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The rate after June 15 is about triple where we had been, although still low by National and California standards.

Expect serious slowing of re-opening measures. A few more months and I may have enough hair in back for a comb-over.

New York: No more news as of time of this posting. The race to face Lee Zeldin (NY-01, Long Island) has a margin of less than 200 with most of the ballots outstanding.

Kentucky: Squeaker win for McGrath. I suspect she would have lost if the election were this week and not last week. I would have more regrets except I don’t expect either can give Moscow Mitch more than a token scare. But: we flipped a Kentucky State Assembly seat up for a special election, 57–43(!). Dr. Karen Berg is the first Democrat to hold it in 25 years. She turns out to be the childhood neighbor of a friend, so we kicked in $25. And—look— that was enough! By my math, this costs the Republicans their veto-proof majority in the chamber.

Colorado: To the surprise of no one, John Hickenlooper won the right to dispatch Cory Gardner in November. Primaries for Progress, which I take, has a low opinion of Hickenlooper. Their newsletter even compared him to Dianne Feinstein: waste of a safe blue seat. Most of the mainstream press attention went to the Republican incumbent in CO-03 losing his primary to a QAnon-conspiracy nut. She also doesn’t let people with masks into her bar. Basically, someone who makes Sarah Palin look like Eleanor Roosevelt. She is highly likely to win; the district is strongly Republican.

Massachusetts: The day after Jamaal Bowman ran up the score on Rep. Eliot Engel (NY–16), I got a call from Alex Morse, the mayor of Northampton, Massachusetts. He’s running from the left against Richard Neal (MA–01), the chair of Ways and Means whose indolent pursuit of Trump’s taxes was frustrating. Morse called me months ago and I told him I’d wait to see Bowman’s result before making a commitment to another insurgency. Morse, who said he’d been at Bowman’s Campaign HQ for Election Day, wanted to make sure I remembered my pledge. I had. I even told him so when I picked up the phone.

Naomi reviewed material on the most effective strategies for GOTV. Postcarding is effective, letter writing more so. (Vote Forward, for letters.) There does not seem to be a problem with contacting people too much, as long as it isn’t an intrusive method like texting. Gentle social pressure and reviewing the actual voting process are better than partisanship. Email Naomi to get postcard addresses for TJ Cox.

I reviewed several upcoming Democratic primaries. Tomorrow we see if tortoise Charles Booker has overtaken hare Amy McGrath for KY-Sen. I tend to put more credence in the polls showing both of them far behind Moscow Mitch than those showing McGrath even with him. There were also several primaries in New York with racial and generational overtones. The NY Times, against type, mostly endorsed youth.

Links to Senate candidates in big bang-for-buck races. Greenfield (Iowa). Bullock (Montana). Cunningham (NC). And rather than donate to Biden generically, we can funnel donations through groups that will push him in a desirable direction. Example: Clean Energy for Biden. (Unfortunately, their name and URL are too easy to misread as “clean energy forbidden”, which is the Republican plan.)

Judy spoke again about the malign Alameda County sheriff. At this point we are trying to remove his support in the county Board of Supervisors. This year the key election is in District One. The progressive candidate in the General Election is Vinnie Bacon, a member of the Fremont City Council.

Bruce is keeping an eye on developments in Indivisible California. Much of the recent call was on Black Lives Matter.

Happy Father’s day, and here is the link.

Andrew Lazarus is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

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My Inbox has also lost weight during the Quarantine, dropping from 54,000 emails to under 30,000, and still shrinking. I just ran across two old emails from “Aaron (the Give Smart guy)” from January, 2019 on the Democrats’ chances to retake the Senate.

Let’s say, we are in much better shape now than it looked then. He expected Doug Jones to lose, meaning we needed four flips. Still the case.

Only Colorado seemed likely. Arizona seemed better-than-even. Maine, worse-than-even, although he correctly predicted Sara Gideon as the strongest challenger to Collins. Montana he correctly predicted as tier-one if Bullock entered after his Presidential campaign collapsed (against Conventional Wisdom, came to pass). North Carolina, Iowa, and Georgia were where the Dems needed to catch up. (We have. In none of those three did he even mention the eventual winner of the D primary.)

I’ve decided to take another look at the Kentucky Senate primary. Charles Booker is getting local endorsements while Amy McGrath keeps running the same two-issue campaign: part personal determination, part Mitch McConnell is evil. I’m not sure that plays well in the long run. McGrath can, of course, turn her $10MM warchest on her primary opponents.

With the pace of news nowadays, I had to Google to learn that Jon Ossoff just cleared the 50 per cent threshold to avoid a runoff. His nearest challenger, Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, had about 15%. Two other candidates won their home counties but trailed even further statewide.

I’m less optimistic about Ossoff than Conventional Wisdom Today, both from the election intrinsics and the certainty that in Georgia the mechanics of voting will be tainted by malice aforethought on top of incompetence.

I was asked why I don’t think Josh Harder, whom we worked hard for last cycle, needs any more money. Open Secrets has the answer.

Howze had to spend what little he raised on a competitive primary, and he is a weak, racist candidate.