We need to get Ohio ungerrymandered.
More recent numbers put that divide at 11,998,200.
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The fight for Congress will always be an away game as long as Democrats canāt come up with a permanent reason suburbanites should vote for them. Suburban voters are responsible for the latest house win, but most Democratic leadership focuses only on urban voters. Democrats need to expand beyond their traditional urban focus to install permanent infrastructure in the suburbs. The Republicans have been cultivating young suburbanites for generations. Those people have been running for and winning city council races and serving on various suburban PTAs and city boards as they prepare to move up. Democrats have lately been finding their best candidates coming out of the military. Great for the short term, but that isnāt how you build a bench.
The Democratic party needs to develop and promote young candidates in the suburbs. The Democratic party needs to start taking the long view.
I live in Florida and was stunned to discover the number of Floridians denied their vote because of the old law. When you look at it the law was aimed at denying the franchise to drug users victimized by the war on drugs, mostly marijuana users. I havenāt found anybody willing to clearly say they were for the old law. Of course, professional Republican politicians favored it because the old law impacted people of color far more than whites.
In our country, when you serve your time, you should be returned to society and regain full privileges. I might reconsider for repeat felons. But first-time offenders? They should be fully restored.
Every once in a while, a politician does the right thing and hires an ex-felon to work in his office. This is the best possible thing for a politician to do, provided there is supervision. Yet opponents will use this as an attack point.
If we are to have a civil society, felons must be restored to full rights. Ted Cruz must be allowed to eat dinner with his wife, without being attacked by morons. Also Bernie Sanders and his wife, and that new governor in Colorado and his husband. We need civility.
I fully support all attempts to end disenfranchisement. It is going to massively change the political climate in FL. Actual citizens will be represented. Isnāt that a wild idea.
Extremely sensible points. Building the bench in school boards and other low-level elections is a good idea. It is not easy to win a school board race, BTW. I tried once, and had little success. It did teach me that running for office is difficult, and getting people to listen to you is more difficult. Framing your message is hard. Articulating your message is harder. It is necessary.
I would bet that 5% of those who hang out here have run for office. If you are politically oriented, running for office is a good idea. It will humble you, first of all. And it will lead you to speak to people.
Itās more complex than you think. As it is, farmers who either own their own farms or are small, local farm owners (typically people who bought other failing farms) are not a huge part of the population in the ag belt. A lot of those farms are owned by large absentee landowners. This becomes more pronounced as you head westward (e.g., more farms are family owned in PA than are in, say, Nebraska or Kansas.) If those farmers get wiped out because soybean prices drop through the floor, then speculators will buy up those farms, and will likely operate at a loss until everything unwinds. In the mean time, the rest of the service economy keeps on going, and thatās where everybody is employed. Itās not just Walmart, someone has to sell and maintain tractors and other farmer gadgets, for example.
These are culturally conservative states. (Even those more affluent voters who donāt vote exclusively based on crap like Trumpās immigration policy and pro-life/anti-gay views still tend to be culturally conservative enough that they can easily tolerate Trump.) They will not respond to economic considerations.