We will have a Zoom with Michael Feggans, D candidate for Virginia State Senate. Zoom link will be provided later for people who can not make the meeting in person. In the meantime, we have a special ActBlue page up for donations, here.

As compensation for toying with the schedule, we will have video chat on 5/14 with Michael Feggans, Sister District’s chosen candidate for VA House of Delegates. Join us and bring anyone interested in the Virginia Elections.

There are numerous Internet services that will bridge 2020s technology to 1990s technology (actually, the fax machine dates to the 1920s, with earlier antecedents). My favorite, because it really is free, is FaxZero. Note that there is an option on the main page that brings up the fax numbers of Senators and House members.

Note: Senator Padilla doesn’t receive faxes. No word on whether his office can read cursive.

Sister District is matching local (to us) groups up with Virginia for their odd-year legislative elections. The four candidates they are supporting are Danica Roem, Schuyler van Valkenburg, Joshua Cole, and Michael Feggans. We are particularly looking at Feggans, who is running for the House of Delegate from the 97th District in Virginia Beach. Feggans is an Air Force veteran, a retired Master Sergeant. On paper his views are what we want: pro-reproductive rights, pro-education, etc. Note that redistricting has scrambled the numbers of the districts: the old 97th was a very red rural area. The district is entirely within Virginia Beach and has zero overlap with the old one. It’s 57% White, supported Youngkin 51–48, but supported the Democratic candidates in previous elections by similar narrow margin. We are trying to arrange a Zoom interview with Feggans for an upcoming meeting. His opponent narrowly won the 85th District (similar location) over our candidate Alex Askew by 115 votes. We can do this.

We signed onto a letter from multiple groups asking Dianne Feinstein to retire, and some of us have made similar individual requests.

Bill has remained active with the Central Valley groups trying to get some voter engagement structure, so we don’t give away winnable seats. They have a virtual fundraiser coming up, Thursday, May 5, 5:00 pm.

A wake for EBAA will be held April 30. I’ll attend.

Bruce will read a book for the next meeting.

And I showed that I can connect to an (empty) local WordPress site.

In the meantime, here is contact information for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office. As you know, a more concerted effort is under way to suggest she retire. There’s a lot of posturing about why no one is demanding that Mitch McConnell step down, as he is still recovering from a concussion, but for me, it’s because I like having McConnell hors de combat.

Happy Orthodox Easter to those who celebrate.

Most of the meeting was about reorganization and expansion of the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Elmwood. I committed to looking into redesign of a website, with special attention to a calendar that could be a one-stop shop for East Bay political organizing events. (I just looked at the Indivisible East Bay site, and its calendar for this month is empty.) We’re thinking of guests like Robert Reich and Brad DeLong.

Besides a new name—Another Bunch of Activists seems to be winning—we will be listing ourselves as affiliated with Sister District, but not a formal chapter, and likewise affiliated to Indivisible.

Short takes

Tomorrow (Tuesday, March 21) is a Day of Action from Third Act, and organization of over–60s working to save the planet from climate change. Tomorrow is for complaining to your major bank about their dismal record on the environment. Don’t worry which bank you have: the American banks are either bad or worse on energy issues.

As I mentioned, the liberal candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court has over three times the advertising budget as her far-right opponent. She needs turnout, not money. There is also a special election for the Wisconsin legislature, where we are trying to flip a seat. I have no idea if this candidate needs more money, nor if there is any hope for this seat. Her multiple spelling mistakes in the ad pitch are a bad, amateurish sign.

Locally, the GOP has targeted not only Mike Levin and Katie Porter’s open seat in Southern California, but also Josh Harder up here. Well, good luck with that. Be prepared for Harder to fundraise from it.

I had not realized that the civic reform initiative A Common Purpose is a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, until I followed its link. It will be nice to get back to its high-mindedness.

We’re having a little trouble scheduling the next meeting because of holidays and other commitments. It may not be until April 23; stay tuned.

Another bunch of activists (or should that be Another Bunch of Activists?) will be getting together to continue discussion of our future plans. I am sure everyone has seen the fundraising for the Wisconsin court race, but it is saturated with money. There are also voter contact campaigns from the usual places (Tony, etc.).

The 2023 Sister District summit is happening this weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at Krutch Theater, 2601 Warring St, Berkeley. That’s on the Clark Kerr Campus.

Friday, 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm is Welcome reception, which we think is in the lobby of the Claremont Hotel. (The site has it there, and also at Krutch. The hotel sounds like more fun!) Events begin Saturday at 9:00. The Keynote speaker is Anat Shenker-Osorio, who is speaking at 2:10 pm. Contact Andrew for a registration link.

Naomi can’t go Saturday. If someone can go Saturday and give us a report, that would be great.

In case any of you have missed it, and want to buy stamps at the lower prices, the First Class Forever stamp will cost 63¢, up from 60¢. The corresponding increase in Postcard stamps is from 44¢ to 48¢. Of course, stamps you have labeled Forever or Postcard are good indefinitely no matter what price you paid.

US postage rates are among the cheapest the developed world. Write on!

The datacrats have had a chance to look at who voted in the election. Given that the results were not what the Punditocracy expected, there are important lessons.

• There was less fall-off in the Youth Vote (under 30) than usual in a midterm. Of course, this group is heavily Democratic. The top reason for larger-than-expected turnout was reproductive freedom.
• Other key Democratic groups—viz., Blacks and Hispanics—did have significant turnout problems. Democrats compensated with continued inroads with high-propensity White college-educated voters.
• A number of registered Republicans rejected MAGA candidates, either voting for their opponents or leaving the race blank. For these voters, Trump’s threat to Democracy was the top issue. This is a mixed result for conventional wisdom. A great many races were decided by swing, independent, or split-ticket voters, which feeds the narrative that candidates must run to the center. On the other hand, the idea that “kitchen table” issues like inflation are the key to their vote was repudiated. (How Democrats were going to run on kitchen table issues in the current economy is not clear to me.)
• Republicans actually ran ahead of Democrats in total vote for House of Representatives, by about two points, depending how you handle uncontested races.
• Centrist Democrats and ex-Republicans see the result as a triumph for their breed of Democrats, pointing at wins like the biggest upset of the cycle, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in WA–03, who defeated a MAGA loon. They are very quiet, however, about moderate Democrats who lost badly, like Charlie Crist (FL–Gov), Val Demings (FL–Sen), and Cheri Beasley (NC–Sen), none of whom did better than some random Democrat would have. (Wins Above Replacement of 0.0 for the baseball stats fans.)
• The New York Democratic Party is a mess, losing any number of winnable races. Bad organizing and flat-footed campaigning. They couldn’t even detect—much less defeat—a pathological liar who may not even be eligible. Heads have to roll there.
• Second-worst performance was by the California Democrats. We need to know why. Chime in!

The MAGA penalty was as much as ten points: that’s the margin of victory in Arizona for the one ordinary-Republican statewide candidate in Arizona, the new State Treasurer. The other AZ races were within one point. In the Nevada Senate race, MAGA cost two points compared to the Governor. In Georgia, there were hundreds of thousands of Kemp–Warnock voters. (Not easy for me to see where Stacey Abrams goes from here. See also: Beto O’Rourke.)