Trump Watchers Are Paying Close Attention to Local Races

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Last night was election night for plenty of U.S. Voters, and there was enough drama to keep plenty of pundits biting their nails until the wee hours.

The nation was transfixed by the tight gubernatorial race in Kentucky in which Matt Bevin, the Trump-favored incumbent, appears to have been defeated in a squeaker by Democrat Andy Beshear.

“Is Kentucky a bad omen for Donald Trump?” Asks CNN.

Maybe. But using local elections solely as bellwethers for Trump 2020 is a missed opportunity to understand the lives of actual people.

Here’s just one example. Among other things, Beshear ran on a promise to immediately re-restore voting rights to some 100,000 people who had been protected under a previous executive order overturned by Bevin. But Beshear has more work to do: Kentucky has one of the strictest voter disenfranchisement laws in the country, one of two states with a lifetime ban for ex-felons. (Iowa is the other.) Experts say that the ban currently impacts some 300,000 people in Kentucky, which is 9% of the state’s voting-age population and includes one-in-four Black residents.

(Also in Kentucky, first-time candidate Daniel Cameron became Kentucky’s next attorney general last night, the first-ever African American, and the first Republican to do so in over 70 years. If Bevin ever concedes, Cameron will be replacing former attorney general Andy Beshear.)

Two other races caught my attention, each inspiring for different reasons.

After months of a nasty hate-speech campaign organized by online trolls around the country, Safiya Khalid became the first-ever Somali immigrant to win a seat on Lewiston, Maine’s city council. At 23, she may also be the youngest. Khalid fled Somalia with her family when she was 7, landing first in New Jersey, then relocating to Lewiston, to join a growing Somalian immigrant community attracted by the affordable homes and good schools.

Today, the former mill town (and home to L.L. Bean) has a population of about 36,000, one-third of whom are Somali — and who now have a representative on the city council who understands them.

And after facing down an ongoing hate campaign of her own, Virginia state delegate Danica Roem was re-elected to serve the state’s 13th district, becoming the first openly transgender person to win reelection in a state legislature. Lord knows, she needs the extra time—Roem ran on a quality-of-life platform that involved delivering breakthroughs in traffic and infrastructure. “Danica inspired trans people across the nation to run for office,” Mayor Annise Parker, president and CEO of LGBTQ Victory Fund, said in a statement. “Her reelection proves that political revolution is a lasting transformation—not an aberration.”

Inclusion—like politics—is all local, all the time.

Ellen McGirt

@ellmcgirt

[email protected]

On Point

A new get-out-the-vote effort focusing on women of color hopes to add marginalized voices into the presidential contest She the People is believed to be the first-ever national voter mobilization effort focused solely on women of color and aims to create a "national political home" for a demographic which has felt overlooked by Democratic party politics of late. "This is a very direct, strategic path to win electoral votes," She the People founder Aimee Allison tells NBC News. Allison says to expect an intersectional approach; the effort will also target Asian American, Latina, and younger women voters, all of whom are excluded from the traditional focus on white, working-class voters. "We're in essence applying on a national scale some of the lessons learned by the Stacey Abrams race in Georgia," Allison says.
NBC News

Today in zero tolerance and chicken wings… Two of the patrons who had been part of a group asked to move away from a racist customer at a Naperville, Chicago-area Buffalo Wild Wings held a news conference at St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church in Aurora, yesterday. Justin Vahl, of Montgomery, and Marcus Riley, of Joliet, along with attorney Cannon Lambert, told their story. Then, they asked for, among other things, better screening of employees, better "zero tolerance" training, a racial bias employee hotline, break room anti-bias signage, and a broader system of accountability. The company is reportedly making a host of changes; the two employees involved in the initial incident have been fired and the customer has been banned for life from all Buffalo Wild Wings stores.
Chicago Tribune

Richard Spencer’s vile racist rant is caught on audio in a not-particularly dapper way The audio was posted online by rival in vileness Milo Yiannopoulos, purportedly recorded at an emergency meeting following the “Unite The Right” rally that killed Heather Heyer and injured many others in Charlottesville in 2017. Spencer, who had gone to great effort to make white supremacist ideas seem mainstream and acceptable, can allegedly be heard screaming racist and anti-Semitic slurs. Click through for the entire messy diatribe, and never forget how hard he tried to make himself seem like an eligible bachelor with some unusual ideas. He had quite a bit of help.
Vox

On Background

Survey Monkey turns 20, board member Serena Williams helps them celebrate It’s hard to believe that the tech survey company has been around this long. Their first-ever promotional video was created in-house by two women—Lydia Baillergeau and Lara Belonogoff—who wanted it to reflect the company’s overall commitment to diversity and how they can play a role in helping others create a more inclusive workplace and world. But Williams’s starring role is a sign that she is continuing to increase her leadership footprint in deliberate and interesting ways. A side note: To date, Serena Ventures has invested in more than 30 portfolio companies, 60% of which are led by a diverse group of non-majority culture founders.
YouTube

California quietly returns land belonging to the Wiyot Duluwat Island is known by many names, sometimes it’s called Tuluwat Island, others, like Google Maps, refer to it as Indian Island. The mile-long marshy paradise sits in the middle of California’s Humboldt Bay. But now, if you visit, there is no need to make a land acknowledgment statement. After a century of wrangling the land now belongs to the Wiyot people again, signed over by the city of Eureka in what the National Congress of American Indians calls the United States’ "first known voluntary municipal land return achieved without sale, lawsuit, or trade."
CityLab

Study: One in five teens can’t finish their homework because of a lack of internet access It’s a real problem that’s not getting any better. Roughly one-third of low-income families with kids ages 6 to 17 don’t have access to high-speed internet, a gap that disproportionately falls on Hispanic and black families. From the study: One-quarter of black teens say they are at least sometimes unable to complete their homework due to a lack of digital access, including 13% who say this happens to them often. Just 4% of white teens and 6% of Hispanic teens say this often happens to them. Pew Research

Tamara El-Waylly helps write and produce raceAhead.