Month: March 2023

And your point is?

A divorced couple in Virginia is arguing over custody of frozen embryos.

Judge Uses a Slavery Law to Rule Frozen Embryos Are Property

Frozen human embryos can legally be considered property, or “chattel,” a Virginia judge has ruled, basing his decision in part on a 19th century law governing the treatment of slaves.

The preliminary opinion by Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Richard Gardiner – delivered in a long-running dispute between a divorced husband and wife – is being criticized by some for wrongly and unnecessarily delving into a time in Virginia history when it was legally permissible to own human beings.

“It’s repulsive and it’s morally repugnant,” said Susan Crockin, a lawyer and scholar at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics and an expert in reproductive technology law.

And her point is? This is your America on Trumpism, and oh so great again.

“I would like to think that the bench and the bar would be seeking more modern precedent,” said Solomon Ashby, president of the Old Dominion Bar Association. The group is primarily African American attorneys.

Gardiner’s decision is not final.

In a separate part of his opinion, Gardiner also said he erred when he initially concluded that human embryos cannot be sold.

“As there is no prohibition on the sale of human embryos, they may be valued and sold, and thus may be considered ‘goods or chattels,’” he wrote.

Crockin said she’s not aware of any other judge in the U.S. who has concluded that human embryos can be bought and sold. She said the trend, if anything, has been to recognize that embryos have to be treated in a more nuanced way than as mere property.

“has anyone tried turning 2023 off and then back on again?” tweeted MiketheMadBiologist.

What people “hate even more is to be patronized”

Andrew L Seidel (“The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American“) notes that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were for the most part not religious men. At least, not in the evangelicals’ sense. Where they referenced morality and religion as necessary to an orderly society, the two were separate things. For men such as themselves, morality was the product of their elite educations and deep inquiry. For the masses, religion was a pale substitute and ripe for abuse and exploitation by the unscrupulous.*

To guard against the latter, the framers revered almost as secular saints were elitists in a groundbreaking way by wisely separating church and state. Thus, they wrote “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” into the U.S. Constitution even before the First Amendment was added.

On that note, Tom Nichols in his The Atlantic newsletter addresses the very different elitism of Fox personalities.

The MAGA right loudly whines, Nichols observes, that they’ve been looked down on while describing opponents “as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, ‘human scum.’” In MAGAstan,  “Fuck your feelings” works only one way.

Nichols owns being elitist insofar as he believes “some people are better at things than others.” In fact, that “some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others,” he writes:

In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.

The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.”They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics.

Nichols may hold to elite views. He has argued them with Trump populists. But never patronized them as elites at Fox and the GOP:

Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.

Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.

You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.

They are shameless about it.

It is not condescending to tell people when they are wrong, Nichols insists. But what people hate more than condescension “is to be patronized.”

* “[In] colonial history…we find true Christian nations—the colonies—founded on Christian principles. Those Christian governments were so tyrannical that they became examples for the founders of how not to build a nation.”

Nobody knows how the company is doing right now

It appears that Trump is getting shady financing from some rich guy in San Diego who owns an online bank. I’m sure he won’t need anything in return should Trump become president again so this is all perfectly fine.

The Trump Organization says it ended a tumultuous 2022 without telling anyone outside the company how business is doing—a claim that, if believed, could be an indication of its looming financial difficulties in the face of a tsunami of legal trouble.

In practical terms, however, the claim also keeps New York state investigators from getting a clear picture of whether the real estate firm has continued lying to banks about its property values, even as investigators barrel toward a trial that could kill off the Trump Organization.

The disclosure about how the Trumps haven’t made any financial statements to banks or accounting firms was made in a Feb. 3 letter written by a retired judge tasked with babysitting the Trumps’ real estate empire, in a document that was made public in court filings last week.

The Trumps “have not provided a 2022 statement of financial condition to any third parties, and do not intend to do so,” Barbara S. Jones, a former federal judge now in private practice, wrote to the state judge who appointed her.

She’s referring to the same type of financial record that has the Trump Organization in hot water now, given that former President Donald Trump issued so many of them based on outrageously phony valuations, as documented by the New York AG’s lawsuit against the company last year.

In accounting, a statement of financial condition is a sensitive legal document that serves as a summary of a company’s assets and liabilities. But notably, it must also include disclosures describing how the numbers were put together. These are the very documents the Trumps are accused of faking for years, padding the numbers with nonexistent real estate space in Trump Tower and hyperinflated values for undeveloped land.

Jones noted that the lack of information wasn’t exactly a surprise, as the court had previously been told the Trumps were keeping mum about last year.

That line wouldn’t be alarming, were it not for two things: the Trump Organization’s financial statements are now the center of the New York attorney general’s massive fraud investigation; and any large real estate company would have to regularly make financial condition statements anytime it seeks to borrow money for a project from a reputable lender.

That means that, either the Trump Organization has fallen on hard times, found a bank willing to do business without responsible paperwork, or isn’t telling the truth.

One person with knowledge of the AG’s investigation noted that the company’s explanation only makes sense if it found a “sketchy” bank willing to do business without relying on official financial statements.

Notably, there was one bank in particular that came to the Trumps’ rescue last year amid a wave of revelations that the company had engaged in fraud for over a decade: Axos, an internet-only bank based in San Diego.

As the Trump business and political legacy began to crumble, legitimate banking and accounting firms finally started to distance themselves from the Trump Organization. Following Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, his go-to German lender, Deutsche Bank, dropped him. When New York AG Letitia James revealed how her investigators discovered the company’s pattern of lying on financial forms in early 2022, Trump’s longtime outside accounting firm of Mazars USA ditched him too.

Axos Bank swooped in and refinanced a $100 million loan to U.S. Bank National Association, according to documents filed with the New York City Department of Finance and signed by Eric Trump as president of Trump Tower Commercial LLC. Axos then gave the Trump Organization a lifeline by paying off its $125 million loan to Deutsche Bank in May 2022, according to the AG’s civil fraud lawsuit against the Trumps.

Axos is run by Gregory Garrabrants, a financial executive who has donated $65,000 to GOP candidates since 2012, with the bulk of that during Trump’s time in the White House, according to Federal Election Commission records. That spending includes $9,600 on Trump’s failed re-election campaign in 2020.

Oddly, the Trumps’ business deal with Axos appeared to hinge on the ability to keep them from having to make the very disclosures that caused so much trouble in the first place, according to the AG’s lawsuit.

“During the negotiations with Axos Bank in February 2022, the Trump Organization sought to avoid submitting a statement of financial condition or making representations about Mr. Trump’s net worth. Instead, the Trump Organization pushed to provide a schedule of material real estate assets and liabilities and leave it to the lender to calculate net worth,” the AG’s office claimed.

That arrangement essentially shifted the burden over to Axos. In previous deals with other banks, the Trump Organization had put together financial condition statements summing up its value—after adding massive injections of seemingly nonexistent values based on intangible stuff like “brand value,” a claim Trump has made several times in public but also in court.

The court-appointed monitor’s Feb. 3 letter confirms the idea that the Trump Organization went the entire year without making any of the typical disclosures required when borrowing money from a financial institution.

Axos did not reply to a request for comment. The Trump Organization also did not answer questions about its deal with Axos.

Sweet…

It still amazes me that Trump is such a massive trainwreck in every way that this blatant form of corruption is an afterthought. He sold the presidency to the highest bidder when he was president —- and they are lining up for more.

From an email friend:

Those of us of a certain age will remember the attached photo depicting the summary execution of a Viet Cong officer, Nguyen Van Lem, by Saigon’s chief of police. Eddie Adams, the photographer who took the photo (for which he won a Pulitzer), subsequently investigated the story behind it. It seems that Lem had killed an ARVN colonel along with his wife and six children. But it turns out that there was a seventh child, a nine-year old son, who escaped the massacre and lay clinging to his mother’s body for two hours until he was found. This son, named Huan Nguyen, fled to the US after the fall of Saigon, joined the Navy, and was yesterday promoted to the rank of admiral.

https://www.corriere.it/esteri/23_marzo_09/foto-saigon-execution-55-anni-fa-bambino-vietnamita-superstite-strage-diventato-ammiraglio-marina-americana-1302baca-be71-11ed-b743-21e74a13bd9b.shtml?intcmp=emailNLcor_americacina_9marzo2023

Wow…

Hookay….

We received the following response from @LtGovMcNally’s communications director who says there is nothing inappropriate about the likes or comments because Lt. Gov McNally enjoys interacting with his constituents of all backgrounds. #TNPolitics pic.twitter.com/RDKIRukcRW

— Walter Murphy (@WMurphyNews) March 9, 2023

Will his homophobic constituents buy this? Probably. They all voted for Trump didn’t they? Shamelessness is their superpower.

This is yet another data point among millions, that many these anti-LGBTQ zealots have secret lives that they are hiding. In the larger sense it’s incredibly sad that so many people can’t find the courage to live their lives honestly, even in this more tolerant world. But the fact that they actually use their power to degrade and discriminate against the people who are doing that is unforgiveable.

For now

This is a very interesting finding in a new USA Today/Ipsos poll about Americans’ view of “woke”, the epithet being hurled by Ron Desantis with virtually every breath he takes:

Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on “woke,” but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans.

Overall, 39% say instead that the word reflects what has become the GOP political definition, “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” That’s the view of 56% of Republicans.

The findings raise questions about whether Republican campaign promises to ban policies at schools and workplaces they denounce as “woke” could boost a contender in the party’s primaries but put them at odds with broader public opinion in the general election. 

Independents, by 51%-45%, say “woke” means being aware of social injustice, not being overly politically correct.

“Most Americans understand that to be woke is to be tuned in to injustices around us,” said Cliff Young of Ipsos. “But for a key segment of Republicans who make up the Trump-DeSantis base, ‘woke’ is a clear trigger for the worst of the politically correct, emerging multicultural majority.”

A new rallying cry in the culture wars

In the early 20th century, “woke” was generally used as a call for Black people around the world to “wake up” to racial oppression. After the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the term gained wider usage to describe awareness of the continuing legacy of racial discrimination and systematic oppression.

Now conservatives have adopted the term as a rallying cry in the culture wars, signaling their opposition to everything from the teaching of the ongoing effects of slavery to the use of gender-neutral pronouns.

“We will never surrender to the woke mob,” Ron DeSantis declared in his victory speech when he won a second term as Florida governor in November. Former President Donald Trump last week accused President Joe Biden of engineering “a woke takeover of the entire federal government.”

Even South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott, a Black man who discusses how racism has affected his life, has derided “woke corporations” and “woke prosecutors” as negative forces in American life.

Trump has announced his campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination, and DeSantis is seen as likely to be his leading challenger, although he hasn’t formally announced his candidacy. Scott has also indicated he is considering a presidential bid. 

Republicans, by 60%-14%, say being described as “woke” would be an insult, not a compliment. Independents – by 42%-32% – agree. Democrats, by 46%-25%, say it would be a compliment.

Across party lines, about 1 in 4 say they don’t know enough about what the term means to judge whether it is a compliment or a slur.

The USA TODAY/Ipsos poll of 1,023 adults was taken Friday through Sunday  using KnowledgePanel, Ipsos’ online probability-based panel. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.

‘Critical race theory’ and the power of words

On issues of race and gender, language matters. 

Americans by close to 3-1, 72%-26%, support teaching “the ongoing effects of slavery and racism in the United States” in public schools, a question asked of half the sample. That includes overwhelming numbers of Democrats and independents and close to half of Republicans (46%). 

But in response to a different question asked of the other half of the sample, those surveyed oppose by 53%-41% the teaching of “critical race theory,” which holds that systemic racism is institutionalized in America to the advantage of white people.

The phrase particularly resonates among Republicans, who by 81%-15%, oppose the teaching of critical race theory in public schools.

Americans overwhelmingly oppose, by 76%-21%, efforts by state governments to ban certain books from school classrooms and libraries. Last year the nonprofit group PEN America reported that school districts in 26 states had moved to ban some books, often ones that relate to race or gender identity.

The opposition to state bans crosses party lines, including 86% of Democrats, 78% of independents and 66% of Republicans.

On gender, a wide partisan divide

The partisan divide is gaping on matters involving gender.

Overall, those surveyed overwhelmingly oppose the use of gender-neutral pronouns to describe someone, 61%-36%.

But while almost all Republicans oppose gender-neutral pronouns, 87%-11%, Democrats support them by double-digits, 61%-37%. 

The clashing views are similar over whether people should be able to identify as someone other than “man” or “woman” on government documents such as passports and birth certificates. Overall, Americans oppose the idea by 61%-36%.

While 88% of Republicans oppose it, however, 60% of Democrats support it.

I’m actually surprised that they were able to get respondents other than Fox news vieweres who are even aware of the term. But I guess people are more tuned into this culture war garbage than I realized.

Ron DeSantis is busy making this a major political thing by saying it over and over and over again. They clearly think they are on to something big, probably based upon his 2022 campaign success. But the exit polls show that DeSantis really won on the issue of inflation not culture war stuff. Abortion, which favored the Democrats came in a distant second followed by crime and immigration. He won 52% of the women vote there whereas Biden was 51% in 2020 soI don’t see that as much of a sea change. The real reason he won so big was because of the age demographics. Old people vote in mid-terms and Florida is full of old people. The younger voters didn’t turn out.

So, this culture war gambit, designed to win over the MAGAs, could end up being an albatross around his neck, even in primaries in blue states where there are GOPers who aren’t really into the book banning and LGBTQ shaming “woke” strategy. It certainly isn’t a magic bullet.

In other words, it’s the Trumpers who have Trump Derangement Syndrome.

If the GOP establishment is desperate to stop Trump, I have wondered why they haven’t changed the winner-take-all delegate rules in various states which gives Trump a built in advantage in a big field with his hardcore base of about 30% of the party. Well, it looks like they might be doing that:

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1633842103100018697

The piece to which she refers said this:

Ahead of 2020, the Trump campaign successfully played the role of the party establishment. From their perch at the White House, his aides shaped state parties’ rules to make it harder for challengers to accumulate delegates. The goal — which they achieved — was to strangle any primary challenges before they could develop.

Heading into 2024, the Trump team’s outlook is very different. With memories of the 2016 efforts to stop Mr. Trump’s victory in mind, they have been canvassing state parties to hunt for opportunities to shape convention and delegate rules to Mr. Trump’s advantage.

Though people involved in the effort said no lobbying for rule changes had yet occurred, the Trump team has begun calling officials of state parties and has dispatched staff members to attend some party gatherings.

The Trump campaign isn’t alone in preparing for a delegate fight. Other prominent Republicans, including Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and a top delegate expert, have been discussing amendments to the delegate rules, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Cuccinelli declined to comment, saying only that he was not publicly committed to a candidate.

Now that Cuccinelli has come out for DeSantis, I think it’s probably that he’s going to try to change the delegate rules to make it harder for Trump. I’m not sure it will make a difference — He’s still pretty popular and even if it comes down to Trump vs DeSantis there’s no guarantee that Trump can’t get a majority of delegates. And Trump still has clout with the state parties which may not go along.

This battle will be a preview of the coming GOP primary campaign.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Conservatives do not own freedom. It is a contested value. Or it would be if the left did more contesting. Time to start.

George Packer considers Freedom’s dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie, a Vanderbilt historian, in the context of what Packer calls “the new fatalism.” It is the notion that America is trapped in the past and cannot change. Recent, less white-centric histories replace old, self-serving myths but perhaps lead to disillusionment.

Part of the stuckness results from historical white appropriation not only of African bodies but of what white dominance views as an unassailable narrative:

Cowie’s theme is how the sacred American creed of freedom serves to justify racial domination. At every turn in the harsh tale of Barbour County [Alabama], white residents resisted challenges to their supremacy by invoking their birthright as free people. At nearly every turn, the federal government made inadequate efforts on behalf of equal Black citizenship, before yielding to the demands of white “freedom” backed by violence. “Those defending racism, land appropriation, and enslavement portrayed themselves, and even understood their own actions, as part of a long history of freedom,” Cowie writes. In his infamous 1963 inaugural address vowing “segregation forever,” Governor Wallace used the word freedom 24 times. To Wallace and his constituents, the real tyrant was the federal government, issuing its court orders and sending down its marshals and troops to impose its laws against the will of white Alabamians. Cowie quotes a blunt question from the 18th-century British essayist Samuel Johnson that could have been the book’s epigraph: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

In the uses of freedom, Cowie argues, domination is as central to the American creed as individual liberty and self-government. Freedom as white power “is not an aberration but a virulent part of an American idiom.” The history of Barbour County “was not much different than what happened in the rest of the Black Belt, the South, or the nation.” For proof, Cowie recounts the nationwide appeal of Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 (“We’re going to show there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country,” Wallace said before the ’68 election). The stories Cowie has excavated in Barbour County “are not simply regional tales lost in the dark, overgrown thickets of the past. They are quintessentially American histories—inescapably local, yet national in theme, scope, and scale.” The historian concludes: “To confront this saga of freedom is to confront the fundamentals of the American narrative.”

The problem is that the new fatalism offers no way out rather than a “character is destiny” inspiration.

Packer writes, “Politics is a competition between stories—and it’s as politics that the new fatalism leads to a dead end. On a landscape strewn with the deflated remnants of old myths, with the country’s essence distilled to its meanest self, what moral identity is it possible to build?”

Conservative politics may encourage its adherents to embrace their meanest selves and zero-sum politics, but the left’s (and scholars’) loudly pointing out the meanness of the conservative narrative behind wagging fingers does not an offer the country a more attractive alternative. What’s needed is a better story with freedom at its center. And people willing to proclaim it.

Some guy named Obama sold the country on that hope twice.

Maybe it’s time for me to reread Lakoff.

Can urban Democrats?

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state won a seat last November in her rural, working-class Third Congressional District. She shouldn’t have. Wasn’t expected to. National Democrats wrote her off. Her victory was “widely considered the biggest electoral upset of 2022,” the New York Times reminds Thursday readers.

We’ll come back to her.

Q: When is majority rule not majority rule?
A: When it’s washed through the legacy of the country’s slave-era constitution.

That constitution, combined with a) political parties’ (one in particular) urge to gerrymander and/or legislate their way into permanent power, and b) left- and right-leaning people’s tendency to sort themselves into urban and rural areas of the country, means that in many statewide and local races, a majority of citizens do not get to elect candidates who reflect their views. Call this democracy-lite.

There is no need to rehash how that’s played out in 21st century presidential outcomes.

There is also my reminder from yesterday:

The right’s existential crisis began on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, when the country elected a Black man to the White House. White conservatives until then could ignore repeated warnings that by 2042 demographic shifts would mean whites would no longer be a numerical majority in “their” country. That white voters had not been a voting majority for many election cycles was too subtle.

But under our clunky system “not a voting majority” does not mean an electoral minority. The outcome of statewide and federal district elections depends somewhat on the urban-to-rural population ratio. What it all means for the left is that while any moderate-to-conservative white population is in slow decline their votes are by no means insignificant. Where they live matters. Democrats ignore them at their peril.

Sadly, Democrats often do. Campaigning in concentrated urban areas that tend to vote your way is simply easier and more cost-effective. What it means for largely rural states like North Carolina is that while it remains possible to elect a Democrat like Roy Cooper as governor, Democrats’ urban focus bequeaths him a Republican-dominated legislature opposed to most eveything a majority of Tar Heels elected him to do. North Carolina Democrats’ sad aspiration over the last couple of general elections has been to maintain enough of a minority to sustain Cooper’s veto. Barely.

The Times reminds readers that Gluesenkamp Perez’s

… Third Congressional District is exactly the kind that Democrats have had trouble holding on to for the last 10 years: It’s 78 percent white, 73 percent without a bachelor’s degree or higher, and made up of a low-density mix of rural and suburban areas. It voted for Barack Obama once, in 2008, and Donald Trump twice, and the national Democrats wrote it off, giving her almost no campaign assistance.

What happened there?

But as the 34-year-old mother of a toddler and the co-owner (with her husband) of an auto repair shop, she had an appealing personal story and worked hard to distinguish herself from the usual caricature of her party. She said she would not support Nancy Pelosi as speaker, criticized excessive regulation of business, and said there should be more people in Congress with grease under their fingernails. But she also praised labor unions and talked about improving the legal immigration system, boosting domestic manufacturing, and the importance of reversing climate change. In the face of this pragmatic approach, her Republican opponent, Joe Kent, followed the Trump playbook and claimed the 2020 election had been stolen and called for the F.B.I. to be defunded. She took a narrow path, but it worked, and you might think that Democratic leaders would be lined up outside her office to get tips on how to defeat MAGA Republicans and win over disaffected Trump voters.

But some Democrats are still a little uncomfortable around someone who supports both abortion rights and gun rights, who has a skeptical take on some environmental regulations, and who has made self-sufficiency a political issue.

“It’s a little bit of a hard message for them to hear, because part of the solution is having a Congress who looks more like America,” she said in an interview last week. “It can’t just be rich lawyers that get to run for Congress anymore.”

To regain control of state legislatures where much of the right’s antidemocracy pogrom is taking place, Democrats need to start acting like a big-tent party. The term of art Anand Giridharadas applies in “The Persuaders” (and even this is derogatory) is that the left must make “room among the woke for the waking.”

[Gluesenkamp Perez] said there is a kind of “groupthink” at high levels of the party, a tribalism that makes it hard for new or divergent ideas to take hold. But if Democrats don’t pay attention to newcomers like Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, they risk writing off large sections of the country that might be open to alternatives to Trumpism.

“The national Democrats are just not ever going to be an alternative they vote for, no matter how much of a circus the far right becomes,” she said. “But I think there obviously can be competitive alternatives. There are different kinds of Democrats that can win, that avoid the tribalism.”

As hated as he was by many NC-11 liberals, Democrat Heath Shuler won the now 82% White district in 2006 (pre-2011 redistricting) with a similar appeal. (It helped that eight-term Republican Charles Taylor had worn out his welcome.) Still, as much as Shuler made lefties grind their teeth (Shuler voted against the ACA), he still voted heavily with the Democratic caucus during his three terms. He was replaced by Republicans Mark Meadows, Madison Cawthorn, and Chuck Edwards. I’d have Shuler back in a heartbeat.

North Carolina Democrats elected a new state chair, Anderson Clayton, 25, in February with a focus on regaining traction in rural areas. (Full disclosure: I advised and helped fund Clayton’s campaign.) It helped that party delegates from rural counties are tired of being the party’s red-headed stepchildren, neither heard nor seen. And tired of losing. Clayton wants to build Democratic infrastructure in rural districts where little exists now. Sometimes it is enough in close races just to shave Republican margins. They’ll need financial help, too.

🚨 Good morning! Last night, two Democrats were re-elected to their seats on the Dobson Town Commission — Congratulations to Commissioner Walter White and Commissioner Wayne Atkins on their elections!

And a big THANK YOU to the work of the Surry County Democratic Party. 🚨 pic.twitter.com/OXbRx1GpBv

— Anderson Clayton☀️ (@abreezeclayton) March 8, 2023

You can’t win where you don’t show up to play. And if you do show up, you’d best have game. Howard Dean understood that and built his 50-state plan around it.

The @NCDemParty was not kidding about putting more emphasis on local elections #ncpol pic.twitter.com/rT7aFAey3Y

— Colin Campbell (@RaleighReporter) March 8, 2023

It is certainly too early to tell if Democrats are getting the message, but every liitle victory counts and builds bench for the future.

Clayton, like Gluesenkamp Perez, is drawing national attention.