All of the elections for supervisor are settled—at least, that’s the way it looked two days ago. Now the race is D11 is getting tighter: Chyanne Chen is just 200 votes ahead of Michael Lai. The Department of Elections says there are 18,000 votes still to count.
Most of those are provisional votes cast at City Hall or at precincts on Election Day. We don’t know which districts they come from.
But if they are roughly equally distributed, then about 1,800 ballots remain in each of the 11 districts. And the votes so far are not equally distributed—of the districts with a contested election, D11 and D3 had the lowest turnout.
In D7, for example, about 35,000 people voted. In D1, it was about 33,000. In D9, 31,000.
In D11, the total so far is 27,400.
So if we can guess that fewer than 1,800 votes remain in D11, Lai would have to capture more than 55 percent of the remaining votes to win, and right now he’s at 49.55.
So if the final results track the existing results, Chen will probably still pull it out.
Probably.
Lots of people are talking about why Kamala Harris lost, and not everyone agrees with my analysis of the role of economic inequality. Some pundits are saying, predictably, that the country has turned more conservative, and the Democratic Party needs to move to the center (which means to the right).
Robert Reich, the UC Berkeley professor who was secretary of labor in the Bill Clinton Administration, has spent a lot of time interviewing Trump supporters. In a long Facebook post, he talks about the people who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primary, then Donald Trump in the general election.
Odd, right? Except he says not.
With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked my “focus groups” which candidates they found most attractive. At that time, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were the likely Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively.
Yet almost no one I spoke with mentioned either Clinton or Bush. They talked about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, oftentimes both, as candidates they’d support for president.
When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”
In the 1990s, many of these people (or their parents) had expressed frustration that they weren’t doing better. By 2015, that frustration had morphed into raw anger.
The people I met were furious with their employers, the federal government, and Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, upset that they had no job security, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and outraged that houses were unaffordable, schools second-rate, and everything far more expensive.
Several people I talked with had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis of 2008 or the Great Recession that followed it. Now most were back in jobs, but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power.
I heard the term “rigged system” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.”
These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party; some had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement. Yet most of them didn’t consider themselves political.
They were white, Black, and Latino, from union households and non-union. The only characteristic they had in common was their position on the income ladder: middle class or below. All were struggling. …
… In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Hillary Clinton with blue-collar voters. He did this by attacking trade agreements, Wall Street greed, income inequality, and big money in politics. Sanders sought to remedy the disease of the Democratic Party — its abandonment of economic populism and of the American dream.
Now that Trump has been reelected and his Republican lapdogs are in control of the Senate and likely to be in control of the House, it’s critically important for Democrats, progressives, and everyone concerned about social justice to see where the anger in America’s heartland has come from, to channel it toward its real causes, and to commit to taking power back from the big corporations, CEOs, and billionaires. …
Had the Democratic National Committee not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging campaign financing in favor of Hillary Clinton, I believe Sanders would have been the party’s nominee in 2016.
I still believe Sanders would have beaten Trump.
One of the most left-leaning members of Congress is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She asked her Instagram followers why some of them voted for her—and for Trump. The answers followed a simple pattern: Voters who are not rich are furious at the state of the economy and the nation’s political leadership, and they wanted to “shake things up.”
The Democrats, she suggests, didn’t give them that alternative. So they went with the Republican.
Mayor London Breed tried to run for re-election on the premise that San Francisco was looking up, that her established policies were working. For a wide range of reasons that have some the same roots as the national crisis, not enough voters believed her.
They wanted change—and while she completely ignored progressives who were offering a different approach to public policy, a straight white billionaire offered what he called an alternative (although his policy proposals were not a lot different from Breed’s).
Now Daniel Lurie and a relatively inexperienced Board of Supes has to govern in a time of crisis.
If they don’t succeed here, and Trump doesn’t succeed in Washington, the lane will be wide open for progressives who can offer a real alternative.
The Constitution states that the president must be a natural-born citizens who is at least 35 years old.
AOC turned 35 this year.
