Tag: anti trump
With Bid To ‘Make Trump Furious,’ Democrat Ossoff Rattles Georgia GOP

With Bid To ‘Make Trump Furious,’ Democrat Ossoff Rattles Georgia GOP

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. (Reuters) – After the crushing electoral losses that swept Donald Trump into the White House and sealed Republican control of the U.S. Congress, the Democrats’ road to recovery winds through the leafy, well-heeled suburbs of north Atlanta.

Here, Democrats are threatening a stunning special election upset that could signal how well the party can turn Trump’s low approval ratings into political gains. And they appear to have an ally in the April 18 vote: Trump himself.

In the first congressional election of the Trump era, a wave of grassroots anti-Trump fervor has positioned Democrat Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old political newcomer, to possibly capture a House of Representatives seat held by Republicans for decades, one of 24 seats Democrats need nationwide to reclaim the House.

“The grassroots intensity here is electric, and it’s because folks are concerned that what is happening in Washington doesn’t represent our values,” Ossoff said in an interview. “This is a chance for this community to stand up and make a statement about what we believe.”

With Democrats desperate for signs of hope after Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump, Ossoff’s underdog “Make Trump Furious” campaign has endeared him to national anti-Trump activists and pushed him well ahead of 17 rivals in polls. The documentary filmmaker and former congressional aide raised a jaw-dropping $8.3 million in the first quarter, his campaign said.

“I’ve never seen the Democrats around here so engaged, and it’s Donald Trump who got us so engaged,” said Carolyn Hadaway, 77, a veteran party activist and retired software engineer from Marietta, a city of about 60,000 people in Georgia’s central Cobb County.

Georgia would seem an unlikely venue for a Democratic revival. Trump won it by about 5 percentage points in November. And its voters backed Republican nominees in eight of the last nine presidential contests, including the last six in a row.

But demographic changes are brewing. Growing minority communities and transplants from other regions have made Atlanta’s suburbs increasingly competitive for Democrats. Georgia’s sixth congressional district, the location for April’s special election, exemplifies changes common in booming southern cities like Atlanta, Charlotte and Nashville.

The district is white collar, educated and doing well economically, with median household incomes of $80,000 versus $50,000 statewide, and nearly 60 percent of adults holding a college or professional degree, more than twice the statewide average. It is also increasingly diverse, and in recent years became a magnet for well-educated immigrants from India and other parts of Asia.

The district was about 80 percent white at the turn of the century. But since then, the black share of the population has grown from 10 percent to 13 percent, the Hispanic share has doubled to 12.5 percent and Asian representation doubled to more than 10 percent.

About a fifth of the district is now foreign born – twice the statewide average, according to census data.

Though newer immigrants may not be eligible to vote, census data indicate more than 40 percent are naturalized citizens, potentially bringing a different set of views on issues like immigration to the table than the voters in this district who sent Trump adviser and former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Congress for 10 straight terms.

April’s special election fills the seat vacated by Tom Price, the new secretary of health and human services. It gives both parties a chance to test their messages for election battles next year in suburban districts where Democrats need to make inroads and where Trump’s populist economic message did not sell well in November.

While Price sailed to re-election with 62 percent of the vote, Trump barely beat Clinton in Georgia’s sixth district by one percentage point. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney beat Democratic President Barack Obama in the district by 23 points.

Republican candidates nationwide will closely watch the result as they calculate whether to embrace the president.

The 11 Republicans in the race have split between those who portray themselves as Trump supporters and establishment candidates who keep a respectful and sometimes wary distance.

“I’m ready to support him,” former state senator Dan Moody, who was endorsed by U.S. Senator David Perdue, said of Trump in an interview. But “I’m not going to jump over a cliff with him.”

Grassroots Democratic groups flood the district’s tidy suburban neighborhoods on the weekends, busing in volunteers from as far away as Maryland to go door to door on Ossoff’s behalf.

The Ossoff momentum worries Republicans, say party officials, and outside help has arrived. A super PAC aligned with House Republican leaders put more than $2 million into ads painting Ossoff as too young and inexperienced.

Ossoff played down the strategic value of a possible upset.

“The national implications here will be about how this affects the political calculus for folks in the Republican conference in the House, not about how Democrats are supposed to run in the midterms,” he said.

In a low turnout special election, getting supporters to the polls is vital, and Democrats have voted early in greater numbers than Republicans so far.

“We aren’t panicking, but there is concern,” said Maggie Holliman, a member of the Republican state executive committee.

Ossoff’s best chance is to win the April 18 vote, a “jungle primary” that features all 18 candidates from both parties on the same ballot. If no one reaches 50 percent, the top two vote getters square off on June 20.

Republicans are confident they can win a one-on-one race with Ossoff, as the party unites with organizational and financial help pouring into the Republican-majority district.

“There is a chance Ossoff can win without a runoff, but that’s his only chance. He’s benefiting from unified Democratic support and Republicans being highly divided,” said Georgia-based Republican strategist Joel McElhannon.

Polls show Ossoff hovering in the low 40s, not enough to avoid a runoff. The leading Republican, former Secretary of State Karen Handel, is well behind.

Handel has been cautious in talking about Trump. She said in an interview she expected to work with him on issues such as tax reform and border security, but “first and foremost” she would be a conservative advocate for her district.

By contrast Republicans Bob Gray, a local business executive, and Bruce LeVell, head of Trump’s national diversity coalition, pledge undivided loyalty to the White House. Gray said he was the Republican in the race who performed the behind-the-scenes political groundwork for Trump in the district.

LeVell pulled out his cellphone and showed a reporter text messages from Trump aides Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and even Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner to prove his insider status with the White House.

“If people are looking for someone to help Trump, I’m their guy,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Howard Schneider in Washington; Editing by Jason Szep and Mary Milliken)

IMAGE: Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff greets supporters after the League of Women Voters’ candidate forum for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District special election to replace Tom Price, who is now the secretary of Health and Human Services, in Marietta, Georgia, April 3, 2017.   REUTERS/Bita Honarvar

How To Participate In The ‘Day Without A Woman’ Strike

How To Participate In The ‘Day Without A Woman’ Strike

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

The Women’s March and demonstrations of its type are all about showing up. Participants aim to make their presence heard. As L.A. Kauffman, the author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalis told Vogue, they “create situations that shine a spotlight on injustice and force a crisis that authorities need to address.”

Many who attended the D.C. march couldn’t hear the speeches or were caught in human traffic jams so crowded they couldn’t complete the official route. All of which didn’t matter, of course, because the point was to be present. But what if there was one day where women didn’t show up? A day women made their value known by their absence?

For their next big project, International Women’s Strike organizers, including the activists behind the Women’s March, are calling for an event of the opposite kind. The March 8 general strike for women aims to showcase women’s importance by revealing what happens on a day without women.

Taking the day off from paid work is only the beginning. Planned to coincide with International Women’s Day, the organizers request that participants engage in one or all of the following actions on March 8, as listed on their website:

  • Women take the day off, from paid and unpaid labor
  • Avoid shopping for one day (with exceptions for small businesses and businesses owned by women and minorities)
  • Wear red in solidarity with A Day Without a Woman

Exactly how to use this time is up to each individual participant, but across the country, women and allies of the strike are staging rallies, marches, benefit concerts, and other gatherings to show support and solidarity. In New York City, they will assemble in Washington Square Park for a tour of sites critical to progressive history, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where young immigrant women died in a horrific fire in 1911, the deadliest industrial disaster in history at the time, which led to substantial labor reforms. In Philadelphia, strikers will stand in solidarity with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, who have been without a contract for 1,200 days.

Some critics, including Maureen Shaw, writing in Quartz, and Meghan Daum in the LA Times, argue that this strike will mostly amount to a day without privileged women—women who can afford to take the day off without fear of lost wages or other repercussions from employers. Shaw notes that, “As empowering as strikes may feel, they tend to be most effective when they are centered on achieving a particular policy goal,” and compares this strike to those of labor unions fighting for higher wages, better working hours, or specific additions to their working conditions.

But the women’s strike is only one step in fighting for a platform that includes all of these asks and more: environmental justice, reproductive rights, and fair wages. The point is to show how many unseen, uncompensated, and unvalued tasks women perform, and how much society depends on them.

It’s supposed to be inconvenient, but Daum and Shaw’s responses also assume that organizers haven’t considered the economic barriers to striking (in fact, they take pains to explain that there is more than one way to participate). You can attend a rally before or after work, wear red, decline to shop, or decline to perform unpaid labor if taking the day off from paid labor is not an option.

For more information, including a letter to inform your employer of strike participation, visit A Day Without a Woman. The International Women’s Strike website has a complete list of events around the country.

Ilana Novick is an AlterNet contributing writer and production editor.

IMAGE: People take part during an event organized by American expats and Canandian nationals, in solidarity with the Washington’s Women’s March, in Ajijic, Mexico January 21, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer

Red-State Resistance Diary: Photographs Chronicling Life In The Trump Era

Red-State Resistance Diary: Photographs Chronicling Life In The Trump Era

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

Pins, pussyhats, rallies, and town halls are all nationwide signs of the resistance. Where Trump support is high, the opposition will fight. If you live in a state Trump won and have a photograph of a protest, meeting, or other expression of activism, hashtag your photos and videos #RedStateResistance, and you may see them on AlterNet.

Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.

IMAGE: Activists march to protest against President Donald Trump’s travel ban in Portland, Oregon, U.S. January 30, 2017.  REUTERS/Steve Dipaola

From Protests To The Polls, Democrats Rebuild The Party Through Local Elections

From Protests To The Polls, Democrats Rebuild The Party Through Local Elections

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

The anti-Trump resistance faced the first of many post-Trump electoral tests this past week, with Democrats fighting for four state senate seats, one in Delaware and three in Connecticut. Activists may have showed up for a month of protests and standing room only town hall meetings, not to mention weeks of jamming their representatives’ phone lines, but the question remained: Would they storm the voting booths as readily as the streets? If three out of four wins in both states are any indication, Democrats are beginning to realize that for the resistance to be resilient, it needs to campaign for and win elections.

With a bruising presidential loss, not to mention the fact that Democrats control just 42 percent of American statehouses, and lost 46 seats along with the presidency in November, this year’s stakes were even higher for state and local races. Stephanie Hansen won her election for state senate in the 10th District of Delaware with voter turnout at 35 percent, a high-water mark for state races, not to mention a special election, both of which even committed voters frequently ignore.

Delaware’s statehouse may have traditionally run blue, but, as Sarah Fox, a volunteer organizer with You Matter, a New York City-based activist group that sent 25 volunteers to canvass for Hansen, told AlterNet, “We also know that after November, anything goes. We can’t count on things to be what we thought they were.”

Fox and the You Matter team knew that “while it’s always important to have the best possible ground operation,” and that while “the campaign was incredibly gracious and welcoming [of outside volunteers] before, during and after… [there was concern that] particularly going into a rural place in Delaware, that they might not be in love with the city slickers coming from New York.” Whatever the response from voters may be, Fox said one of Hansen’s staff told her, “it speaks volumes that so many people from New York care about our election. We’ve never seen something like that before.”

Connecticut had three special elections the same week, and Democrats took the two they were favored to win, though not the third, which would have given Democrats a majority in the upper chamber of the statehouse. Still, even though Democrat Greg Cava lost to Republican Eric Berthel, as the Connecticut Mirrornoted in its election coverage, “In the most Republican Senate district in the state, Cava lost by 10 percentage points, which Democrats say is their best showing there in decades.” Cava’s campaign also benefited from a surge in volunteer participation, both in-state and across the country. Aaron Schrag, campaign manager and treasurer for Cava, said “the 32nd district has never seen a campaign like this before,” noting that they had support from “California, Texas, Delaware, all the surrounding New England states. Really across the country. We know we’ve done something special here.”

Schrag continued, “Protests are great, marches are awesome, but it’s just the beginning. Now they’ve found something they can put all that energy into.”

Ilana Novick is an AlterNet contributing writer and production editor.

IMAGE: The mascots of the Democratic and Republican parties, a donkey for the Democrats and an elephant for the GOP, are seen on a video screen at Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign rally in Cleveland, Ohio March 8, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria