Oh how sweet it is
Oh how sweet it is
Karma (postal) police, arrest this monster
Hello and welcome to an unexpected big Thursday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
We had a bit of trouble with the email server last night, so I wanted to send out a fresh newsletter to everyone. Along with the candidate profile, there’s new all updates and big news ahead!
Oh How Sweet It Is
National: It was certainly a busy day. Steve Bannon, the architect of Donald Trump’s racist grievance politics presidential campaign, was arrested today for his involvement in another racist, grievance politics scheme.
Federal prosecutors allege that Bannon, along with several others, defrauded the hundreds of thousands of donors to their “We Build the Wall” campaign on GoFundMe.
Instead of putting all of the $25 million they raised towards building a wall on the United States’ southern border, they pocketed a sizable chunk to do things like buying a boat. Bannon took over $1 million through a non-profit he runs despite promising to not take a salary for his role in the fundraiser.
Ironically, Bannon was arrested (by the Postal Service!) on a 150-foot yacht this morning. Boaters really do love Trump, I guess. And as always, Donald Trump Jr. comes out looking the dumbest of all.
There’s more big news below the next segment, but I want to make sure you see this story because it’s especially relevant today.
The American Dream in a Must-Win Seat
Steve Bannon is one of the foremost purveyors of hate in the United States. He helped make Donald Trump possible by stoking misplaced resentments, stirring racial animosity, and working to deny people their full human rights. Our next candidate is the antithesis of what Bannon believes and the kind of person we should be electing.
Son of working-class immigrants. First in his family to attend college. Went to the University of North Carolina and then attended grad school at Princeton University.
Ricky Hurtado has the sort of life story and resumé that embodies the American dream and he’s made it his life’s work to help other people reach those same heights. Right now, that means running to represent his hometown in the North Carolina legislature, seeking to win what’s been called a must-win seat (HD-63) in a state that needs to go blue this year. Remember, Dems need to flip just six seats in the state, and with new district lines, it’s absolutely doable.
He’s so dedicated to the cause, not even a case of COVID-19, which he contracted in June, can keep him from working tirelessly to win his district. Put together, it’s truly the antidote to Trumpism, a reason to feel a little faith in this country.
If you can say one thing for the last decade’s worth of craven far-right Republicans, it’s that they’ve inspired a generation of progressives to become activists and run for office. For Hurtado, it was former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, who went to war on the state’s environment, women, and workers during his time in office.
“It was just headline after headline coming out about how they were dismantling our public education system, how they continued to refuse to expand Medicaid, the suppression of people's voices in our democracy through voter ID and gerrymandering,” Hurtado tells Progressives Everywhere. “It was all that piling up and me realizing that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution.”
So around 2014, Hurtado moved back to Alamance County in North Carolina and immediately began working in the community where he’d grown up. Having received mentorship that put him on the path to college and beyond, Hurtado decided that his focus would be on providing the same opportunities to a new generation of kids in his hometown.
“I'm a first-generation college student and that trajectory really opened my eyes to so many of the challenges that working families have in North Carolina,” he explains. “We grew up living paycheck-to-paycheck and struggling to make ends meet at times when things got tough. I used my college experience, both at UNC and Princeton, to begin to understand social and income inequality and their root causes. And I really see education as being foundational to reversing this trend of inequality.”
Again, Hurtado followed his convictions. He’s now a lecturer at UNC Chapel Hill and the co-founder and co-executive director of LatinxEd, a non-profit mentor system that helps Latinx students through school and into higher education. Alamance County has a growing Latinx population — it’s up to about 16% — but many of them are low-income and children have fewer resources as compared to other students.
While the Hurtado campaign has like all others been somewhat scrambled by COVID-19, he’s applied his ethos of community service to quickly convert what was just a political operation into an opportunity to connect with and help his neighbors and perhaps future constituents. The campaign has made more than 1,000 calls a week, putting them up above 30,000 overall, and Hurtado has made house calls to deliver PPE and other supplies to people who haven’t been able to afford or acquire them otherwise.
The campaign has also held round tables with business owners, employees, gig workers, and other people who are suffering from the pandemic, a service that also gives him an early start on understanding the many interests and needs of a community that’s growing but still more rural and working class.
Now more than ever, the fact that North Carolina Republicans have refused to expand Medicaid stands as an egregious affront to working people in the state. The gerrymander that once made Hurtado’s district unwinnable was shot down by the State Supreme Court, making this the best chance for Democrats to take back the seat and the legislature. With just six seats required to flip the state blue, winning this district is absolutely essential. That Hurtado is the candidate makes it even more important.
Intermission announcement: Yesterday I spoke with Massachusetts congressional candidate Alex Morse, the progressive mayor who is challenging long-time Rep. Richard Neal.
There was a whole lot to talk about in our exclusive interview and I’ll be sending it out on Friday to our premium community members.
It’s the first of a long series of exclusive interviews we have planned for our members, which will come in addition to our jam-packed nightly news roundups. Becoming a member (just $5 a month!) allows me to bring you more original reporting and interviews and raise money for amazing progressives working to save the country. And it’ll help you win debates with your conservative family members!
Elections and Voting Rights
Massachusetts: The other big story this afternoon is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to endorse Rep. Joe Kennedy in his primary challenge to the much more progressive Sen. Ed Markey, the original Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal.
There are a number of reasons why this is quite remarkable (and one why it makes total sense).
The Democratic Party tends to hate primary challengers, so much so that tried to blacklist political consulting firms that worked with progressive challengers of incumbents earlier this cycle. Predictably, that policy backfired in a spectacular way. A number of primary challengers have upset establishment Democrats this spring and summer, including Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri.
The DNC especially hates young primary challengers who are taking on powerful, entrenched incumbents.
Pelosi served with Markey in the House for close to three decades; Kennedy is just 39-years-old.
Pelosi is supposedly concerned about Markey’s attacks on “the Kennedy legacy,” which amounted to a clever line in one of the Senator’s recent TV ads. The reality is that Pelosi has long been against the Green New Deal and Markey’s alliance with young progressives.
Given the blatant hypocrisy of this endorsement, progressives — including AOC — are steaming mad, especially after the tacit support that was given to Ilhan Omar’s primary challenger.
Markey is proving to be far classier than the rest of his old school Democratic cohort:
National: Remember Tuesday when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said that he would stop his sabotage of the postal service until after the election.
It may not surprise you to learn that he was basically full of it.
On Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she met with DeJoy, who told her that he had no plans to fix any of the problems he’d already created.
"The Postmaster General frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works," Pelosi said in a statement.
And on Thursday, news broke that USPS leadership is explicitly telling postal workers to not reconnect disassembled sorting machines.
Now, USPS employees aren’t even allowed to speak to the press.
In San Antonio, workers were told to hide a messy backlog of mail when Rep. Joaquin Castro visited the city’s main post office yesterday. Six sorting machines have been removed.
Various: Despite the USPS’s attempts at sabotage, voters are still requesting absentee ballots in record numbers.
In Maine, over 20,000 people asked for absentee ballots within the first 24 hours of the state’s request window being opened.
In West Virginia, the number is over 15,000 in just over a week.
In Georgia, the state will provide counties with grants of up to $3,000 to set up drop boxes for ballots. That should off-set about 75% of the cost.
Arizona: The popular “Invest in Ed” voter initiative that was thrown off the ballot last week by a county judge has been put back on the ballot.
It was a unanimous decision by the State Supreme Court, which ruled that the 100-word description provided by the organization proposing it was not misleading.
If passed, it will raise taxes on Arizona’s highest earners to fund education, which has been badly starved in the state. Their tax rate would go up to 8%.
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