He's the American Dream, an antidote to Trumpism
He'll make you believe
Welcome to the big Wednesday night edition of Progressives Everywhere!
While all eyes are on the Democratic National Convention, there’s a lot of big news happening around the country. Tonight, we’re going to talk about major elections in Florida, meet a rising Democratic Party star, look at USPS and QAnon, and more!
The American Dream in a Must-Win Seat
Son of working-class immigrants. First in his family to attend college. Went to University of North Carolina and then attended grad school at Princeton University.
Ricky Hurtado has the sort of life story and resumé that embodies the American dream and he’s made it his life’s work to help other people reach those same heights. Right now, that means running to represent his hometown in the North Carolina legislature, seeking to win what’s been called a must-win seat (HD-63) in a state that needs to go blue this year. Remember, Dems need to flip just six seats in the state, and with new district lines, it’s absolutely doable.
He’s so dedicated to the cause, not even a case of COVID-19, which he contracted in June, can keep him from working tirelessly to win his district. Put together, it’s truly the antidote to Trumpism, a reason to feel a little faith in this country.
If you can say one thing for the last decade’s worth of craven far-right Republicans, it’s that they’ve inspired a generation of progressives to become activists and run for office. For Hurtado, it was former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, who went to war on the state’s environment, women, and workers during his time in office.
“It was just headline after headline coming out about how they were dismantling our public education system, how they continued to refuse to expand Medicaid, the suppression of people's voices in our democracy through voter ID and gerrymandering,” Hurtado tells Progressives Everywhere. “It was all that piling up and me realizing that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution.”
So around 2014, Hurtado moved back to Alamance County in North Carolina and immediately began working in the community where he’d grown up. Having received mentorship that put him on the path to college and beyond, Hurtado decided that his focus would be on providing the same opportunities to a new generation of kids in his hometown.
“I'm a first-generation college student and that trajectory really opened my eyes to so many of the challenges that working families have in North Carolina,” he explains. “We grew up living paycheck-to-paycheck and struggling to make ends meet at times when things got tough. I used my college experience, both at UNC and Princeton, to begin to understand social and income inequality and their root causes. And I really see education as being foundational to reversing this trend of inequality.”
Again, Hurtado followed his convictions. He’s now a lecturer at UNC Chapel Hill and the co-founder and co-executive director of LatinxEd, a non-profit mentor system that helps Latinx students through school and into higher education. Alamance County has a growing Latinx population — it’s up to about 16% — but many of them are low-income and children have fewer resources as compared to other students.
While the Hurtado campaign has like all others been somewhat scrambled by COVID-19, he’s applied his ethos of community service to quickly convert what was just a political operation into an opportunity to connect with and help his neighbors and perhaps future constituents. The campaign has made more than 1,000 calls a week, putting them up above 30,000 overall, and Hurtado has made house calls to deliver PPE and other supplies to people who haven’t been able to afford or acquire them otherwise.
The campaign has also held round tables with business owners, employees, gig workers, and other people who are suffering from the pandemic, a service that also gives him an early start on understanding the many interests and needs of a community that’s growing but still more rural and working class.
Now more than ever, the fact that North Carolina Republicans have refused to expand Medicaid stands as an egregious affront to working people in the state. The gerrymander that once made Hurtado’s district unwinnable was shot down by the State Supreme Court, making this the best chance for Democrats to take back the seat and the legislature. With just six seats required to flip the state blue, winning this district is absolutely essential. That Hurtado is the candidate makes it even more important.
Intermission announcement: I just spoke with Massachusetts congressional candidate Alex Morse, the progressive mayor who is challenging long-time Rep. Richard Neal (aka Wall Street’s favorite Congressman). There was a whole lot to talk about in our exclusive interview and I’ll be sending it out on Friday to our premium community members. It’s the first of a long series of exclusive interviews we have planned for our members, which will come in addition to our nightly news roundups. You can try it out for a week for free!
Elections and Voting Rights
Florida: While we’ve been working to help Democrats flip the state legislature, the reality is that the Democratic caucus itself needs a lot of work. On Tuesday night, progressive voters began to remake the state party by ousting some of the worst Democrats and elevating some really great ones.
Voters ousted two homophobic legislators, State Reps. Al Jacquet (HD-88) and Kim Daniels (HD-14). Jacquet was caught using a homophobic slur to describe one of his primary opponents, Omari Hardy, who is not a member of the LGBTQ community but was raised by lesbian mothers.
Daniels, meanwhile, is a true terror. She is a former “exorcist” who pushed bills to introduce religious education into public schools, said some very anti-semitic things, is super anti-gay, and fought to restrict abortion. She also happens to be former New York Giants Super Bowl hero David Tyree’s mother. Even better, she was defeated by a union organizer named Angie Nixon.
Democrats also nominated three LGBTQ candidates for safe seats. Rep. Shevrin Jones is going to get a promotion to the State Senate in District 35, civil rights attorney Michele Rayner won a four-way race in HD-70 and will have a clear road to the State House, and activist Jasmen Rogers-Shaw is looking good in her attempt to oust the HD-95 incumbent.
In less positive news, QAnon whack job terrorist Laura Loomer won her Congressional primary, giving Republicans another Q-believing lunatic on the ballot this fall. She’s unlikely to win the general election, but it’s terrifying (though not at all surprising) that Republican voters continue to elevate these demented conspiracy theorists.
Then again, it should come as no surprise, given that Donald Trump is openly courting QAnon — dubbed a terrorist group by the FBI — in press conferences.
Everyone acts surprised by what Trump said today, as if he doesn't regularly praise Nazis or throw racial slurs around every single day. I just don’t think people can fully grasp that we have a full-blown Nazi wannabe dictator running the country. There’s this fixation on the way that things should be and the media is so obsessed with normalcy that Trump is treated like a president, not a mass murderer.
National: Remember yesterday when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said that he would stop his sabotage of the postal service until after the election.
It may not surprise you to learn that he was basically full of it.
Today, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she met with DeJoy, who told her that he had no plans to fix any of the problems he’d already created.
"The Postmaster General frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works," Pelosi said in a statement.
In fact, it looks like DeJoy didn’t even hit the pause button on the things he did promise to stop.
DeJoy will be testifying to the Senate on Friday and the House on Monday. In addition, at least 20 Democratic state attorneys general either filed or promised to file lawsuits over the sabotaging of mail delivery, which is already causing millions of people to wait far too long for life-saving medication.
It’s unclear what will happen — a lot of Republicans are angry about it too — but at least we have one potential hero:
Texas: Here’s a good analysis of the changing political winds in the state, largely focused on the seven congressional districts that Democrats are targeting this year.
Georgia: A judge is weighing whether to extend the absentee ballot deadline in the state to all ballots that are postmarked by election day.
As you’ll see on AbsenteeBallot.info, some states only look at ballots that they receive by election day, while others are more lenient.
Remarkably, Georgia isn’t as bad on mail voting as some other states — including New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo still hasn’t signed legislation that would extend no-excuse absentee ballots to the general election.
To be clear, though, Georgia is terrible on voting rights overall. Georgia has undergone waves of voter purges over the past half-decade, erasing over 800,000 registrations since 2017 alone. They are infamously aggressive, using a “use it or lose it” law that disqualifies people if they sit out a few elections, whether or not they moved or otherwise indicated a life change.
Yesterday, word came out that tens of thousands of voters are being placed on the state’s “inactive” list because absentee ballots sent to them this spring were returned as undeliverable. Instead of trying again, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is moving them along the chain that ultimately leads to their voter registration being canceled.
This winter, nearly 90,000 people who were purged after a time on the inactive list wound up re-registering to vote. It’s likely that many, many more didn’t even realize they were off the voter rolls.
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