Credit where credit is due

Because so many Democratic victories last Tuesday were so sweeping, punditry has tended to focus on how relatively weak the victors' cash supply seemed up against the oligarchs and also how strong their messaging was -- how well Dem candidates fit their districts. And all that is true. 

Opinion writers also crow about how Trump made MAGA vulnerable -- failing at lowering prices while launching a failed war. 

But what tends to get lost in the discourse is the vast amount of volunteer human labor that contributed to those victories. My years of electoral organizing have taught me that even well designed efforts by impassioned fans of a candidate to Get Out The Vote can only carry a campaign so far -- perhaps a 2 percent boost if successful. That's not nothing -- Scott Colom in Mississippi is showing this as I write. In 2022, Catherine Cortez Masto won the US Senate seat in Nevada by a mere 8000 votes, many of them turned out by the union UniteHERE and associated volunteers. 

But too many election pros are oblivious to or dismiss of the people-to-people energy that can get a campaign over the top, not only in the last days, but also by setting the climate for the contest. So I appreciated David Cole's reflection in the New York Review of Books which takes a broad view of how so many people contributed to turning back MAGA. Cole is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and the former National Legal Director of the ACLU.

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... we owe the blue wave not just to Trump’s own failures but to a pattern of sustained popular organizing and resistance since he retook office. Over the past two years the people marched in No Kings Day rallies, supported Democratic candidates who promised to check Trump, joined and donated to organizations that filed lawsuits challenging the legality of his ventures, raised their voices in outrage and derision at his misconduct, lampooned him on late-night television, exposed his incompetence and mendacity through investigative reporting, and knocked on doors to get out the vote. All of that contributed to the results we saw on election night. People often wonder what they can do in the face of assaults like those Trump repeatedly launched; the answer, in retrospect, is “a lot.” 

... Without our collective engagement, using the tools the Constitution gives us, these midterm results never would have happened. With our engagement, the institutions held, and are stronger now for having done so. The fight for our democracy is by no means over, but we know what to do.

The next round will be even harder. Trump and Stephen Miller can be counted upon to make lawless efforts to recapture momentum for their fascist project. Meanwhile, our Democratic electeds are a big tent and can be expected to struggle to maintain unity for the battles ahead. 

One election doesn't mean the MAGA project is over. But millions made last Tuesday happen and let's remember that we the people did this. A functioning democracy continues to depend on all of us.

Good riddance

Today I'm on an airplane, performing our seasonal migration to hither Massachusetts. But I won't resist passing on this delicious tidbit from the wonderful writer from the LA Times, Anita Chabria.  As I always wonder, what she is doing at the dead duck of a rag -- though LA looks likely to be interesting with its new mayor. Here's her good news:

... It’s not unusual for top government officials to skedaddle after a midterm election. The two-year mark offers a somewhat elegant exit for those who have suddenly decided to spend more time with family.

So it was little surprise when Trump’s legal lapdog Harmeet Dhillon announced Thursday that she was resigning from her job as the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Someone had to be first, and it doesn’t shock me it was one of the few women left in the administration.

Under her tenure, civil rights were dismantled, which is not historically what the office is for. The agency was hollowed out of the nonpartisan legal experts who made a career serving government — more than 75% of the staff left. Instead, she wielded her power to, as she proudly put it, destroy diversity, equity and inclusion — making observers such as myself wonder whether she actually understood what civil rights are.

“Harmeet Dhillon has been the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history,” said Stacey Young, founder of Justice Connection, a group that supports current and former civil servants driven to near-insanity by the lawlessness of the Trump era. Young served in the Civil Rights office herself, across the administrations of five presidents.

“After she upended the division’s mission-critical work, the civil servants who dedicated their careers to protecting vulnerable communities were instead told to target them — and more than three-quarters of the division’s lawyers left,” Young continued in a statement. “Dhillon wielded the enormous power of the Justice Department to threaten universities, state and local officials, and election workers in spurious cases that rarely won in court.”

Rarely won in court is the key part there, because for all her vitriol and energy, Dhillon mostly lost when an actual judge was involved. ...

Unfortunately, she's most likely running away to northern California where she'll continue to afflict the powerless whenever she can from the private sector.

Science is back in the house!

Among the dozens of delighted commentaries on the election I've read, this one particularly struck me. Katelyn Jetelina, a student of public health and epidemiology, writes Your Local Epidemiologist.  She sees a different Congress:

 ... last night, I saw a STEM wave. More U.S. scientists and physicians ran for state and federal office this cycle than ever before. And many won:

    •    A pediatrician in South Carolina
    •    A public health physician in Michigan
    •    A microbiologist in Georgia
    •    A nuclear engineer in Virginia
    •    A physician in Ohio
    •    An ER nurse in Wisconsin
    •    An environmental engineer in Iowa
    •    A mathematician in Illinois
    •    A physician in New Jersey

The United States said clearly: Health matters. Science matters. Integrity matters. Empathy matters. People matter.

But let’s not forget: change matters. Many of these candidates weren’t focused on defense or the status quo. And rightfully so. We cannot go back to 2019. We cannot go back to 2024. 

The health ecosystem was not working for people. It was built for another time and has failed everyone for years. We need an alternative path forward from the one we’ve been on for the past 20 years, and the one we're on now.

This means it’s time for something bigger than repair. It’s not just about putting the pieces back together; it’s about reimagining what’s possible, and, quite frankly, what’s needed.

Let's get behind these people and let them lead. Their rise is not a moment too soon for the country.

Boogeyman proves past its expiration date

Here's a delicious take on one aspect of Tuesday's blowout election. Take this Elon!

The Secret Weapon That Went Pffft: The GOP’s Anti-Trans Attack Ads

... while the American public wasn’t supportive of transgender people, most didn’t really care about the issue because it didn’t affect them or anyone they knew. Republicans found out that you can only wave a boogeyman around for so long before people stopped believing him/her/them.

... YouGov polling that found that the public trusts Democrats (52 percent) on transgender issues more than Republicans (23 percent). In other words, the people who rated transgender issues as a top priority were more likely to be pro-transgender Democrats than anti-trans Republicans. The GOP bet that they could win an election based on fear and loathing directed at less than 1 percent of the population, on an irrelevant issue that Democrats care more about than the Republican base does.

... Polling suggests that when pressed on the issue, it’s Democrats, not Republicans, who were more likely to say transgender issues are a priority. Additionally, polling indicates that the public thought Republicans were talking way too much about this issue. Regardless of whether Democratic candidates threw their transgender constituents under the bus, however, Republicans still attempted to smear them with accusations of supporting trans people.

The only thing it did was anger a core Democratic constituency. Some Democratic candidates who did flip seemed surprised at how much anger and dissent their transphobic platform created. Dealing with the fallout was a distraction and headache for them and their staff in the waning days of their campaigns. Thus, one could also make the argument that had these candidates not done a heel turn, they would have done even better given the lack of evidence that this was the issue that drew in centrist voters. ... 

Journalist Brynn Tannehill is a Naval Academy graduate, former naval aviator, author, and senior defense analyst. She currently lives in British Columbia, Canada, with her wife and three children.  

The emerging majority has emerged

For me, this chart of national voting demographics from the New York Times says it all.

 

Finally we will get to see what the democratically representative USofA will become. This country has been struggling to be born for the last 20 years.

It won't be simple; it will often be messy. It won't be uniformly progressive. California made the demographic transition around the turn of the century. We got lucky in the availability of a used governor (Jerry Brown) who actually knew a thing or two for awhile. Now we're in the humdrum stew of living out what comes next. Welcome, Mr. Becerra!

I'm sure there will be much to learn and to do as we enter the new configuration. I've always believed that Democrats are only as good as the people make them be. The work of civic democracy never ends, but it sure can feel good sometimes.

Election day 2026

 

Erudite Partner passed along this image from early morning in the San Francisco Mission District as she set off to accompany an immigrant to a mandatory check-in with federal Homeland Security. They are not expecting an ICE kidnapping, but you never know. (All went okay today.)

 

There's lots of chatter about whether this is the most important election since -- say 1860. That is, will the USofA demonstrate that it's down with vicious Trump/MAGA mobsterism or that we can do better? We'll see.

 

Weirdly, the emergency has brought forth unexpected candidates and resistance to hate in places that oh-so-progressive Californians were ignoring. Who'd have thought that one of the most sensible responses from a politician to the GOP's phoney transgender panic would emerge from a Senate candidate in Kansas?

Most of the federal action today, besides the ranked choice voting for US Senate in Alaska, will happened east of or adjacent to the Mississippi. We'll know a lot about the results before the polls even close on the Left Coast. 

 

 

Our local and statewide California results will take longer, but the national action will be clear much earlier. I can't say I enjoy an anxious election day -- but here we are. 

All Souls Day/Dia de los Muertos 2026: ¡Sharon Martinas, presente!

I don't know whether she'd have liked this picture. Probably not. But her expression of embarrassed wonder on her 70th birthday, twenty years ago, makes a good entry point for thinking about my friend Sharon Martinas who left us in August.

A generation of white anti-racist activists were formed in their activism by her Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, a training program for organizers which thrived from 1993 through the end of that decade and eventually led to numerous spin-offs. See Facebook posts from Criss Crass and Ingrid Chapman. 

Sharon (née Gold) Martinas didn't often talk about her early life. If you knew her well, you knew that either her birth family had disowned her or she had disowned them. 

Whatever she'd been born to, she early on chose to become a sometimes isolated foot soldier for human freedom and justice. And she never quit.

Sharon had worked in a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom School in Selma, Alabama, in the summer of 1965. At an event in 2010 looking back on women in the civil rights movement, she was still wondering what lessons from that time offered going forward:

I just finished reading the entire Hands on the Freedom Plow book, a lot of sleepless nights. ... One of the things that impressed me so much, not only the commitment, which I already knew, but the incredible courage in the face of life and death. And I know from my own experience — I was in Selma in a Freedom School in '65, and that was my first experience. I had commitment, but I was scared shitless. And so I guess my question to you is two-part. One, if you could speak a little about where that courage came from and the choices you made to exercise it then, and how your experience of acting on that courage has impacted your activist and organizing work in any particular ways since then.

Always the questioner ... and the organizer ...

After Selma, while working as one of the founders of what they called the Experimental College, she organized white students and faculty in support of the Third World Liberation Front Strike at San Francisco State University. The uprisings at UC Berkeley in that era are probably more commonly remembered, but the SFSU strike, which extended for six months from November 1968 to March 1969, may have been more durably influential. The Black Student Union and Asian, Latino and Native students and faculty were a larger fraction of the school population than at Berkeley and formulated achievable demands despite vicious repression. They won a pioneering Ethnic Studies program and commitments to increase enrollment of students of color. Sharon donated her archive of strike papers to an SFSU library in 2004.

In the decade of the 1970s, she served as a legal staff worker at the National Lawyers Guild. Sometime in that era, she acquired the surname "Martinas."

I first knew Sharon when she worked with CISPES -- the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador -- during the 1980s. CISPES mobilized North Americans to support social revolution in that Central American country (which the country still needs). The US government supported violent repression of El Salvador's domestic activists by its oligarchs and generals. Sharon had a particular role in San Francisco. Periodically some Salvadoran citizen would be disappeared and usually tortured by the US-sponsored government. We learned that, sometimes, enough phone calls to the Salvadoran government from the US could save a captive's life and get them released. This was before universal online communications and even mass email. On learning that someone had been snatched up, Sharon would start her phone tree and soon dozens of Spanish speaking volunteers were bombarding authorities in San Salvador. Sometimes captives lived and thrived.

In Mainstreaming Torture my partner Rebecca Gordon describes meeting a Salvadoran woman a decade later whom Sharon had asked her to call on behalf of. She realized we may not understand in the moment the importance of what seem small actions:

Suppose Sharon's little group had failed to make those calls? What if we had been too busy in the days of Gloria's capture to add our voice to those of others demanding her reappearance? ...

Sharon, who didn't speak Spanish and never made it to Central America, made this lifesaving work happen.

In 1993, Sharon began the Challenging White Supremacy workshop along with Mickie Ellinger. I participated in early pilot sessions and appreciated what she was trying to do: re-educate and re-acculturate white people for whom resistance to racism was not their daily bread. A heck of a lot of activists and some organizers got their start from that venture. Take a look at Chris and Ingrid's descriptions linked above.

In that decade, I worked predominantly on founding Californians for Justice (CFJ) as an organizing force to combat racist state ballot measures. Right wingers took advantage of the unease California's majority of white voters felt on account of the changing demographic make up of the state to pass the anti-immigrant Prop. 187 in 1994 and then to outlaw affirmative action via Prop. 209 in 1996. Communities of color were outraged and frightened but not yet acculturated to fighting in the electoral arena. In parallel to the conventional electoral campaigns mounted by non-profit civil society groups, CFJ worked to activate young people and the disenfranchised of color.

Sharon helped make CFJ happen. When we were just getting started and were literally unable to make payroll, Sharon passed along part of a windfall inheritance she had received. And though she was instinctively doubtful about election work, she sent over her CWS trainees to join our trainings and voter contact mobilizations. The CWS folks sometimes edged toward using their cultural capital to drown out others from our base in communities of color, but our trainers complained to Sharon and she worked to ease the cultural gulf. She got it. Connections from that configuration persist to this day. (CFJ still thrives as a movement of youth for better public education.)

Much of what I saw of Sharon in her later days was hard. She practiced a monastic-like rigor of self-denial, never buying new clothes or foods she considered fancy. (If you brought treats, she'd eat heartily.) She still bought new books though, ever the compulsive student of human liberation. She had always had bad lungs and kept herself going by marathon daily pool swimming sessions. I remember charging all the way up to Nob Hill from Market Street next to her in some street demonstration (perhaps over the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012?) and wondering if she could keep it up. She got to the top by Grace Cathedral. She was never easy on herself. 

Eventually her hips broke down; she recuperated in the same Daly City rehab facility where I spent two weeks this September with a busted leg. More and more her life was at home in her apartment with her cat, corresponding with incarcerated prisoners. Those of us who had been formed by working with her visited (for myself, less frequently than I might have) and discussed events of the day and what (if anything) we were doing about injustice.

Sharon was a complicated person with unexpected quirks. One of her annual pleasures was joining us at Episcopal Church Christmas Eve services -- not because she was religious, though I sometimes thought there might be a hidden belief in Something (not Christian) within her. She just wanted her annual dose of Christmas carols and perhaps eggnog.

Now she sings with the elders ... 

Not a pretty picture

Democratic elections warrior Simon Rosenberg ventures into the Donald's dis-eased noggin as we come up to the midterm elections on Tuesday: 

... Trump never thought it would get to this. After all he escaped prison and retook the White House in 2024. He had conquered Venezuela and stolen their oil. He had looted the Treasury, stuffed his pockets, buried the Epstein files, and is building himself an Imperial enclave. He had launched a big war, a war that no one else had dared to wage, for he was mighty, an historic strongman, and he would be bring generations of glory to the Trump name. The stock market had boomed and he was successfully enriching his friends and cutting their taxes too. 

The titanic pay to play scheme he built would yield the Republicans unprecedented campaign cash, building a campaign fire wall that would ensure they keep the Senate no matter what happened in the House. He and his allies had successfully taken control of immensely powerful social and legacy media orgs, and successfully bullied and censored others. The right-wing noise machine supported by his Russian allies kept poisoning our discourse 24/7/365. Schumer and Jeffries were little people, he believed, not capable of mounting any kind of serious opposition. His quislings at the Fed would make sure the economy would be good. He would launch a huge end of election rally blitz that would re-awaken the faithful and lead them to victory once again. 

While things might get bumpy and spicy at the end of the day everything would be fine. He always found a way. The newly crowned Emperor of the Americas would once again slay his enemies and bring victory home to Natalie and MAGAland. The crowds would cheer, he would keep getting rich, and Todd Blanche would keep the legal lilliputians like Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Katie Phang and those Dem AGs at bay. Everything would be fine.

But everything is really not fine. Democrats saw heightened performance in special elections all over the country these past two years. We blew it out in the November elections last year. We saw elevated performances in the primaries all across the US his year. Our candidates have raised gobs of money and the House Democrats have outraised little Mikie J. Inflation kept rising, job growth kept slowing, his glorious war went to shit, and his poll numbers just keep falling. The VP turned out to be a lifeless dud. His friend Lindsay passed. 

An American anti-Trump was elected Pope. Orban fell in Hungary. Putin kept getting humiliated by that little guy from Ukraine. His business partners in Saudi Arabia are getting routed by the Houthis. The Labour Party in the UK found a new leader and pushed the MAGA Reform Party into second place and escalating disarray. 

Vivek took a big, vile swing and gave away Ohio. Paxton turned out to be the shit candidate everyone warned him about. He had to fire lots of misbehaving staff, almost all women of course. The leaks from inside became a geyser. Then this week his allies in Serbia, Brazil, and Israel all lost their elections - yikes! 

The oligarch funded Senate firewall collapsed. And the old, unwell, addled, traitorous, rapacious, venal, big, blubbery baby man was forced to confront his failure and decline by having to campaign to embarrassingly small crowds in places like Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, and South Carolina. He began repeatedly gushing over the beauty and strength of manly men, perhaps as a way of attempting to restore his own. Texas, of all places, was falling. The faithful weren’t showing up in the early vote and young, Black, and Hispanic voters - them - were showing up bigly. 

Not a pretty picture, but one we have reason to believe is accurate.

Meanwhile, the watchword for the coming week is "be prepared, not scared."

Mission District Halloween

To rehab my busted leg, I walk the streets of my neighborhood. Seen today as I made my rounds:

 Some of my neighbors are artists. Sure wouldn't want to meet this witch in person. 

Modern city dwellers are never quite sure whether the holiday is about witches and goblins or the fall harvest. Or both. 

Whatever ... beware spiders who emit green webs.

Friday cat blogging

They spend all night running about -- sometimes racing over us. And then they need their beauty sleep.

Mio is a big guy. Apparently he feels secure on that platform.

Janeway prefers an accommodating lap. Anything that might require me to move can wait.

Why, oh why, don't we have better political journalism?

The incomparable Anita Chabria deconstructs President Obama's quip about "the most important issue in America today: the decor of the Cheesecake Factory." (This writer is a genius talent -- why is she still at a journalistic backwater, the Los Angeles Times under owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong?)

Earlier this week, former President Obama made a quip at a Cleveland rally that President Trump has renovated the White House to look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

Trump lost it. If we’ve learned anything about the president in recent years, it’s that he loves gold as much as he hates Obama. Roll them together in one moment, and the leader of the free world can’t help but freak out. ...

... if you think this is all a silly back and forth with an unserious administration, think again. Obama is masterful at political strategy, and this wasn’t just a joke. It was rage-bait, crafted for engagement.  

She explains further: 

... The deeper point of Obama’s remarks seemed entirely buried by media coverage that focused on the Cheesecake part. But why Saddam Hussein?

Trump didn’t seem to take issue with being likened to the brutal dictator responsible for killing and disappearing thousands to maintain power. In fact, in all of the rebuttals from Trump and his minions, the Hussein reference hasn’t been mentioned once.

But don’t think Obama choose that reference carelessly, or just for humor.

Hussein ruled Iraq in no small measure though a cult of personality. Like Trump, he loved showy monuments to his power, including a “Victory Arch” in Baghdad (Trump also wants to build an arch); weird fantasy artwork of muscle-bound men and dragons (similar maybe to Trump’s love of AI-generated images of himself); and of course, gold! There were marble and granite and gilt and gold everywhere in Hussein’s homes, even the infamous gold-plated toilet accessories American and British soldiers found when they made it into his palaces.

That ostentatious excess wasn’t just bad taste. It was a show of power. At the same time that Hussein was amassing his wealth and consolidating that cult of personality, his people were broke. 

Now, I’m in no way saying that Americans in 2026 are suffering the way Iraqis were under Hussein. But there’s a Marie Antoinette-style similarity between Hussein’s narcissist tendencies and Trump’s obsession with all that glitters — from the water in the reflecting pool to the walls of the Oval Office — even as the economy crashes. ...

She draws the lesson: 

... it got to Trump in a way that was entirely predictable with his unbridled ego, and a way in which Obama almost certainly knew it would. In a way that links him to a dictator who cared more about gilt than people, but in a way so clever Trump himself grabbed the bait and ran with it.

Hearing his taste criticized, all his beautiful, shiny gold mocked — by Obama of all people — was rage-bait that Trump could not ignore. Trump could not stop himself from responding, and even more, he couldn’t stop himself from demanding others defend him and his gaudy aesthetics.

And the ever-willing members of his cult of personality across government and right-wing media quickly complied — with an attack that Obama surely knew would be the only possible pushback: That he was elitist for making fun of the decor of a wildly popular average-family spot (Obama quickly hit back that the Factory was “his jam” and he, like many parents of teens, myself included, had eaten there numerous times.)

And then she sticks the knife in: 

... Suddenly, in the middle of a pivotal election, all Republicans are hearing about is the Cheesecake Factory, and how wonderful it is their president is plastering gold all over everything while they are wondering if they’ll be able to pay the gas bill this month.

Granted, the Republicans don’t have a lot of bright spots to focus on as they give their final message to voters. But I am guessing that even the reddest of ballot-clutchers doesn’t want to hear about the Cheesecake Factory, or how much marble Trump has installed at the entrance to the White House. That seems tone-deaf.

Obama’s purposeful provocation completely derailed Republican messaging for multiple, critical news cycles, all because Trump couldn’t stand to have his taste criticized by a guy who has become a bogeyman in his own brain.

Trump had to defend his excess, he couldn’t resist — and in failing to check his own ego, again, he put into the bright spotlight the truth that his followers are increasingly unable to ignore: The only thing that matters to Trump is Trump. Not the economy. Not the war, and certainly not the concerns of voters in the final days of the election.

Obama’s one-liner wasn’t just a zinger. It was political gold, an artful bit of rage-bait trolling that casually took control of the narrative with a well-aimed poke. 

Somehow the USofA moved on from a brilliant political mind (and functional president) to a self-centered clown. Trump has talents, but they are only to degrade and self-enrich. Generations of political scientists and historians will pick over theories of why the American people put Trump in office. 

Meanwhile, let's hobble him with a strong Dem election now! 

Dolores Huerta, R.I.P.

I've had the good fortune to interact with a few people whose impact on our world was so much greater than that of most individuals. Dolores Huerta -- labor leader, feminist, and inveterate activist -- was one such. A few of my photos from her long presence in our northern California lives and struggles:

2007 – listening at a community meeting

2009 – at a fundraiser

2010 – leading a chant in Central Valley for Dem candidate Jerry McNerney

2017 – marching with immigrant families

There were so many other times when I crossed paths with Dolores when I was not being a photographer. I was about 20 feet away in 1988 when rampaging San Francisco cops ruptured her spleen during a protest in Union Square. She had guts.

You could count on her to be there. Sure, at times Dolores lent herself to people and causes I might have doubted. But she always gave her energies to what she thought was good for poor people and women. How many of us can say the same?