Sorry we haven’t talked in about two weeks, but things have been busy. It’s also been unseasonably warm here in New England—a pleasant, but foreboding, sense of things to come.
Above you’ll hear a podcast I did with the two Sams of the District Sentinel today.
Here’s what else I’ve been working on since we last spoke.
On November 2, I looked at the Covid outbreak in Wisconsin letter carriers for Shadowproof.
Paul McKenna, president of the American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO for Milwaukee Area Local 3, told Shadowproof the total cases in the district from March were a little over 500, with around 200 of those coming in October alone.
“There were 236 cases from March to September 1,” said McKenna. “Then, in September and October, there were roughly 300.”
For Election Day, November 3, I covered ranked choice voting in Maine for The Intercept:
Lisa Savage, an unenrolled independent with ties to the Maine Green Independent Party, ran her Senate campaign explicitly asking voters to rank her first in their preference and Sara Gideon, a Democrat and the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, second. Under ranked-choice voting, if no candidate wins an outright majority, the lowest vote-getter’s votes are redistributed and so on, until there is a winner.
“Certainly we all would like to see Susan Collins retire,” Savage explained to The Intercept.
Less than an hour after Biden was declared the winner on November 7, I joined A Time of Monsters to break down the election. You can listen here.
After Biden was declared the winner, I covered the Biden transition’s rejection of Sen. Elizabeth Warren for a position in the Cabinet and how that was seen by her supporters, on November 9 for The Nation:
“Right now, we are fighting for our lives,” said New York Assembly member Yuh-Line Niou. “And it is important that we have these ideas everywhere, and we have to have all of our leadership be pushed to fight for us as working people here and in all of our country.”
Later that day, I provided an overview of the exit polling and how it shows progressive policies are in fact the way forward for the Democratic Party at Business Insider:
What Biden and congressional Democrats need to do is to hammer on the two main points here — the president-elect won more votes than any candidate in US history and the progressive platform that the party's liberal-left wing has made central to the conversation enjoys broad support. By taking this approach, the Democratic Party can make the case for a mandate and the will of the people, even as a possibly GOP-controlled or close Senate makes life difficult for Biden as he tries to make change.
The next day I joined TN Holler to talk progressive politics:
On November 11, I wrote for The New Republic on how the media is already rehabilitating Trump:
There is a simple truth that’s getting glossed over here: Trump is the natural culmination of the past five decades of the American conservative movement. But that’s not stopping the effort to reshape reality and separate conservatives into “good” and “bad” silos, which furthers the false idea that Trump is an aberration. That kind of mentality leads to visual atrocities like a political cartoon showing GOP Senator John McCain and Democratic Representative John Lewis looking down on the election results from heaven in delight. It’s a nice image until you remember that McCain supported Trump in 2016 long enough for him to beat back a Tea Party challenger and voted with the president 90 percent of the time until his death.
And then for The Intercept on the internal Massachusetts Democratic State Committee report on the Alex Morse scandal:
Despite its public assurances, the report concluded, the party remained in close touch with the College Democrats as the attack unfolded.Even more damningly, party officials, the report found, spoke to an attorney who said that the allegations, which were not specific nor backed up by evidence, did not rise to the level of something that could be made public without risk of a slander lawsuit. Party leaders then referred the students to a different attorney, Jim Roosevelt, who advised them to put their concerns in writing and helped edit the letter to Morse. The students told party investigators that Roosevelt urged them to leak the letter, but Roosevelt denied giving such advice. Regardless, it was immediately leaked.
There’s more Flashpoint coming. We’re going to have a review of the DSC vote and an investigation into a Covid long hauler, as well as other reporting, coming soon.
Thanks for reading—and stay tuned.
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