Throughout the history of New York, a city of immigrants and political machines and union loyalists, democratic socialist voices have been part of the thrum of local politics. Mr. Dinkins himself was, at some point, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. [...]
In fact, Mr. Dinkins is not the only city leader to have had ties to socialism. Fiorello La Guardia, the three-term Republican mayor, ran for re-election to Congress in 1924 on the socialist party line (for pure political convenience, after he couldn’t get the Republican nomination). Ruth Messinger, who served as Manhattan borough president in the 1990s and ran for mayor in 1997, was a D.S.A. member. In 1917, a socialist union lawyer named Morris Hillquit ran for mayor and won nearly a quarter of the vote. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez catapulted to Congress in an upset over the Democratic establishment in 2018, she did so as a member of the D.S.A., which endorsed her just before the primary. [...]
Some scholars of democratic socialism say Mr. La Guardia governed like a socialist, though he wasn’t one. In City Hall, he took an expansive approach to government services, creating sweeping public housing developments and extending public transit’s reach. La Guardia, who was half Jewish and a Yiddish speaker, like many card-carrying socialists at the time, employed socialists in his administration. A protégé turned aide, Vito Marcantonio, later became a congressman in the American Labor Party, representing East Harlem.
I’m glad that I went down this particular rabbit hole and learned of the incredible life of Fiorello La Guardia’s sister, Gemma La Guardia Gluck.
Sophia A.McClennen of Salon details the many ways in which the tacky shoe salesman attacks the minds of Americans.
Trump’s assault on the American mind operates on five fronts, with each one designed to distort perception, drain attention and degrade the nation’s collective reasoning. While it can be easy to think that these are simply incidental habits or stylistic quirks, it is critical to note that they are strategic modes of cognitive domination and they have been on display since well before Trump began his first term as President. [...]
For example, when it emerged that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussed classified U.S. military operations using the encrypted messaging application Signal, the faulty logic of the administration was on full display. The same administration that once led chants of “Lock her up!” over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server now dismissed the breach as “no big deal” and a “witch hunt.”
It isn’t just that the Trump team offers an incessant flood of faulty logic. They also create an environment that makes thinking critically exceptionally difficult. As cognitive scientists Keith Stanovich and Richard West have shown, humans possess two systems of thought: One fast and emotional, the other slow and deliberative. Trump keeps the public in the first mode — triggered, reactive, impulsive. Under Trump, critical reasoning collapses from emotional overload.
The threat, then, isn’t just misinformation; it’s misreasoning.
Finally today, Mike Brock writes for his “Notes from the Circus” Substack about the deal that non-racist Republicans had with the racists.
For decades, the deal worked like this:
The racist faction delivers votes. In return, they get policies that serve their interests—immigration restriction, “law and order” that targets the right people, opposition to affirmative action, culture war positioning that codes clearly enough that they understand who’s being defended and who’s being opposed.
But they stay quiet in public. They don’t say explicitly what everyone knows they believe. They use acceptable language. They let respectable conservatives provide the intellectual framework and public face while they deliver the votes.
When someone says the quiet part too loud—when they’re too explicit, too undeniable—the party distances itself. “That’s not who we are. Those aren’t our values. We condemn racism in all forms.” The racist gets sidelined, the respectable conservatives resume control, and the bargain continues.
Brock’s essay is kinda “meh” but one thing that he gets right is that when Republican voters prioritize “culture war” issues over economic issues, they are voting in what they define as their best interests. Too many people here even at Daily Kos assume that they they are not.
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
