2023-2024 Presidential, senate, house, state and city election thread

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GOP Senate Candidate Larry Hogan Says His Democratic Foe Is Awful. He Once Praised Her as “Great.”
by David Corn
October 4, 2024

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, has a tough task. As he now runs for the US Senate, he claims to be a reasonable, non-Trump Republican, hoping to win over Democrats and independents in a state Joe Biden won by 33 points in 2020. He repeatedly insists he is a “straight shooter” who eschews “performative politics” and asserts he is “fed up” with politicians who are “more interested in attacking one another than actually getting anything done.” Yet while he casts himself as a sensible moderate who rejects attack-politics-as-usual, Hogan has mounted fierce negative assaults on his Democratic opponent, Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince Georges County. Moreover, he has pulled a giant flip-flop, assailing her performance in office as disastrous, even though Hogan had, prior to this campaign, praised her as a “great” leader and a highly accomplished county executive.

This summer, Hogan’s campaign launched a spoof website with the URL angelaalsobrooks.org that looked like her official site but slammed her on multiple fronts. The site was headlined, “Meet Angela Alsobrooks: Another partisan politician who doesn’t deliver.” It claimed she has failed “to deliver on even the most basic of government functions”—quite a harsh accusation. Echoing a dominant theme of Donald Trump’s campaign, the Hogan-backed site declared that crime in Prince Georges County has “increased to out-of-control levels.” (That was an exaggeration. Overall crime in the county was down as of this summer, though violent crime had ticked up, mainly due to a rise in assaults not involving a weapon and an increase in domestic violence. Carjackings were occurring at a lower pace than the previous year.)

The site also blasted Alsobrooks for “a lack of funding for police and firefighters,” though the budget the county passed on her watch contained an additional $200,000 to help the police fill vacancies and covered the creation of another 50 firefighting positions.

When asked about the misleading or inaccurate information on the site, Hogan said, “I would say that it’s—the whole purpose of the thing was to put out factual information, and it’s facts and nothing but the facts. There’s nothing misleading about it.”

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... -senate/

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Progressives Set to Unleash Swing State Blitz for Harris
by Jessica Corbett
October 4, 2024

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) Just over a month away from the U.S. general election, the largest progressive political organizing group in the country announced Friday that it is aiming to encourage 5 million voters in seven battleground states to vote against former Republican President Donald Trump.
Our Revolution hopes to reach voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin via door-knocking, phone calls, and text messages ahead of the November election, in which Trump is facing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

The get-out-the-vote effort comes after surveying over 1,400 Our Revolution members who live in swing states. The results, the group said, "present worrying signs for the Harris campaign" and "suggest that the Trump campaign is actively engaging young and progressive voters."

Joseph Geevarghese is the executive director of Our Revolution, which grew out of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The group leader said Friday that "the polls are tight and the Electoral College is rigged to give Trump an edge, but Our Revolution can turn the tide by turning out progressive voters in key battleground states."

In the 2020 election, President Joe Biden "narrowly beat Trump by less than 300,000 votes in these states four years ago, which means that our 1.2 million supporters in the swing states could be the margin of victory in 2024," Geevarghese noted.

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/harris-2024

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Because we don't have a 2028 thread yet, I will put this article here since it concerns an event that occurred in the current election cycle:

The First Debate of 2028
by Ian Ward
October 2, 2024

Introduction:

(Politico) Since the start of JD Vance’s vice presidential campaign this summer, I’ve heard versions of the same wistful complaint from his elite conservative allies: Where is the other side of JD Vance?

Vance’s pugnacious side, they acknowledge, has been on full display — at his campaign rallies, in his combative television interviews and on social media, where he’s leaned into his habit of picking very public fights with his digital antagonists. But where, they wonder, is the side that has made him such an object of such hope and fascination among New Right intellectuals and National Conservative-minded policy wonks, the side that blends an unselfconscious nerdiness with an apparently earnest — if also somewhat naïve — longing to remake the GOP along nationalist and populist lines?

At Tuesday’s debate, Vance gave these supporters a glimpse — if only a very fleeting one — of that side of him. Gone was the cat-lady-bashing, they’re-eating-the-pets MAGA firebrand. Here, at last, was the cerebral and wonky New Right figurehead that has won so many converts among the suit-and-tie-wearing conservative set.

“This was the Vance that energized so many of us,” said Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative journalist and co-editor of the Vance-friendly Compact Magazine. “Sophisticated, nimble, possessed of a post-neoliberal theory of bipartisan failure.”

Vance’s debate performance will likely do little to change the dynamics of the presidential race — vice presidential debates rarely do, and snap polls show likely voters rated Tuesday’s debate as a tie. Nor will Vance’s comments during the debate — especially his refusal to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election — overcome Democrats’ suspicion that he is merely presenting a more palatable and polished version of Trump’s anti-democratic extremism.

Read more here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine ... 00182260

[Ozzie guy]

Assuming I set this up right (I'm not from the US so I don't naturally know about your timezones etc)

This is a countdown timer to the first polls closing at 6pm EST on election day.

https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/t ... nt=cursive

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PA update - 10/7

Total ballots requested: 1,541,052
Dems 945,760 (61.4%)
Reps 419,190 (27.2%)
Other 176,102 (11.4%)

Total ballots returned: 137,654
Dems 100,845 (73.3%)
Reps 26,148 (19.0%)
Other 10,661 (7.7%)

Dem return rate: 10.7%
Rep return rate: 6.2%

Both Philly and Montco keep churning away, closing in on nearly 30% returned already.


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Flood-ravaged North Carolina Races to Restore Voting Access After Helene
by Zoya Teirstein & Jake Bittle
October 2, 2024

Introduction:

(Grist) There are battleground states, and then there’s North Carolina. Former President Donald Trump won the state by 1.3 percent in 2020, his lowest margin of victory in any state, and polls now show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris within just 2 percentage points of each other there. It also has more electoral votes than several of the other swing states that will decide the November election, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

“Kamala Harris wins North Carolina, she is the next president of the United States,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, said at an event in New York City last week.

Then Hurricane Helene etched a 500-mile path of destruction through the southeastern United States, killing at least 139 people in six states and causing more than $100 billion in damages, according to preliminary estimates.

In western North Carolina, moisture-laden Helene collided with a cold front that was already dropping rain on the Appalachian Mountains. Hundreds of roads in the region are now impassable or have been wiped off the map by flooding and landslides, communication systems are down, and hundreds of people are still missing. As the North Carolina Department of Transportation put it, “All roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed.” With just weeks until November 5, thousands of people displaced, mail service shut down or restricted in many ZIP codes, and many roadways shuttered, officials are now rushing to figure out how to handle voting in the midst of disaster.

“This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of North Carolina’s top election officials, told reporters on Tuesday. “The destruction is unprecedented and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting.”

Read more here: https://grist.org/extreme-weather/hurr ... e-ballots

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