2022 U.S. Congressional (and Other) Elections

[N.E. Brigand]

I've not been a fan of Nina Turner, but this interview with Shontel Brown, her chief opponent in the Democratic primary (and thus the general election in a safely Democratic seat) to succeed Marcia Fudge as the Congressperson in Ohio's 11th district (centered in the urban neighborhoods of Cleveland's east side and Akron, connected by a 35-mile long strip), makes it pretty clear to me that Turner is the better candidate. But as I live on Cleveland's west side, I don't get to vote in that contest.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I've also not been a big fan of Nina Turner, but I know nothing about Shontel Brown, or the other 3 or 4 candidates for the primary.

[River]

In Texas mayoral elections today, Republicans seem to have done somewhat better than expected, retaining control over Fort Worth (which is either the largest or second largest U.S. city with a Republican mayor: Jacksonville, Florida is about the same size), and flipping the mid-sized city of McAllen (which is 85% Hispanic). Turnout was terrible, though: 16% in Fort Worth and just 6% in McAllen.

Well, apparently the Democratic office in Hidalgo County (where McAllen is located) did absolutely nothing to promote local candidates last week. You can't win if you don't try.

But in Fort Worth, where the Republicans held onto the mayoralty, Democrats did take control of the city council.

The take-home is Dems have to work harder in Texas.

[N.E. Brigand]

I've also not been a big fan of Nina Turner, but I know nothing about Shontel Brown, or the other 3 or 4 candidates for the primary.

I'm also not enamored of the Congressperson in my district, Marci Kaptur, mostly because she's practically a non-entity, although I'd vote for her against any Republican, and to her credit, on one occasion when I called her local office, she herself answered the phone.

[N.E. Brigand]

New York City's population of 8.3 million people makes it not only the largest city in the United States but also larger than all but twelve U.S. states. Accordingly, although I'm not sure what if anything the results would imply for the 2022 midterm elections, the upcoming mayoral election in New York probably deserves some mention. The primaries for that election are tomorrow, and the winner of the Democratic primary is all but assured to win the general election in November. There are many candidates in the Democratic race, which will use ranked-choice (aka instant run-off) rather than first-past-the-post voting: voters will rank their top five candidates, and if no candidate has a majority of first choice votes, the lowest-ranking candidate is eliminated and that candidate's voters' second-choice votes are awarded to other candidates, and the process repeats until someone has a majority of first choice votes. The leading candidates appear to be former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, businessman Andrew Yang (who rose to national prominence when he ran for President in 2020), lawyer and professor Maya Wiley, and the apparent front-runner in that race, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president who was formerly a police officer and state senator.

Adams seems to be a curious fellow. It's not even clear that he actually lives in New York. Then after Garcia and Yang this weekend jointly urged their own supporters to each select the other candidate as their second choice, Adams complained that this effort to cut him out was racist, even though Yang would be the first Asian American ever elected to the mayoralty. Also while it's less important, Adams lately gave a most unusual answer to a softball question that was posed to multiple candidates: "What's the best concert you've ever been to?"

Adams answered that it was the outdoor concert in Brooklyn by soul musician Curtis Mayfield on August 13, 1990 in which, tragically, Mayfield was struck by stage lighting equipment blown from the grid above by a storm that paralyzed him from the neck down for the rest of his life.

Even if you set aside the weird decision by Adams to pick the show in which Mayfield was horribly injured as "the best" he'd ever attended, saying "it was an amazing concert before that happened," there's another problem, as noted here: the accident happened before Mayfield performed. The opening act, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, had wrapped up early at the urging of the show's organizer, state senator Marty Markowitz, who moved up the timeline so that Mayfield, the headliner, could at least perform one song before an impending storm blew through. Mayfield had only just walked onto the stage to Markowitz's introduction when the accident happened. Markowitz himself just missed being struck. Mayfield hadn't played or sung a single note.

[N.E. Brigand]

New York City's population of 8.3 million people makes it not only the largest city in the United States but also larger than all but twelve U.S. states. Accordingly, although I'm not sure what if anything the results would imply for the 2022 midterm elections, the upcoming mayoral election in New York probably deserves some mention. The primaries for that election are tomorrow, and the winner of the Democratic primary is all but assured to win the general election in November. There are many candidates in the Democratic race, which will use ranked-choice (aka instant run-off) rather than first-past-the-post voting: voters will rank their top five candidates, and if no candidate has a majority of first choice votes, the lowest-ranking candidate is eliminated and that candidate's voters' second-choice votes are awarded to other candidates, and the process repeats until someone has a majority of first choice votes. The leading candidates appear to be former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, businessman Andrew Yang (who rose to national prominence when he ran for President in 2020), lawyer and professor Maya Wiley, and the apparent front-runner in that race, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president who was formerly a police officer and state senator.

Adams seems to be a curious fellow. It's not even clear that he actually lives in New York. Then after Garcia and Yang this weekend jointly urged their own supporters to each select the other candidate as their second choice, Adams complained that this effort to cut him out was racist, even though Yang would be the first Asian American ever elected to the mayoralty. Also while it's less important, Adams lately gave a most unusual answer to a softball question that was posed to multiple candidates: "What's the best concert you've ever been to?"

Adams answered that it was the outdoor concert in Brooklyn by soul musician Curtis Mayfield on August 13, 1990 in which, tragically, Mayfield was struck by stage lighting equipment blown from the grid above by a storm that paralyzed him from the neck down for the rest of his life.

Even if you set aside the weird decision by Adams to pick the show in which Mayfield was horribly injured as "the best" he'd ever attended, saying "it was an amazing concert before that happened," there's another problem, as noted here: the accident happened before Mayfield performed. The opening act, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, had wrapped up early at the urging of the show's organizer, state senator Marty Markowitz, who moved up the timeline so that Mayfield, the headliner, could at least perform one song before an impending storm blew through. Mayfield had only just walked onto the stage to Markowitz's introduction when the accident happened. Markowitz himself just missed being struck. Mayfield hadn't played or sung a single note.

New York Board of Elections officials visited this polling location in Brooklyn today, after polls had been open for a few hours, to remove the picture seen here:



That's a photo of Adams.

The person who did that had to know that was illegal. Surely the cop sitting there knew it too!

[N.E. Brigand]

Adams leads with 31% of the vote after the in-person portion of the first-choice votes are counted. Mail votes won't be counted until next week, and only after that will second-choice votes be counted, but it's going to be tough for Garcia or Wiley, both at about 20%, to catch up. Yang has conceded after winning just 12% of the first-choice votes. The Democratic nominee will face the Republican nominee, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, in November's general election.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the state, a socialist candidate, India Walton, appears to have won the Democratic nomination to be Buffalo's mayor, defeating the incumbent, and some other progressive candidates in western New York are doing well, it seems.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

While Adams leads in the first set of tabulated ranked-choice voting results released Tuesday by the city's board of elections, the race is tightening and despite Adams having all but declared victory after the initial first choice votes were counted, the race is really still too close to call. Adams has 51.1% of the vote and is followed closely by the former city sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, who currently has 48.9%. The new numbers do not include more than 120,000 absentee ballots. Most likely, Adams will still end up on top once all the votes are counted, but it is by no means certain.

[N.E. Brigand]

While Adams leads in the first set of tabulated ranked-choice voting results released Tuesday by the city's board of elections, the race is tightening and despite Adams having all but declared victory after the initial first choice votes were counted, the race is really still too close to call. Adams has 51.1% of the vote and is followed closely by the former city sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, who currently has 48.9%. The new numbers do not include more than 120,000 absentee ballots. Most likely, Adams will still end up on top once all the votes are counted, but it is by no means certain.

A number of analysts today indicated that, based on those results, Garcia stood a very good chance of coming out on top after the absentees are counted.

However, today's results are apparently garbage, because:

Elections 2.0: Sources tell me the Board of Elections is going back to the drawing board and running corrected ranked-choice numbers tomorrow. About 130,000 “votes” were part of a test-run that were never cleared from a computer.

New York is just terrible at elections.

[N.E. Brigand]

While Adams leads in the first set of tabulated ranked-choice voting results released Tuesday by the city's board of elections, the race is tightening and despite Adams having all but declared victory after the initial first choice votes were counted, the race is really still too close to call. Adams has 51.1% of the vote and is followed closely by the former city sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, who currently has 48.9%. The new numbers do not include more than 120,000 absentee ballots. Most likely, Adams will still end up on top once all the votes are counted, but it is by no means certain.

A number of analysts today indicated that, based on those results, Garcia stood a very good chance of coming out on top after the absentees are counted.

However, today's results are apparently garbage, because:

Elections 2.0: Sources tell me the Board of Elections is going back to the drawing board and running corrected ranked-choice numbers tomorrow. About 130,000 “votes” were part of a test-run that were never cleared from a computer.

New York is just terrible at elections.

The revsied (but still not final) results the next day didn't change much: Adams ahead of Garcia by two points in the last round -- again this is before absentee ballots are counted. The one big difference was that in the second-last round, Wiley was only behind Garcia by a few hundred votes.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

CNN is projecting Adams to be the primary winner

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/06/politics ... index.html

[N.E. Brigand]

According to a poll featured in The Economist, nearly 50% of Republicans believe that state legislatures ought to be able to overturn the popular vote in their states (and more than 60% of Republicans believe that Donald Trump actually won the election last year). What will this mean for 2022 (and 2024)?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I fear the answer to those questions.

[N.E. Brigand]

J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy who is running for the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 2022 as a well-funded Republican, has been pandering extensively to the Trumpist base. He's a graduate of Yale Law School and venture capitalist with substantial experience mingling with the rich and powerful, but a couple weeks ago he pretended to be disgusted at the idea of having to travel to supposedly crime-ridden New York City (he was actually going to a fundraiser at a mansion on Long Island). And for the past few days, he's been pushing a curious theme, which today found expression as follows:

"Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too.

I guess he has a point, as long as you don't count:

President Joe Biden (4 children)
Secretary of State Tony Blinken (2 children)
Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen (1 child)
Attorney General Merrick Garland (2 children)
Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland (1 child)
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack (2 children)
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo (2 children)
Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (3 children)
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm (3 children)
Secretary of Education MIguel Cardona (2 chlidren)
Secretary of Veterans' Affairs Denis McDonough (3 children)
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (3 children)
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain (3 children)
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jen O'Malley Dillon (3 children)
Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti (4 children)
Senior Advisor to the President Anita Dunn (3 children)
- - - - - - - - -
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (5 children)
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (3 children)
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (3 children)
Assistant Speaker of the House Katherine Clark (3 children)
House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries (2 children)
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (2 children)
Senate President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy (3 children)
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (3 children)
Assistant Senate Majority Leader Patty Murray (2 children)
Vice Chair of Senate Democratic Conference Elizabeth Warren (2 children)
Vice Chair of Senate Democratic Conference Mark Warner (3 children)
- - - - - - - - -
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (3 children)

That's the entire Democratic leadership in Congress, one of three Democratic Supreme Court justices, the President, 11 of 15 Biden cabinet members (including 9 in the presidential line of succession; Granholm and Mayorkas are naturalized citizens and thus ineligible to succeed to the presidency), and 4 of the 7 people that Wikipedia lists as most senior in Biden's executive office.

And of course, it shouldn't even matter. Vance's actual targets appear to be Vice President Kamala Harris (who married relatively late in life and is apparently beloved by her two grown stepchildren, who refer to her as "Momala"), and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (who has long expressed a wish to adopt and who announced with his husband earlier this year that they are in the process of doing so).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
All that said, I agree with Matt Yglesias that Vance, precisely because he almost certainly doesn't believe the Trumpist nonsense he's been shamelessly pandering, is possibly the best choice of the front-runners for the GOP nomination (and in the end, it's almost certainly going to be a Republican who wins this Senate race).

[N.E. Brigand]

According to additional data from the decennial U.S. census released today, even though the U.S. overall grew by about 7% (from 309 million to 331 million) over the past ten years, a majority of U.S. counties lost population from 2010 to 2020. This affects rural areas more than urban areas. New York City grew by about 10%. And for the first time since 1790, the number of White Americans decreased, from 196 million in 2010 to 191 million in 2020 -- although there is some suspicion that this is due in part to people who formerly identified as White now identifying as Other.

These points and others will affect redistricting and/or the results of the 2022 mid-term elections.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Herschel Walker, who won a Heisman Trophy with the Georgia Bulldogs before going on to play in the NFL, has announced that he is running for the Georgia Senate seat currently held by Rev. Warnock. Walker, who has no experience in politics and has lived in Texas since 2011, is a great favorite of former president Trump, and thus becomes the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination, despite serious doubts about his candidacy from establishment Republicans such as Mitch McConnell. If he does win the nomination, I believe it would become the first Senate race between two major party African-American candidates, though I am not sure that is the case.

CNN's Chris Cillizza runs down why this candidacy is a concern to McConnell and other establishment Republicans:

A Herschel Walker candidacy is a total nightmare for Senate Republicans

He hasn't lived in the state for a very long time. Moving back to the state to run for office opens Walker up to charges of carpetbagging -- and he has no ready answer for that.

He's been accused of threatening behavior. Walker has been open about his diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder and the struggles it has caused him, including writing a book about his experiences. But a recent AP report that went through Walker's business and divorce records reveal troubling -- and previously unreported -- behavior. "The documents detail accusations that Walker repeatedly threatened his ex-wife, exaggerated claims of financial success and alarmed business associates with unpredictable behavior." (Walker didn't respond to the AP's request for comment on the report.)

He's never been a candidate before. A Senate race is a very tough place to make a maiden campaign. And that goes double when you are talking about what will likely be one of the most closely watched and expensive Senate races in the country. Walker will now be under a very bright light from the second he made clear his candidacy -- and if past is prologue, he could struggle at times under such close scrutiny.

We'll see what happens. There is a reasonably good chance that this race could determine which party controls the Senate. Again.

[N.E. Brigand]

Additionally, Walker's wife may have voted illegally in 2020: it seems she cast an absentee ballot in Georgia despite having her primary residence in Texas, where she once received a "homestead exemption" tax break.

Voter fraud is so rare as to be statistically insignificant, and when it does happen it's often an innocent mistake, but some states (like Texas) will punish those mistakes quite harshly (while other states, like Pennsylvania, let off people who deliberately commit such fraud with just a slap on the wrist). Not sure about Georgia's track record in this regard.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I note that that article is from five days ago, before Walker took any overt steps towards announcing his candidacy (which included first registering to vote in Georgia himself, as I understand it). So either he and his team known the investigation is not going to go anywhere, or they just don't care.

[N.E. Brigand]

J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy who is running for the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 2022 as a well-funded Republican, has been pandering extensively to the Trumpist base. He's a graduate of Yale Law School and venture capitalist with substantial experience mingling with the rich and powerful, but a couple weeks ago he pretended to be disgusted at the idea of having to travel to supposedly crime-ridden New York City (he was actually going to a fundraiser at a mansion on Long Island). And for the past few days, he's been pushing a curious theme, which today found expression as follows:

"Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too.

I guess he has a point, as long as you don't count:

President Joe Biden (4 children)
Secretary of State Tony Blinken (2 children)
Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen (1 child)
Attorney General Merrick Garland (2 children)
Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland (1 child)
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack (2 children)
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo (2 children)
Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (3 children)
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm (3 children)
Secretary of Education MIguel Cardona (2 chlidren)
Secretary of Veterans' Affairs Denis McDonough (3 children)
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (3 children)
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain (3 children)
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jen O'Malley Dillon (3 children)
Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti (4 children)
Senior Advisor to the President Anita Dunn (3 children)
- - - - - - - - -
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (5 children)
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (3 children)
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (3 children)
Assistant Speaker of the House Katherine Clark (3 children)
House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries (2 children)
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (2 children)
Senate President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy (3 children)
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (3 children)
Assistant Senate Majority Leader Patty Murray (2 children)
Vice Chair of Senate Democratic Conference Elizabeth Warren (2 children)
Vice Chair of Senate Democratic Conference Mark Warner (3 children)
- - - - - - - - -
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (3 children)

That's the entire Democratic leadership in Congress, one of three Democratic Supreme Court justices, the President, 11 of 15 Biden cabinet members (including 9 in the presidential line of succession; Granholm and Mayorkas are naturalized citizens and thus ineligible to succeed to the presidency), and 4 of the 7 people that Wikipedia lists as most senior in Biden's executive office.

And of course, it shouldn't even matter. Vance's actual targets appear to be Vice President Kamala Harris (who married relatively late in life and is apparently beloved by her two grown stepchildren, who refer to her as "Momala"), and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (who has long expressed a wish to adopt and who announced with his husband earlier this year that they are in the process of doing so).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
All that said, I agree with Matt Yglesias that Vance, precisely because he almost certainly doesn't believe the Trumpist nonsense he's been shamelessly pandering, is possibly the best choice of the front-runners for the GOP nomination (and in the end, it's almost certainly going to be a Republican who wins this Senate race).

Secretary Buttigieg and his husband Chasten have since announced they have adopted not one but two childs, a boy and a girl:



Before I say this sooth again, you must run seven times around the seven hills of Rome.

[Inanna]

Adorable!