Offering asides, recommended links, blogworthy quotations, and more, In Brief is the Northwest Progressive Institute's microblog of world, national, and local politics.
The Commonwealth of Australia has a new leader: Anthony Albanese. Following Labor’s victory in the 2022 Australian federal election, Albanese has assumed office along with several top ministers. Watch the swearing-in ceremony and the press conference that followed.
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“Energized by their fight against government coronavirus restrictions, far-right activists are rallying supporters to engage in politics and show up to vote,” Hannah Allam reports.
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Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a Republican accused of compromising sensitive election machine data, was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday. Here’s an explanation of everything that’s happened so far from The Colorado Sun.
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NPI’s February 2022 statewide research poll found Democratic Senator Patty Murray with a narrower advantage over Republican Senator Tiffany Smiley than she enjoyed in our 2021 polling, prompting a contest rating downgrade and driving news coverage.
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“Mohamed Egal, Jake Simpson and Iris Guzmán won their races as three progressive candidates in Seattle were defeated, attracting notice in the big city and calling attention to efforts by political groups to make change throughout South King County,” Seattle Times political reporter Daniel Beekman reports.
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“The reality is that politics is complex and somewhat unpredictable — with a lot of voters who are regularly changing or just forming views on issues and also changing who they vote for or whether they vote in the first place,” Perry Bacon Jr. writes.
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In this important opinion piece, New York Times editorial board member Jesse Wegman resurrects some of the writings of the Founders to make the point that they would never have expected the Constitution they drafted in the 1780s to have lasted for over two hundred and thirty years with only twenty-seven changes.
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“He’s now the biggest threat to it reaching the finish line in the confidence vote, but if it crosses the line, Netanyahu could also become its greatest asset in keeping it together for longer than most are now willing to predict,” Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer writes.
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Stansbury’s arrival in the House will soon give Speaker Nancy Pelosi one more vote to work with, bringing the House Democratic majority back up to two hundred and twenty, which will make moving legislation through the House easier.
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Assembly Bill 126 would “do away with Nevada’s caucus system that has been used to determine each major party’s presidential nominee in the state since 1981,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal explains.
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This piece from The Washington Post previews the coming redistricting fight in the Lone Star State. Republicans have a firm grip on the Legislature and will control the process. They’re sure to produce a gerrymandered map that will likely be challenged in court.
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“By the time rioters ransacked the Capitol, the machinery of the left had already been primed to respond — prepared by months spent sketching out doomsday scenarios and mapping out responses, by countless hours of training exercises and reams of opinion research,” The New York Times reports.
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Via Daily Kos Elections: “Just under 5 million votes were cast in November, so that means we could see runoff turnout at about 85% of Election Day turnout. By contrast, in 2008, which was the last time Georgia hosted a Senate runoff, turnout in the runoff was just 57% of Election Day.”
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“Bold, grassroots organizing is what wins elections,” Tania Unzueta Carrasco says, telling the story of how they successfully contacted every single Latino voter in the Peachtree State.
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Focused remarks? Check. Message discipline? Check. Making the most of an opportunity to speak to right wing voters and do some reframing? Check. Jon Ossoff shows how it’s done.
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“Our duty is very simple, and it’s a duty… We have no authority to request an audit, to delay or block certification, to review inaccuracies that happened at the local level,” Van Langevelde said.
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“In 2020, Biden won 477 counties that account for seventy percent of the U.S. economy, while Trump won 2,497 counties amounting to just shy of thirty percent of the economy, according to an analysis by Mark Muro, senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, and his team.”
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Biden calls the work of rebuilding America, “the task of our time.” His win in Pennsylvania sealed his victory earlier today.
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Joe Biden and Kamala Harris address the nation in the aftermath of their electoral college victory.
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News networks declared Biden the winner after his lead in Pennsylvania surpassed the threshold needed for a vote recount.
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Faced with the likelihood of a Republican Senate and a powerful alliance of progressives, Biden must toe a narrow line in his appointments.
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