This week we are celebrating our third birthday. We’ve had three years of GNR here on Daily Kos. Three years of good news.
The GNR first started in my local indivisible group soon after the election when it became clear that the relentless bad news was destroying the moral, mental health, and dedication of many of our members.
At first, finding good news was tricky. I would spend hours scouring local papers from all over the country just to find a few items.
But as time went on, it became easier. It became easier because more and more of us pulled out of our stupors and fought to make good news. We took local special election after local special election. We won the House in 2018. We won governorships and state Houses. We used our economic power and the chorus of our voices to stop many of the worst actions.
And this group grew too. More people came to read the GNR. People became regulars in the comments. More and more writers took over different days until I was left with just this little Saturday roundup. We became a community and a family.
My only regret is naming it the Good News Roundup. At first, I just used to list good news items when we really needed to see them. But now it is so much more. It is a place to get a pep talk when things are dark. It is a place to gather energy for the coming fight. It is a place to find community. It is a place to remember that you are not alone.
We have come a long way from those terrifying early days. And in a few short months we will have the biggest opportunity of our lives: the chance to change history and save our democracy.
The best path to saving our democracy will come if we take the White House, take the Senate, *and* keep the House of Representatives.
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Want to help from the comfort of your quarantine? Of course you do. You don’t want to be the reason we lose, right?! Here are things you can do:
(click on the links):
Get involved with Postcards to voters. Postcards to Voters are friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast.
Register voters in key battleground states. Vote Forward has active campaigns going in 8 key states to encourage under-represented (potential) voters to register. In 6 of them, the packet you send to each potential voter will include the actual voter registration forms and instructions with pre-paid postage for that state. The folks at Vote Forward have collected data on this technique and determined that it does, indeed, appear to increase voter registration.
Text voters in key Senate races Payback Project has a comprehensive, four-pronged approach to make sure Republicans Senators are held accountable for their actions, their votes, and their enabling of Donald Trump.
Organize your community online The Democratic National Committee’s digital organizing team put together a list of ways you can keep organizing in your community online.
Do whatever we can to promote Biden in tweets and posts and emails and wherever. The same goes for other D candidates. Help them get positive recognition!
Also, contact your reps and senators on important issues like funding for the states and cities and for increased testing.
Now onto the good news ❤️
Biden Can Win
Biden to go after Trump in November in Republican states like Arizona, Texas and Georgia, campaign says
Former vice president Joe Biden is planning to compete against President Trump in traditionally Republican states like Arizona, Texas and Georgia as his campaign bulks up in size and turns to a general election made highly unpredictable by the coronavirus.
“We believe that there will be battleground states that have never been battleground states before,” said Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, on a call with reporters Friday. “We feel like the map is really favoring us if you as you look to recent polling.”
Biden’s campaign said it will also compete in other states like Iowa and Ohio that Hillary Clinton lost by large margins in 2016.
Trump is getting trounced among a crucial constituency: The haters
President Donald Trump is losing a critical constituency: voters who see two choices on the ballot — and hate them both.
Unlike in 2016, when a large group of voters who disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton broke sharply for Trump, the opposite is happening now, according to public polling and private surveys conducted by Republicans and Democrats alike.
A new internal GOP poll suggests tight prez, Senate races in Georgia
An internal poll conducted by a group backing Gov. Brian Kemp showed a deadlocked presidential race in Georgia and tight contests for both U.S. Senate seats, underscoring the challenges Republicans face keeping the state in the GOP column.
The poll pegged Joe Biden at 47% of support and President Donald Trump with 46%, within the margin of error of 4 percentage points.
Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 6 points in Florida, new poll shows
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has a 6-point lead over President Donald Trump in Florida, a poll of the state’s voters said Friday.
The Florida Atlantic University poll found Biden with 53% to Trump’s 47%
For some seniors, virus is shifting their views of Trump
President Trump’s approval rating has fallen among older Americans, many of whom feel especially isolated and at risk. Even a small shift among this bloc of voters could pose a serious threat to the president’s reelection.
Trump’s racism will bring his party down with him
Trump’s Republican Party has become numbed to its party leader’s daily outrages — the racist attacks, the 18,000 lies (and counting), the petty insults, the breaches of constitutional norms, and the gross incompetence that has worsened the covid-19 crisis in the United States and has driven America to the edge of a depression. These GOP politicians have long believed that ignoring Trump’s unfitness for office is their best political play, but the Democratic Party’s historic landslide in 2018 along with their Southern gubernatorial victories last year suggest just the opposite. Public and private polls are looking worse for Republicans than they have since 2008.
If Democrats win back the White House and control of the Senate in 2020, much of that will be because black and Hispanic voters continue to reject Republican candidates. But Monday’s ugly display also brought into sharp relief another glaring problem for the Party of Trump: Asian Americans. When George H.W. Bush lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton in 1992, the Republican president still received 55 percent of the Asian American vote; Ronald Reagan had fared even better. By 2014, Democrats were winning 49 percent of Asian Americans, and after two years of Trump in the White House, that number jumped to 77 percent. With outbursts such as Monday’s, one wonders how much worse things will be for Trump’s Grand Old Party this fall.
Biden Campaign Is Secretly Building a Republican Group
Appearing in an Instagram live chat with soccer star Megan Rapinoe on April 30, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden made a spontaneous, vague statement about how he’s been “speaking to a lot of Republicans,” including “former colleagues, who are calling and saying ‘Joe, if you win, we’re gonna help.’”
Then he showed his hand: “Matter of fact, there’s some major Republicans who are already forming ‘Republicans for Biden,’” the former vice president said. “Major officeholders.”
The comment hardly received any attention at the time. But in declaring it, Biden ended up tipping off the earliest stages of a brewing effort that’s starting to get underway in certain Republican circles behind-the-scenes.
Biden's lead is the steadiest on record
The poll is largely in line with the average poll since April that puts Biden 6 points ahead of Trump nationally.
What's the point: Biden's lead is about as steady as it can possibly be. Not only is he up 6 points over the last month or so, but the
average of polls since the beginning of the year has him ahead by 6 points. Moreover, all the polls taken since the beginning of 2019 have him up 6 points.
The steadiness in the polls is record breaking. Biden's advantage is the steadiest in a race with an incumbent running since at least 1944.
Democrats are Amazing
Biden, Sanders announce AOC, Kerry, Jayapal as co-chairs of unity task forces
Former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders announced the members of six joint unity task forces Wednesday morning, which will “explore possible policy initiatives”--another notable step by the Democratic leaders trying to unite their party ahead of the November election.
A hidden way that Democrats hope to hold the GOP accountable
Democrats tell me they hope to make the dispute over social distancing policies a key issue in those elections — meaning they could provide a way to hold Republican state legislators responsible for pushing for a too-rapid reopening, in keeping with Trump’s demands.
“We are going to hold them accountable in 2020,” Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.
Post, who oversees Democratic efforts to win state legislative seats, argued that these GOP state legislators have worked to “reverse many of the public health measures that have been put into place,” a position she labeled “extreme."
Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency
The pandemic is breaking the country much more deeply than the Great Recession did, Biden believes, and will require a much bigger response. No miraculous rebound is coming in the next six months.
Long before the pandemic, he described a range of actions he’d take on day one, from rejoining the Paris climate agreement to signing executive orders on ethics, and he cited other matters, like passing the Equality Act for LGBTQ protections, as top priorities. Already his recovery ambitions have grown to include plans that would flex the muscles of big government harder than any program in recent history.
Trump will lie about the death toll. Kamala Harris wants to stop him.
The signs are everywhere: President Trump’s endgame will be to lie about the coronavirus death toll, in a last-ditch effort to prevent it from overwhelming his reelection hopes.
Is there anything we can do to be prepared for this?
A group of Democratic senators, led by Kamala Harris (Calif.), is set to launch a new effort to try to block it from happening. They are putting the administration on notice about any future efforts at death deflation, and calling on officials to work with outside experts to establish a methodology from which it will not diverge, before Trump inevitably begins concertedly low-balling the death count.
Trump lashes out at GOP critics, exponentially increasing their visibility
Trump’s tweets launched them into a new stratosphere. Their videos typically receive several hundred thousand views; “Mourning in America” has been watched by more than 16 million people. Between Nov. 5 and March 31, the group raised under $2.6 million; in less than a week since the ad’s debut, they raised more than $2 million. The group plans to use the money to air the ad in Wisconsin, Florida and Ohio this week.
We Are The Majority
Poll: Prominent governors who want to reopen quickly aren’t so popular
Many state governors have seen their popularity — and approval ratings — soar since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. But according to a new poll, how popular individual governors are seems to depend on how quickly they took steps to prevent the spread of the virus and whether they’ve thus far delayed reopening.
Senate battleground map shifts during pandemic response
The 2020 election is less than six months away, and in recent weeks the battle for the Senate seems to have tilted in the Democrats' favor, according to polls and campaign analysts.
The numbers suggest that, as Washington and the states weigh various responses to the coronavirus, Republican candidates are facing a tough campaign-year balancing act. They are left to figure out how closely to tie themselves to a less-than-popular president who is seeking re-election while getting low marks for his handling of the pandemic.
We Have Good Allies
Court revives lawsuit targeting Trump’s business dealings at D.C. hotel
A federal appeals court on Thursday revived a lawsuit seeking to block President Trump’s hotel in downtown Washington from accepting payments from foreign and state governments.
Saturday Funnies
the dude abides
That is it for today. Have a great weekend and HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
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