Tag Archives: District of Columbia

The Unfinished Civil Rights Agenda — The Commonwealth of Douglass and the State of Puerto Rico

By tmess2 | Published January 18, 2021

Today, we celebrate the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  And appropriately, later this month, we will see one of his successors, the Reverend Raphael Warnock sworn in as a United States Senator from Georgia.

But there is a lot of work still to be done.  And while I could probably write a much longer essay on the full civil rights agenda, I am going to limit this post to a very key symbolic part of the agenda.  Voting Rights was a key part of the King agenda.  And, while other parts of the voting rights agenda are important, today — over 4 million Americans are being denied the most basic of rights, voting representation in the House and the Senate.

At the time of the framing, the United States had vast, mostly unsettled territories.  Even in the states, the settlements were mostly limited to the coasts.  However, between 1784 and 1787, the original Congress under the Articles of Confederation adopted a series of ordinances related to the Northwest Territories (what are currently the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin) that governed the settlement of those territories and their ultimate admission to statehood.  Under those ordinances, a territory was eligible for statehood when it had population in excess of sixty thousand people. Continue Reading...

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Election Night Preview — Part 2 (8 PM to 9 PM EST)

By tmess2 | Published October 28, 2020

As noted in the previous post, by 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, we should have a significant amount of precincts being reported in the two earliest states (Kentucky and Indiana) and should be starting to get some counties reporting votes in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and Vermont.  During this hour, the counts in those states should be increasing.  By 9 p.m., we should be seeing either some projection in those states or an indication that the states are too close too call.  We may also be getting an indication in some of those states of how many absentee votes might remain to be counted (which could determine whether it will be possible to make any projection in those states on election night).

While it would be nice if we could get calls in a state like Virginia early in this hour, the bigger question as the hour goes will be the types of swings that we are seeing in these states.   Virginia in 2016 was a leading indicator as we were just not getting strong results compared to 2012.  So as this hour goes along and the networks start looking at the maps of the state, the key thing to pay attention to is how the numbers are comparing to 2016.  Even if the networks aren’t comfortable in calling a state yet, if the results are showing that Trump is underperforming in red parts of a state (i.e. rural counties) and Biden is overperforming in the suburbs, then that is a good sign for the rest of the evening as Trump only one by the slimmest of margins in 2016 and any erosion in his support could prove fatal.

This hour has the most states close.  You have partial closures in Florida (the rest of the state closed an hour earlier), Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota, and Texas.  While a significant part of South Dakota will close an hour later, the polls close for most of the population in Kansas, Michigan, and Texas at 8 p.m. Eastern.  In addition to these states, polls for the entire state close at 8 p.m. Eastern in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Illinois, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. Continue Reading...

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