Monthly Archives: September 2023

Alabama govt denied bid to screw Black voters

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  • SCOTUS ruled against Alabama’s request for a stay of a lower-court ruling to enforce Allen v Milligan, with no dissents;
  • District court’s ruling on congressional map stands for 2024;
  • Court-appointed Special Master Richard Allen made three maps of a redrawn 2nd district, extending from 48-50%-African American voting age population;
  • Proposed new 2nd district in all versions straddles east to west, including Phenix City-Russell County and part of Mobile.
  • Columbus-Muscogee, most of which is in Rep. Bishop’s GA-02, will have a Democratic neighbor across the Chattahoochee in Congress;
  • Plaintiffs are pleased with the result so far, but both parties had three days to file objections to the maps;
  • court selected remedial Map 3, which is seen by #ElectionTwitter as holding up the most for Democrats in its new 2nd district;
  • This may be good news for the plaintiffs in the Louisiana case, which is currently before the 5th Circuit;
  • Candidate qualifying in Alabama will open on Monday, October 16, 2023, at 8:30 a.m and close on Friday, November 10, 2023, at 5 p.m. CST.
  • Alabama had a separate appeal before SCOTUS, but on September 30, the state voluntarily dismissed their case. It would have been very odd for SCOTUS to support Alabama in that case after rejecting their bid for a stay;
  • Famous places to be represented by the new AL-02:
    • Tuskegee University
    • Tuskegee National Forest, the smallest national forest in the US
    • The Montgomery end of the Selma-to-Montgomery National Trail
    • The Jere Shine archaeological site
    • Alabama State University and its Historic District
    • Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base
    • Troy University (main campus)
    • Faulkner University
    • Huntingdon College
    • Auburn University at Montgomery
  • Declared candidates:
    • Austin Vigue (staff at Auburn University)
  • Possible candidates for District 2:
    • Kirk Hatcher (Senate District 26, Montgomery)
    • Robert Stewart (Senate District 23, southern Black Belt)
    • Vivian Davis Figures (Senate District 33, Mobile)
    • Jeremy Gray (House District 83, Phenix City)
    • Berry Forte (House District 84)
    • Pebbin Warren (House District 82)
    • Patrice McClammey (House District 76)
    • TaShina Morris (House District 77)
    • Thomas Jackson (House District 68)
    • Napoleon Bracy (House District 98)
    • Adline Clark (House District 97)
    • Barbara Drummond (House District 103)
    • Steven Reed (Mayor of Montgomery)
    • Eddie Lowe (Mayor of Phenix City)
    • Lawrence Haywood Jr (Mayor of Tuskegee)
    • Phyllis Harvey-Hall (2nd congressional district Democratic nominee 2020 and 2022)
    • Doug Jones (former U.S. Senator, although he lives much closer to Birmingham)

Several people, all likely Dems, may look for an on-ramp to a career in DC with this district when it is approved.

A big question is if the creation of this district will allow Dems to cultivate more political talent from the rural Black Belt region.

Alabama will join the number of Southern states with more than one majority-minority or minority-plurality district, alongside Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and Texas (Tennessee used to have more than one but it was eliminated in 2022).

FKA Twigs Performs “It’s a Fine Day” at Vogue World: London

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FKA Twigs performs Opus III’s “It’s a Fine Day” with the Rambert contemporary dance company at Vogue World: London. Providing one of the first live performances of the night, FKA Twigs hit the stage wearing a sexy black cut-out bodysuit by the New York designer LaQuan Smith, while the Rambert dancers sported traditional black, form-fitting dance wear behind and around her.

Watch the entire event here: https://youtube.com/live/oWfius0mvkY?feature=share

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What the iPhone 15’s Spatial Video Feature Means for the Vision Pro

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CNET’s Scott Stein talks about Apple’s new Spatial Video feature for the iPhone 15 and what it means for the company’s Vision Pro headset.

New Double Tap Feature Gives Apple Watch Users Hands-Free Control https://cnet.co/46bl8sw

0:00 Intro
0:26 iPhone 15 Pro Spatial Video Cameras
0:56 Apple Vision Pro Spatial Videos
2:18 Apple Watch Double Tap
2:45 Vision Pro Gesture Controls
2:25 Apple Watch X

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Mastodon/Fediverse now on WordPress.com

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I see that Mastodon is now an option for auto-sharing posts for WordPress.com. Also, Automattic acquired the ActivityPub for WordPress plugin and released v1.0 this week, and are working on connecting ActivityPub to WordPress.com. Good. It’s all coming together.

Still waiting for Automattic to join Tumblr to the Fediverse though.

Consider This: Redrawing Borders

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An onstage conversation on borders and divides with Matt McCaw, spokesperson for the Greater Idaho movement; Alexander Baretich, designer of the Cascadian flag; and Carina Miller, chair of the Columbia River Gorge Commission.

Why are our borders in the places they are, and when should they be redrawn? When are borders useful, and when are they symbolic? Should borders be based on geography, history, culture, or some other criteria?

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How Republicans conquered Florida

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Florida was once the iconic swing state. What happened?

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In 2022, before he began a campaign for the presidency, Ron DeSantis was reelected governor of Florida in a landslide. This was impressive and surprising because the 2022 elections were disappointing for Republicans almost everywhere else in the US. But DeSantis’s overwhelming victory was doubly impressive and surprising because when he had first been elected, just four years earlier, it was by just a tiny margin.

For a long time, in fact, tiny election margins were the norm in Florida elections. Florida was a “swing state” — it sometimes voted for Democrats, sometimes for Republicans, and was a major prize up for grabs in presidential elections. But by 2022, something had changed: Florida Republicans up and down the ballot won their races by margins similar to DeSantis’s, and no one was calling Florida a swing state anymore.

Florida seems to have undergone a political transformation. So what happened? In this video, we look at three possible explanations.

Chapters:
0:00 What changed?
1:49 Defining the question
2:52 New Floridians
4:10 Latino voters
7:05 Florida Democrats
8:26 The other reasons
10:09 A request

Read “The United States of Florida,” a contributor-supported project from Vox: https://ift.tt/R2p8Jyv

We looked at …. a lot of data for this video. Here are the main sources we used:

County-by-county results in Florida elections from 2016-2022 came from the Florida Department of State’s Election Reporting System: https://ift.tt/kFuHjZ9

The screenshotted US Census page showing that Miami-Dade is mostly Latino can be found here, under the “data tables” tab: https://ift.tt/tEpHReh

Our map showing the “specific origin” of various states’ Latino populations was inspired by the University of Washington’s Great Migrations Project: https://ift.tt/9UzaK02

The data we used for that map came from the US Census via this very helpful tool: https://ift.tt/pVg6XKk

The chart about Spanish-language ad spending in the 2022 Florida governor’s race came from a post-mortem of the 2022 election by the research firm Equis. You can find it on page 59: https://ift.tt/Ng7ipqc

And now for the big red bars. The Florida state party expenditures came from Transparency USA, an organization that tracks state-level campaign finance data. That data for Florida Republicans is here: https://ift.tt/z4QVtgW
And Democratic state party expenditures are here: https://ift.tt/8f42NG3

The data on the best-funded state parties is from OpenSecrets, another org that tracks campaign finance data: https://ift.tt/rXV6caO

The chart at the end, which compiles spending from the national Democratic Party, was also based on information from OpenSecrets: https://ift.tt/6QbjeXa

And the data on how much the state parties raised came from Florida Department of State’s campaign finance database: https://ift.tt/HsfkKiZ

The line chart that shows total voter registrations for each party is based on data that Florida’s Division of Elections makes public: https://ift.tt/2AUGdIK

Finally, the data around voters who moved to a new state and new Florida registrations from 2020-2023 came from the data vendor L2: https://ift.tt/vds8Wuw

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