While this song is, of course, very familiar, I venture to say that not very many people know that it’s title is “Optimistic Voices”:
I try to keep my blog somewhat free of the nonsense that’s going on all around us, and recently I’ve had several political posts, but as the most recent one was a bit of a downer, I thought I ought to post something more optimistic.
And a bit of good news has come this way.
For example, in Omaha, Nebraska, which is in congressional district NE-02, there was a race for mayor where three term incumbent Republican Mayor Jean Stothert faced off against Democratic candidate John Ewing Jr., but it wasn’t especially contentious or partisan because when you looked at the Democrat’s website, his top issues were crime prevention and fiscal responsibility. So there really wasn’t much distance between him and the Republican, was there?
Well, not until the final few weeks of the campaign, there wasn’t. That’s when incumbent Stothert noticed that she was running behind, so she went full MAGA on Ewing and started accusing him of wanting trans girls to be able to play girls’ sports. Uh, how many actual trans girls do you think there might be in all of Nebraska? What an asshole. Ewing just accused Stothert of being another Trump stooge.
Happily the voters of Omaha didn’t fall for Stothert’s hate schtick, or at least not enough of them anyway, and she lost 56% to 44%.
Ewing didn’t just win; as we note, it was a laugher. Elections in Omaha and/or NE-02 are rarely decided by double-digits. Further, if the Democrats are going to retake the House, this is precisely the kind of district they need to flip (in fact, the current NE-02 representative, Republican Don Bacon, is a top target of the DCCC). What the blue team needs is to swing 2-3% of the vote in 15-20 of these purple districts, and the House will almost certainly be theirs. And Ewing just swung considerably more than 2-3% of the vote. So, Democrats should indeed feel good about this result. Just not TOO good.
Also in electoral-vote.com yesterday was this news from Alabama:
The Alabama redistricting case may have finally reached its denouement, as a 3-judge panel in a federal district court in Alabama has issued a final ruling finding that the Alabama state legislature violated the Voting Rights Act in its 2023 redrawing of legislative districts.
You may want to read the whole thing, but briefly the Republican dominated Alabama legislature has spent years trying to disenfranchise Blacks. It’s the South. Whaddaya expect? Or perhaps I should say, they’re Republicans. Whaddaya expect?
The courts have finally ruled against them. They really smacked down the Republican legislature.
The Court wasn’t done. In a final salvo, the judges said the legislature “had raised the stakes of this litigation well beyond redistricting.” Recalling a shameful period and with an eye toward current events, the Court hearkened back to a decision from the Jim Crow era: “In a case all too familiar to Alabama, the Supreme Court explained decades ago that decisions to ignore court orders are intolerable in our system of ordered liberty even when they are undertaken in unassailable good faith and for purely ‘righteous’ purposes.” They added: “The 2020 redistricting cycle in Alabama—the first cycle in 50 years that Alabama has been free of the strictures of federal preclearance—did not have to turn out this way. We wish it had not, but we have eyes to see the veritable mountain of evidence that it did.”