LitCityBlues: The 2024 Endorsements
PRESIDENT/VP:
Harris/Walz: I keep meaning to respond to a tweet that floats up in our pre-election nausea/anxiety phase. It's something like, "Tell me why you're voting for Harris without using Trump as a reason." Well, okay, then random Twitter person, as the kids say: Bet.
Leaving aside the fact that she's excellent on reproductive rights, and housing, has actual policies on her website, and doesn't just verbally diarrhea her way to half a dozen different policy positions a week, I have a couple of very simple reasons I'm back Harris/Walz this time around that have absolutely nothing to do with Trump.
First, it's a hammer blow to our current primary system. As currently constructed, the primary system rewards and encourages partisanship. To a certain degree, that's to be expected, but it's metastatized beyond the point of lunacy now. Candidates who run for either party's nomination are forced into positions that are wildly out of sync with where the median voter is. Harris has picked up a lot of criticism for her alleged 'flip-flopping' between this campaign and her run for the Democratic nomination in 2020, but that only proves my point: she's running for two different jobs. Of course, her campaign is going to be different now.
This isn't just a Democratic problem either. Had Ron DeSantis been hot-swapped in for Trump in early July, he would be running a very different campaign as well. Nikki Haley had the same problem. Primary voters are not general election voters and Clinton-era triangulation just doesn't work the same way it used to, because both parties have become increasingly polarized. I am beyond tired of living in an insane asylum of toxic partisan nonsense. Our election cycles are eight million years long. They reward partisanship over any kind of sane policy positions and if Harris can be hot-swapped in and speed run a Presidential campaign to a win I am hoping beyond hope that people start to realize, 'Hey, we don't have to pick candidates this way at all.'
I don't know what the answer is. Open primaries? Ranked choice primaries? National/regional primaries? Hell, there's an argument for smoke-filled rooms, brokered conventions, and letting the voters decide on election day you could make, even if I personally dislike that option. But if she wins, we gotta start talking about this. Because it's broken and a Harris victory would prove that it's broken and then, perhaps, we can start talking (or at least thinking) about how to fix it.
Second, it's a hammer blow to the power of incumbency. In American politics, incumbency is all. Throw in a little gerrymandering here and there and once you win an election or two, it takes a lot (like video footage of kicking puppies) to unelect you. It's way more of a problem on the Congressional side, but it's still a problem. But consider this: yes, Biden's old, and part of the reason he was hot-swapped out was that they (appeared) to go all-in on a pre-convention debate to shut people up about how old he was and he had a bad night. But the speed at which the Democratic Party moved was impressive. It's a small thing, but do you think any President for the next fifty years will sleep easy if Harris can pull this off? If a Harris win implants that tiny little 'what if' at the back of the mind of Presidents for the next half-century or so and gets them to hustle a little bit harder for the American people or at minimum to juice their approval ratings a bit, I'll call that a win.
Those reasons are somewhat esoteric, I'll grant you, but they are definitely non-Trump reasons.
HOUSE:
Bohannan: I have voted for Miller-Meeks in the past, but she's not the sensible voice of reason she pretended to be by any stretch of the imagination and if the state is not going to protect a woman's right to choose, then I have no choice but to back candidates for Federal office who support Federal protections. That's pretty much the heart of my reasoning here. Plus, the statewide Republican trifecta is bad enough, it's time to break the Federal foursome up a bit.
STATE REP DIS 90:
Zabner
BOARD OF SUPERVISORS:
No Endorsement: I'm honestly considering writing in Bart Simpson, Mickey Mouse and The School Sucks for this, because holy hell is the Board of Supervisors degenerating into a mess. I know it's not a popular position to take in Johnson County, but there is one thing and one thing only I want the Board of Supervisors to figure out and that's a new jail. Y'all, we desperately need a new jail. I know people think they know, but rest assured, y'all don't. A not-insignificant amount of your taxpayer money is going to other counties to house our prisoners every single year.
I get it, I do-- I think we need a robust debate about the ideal size of a new jail, because if you don't want to make money (that you could use for all kinds of shiny progressive things) by housing other county's inmates, you've got to figure out the right size and take into account future population growth as well, so we don't have to do this again for another four decades or so. But it needs to be done. Opining that 'the ideal number of beds for a new jail is zero' does not solve this problem. Despite what JoCo residents may think, these are not people getting jailed for jaywalking or simple marijuana possession. Does this suck? Yes. Is it the thing people want to have? Not in this county, No. But does it desperately need to be done? Yes. I'm not remotely interested in HR disasters or progressive fanfiction from the Board of Supervisors. I want to know one thing and one thing only: when are we getting a new jail? Because this is a problem and they need to fucking well fix it.
AUDITOR
Parsons
SHERIFF
Kunkel
SOIL AND WATER CONSERVATION DISTRICT COMMISSIONERS:
Every year I see these non-partisan offices on the ballot and every year, I wonder, "What does the Soil and Water Conservation District actually do?" So I looked up their website and they do a bunch of stuff, but this list of programs that are eligible for cost-share assistance seems pretty cool.
COUNTY AG EXTENSION COUNCIL/COUNTY AG VACANCY:
Same deal here. If you're curious, have a poke around their website.
JUDGES:
My process is pretty simple here: if I look at the Judicial Evaluations and you score below 90%, I'm probably voting 'No.' I am also, given what happened when Iowa legalized same-sex marriage, not at all impressed with various op-eds and sanctimonious pronouncements about how 'judge retention shouldn't be political.' I remember the obscene amount of money that poured into this state to oust Supreme Court justices after the same-sex marriage decisions. No op-eds were opining about the apolitical nature of our judiciary then. Play stupid games, and win stupid prizes. May, Buller, and Langholz all get No votes, the rest Yes.
May- No (64%)
Tabor: Yes
Buller: No (83%)
Chicchelly: Yes
Langholz: No (64%)
Dupuich: Yes
Chappell: Yes
Cox: Yes
Scott: Yes
Black: Yes
Schrock: Yes
Constitutional Amendments:
1: No
There are arguments out there trying to say that changing this to 'Only U.S. Citizens' will somehow open the door to further restrictions of the franchise down the road. I have not been convinced by any of them. To me, having been a non-citizen for a significant chunk of my life, this seems about semantics more than anything else. If you think the law is referring to lowercase c, citizens (as in general residence of any given country) then I can see why you would want to vote Yes here. But the problem is that legally, there is a distinction between Citizens (uppercase C) and Non-Citizens. Non-citizens legally cannot vote.
The bigger question that remains unaddressed by this amendment is determining what, if any means of verification the state has to ensure that if you do register to vote, you're a Citizen. Because that isn't addressed, this seems largely redundant to me.
2: Yes
So, it's amazing what you can learn if you actually read. I was initially voting No on this one, but then I started reading and read some more and some more, and basically, I tracked down Section 17 of Article IV of the State Constitution, read it, read what they were proposing to replace it with and decided that clarifying this was a good thing. I'm down- I feel like spelling out how it all works if there is a vacancy in the office of the Governor is probably a good and important thing.
Conservation Bond:
Yes
I like land, and water and appreciate both being clean. But when they passed a similar bond in 2008, they did work. 2008 supported 16 different projects, 9.2 miles of hard surface trails, and acquired 1,177 acres of land for public access and to protect water quality in rivers, lakes, and streams. Seems like good value for money to me.
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