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What's On Our Minds for May 18, 2023

Here’s what we talked about on 2023-05-18:

  • Gratitude to those who ran for local offices and board positions.

  • Turnout - problem of little information about candidates causing low turnout. Regret that the DPO appears not to have delivered the tool that was supposed to allow us at least to look up the party registration of .

  • Lack of balanced participation in candidate forums: Republican forums much more heavily attended by conservative candidates, and forums hosted by more liberal organizations (AAUW for example) more heavily attended by progressive candidates. Hugely positive feedback received by AAUW and MooVoter forums. Positive impressions some of us had about how the Republicans ran theirs. Desire not to give up on more balanced participation from both candidates and voters. Is there any chance we could co-host a candidate forum with the Republicans next year? That would surely be affected by whether Trump is actually at the top of their ticket because of the extremism and possibly even violence that might somehow flow out of that.

  • This example of mutual respect and valuable/insightful conversation between people who disagree on fundamental issues: the classes taught jointly by Cornell West and Robert George.

  • Races in which we still don’t have an outcome, due in part to new rules about counting ballots postmarked on election day. Amazingly close results in some. Very good results for us overall.

  • Tim Borman’s very generous appreciation for Joe Carr’s victory in the Neahkanie School Board election.

  • Jim Heffernan’s involvement in Braver Angels, and the enormous de-polarizing benefits of showing up in places where we aren’t expected.

  • Community Conversations that Laura Swanson is organizing, and whether they can improve the community’s understanding about basic issues of how government works. Her recent conversations with Betsy Johnson, who might be able to help with reach-across-the-aisle efforts, but who needs a lot more persuasion on HCP issues. Betsy is apparently very focused on open-primaries; consensus among us that we could only support that in combination with ranked-choice voting.

  • Worrisome news that our friends at the DPO are coming under fire over reporting of a large contribution.


Direct link to item: https://tillcodems.org/whats-on-your-mind/2023/5/25/whats-on-our-minds-for-march-18-2023.