Delaware Politics – Page 2

Additional developments

Last week I promised you I was going to dig into Delaware’s redistricting? Well, I have all these piles of dirt around me and yet there’s still more gold in them thar hills, so that is a series I may begin in December since this is the time of year I take care of other blog business: the annual Thanksgiving post (if I don’t decide to use a prior version), my anniversary post on December 1, and the induction post for my Shorebird of the Week Hall of Fame Class of 2021. (I may push that back a week to December 9, depending how the others and the updating of that page go – updating it takes longer and longer as the roster of members increases each season. Because of that, the SotWHoF will likely go dark for a bit as I start this maintenance this coming weekend.) Usually I try to do this sort of housekeeping last, but then I noticed I’d been away a week and I don’t like to leave y’all hanging too long.

One thing that happened in the interim was the local election in Delmar, Maryland. It would have normally been a boring ballot in a small town except for them having the whole controversy about the on-duty killing of Delmar Police Cpl. Keith Heacook this past April. Once things calmed down a bit, that incident sparked an allegedly well-funded slate of challengers in the town election as neither of the two incumbent commissioners opted to run again; meanwhile, incumbent Mayor Karen Wells drew her own opponent as she decided to seek another term. Last Tuesday the new broom swept clean as the reformer slate won all three positions. (They were assured of winning one commission seat as just three ran for the two slots, but the slate outperformed.) So Wells, who had been Mayor since now-Delegate Carl Anderton resigned the position to represent the town in Annapolis after the 2014 election, was ousted after six-plus years in office.

While it’s a peripherally Delaware story only because of Delmar being “the town too big for one state,” the other reason I brought it up was that Wells was a blogger before she moved into public office 12 years ago. I used to link to her sites, the most recent being Off The Cuff, a site for which she apparently turned the keys over to someone else when she became an elected official. I welcome her back to the game because she’s going to provide both insight and oversight to her erstwhile constituents in Delmar.

It was rather funny as well because on social media she shared a screen shot of Off The Cuff from 2009, with a list of blogs that were “good” and “bad,” with the “bad” one being Salisbury News. I think out of the fifteen or so sites listed, mine and Salisbury News are the last two survivors. (And I’m the last one with the original author.) Maybe I’m the glutton for punishment, but it would be nice to have some of the old gang back. I miss those days of blogging.

Was Delaware gerrymandered?

Earlier this week the state of Delaware had new legislative districts come into effect. They had to be in place by one year before next year’s election so, after the usual suspects blamed Donald Trump for the late Census data – which had to be finagled to account for the last known address of the prison population – the Democrats got their maps through.

Over the next week or so, I’m planning on digging deeper into these numbers and districts. I don’t know where pockets of R or D voters live specifically, but just based on the population and registration numbers there are a few things which merit a second glance. I know my districts didn’t change, so there is that.

Since the candidates may now file in their new districts, I was hoping the state would update their website accordingly so we could see who was already running in 2022. Alas, it was not to be.

However, I did find an interesting calendar of municipal elections for next year. Our friends in Laurel are one of just a handful of towns in the state with no election next year – however, they were one of those that didn’t cancel their balloting this year. (Just one Delaware town remains yet to decide this year, although I happen to know that just across the border in Delmar, Maryland they vote next Tuesday in a hotly-contested mayoral race, among other things.) Maybe next year there will be interest in the tiny town of Bethel, which is just up the road a piece from me.

In looking at this year’s list, I noticed most of the spring elections were bagged, probably due to a lack of candidates. But more of the fall elections took place, which to me shows a newfound interest from the grassroots. It’s something to follow once the calendar flips over to 2022.

So I didn’t want you all to think I forgot about you. This is the month I start getting together my compilations and update some of my pages – hard to believe we are two weeks from Thanksgiving, 20 days from sweet sixteen for my site, and three weeks from inducting the Class of 2021 into the Shorebird of the Week Hall of Fame. It’s a busy month behind the scenes here.

And yes, I will delve into this data.

A potentially disturbing report

In order to run the 2022 election properly, perhaps we should understand why fewer and fewer people trust the results from the 2020 election.

In 2022, the state of Delaware will commence with early (and often) voting for the first time. It wasn’t our choice, since no one but the General Assembly voted on it, and I don’t recall a real crush of voters demanding Election Day become Election Month. We also may or may not have the same mail-in ballot issues that we had in 2020 since the powers that be keep on telling us the pandemic is real. (It is, but we are nowhere near spring 2020 infection levels.)

Before I continue, I’m going to throw some numbers at you. In Delaware:

Biden/Harris defeated Trump/Pence by 95,665 votes.
Chris Coons defeated Lauren Witzke by 105,750 votes.
Lisa Blunt Rochester defeated Lee Murphy by 84,990 votes.
John Carney defeated Julianne Murray by 102,591 votes.
Bethany Hall-Long defeated Donyale Hall by 88,295 votes.
Trinidad Navarro defeated Julia Pillsbury by 91,438 votes.

While the margins seem impressive, it’s worth pointing out that in terms of machine votes (in-person):

Trump/Pence defeated Biden/Harris by 208 votes.
Chris Coons defeated Lauren Witzke by 8,415 votes.
Lee Murphy defeated Lisa Blunt Rochester by 3,510 votes.
John Carney defeated Julianne Murray by 6,516 votes.
Donyale Hall defeated Bethany Hall-Long by 835 votes.
Trinidad Navarro defeated Julia Pillsbury by 7,014 votes.

I will grant that Democrats, who seemed to be more afraid to live than Republicans who stood in somewhat socially distanced lines on a cool but clear Election Day, were far more prone to send in their ballot. They took good advantage of the rules and the COVID-tilted playing field that made gaining name recognition for the Republicans an uphill battle since many events were scrubbed thanks to the CCP virus.

So it’s disappointing (but, alas, not shocking) to find that the Patriots for Delaware advocacy group has been looking into the 2020 election and finding the numbers don’t add up. This is the operative portion of a recent report by their “election integrity team.”

The election integrity team has found that there are 1,768 people who voted on Nov 3, 2020, after they died. Shockingly, 1,165 of these dead voters are recorded as having voted at a polling place, on an ES&S voting machine (ID required). The others mailed in their ballots.
Numerous problems are apparent when we take a closer look at the details surrounding these dead voters. For example, 91% of confirmed dead voters have been deceased since at least 2015 and have a history of voting after death. Meaning, 1,608 dead voters are not only recorded as having voted in 2020 but also voted in 2016 and/or prior elections, after they died. Half of the dead voters were registered to vote and/or sent in ballot applications, after their date of death. 22% of dead voters have been dead for decades and in hundreds of cases, generations. In one specific case, the voter died in 1963 and cast a ballot on an ES&S voting machine in 2020. Furthermore, Title 15, Chapter 17, Subsection 1705 (a) of Delaware Code states, ‘The State’s Office of Vital Statistics shall send each month to the Department and to the State Election Commissioner a complete and accurate file or list of each person 16 years of age or older who has been reported to have died within the State since the previous report.’ ‘(c) Upon receipt of a file or list from The Office of Vital Statistics, the Department shall cancel the registration of each registered voter whose name is on the list.’ Why hasn’t Anthony J. Albence, our election commissioner appointed by Carney, adhered to Delaware election laws? How do votes from the deceased get recorded on a voting machine?
Continuing on, one of the qualifications to register to vote in Delaware elections is that you must be a DE resident. The team has found that 2,117 people voted in our 2020 General Election who had previously moved out of state. These votes are in direct conflict with the DE qualifications to vote and should not have been counted. Period. Also, there are 1,854 voters who moved before the election with no forwarding address and voted in Delaware in 2020. If the mail-in portion of these voters do not have a forwarding address, how did they receive the ballot they used to vote in our election?
Additionally, the team discovered an anomaly in the mail-in/absentee ballot return rate. Nationally, mail-in ballots are returned at a rate of 71%. According to information received from a Department of Elections FOIA request, 168,629 mail-in ballots were sent to voters and 168,355 were returned. This amounts to a 99.8% mail-in ballot return rate. That is a 28.8% higher return rate than the national average and is statistically impossible. For perspective, 28.8% of mail-in ballots is equal to 48,480 votes.
Last, the analysis of election data totals has shown some curious findings. For example, the Department of Elections FOIA states that 168,629 mail-in ballots were sent to voters. However, there are 191,323 mail-in ballots recorded in the ‘voted file’ from Election Day, with 187,381 of those ballots officially accepted. How is it possible for election officials to receive over 22K more ballots than they sent out? The total amount of votes, both machine and mail-in, recorded in the ‘voted file’ is 530,411 votes. The total votes recorded on the Department of Election website is 504,010. A difference of 26,401 votes. Why were tens of thousands of votes from Election Day not counted in the official totals on the state website?
The election integrity team is committed to getting to the bottom of what happened on Nov. 3, 2020. They will be releasing a series of updates over the next several weeks with the intent to educate Delawareans on the details of what their canvas is revealing and the blatant disregard of The People’s right to a free and fair election by our legislature, election officials, and governor. These elected and appointed officials take their salaries from our hard-working hands; therefore, they owe us an explanation in the form of a forensic audit of every single vote. Delawareans should HOLD contributions from any candidate and incumbent in every political party until they do their jobs to protect Delawarean’s essential right to choose their leaders. Without a free and fair election, we can no longer be considered a Republic. It is our duty to unite and stand together, shoulder to shoulder, to save Delaware. We The People have the power. We cannot allow our public servants to spin their wheels until the next fraudulent election. The time to fix 2020 is now.
God bless The People of Delaware and God bless these United States of America.
“Election Integrity 10/26/2021 Update,” Patriots for Delaware, October 26, 2021.

These are the sorts of abnormalities that could be explained away in part, and the reason I went through the numbers at the top is to show that the results overall may not have changed anyway, even if all of the “extra” mail-in ballots were Democrat votes and the “shortage” of machine ballots accrued to Republicans, which would almost be statistically impossible. (But, had this been so, it would have made the House and Lieutenant Governor races veeerrrrry interesting.) So Lauren Witzke probably should back off her call for Chris Coons to clean out “her” office.

However, saying that, it’s more possible that the Democrats “stole” two Senate seats from the GOP. Even though the two Senators in question were the two largest RINOs in the Senate, the fact that Democrats succeeded in getting a 2/3 majority in the Senate is important in whether legislation passes or perishes.

What this all tells me is that there’s a lot of work to do before Election Day 2022 – organizing watchdog groups, demanding a culling of the voting rolls, and developing a strategy for countering the Democrats’ advantage in mail-in votes. (It would be even better to go back to pre-2020 rules but it’s certain the majority won’t let that genie return to the bottle.)

And yes, we should get a forensic audit of the 2020 vote.

Just so I don’t have another P4D-related post in a row, I think I will toss in a odds and ends post before I do Weekend of Local Rock next weekend. I had a website issue for a couple days that held this post up.

Total recall

While the final result wasn’t unexpected, the political news over the summer was the fate of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who survived an effort to recall him Tuesday by gathering over 60% of the vote so far – enough to safely assume he will stick around to finish his term next year and perhaps help propel him to re-election against whichever hapless candidate the California GOP will throw on the ballot. Interestingly enough, had Newsom somehow been recalled, the overwhelming winner of the race to replace him would have been black Republican, columnist, and talk show host Larry Elder. Larry received nearly half the vote in an exceptionally crowded replacement field with one caveat: it did not boast a major Democrat, probably because no connected Democrat would risk crossing the state’s political machine. (Yet the field did have the athlete formerly known as Bruce Jenner, who ran as a Republican.)

But the reason I’m bringing this up is the theoretical one: here in Delaware, Governor John Carney has led his state in much the same way that Newsom has governed California, using the heaviest of hands last year to browbeat individuals and businesses into attempting to stop the spread of the CCP virus. While things have eased up somewhat in recent months, Carney is running a state that is fat and happy with federal largesse at the moment but one that doesn’t seem to be sharing in the economic recovery from COVID all that well. While recall isn’t an option that’s available to Delaware voters, the question is whether such a bid could succeed if it were.

In California, the Newsom recall (which, by the way, was the 55th such effort, with success coming only in 2003 when Gray Davis was recalled in favor of Arnold Schwarzenegger) needed about 1.5 million signatures on a petition drive. (The number is 12% of the number of voters who participated in the previous gubernatorial election.) Based on the 2020 election, such an effort in Delaware would need a little over 59,000 signatures – and I think we could pick up a lot of that in Sussex County. One thing that would help is that Carney is not too far along in his term, so whoever succeeds him would have a long time to be in office.

But the question would be twofold, just as it was in California: could a Delaware recall vote of John Carney succeed, and who would run to replace him?

If you listen to the political pundits, they will say that the reason the recall failed (after looking somewhat promising initially) was that once Larry Elder emerged from the field as a contender, the contest became less on Newsom’s record and more like a standard election, which in California accrues a huge advantage to Democrats. If the system were set up in such a way that the Newsom recall would have been done first, then the election to succeed a few weeks later (with the lieutenant governor stepping in for the interim) it may have had more of a chance to succeed. Chances are that, in the end, the LG would have run for the top spot in the second election and won, but the key goal of getting rid of Newsom would have been achieved.

Here in Delaware, there are no shortage of Republicans who would have likely thrown their hat into the ring for such an election, with the top-tier candidates being the last two who the GOP has nominated for governor, Julianne Murray and Colin Bonini. But I suspect there may have been a high-profile regressive Democrat who jumped in as well, figuring he, she, or they would motivate their far-left voters to join in the recall effort and rid themselves of a more centrist Democrat. That would make things a lot more interesting and give a whole bunch of heartburn to the Delaware Democrat Party.

In a best-case scenario, the two forces combine with independents who are sick to death of “Governor Carnage” and push him out of office – say 35% of the total are Republicans and independents and 20% are those far-left Democrats. Assuming the GOP didn’t shoot itself in the foot and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by running enough people to split the vote, it would put a Republican in the governor’s chair even if he or she had to face a strongly Democrat General Assembly.

The more likely outcome, though, would find the Democrats having enough party discipline to prevail. That’s one thing they do pretty well, given the fact both their incumbent U.S. Senators have run against a “progressive” candidate recently and crushed that opposition. (By that token the regressives must be happy with LBR because no one with any significant bankroll or support base opposed her in the last two primary elections.) It would probably be something on the order of the California outcome, with over 60% voting against their best interests to retain.

Now if I were still in Maryland and recall were possible, THAT would be an intriguing coalition trying to recall Larry Hogan. I’ll just leave it at that.

True lies from the opposition

I haven’t written much about Indivisible of late because they’re continuing their predictable slide into grifter status, perpetually begging for money from the unwashed but certainly collecting their real cash from the same monied interests that keep the entire political Left afloat.

That support is a subject surely to be avoided by an initiative I was alerted to a few weeks back that they portrayed as a “truth brigade.” Get a load of this:

Big news! We recently publicly launched a massive volunteer program to counter right-wing disinformation: the Truth Brigade. You may have seen this campaign featured in the Washington Post, Forbes, and other outlets — we’ve been running a pilot program for several months that has already engaged 4,750 people, driving posts that together generated over 82 million impressions on social media.
Now, because the stakes are so high, we’re taking this plan public and expanding even further, as the right wing continues their crusade to poison the discourse and undermine our democracy…
(Pause for fundraising appeal…of course.)
The Truth Brigade is our answer to the right-wing disinformation machine. Research shows that one of the best ways to counter disinformation is through interactions with real people in your network — so thousands of volunteers are getting the training and the tools they need to shift the narratives in their own communities.
We provide resources on best practices, from how to structure messages to understanding how social media amplifies lies. Then, every two weeks, volunteers receive careful explainers about the latest issues and work on a campaign tailored to push back against messaging trends from bad actors. And leaders are constantly evaluating success to build more effective campaigns.
Just like all our work, it’s guided by experts who monitor right-wing circles, follow the spread of disinformation, and build tested tactics to fight back. And it’s powered by real volunteers, channelling (sic) their anger into action to protect our democracy.
Indivisible, “Project Launch: The Truth Brigade,” July 16, 2021.

So do you get it? This “grassroots” group that works from the top down is sending out “careful explainers” (read: misinformation) to “push back against messaging trends” (in other words, the real truth) from “bad actors” (people like us.) In a different era, we would know these people for what they are: useful idiots. And those “experts” are the trolls who “fight back” by regularly invading our political discussions with their tired talking points. (They’re the people I call the “traveling roadshow.”)

And the thing is: most of these local people Indivisible is really targeting – as opposed to those like me who only follow to know what the other side is up to – aren’t bad people, they’re just misguided. (Sort of like the unsaved who live in a worldly manner because they haven’t yet understood the Good News. I’m betting many of them get caught up in the center of that Venn diagram, too.)

On that thought, there is one other passage which sticks out: “channeling their anger into action to protect our democracy.” Setting aside the incorrect assertion that we are a democracy, one needs to question what they are angry about? Are they angry because they aren’t in with the powerful and privileged and seek some Other to rectify the situation? Since it’s not likely those chosen few are going to allow you to join their club without selling your soul in the process, maybe you simply need something to dissipate your anger. All anger seems to do these days is to get people in trouble. As a conservative white male, one would think I have the most to be angry about but I let it roll off me like water off a duck because I know I have a higher purpose and better destination in the end.

So if I were to guess, the real truth is probably a little closer to what I’m telling you than the “careful explainers” that Indivisible is churning out.

But what got this post elevated from something that was still simmering on my back burner as a piece worth barely worth more than an odds and ends mention to actually writing it was this gem from Indivisible yesterday. The sender was Meagan Hatcher-Mays, who I gather is part of their policy team:

Normally we wouldn’t email you twice in one day but we just heard some very important intel on the For the People Act, and with the Senate headed for recess literally any day, it couldn’t wait.
This afternoon, our policy team (that’s me and my colleagues) heard from multiple sources that Delaware’s two senators, Tom Carper and Chris Coons, are both holding out on eliminating or even reforming the filibuster, effectively stalling passage of the For the People Act (S. 1). We’ve known for a while that they were both reluctant to upset the status quo even for important legislation — they’ve been telling Indivisible groups so for a while — but this is the clearest confirmation we’ve heard that they’re willing to put arcane Senate rules over the legislation the American people elected Democrats to pass.
Having them standing in the way also provides cover for Sens. Manchin (WV) and Sinema (AZ), who can now pretend they aren’t the ones blocking progress. If you’re not part of the solution, Senators, you’re part of the problem.
Depending on where you live, here’s what we need you to do:
If you live in Delaware, call Senators Coons and Carper at 1-877-684-7760 and tell them you’ve heard information that they’re wavering and it’s time to pick a side: Democracy or the filibuster. Remind them you’re paying attention. (If you want, fill out your information here and we’ll call you with a script and patch you through to their office directly.)
Indivisible, “Important new intel re: Delaware (and the country),”August 6, 2021.

First off, insofar as I know that’s not actually a Senate number. I suspect it’s part of Indivisible’s fundraising efforts. Secondly, maybe they finally figured out I live in Delaware because a lot of their other stuff was targeted more to my previous zip code. (Or maybe they figured I’m close enough.)

But this is a rare time I actually agree with my Senators because they understand the function of the Senate insofar as it’s constituted in the modern day. (If they wanted it to truly function properly, they would call for repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment but we all know that’s not going to happen.) They’ve figured out that the filibuster that may hold them back in this cycle could well be their protection next time when the pendulum swings back.

So perhaps we should call their offices or drop them a line to commend them on that stance in keeping the filibuster. Why let the Indivisible minions have all the fun?

Time for a new arrangement?

I didn’t really want to end a long absence from the site with my Shorebird of the Month next week (nope, I can’t wait to restart that tradition after an unplanned and extended hiatus) and, luckily, listening to the Dan Bongino radio show for the first time yesterday gave me an idea to bounce around.

[Dan’s show has a different, more serious tone than Rush, although Limbaugh lost a little of his sense of humor in the Obama-Trump years. But it was interesting enough for me to listen for the better part of an hour as I drove around to check things off the honeydo list. I actually set out at Phillips Landing (locals know where I’m talking about) for awhile to catch this part of the show in my car, so Dan sets things up well.]

The idea Bongino got into was the thought of how to preserve and expand conservative power. Given the successes of places like Texas, Florida, and other low-taxing, lightly-regulating states in the grand national scheme of things, Dan expounded on a two-pronged plan to bring back our nation to its time-tested conservative values, with the first part being simply: move.

I preface this part by presuming there are more people who prefer a right-of-center, populist political philosophy exhibited by Trump than the radical leftist Biden regime – which is seemingly propped up by allies in the media, both social and otherwise. Evidence to buttress this point of view is the number of people leaving states like New York, California, Illinois, and Michigan for the greener pastures of Texas and Florida. Among the crowd I’m most familiar with, South Carolina and Tennessee are also popular places to go. Anyway, these folks are among those who have already taken Bongino’s advice and made these already-red states an even deeper ruby hue.

It’s a theory that makes some sense on a Presidential and Congressional level: in the next Presidential election traditional red states gained on a net basis just by the shifting of seats from Democratic bastions like the aforementioned California and New York down to Florida and Texas – and this was before the pandemic and Biden administration. Accelerating the growth of Republican-led states gives an opportunity to regain control of the House and adds to the bank of electoral votes a GOP candidate can count on when running for President.

So those conservatives who are in regressive states like New York and California were advised to move and let the Left waste a maximum number of votes. But what of those who are stuck in these states thanks to jobs or family obligations? It’s a category that I fall into because my wife and I can’t telecommute and she has a close family.

Bongino was inspired by this piece by Michael Anton at the American Mind, and it reflects some writings I’ve made in the past about a greater Delaware and how it would play out politically. While the most recent news on that front has been about the concept of a greater Idaho (wonder what my old friend Marc Kilmer thinks about that?) Dan made a point about western Maryland shifting over to West Virginia as the areas are politically closer to Charleston than Annapolis – surely they get tired of their couple state Senators and half-dozen Delegates regularly being bulldozed in the General Assembly – but the same could be argued for the Eastern Shore. Unfortunately, they really don’t have an adjacent rock-solid conservative state so their best bet may be a Delaware merger.

(Another, more academic and judicial study on the state secession subject was written by Glenn Reynolds, if you’re interested.)

However, all this talk brings up a corollary point about Senate seats.

We know that the key reason we’re talking about statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia is the four Senate seats Democrats could count on winning. (If their motive was truly representation for District citizens, it would be easiest just to allow the retrocession of all but the federal buildings to Maryland. But that doesn’t give the Democrats two Senators since Maryland is already a lock for them, although it could eventually give Maryland another House seat.)

By that same token, creating new states out of Republican areas won’t fly with Democrats who wouldn’t want the two Senators who came from those regions. (One example is the state of Jefferson, often discussed by those same Oregonians who now want to merge with Idaho. Jefferson would include rural Oregon and part of northern California.)

Anton points out that, since the Missouri Compromise, states have regularly been adopted in pairs. That pairing may be more difficult to achieve in these cases, though, since few red states have blue areas that would qualify to be states by population.

But the principle of moving to red states would only solidify those places, and when you’re talking about Senators these states already send two Republicans. So I think I have a corollary to the moving blue-to-red idea: what about moving to the smaller blue states, like Delaware? It would be something on the scale of the already-existing Free State Project in New Hampshire.

For example, Vermont is a blue state but it only has 500,000 registered voters. Imagine if 50,000 conservatives moved in to tip the scales to making it more purple and Bernie Sanders became an ex-Senator. The same type of idea might work in other small states like Maine, Rhode Island, and – of course – Delaware. Think of what those eight Senators could do if these states were flipped!

But even if just a couple of these states could be shifted, that brings up other possibilities for county shifts. I’ve talked about Delaware as a larger state, but imagine the newly conservative Vermont picking up adjacent areas of New York or Massachusetts (and gaining electoral votes.) At that point all of electoral math starts to shift in favor of the working class over the elites.

And while I’m at it, here’s another idea for the hopper.

If we did electoral votes by Congressional district nationwide like Maine and Nebraska do, the electoral fraud perpetrated by Democrats would have had much less effect. In 2020 Biden would have still prevailed but more narrowly (277-261) but then again one could speculate what turnout may have been like in certain areas where people in the real world thought they had nothing to vote for and didn’t show up.

But imagine states thought long gone to the other side, like California or Texas, now coming into a bit of play because there may be three to five EVs in play there from swing districts. While Delaware will always perfectly reflect results of the entire state unless we somehow gain a second Congressional seat, under this formula Maryland may have two to three votes possibly swing to the GOP instead of being a usually dependable 10 in the Democrat column. This would have made even an election like 1984’s blowout a little more interesting – remember, Democrats always had a Congressional majority in those days so Walter Mondale may have easily cracked 200 electoral votes despite a double-digit popular vote loss.

So I think for my next post I will clean out the old mailbox again then it’s time for the Shorebird of the Month, which may come down to how top contenders do this weekend.

A tale of two endorsements

On Tuesday, voters across a wide swath of Delaware, including my home district here in Laurel, will choose at least one member of their school board in local elections. I noted awhile back that our one seat had four aspirants, which was tied for the most in the state, but since then one of them withdrew and left us a three-person race.

To be frank, there really hasn’t been a whole lot of media interest in these hyperlocal elections and I haven’t really come across much in the way of campaigning except for scattered yard signs from two of the three here in my district. Other districts, however, seem to have a little more action.

One of the rare stories regarding this race piqued a bit of interest on both sides of the political spectrum. A Delaware News Journal story discussing my newfound friends at the Patriots for Delaware (P4D) and the five candidates they have thus far endorsed also begat a counter from the Delaware chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) with “a statewide list of people running that we are not officially endorsing but are suggesting.”

Since the Patriots for Delaware only endorsed five people running – with one assured of victory because he’s unopposed – here are the four remaining contests where both sides have endorsed a candidate:

Brandywine (NCC): Tonya Hettler (P4D) vs. Kimberly Stock (DSA). There is also a Libertarian candidate, Scott Gesty – which is sort of bad news since they may split the reformer vote, but hopefully won’t.
Cape Henlopen (Sussex): Ashley Murray (P4D) vs. Janis Hanwell (DSA). Two-person race.
Red Clay (NCC): Janice Colmery (P4D) vs. Kecia Nesmith (DSA). Rafael Ochoa is a third candidate, who may get the vote of people convinced the other two are extremists.
Woodbridge (Sussex): Danielle Taylor (P4D) vs. Elaine Gallant (DSA). Two-person race.

It’s worth pointing out that the DSA didn’t necessarily seek out candidates, but are putting up this list because they seek what they call “real and positive educational leadership.” It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if their list isn’t a simple reflection of candidates backed by the teachers’ union.

Here in Sussex County, I’ve already covered two of the five districts holding an election (Indian River is not) and the Seaford district has just one candidate. That leaves Delmar and Laurel.

Delmar has some spirited races going because there are two races: one for the last two years of an unexpired term and another for a full term. Interestingly, the DSA chose not to endorse anyone in the Delmar races (the only such contests in the state) so we’ll let them fight it out accordingly.

In Laurel, the DSA chose a former school principal with the memorable name of Ivy Bonk, who hasn’t otherwise grabbed my attention (she has no signage that I’ve seen nor a social media campaign page) but does have the claim to fame of writing two books on childhood trauma. It’s interesting that the DSA did not choose the former board member who lost last year and decided to run again (David B. Nichols) and I didn’t figure on them backing the youth coach who has kids in the Laurel school system (Joey Deiter.)

To be honest, I think the best choice in these cases is generally the outsider since a new set of eyes can often see problems that exist right under the nose of the others on the board. This race has two outsiders, but one of them talks right over the head of the electorate with her buzzwords and jargon, a lingo which includes the concept of equity I’ve considered quite a bit recently. The other coaches kids and has a wife who runs a family business, so I believe he would be more amenable to the arguments I would make about instilling competition for the school system to make the prospects better for all children.

So I’m going to go with Joey Deiter. We’ll see if my endorsement carries more weight than the one provided by the Democratic Socialists of Delaware.

More thoughts on government dependence

While I love working in this venue, I also cherish how I get to stretch my writing wings on various subjects of national importance thanks to my longtime employment as part of The Patriot Post. Thus, last Friday I got the opportunity to take a swing at one of my favorite subjects, that of government dependence.

In this case, however, I was looking at the issue on a personal level. And while that is extremely important, we shouldn’t forget that it can happen on a local and state government level as well. And that brings me to a topic I was alerted to recently.

According to Charlie Copeland at the Caesar Rodney Institute, the state of Delaware has a “shadow budget” estimated at $7.5 billion, and it’s money which is “almost entirely comprised of Federal funds in the form of grants for hundreds of projects in dozens of our state agencies as well as our colleges and universities.” (The quote comes from a related “exclusive interview” the CRI released in e-mail form, with much of the same information.)

The very important piece of context for this is that Delaware has a state budget (at least the one officially on the books) of about $5 billion, which is the smallest state budget in the country. If you added this $7.5 billion “shadow budget,” though, it’s no longer at the bottom and, on a per capita basis, it now becomes larger than adjacent Maryland’s – where (I believe) both state expenditures and federal pass-throughs are listed in their $50+ billion budget. In fact, Delaware could easily fall into the top 10 in highest per-capita spending, although that depends on how each of the other states treat federal contributions to state budgets. It’s likely there are other states whose budget reporting in skewed in similar fashion; it’s a scope I’m not going to get into right now.

My point is that state and local governments have fallen into a trap that no one seems to have the will to extricate themselves from. By taking that federal (or, in the case of local government, state) largesse they avoid making the difficult decision of balancing a budget or raising taxes to do so. And if it’s enough, they can take the credit and keep the voters happy – if not they have a convenient scapegoat to blame. (Case in point: the staffing controversy in Delmar after the death of DPD Corporal Keith Heacook.)

Certainly there are aspects of government only suitable for handling at the federal level, but generally these are performed by federal employees. Where the feds overstep their bounds is those times when they hand out money to the states, expecting them to follow along in lockstep by enacting desired policies. Since no one wants to give up the federal funding, they follow along dutifully like a dog on a leash.

What the federal government needs is a reformer who both understands the Tenth Amendment and knows that many millions of federal employees, lobbyists, and other beggars and hangers-on really need a productive gig. The world needs ditchdiggers, too. Sadly, we are stuck going in the opposite direction for the time being.

Programming note: Speaking of wing spreading, today was my last Friday piece for The Patriot Post and it was on a somewhat related topic. But it’s not the end for me there.

I don’t know if this is a promotion or just a lateral move, but they have asked me to write on Tuesday nights for Wednesday publication and I agreed to do so. I suspect my first Wednesday piece will come next week.

The state of a non-state, 2021 edition

Four years ago, thanks to a rant by Delaware writer friend of mine by the name of Chris Slavens, I had the idea come to me of figuring out just how a state of Delmarva would have voted. It turned out we would be perhaps the most purple state in the country based on the 2016 election and how the legislature would stack up.

But because the 2020 election had a home state nominee in Joe Biden, the state of Delmarva (or you could call it New Delaware) would have been a more bluish shade this time around – that was expected. But that trend carried over in other portions of the ballot, too.

There are a few caveats with this, of course: because the three states which share Delmarva have their local elections at different times, the results downballot aren’t necessarily congruent to a real election. But having kept my 2016 spreadsheet around I could pick out some interesting trends.

Still, if Delmarva had a statewide election, the “native son” (even though he was born in Pennsylvania) Joe Biden would have carried the state, although perhaps not as convincingly as one may think:

Joe Biden (Democrat) 402,229 – 53.00%
Donald Trump (incumbent Republican) 343,352 – 45.24%
Jo Jorgensen (Libertarian) 8,155 – 1.07%
Howie Hawkins (Green Party) 3,280* – 0.43%
all others 1,950 – 0.26%

*Hawkins was not on the Virginia ballot, which may have lost him about 140 votes based on how he ran elsewhere.

Despite picking up about 23,000 more votes in the twelve counties that make up Delmarva, Donald Trump was swamped by a candidate in Joe Biden who found nearly 80,000 more votes in the heretofore tri-state area – including a hefty 32,000 in New Castle County alone (where Trump gained less than 3,000 votes.) Sussex County chipped in another 17,000 or so extra toward Biden’s total as he outpolled Hillary Clinton’s 2016 effort in all 12 counties. Donald Trump beat his 2016 performance as well in each county, but in some cases it was an improvement of less than 1,000 votes.

If you recall my 2017 article, the only two counties Hillary carried were the largest, northernmost (New Castle County, Delaware) and the smallest, southernmost (Northampton County, Virginia.) Biden kept those in his column but also flipped three that were more in the middle: Kent County, Delaware, Kent County, Maryland, and Talbot County, Maryland.

Because there was no Senate race in Maryland last year, I used the three Congressional races on the Shore as a surrogate for that race as well as the one House race that Delmarva would have. When I wrote this in 2017, I figured Delmarva would have a second seat with the extra population Delaware does not have, but a closer examination of population reveals the 12 counties have 1,474,465 people (per 2019 estimates) and the average Congressional district has just over 750,000. So Delmarva is roughly 50,000, give or take, short of qualifying.

However, if the math did happen to favor the state of Delmarva and there could be two members of Congress, the most logical district split would put New Castle, Cecil, all of Kent County, Maryland, and the northern fringes of Kent County, Delaware into one district (that would be a fairly safe Democrat district despite the heavily Republican pocket of Cecil County) while the rest would be a pretty strong Republican district notwithstanding some sag on the mid-Shore, in Wicomico County, and at the southern end of Delmarva in Virginia.

As for a statewide Delmarva Senate seat, that contest would also go to the Democrats:

D total 380,827 – 51.64%
R total 345,305 – 46.82%
L total 3,814* – 0.52%
all others 7,551 – 1.02%

*The Libertarian Party only had a Congressional candidate in Delaware.

In reality, having a much larger than average Congressional district in Delaware with a Democrat incumbent easily outweighed the similar victory Andy Harris picked up in Maryland (in the Eastern Shore half of his district.) Meanwhile, Virginia’s numbers were too small to matter and as a matter of fact had a margin of just 69 votes favoring the Republican. The Democrats only carried three counties of the twelve, but flipping Kent County, Delaware helped put them over the top.

We also elected a governor here in Delaware, which gave the state an advantage in a mythical Delmarva governor’s race that combined the 2020 results in Delaware, the 2018 balloting in Maryland, and 2017 race in Virginia to get the following results:

D total 340,257 – 49.94%
R total 329,552 – 48.37%
L total 4,583 – 0.67%
Green total 686* – 0.1%
Others total 6,258* – 0.92%

*There was no Green Party candidate in Virginia or Delaware. As for Others, the vast majority of that came from the Independent Party of Delaware candidate.

This was a turnout election, so the advantage went to the Democrats who won Delaware in the 2020 Presidential election over the Republicans who took Maryland in the lower turnout 2018 midterm.

Yet the Democrat success should not come as a surprise: voter registration still favors them by 11 1/2 points:

Democrat RV: 468,180 – 42.94% (down 0.3% from 2016)
Republican RV: 342,597 – 31.42% (up 0.32% from 2016)
All other RV: 279,645 – 25.65% (down o.01% from 2016)

Bear in mind that non-affiliated number includes the 34,281 voters in Virginia who don’t declare a party. But the interesting factoid here is that Somerset County flipped from Democrat to Republican insofar as plurality of voter registration is concerned over the last four years – the only county of the twelve to switch.

The other big change in the last four years would have been a shift in the mythical Delmarva Senate, which would have gone from a 13-13 tie to a 15-11 Democrat control thanks (most recently) to the loss of two Republican seats in Delaware. The ersatz Delmarva House would slide from a 28-26 GOP edge to a 27-27 tie thanks to a Delaware loss in 2018. Talk about swing votes!

But what if there were another way? The one weakness with my method is that I have a lot of small districts in Delaware (less than 25,000 for House and 50,000 for Senate) but much larger districts in Maryland (about 50,000 for House and 150,000 for Senate) and Virginia, where the Eastern Shore is less than half a House district, let alone their Senate. So the state of Delaware is way overrepresented in this model.

Since this is my fantasy, I decided to use a federal model and give each of the counties two state Senators (screw the incorrect SCOTUS decision of Reynolds v. Sims), which means the 28 Senators would likely work out to be a sizeable Republican majority (on the order of 18-10) because New Castle County only gets two. Using a model like Delaware’s, with about two House members per Senator, the House count would be about 29-27 Republican but with a lot of potential flipping in several areas, making local elections become greatly important. This divided government would mean ideas from the GOP legislature would have to be appealing enough for the Democrat governor to become law (since there’s not a vetoproof majority in the House and perhaps not the Senate.)

Either way, it’s a fairly safe bet that, having a state of Delmarva, you would not see the radical left-wing nonsense that seems to be ruining both the state of Maryland (over the Eastern Shore’s objections) and Delaware (because there’s outsized influence from one liberal county that has over half the state’s population.) Even with the slight trend to the left based on 2016-20 results, this state would perhaps have the most interesting politics on the East Coast.

Let’s make a deal: Maryland gets the retrocession of Washington, D.C. while they give up the Eastern Shore to become part of Delaware. (Virginia just forgets about its Eastern Shore half the time, anyway, so if we grabbed that, too, they wouldn’t miss it until it was too late.) We could make the new Delaware into a great state – all without messing up the American flag.

The replacement?

For many years I have been on the e-mail list for a group called the 9/12 Delaware Patriots. From time to time their events and announcements have graced my pages – beginning way back with this notice in 2012, ironically on 12/12/12. According to their social media page, the group began the 9/12 Delaware Patriots page back in August, 2009 – a time when the overall TEA Party movement was at its organizational peak.

Yet over the last year or so it seems like the group has run out of steam, with a little bit of help (or call it bad luck.) For several years, the 9/12 Delaware Patriots would hold two monthly meetings, generally with the same speakers for each: one in Sussex County and the other intended for Kent and New Castle counties. But that was before the pandemic hit and eliminated the prospect for monthly public gatherings at the local restaurants which they generally used.

Back in the Zoom meeting days of last spring, I sat in on one of their monthly meetings only to find fewer than a dozen denizens. It was a bummer because I was looking forward to seeing what they were about as we had just become Delaware residents, three years or so after our original intention. And it’s strange: their social media page remains a hotbed of activity despite the dearth of meetings.

Over the last few months, though, their position seems to have been supplanted by a new group called Patriots for Delaware (P4D.) The upstarts are now boasting a social media membership into five figures, dwarfing the reach of the 9/12 group that remains in the 1,600 range. (Since both are private pages, though, this may be intentional on the part of 9/12.) P4D also claimed that a recent meeting drew 150 attendees, which is a phenomenal turnout for a political event not featuring a candidate. (As a comparison, even in the heady days of the TEA Party a decade ago, meetings of our local Salisbury area Americans for Prosperity or Maryland Society of Patriots groups seldom drew more than about 50, and averaged 25 or so.)

Meanwhile, the last event I heard about that was sponsored by the 9/12 group was the bus trip they took to the Capitol rally on January 6. Since then, it’s been almost three months out of the public eye so I decided to ask them if they had gone on hiatus.

My request for information was answered by their president Karen Gritton, who advised me that, indeed, the group was at something of a crossroads.

Gritton told me that she had gone to a P4D meeting, saying, “they seem to be very similar to the 9/12 and very well attended at present.” Unfortunately, she also confided that she could not continue as 9/12’s president and no one on the board was in a position to take over for Gritton. Their next steps would be considered at an upcoming board meeting. “We may be at a turning point where we will restructure,” she conceded.

Having been in that sort of position a couple times myself, I can feel for Gritton’s plight. So what interested me was why the leadership of P4D didn’t just come in to the existing group, and their co-founder Glenn Watson, Jr. let me know:

9/12 is a group that mostly focuses on 2A issues, whereas our vision was much more broad. At Patriots for Delaware we strive to focus on all Constitutional Values, and attempt to do so in a way that attracts moderates from both side of the aisle. Being a “Patriot” is not limited to those that affiliate with the political right. We felt that having a well organized group was very important and starting from the ground up allowed us to do that. We clearly took inspiration from 9/12 but ultimately, our missions are not identical, so it made sense to start our own organization. We wish 9/12 great success and hope to work with them on issues where we share common ground.
e-mail from Glenn Watson, Jr., March 30, 2021.

I don’t think the 9/12 group was overly focused on the Second Amendment myself, but that’s just me. Among patriots the gun issue tends to be among those they are most passionate about, and ironically there is a sharp focus on the P4D page on 2A issues right now as the Delaware General Assembly debates more useless gun legislation.

Anyway, one other interesting facet of P4D is the organizational chart they’re already come up with, one which features several committees on various topics (member outreach, political action, finance, critical thinking, press/visual arts, and education) and creates a seven-member board of directors who breaks the tie if the two co-founders disagree on a course of action. It’s a rather mature setup for a group that’s less than a year old.

But I want to come back to something Watson said that caught my eye: “Being a ‘Patriot’ is not limited to those that affiliate with the political right.”

Back in the day, probably about the time when I was still sharing a bedroom with a bunk bed and crib for me and my two brothers in the little two-bedroom house that was the starter home for my parents, politics stopped at the water’s edge and everybody loved America. Certainly Republicans and Democrats disagreed on the direction and role of government, but the rank-and-file of both sides pretty much shared the same values insofar as the idea of America being the shining city on the hill that was later publicized by Ronald Reagan (who famously was a Democrat until the party left him.)

The split over Vietnam, where the youth of America became antiwar protestors and dodged the draft, seemed to be the schism that set us on the course to where we are today. Those on the Left who sympathized with the Jane Fondas of the world also began dabbling in a number of other political venues which separated us out: abortion, gay rights, unchecked immigration, and the attitude that America was no better than any other nation regardless of philosophy and how they treated their people. To them, the banana republic with the tinhorn dictator was just as worthy as we were on the world stage.

Of course, I was way too young at the time to really understand at the time what the college kids were upset about. I barely remember Walter Cronkite telling us “that’s the way it is” after my mom and dad watched him and the local 6:00 news. And I’m probably the last generation who went to public school yet was still told of America’s greatness, warts and all. Watergate didn’t bother me because I had no idea what was going on – I was more interested in the ballgame my Little League team would be playing that week.

So I would tend to disagree with their assessment to some extent because few on the political Left subscribe to the notion that America is something to be patriotic about, but that’s just me.

If I were a betting man, I would suspect that the 9/12 Delaware Patriots have run their course – not because it was a bad organization, but it lost members who would become its leaders as they slowly drifted away over the last few years. One thing I’ve noticed about TEA Party groups: we’re not getting any younger. Perhaps this is something that Patriots for Delaware can address while they are the new, hip thing and create a subgroup called Young Patriots for Delaware. (Even better would be a third group: College Patriots for Delaware.)

Say what you will about the party structure, but it works: I wasn’t a College Republican, but I was a Young Republican for several years in the mid- to late 1990s, culminating with being president of the Toledo YRs in 2000. (And I speak from experience: after I left, the group went on a hiatus for a year or two until new young people revitalized it.) But those College Republicans oftentimes become Young Republicans, and the YRs move up to be the leadership and candidates of the party once (or many times before) they age out. The same should hold true of other political groups, and right now we need young conservative Patriot leaders to counter the indoctrination our youth is being disserved.

That’s also why education should become our new pet issue. I’m not sure which committee gets that idea, but it definitely should go in the Patriot hopper.

If the Patriots for Delaware comes Laurel way, I may just stop in and see what the fuss is about. And if the 9/12 Patriots somehow revitalize their group, hopefully it will be when the state opens up so I can enjoy the experience.

How the First State stacks up

I happened to notice a map in doing some other research that showed states which would be gaining or losing Congressional seats thanks to the 2020 census. As one might expect, Texas and Florida will be big winners while the biggest losers will be Ohio and New York – and for the first time in decades (if not ever) California will not gain a seat this time.

Of course, Delaware, which is still checking in with fewer than a million residents, will remain a puny three electoral vote state since the representative population per district is roughly 750,000 and we’re nowhere close to a million and a half. (Now add in the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia to create a greater Delaware and we are right there. That reminds me of a post I need to do, too.)

But this will also be the time that we re-apportion our state into its 41 House and 21 Senate districts. It’s not a clean division, as a handful of districts cut between county lines.

In the Senate, however, New Castle County has 12 full and one partial Senate district after the 2010 count, while Kent County has three full and two partial (sharing one apiece with New Castle and Sussex) and Sussex has four full and one partial. In 2010 one district moved from New Castle to Sussex, and this time Sussex should be due again to have five full districts as they have almost exactly 1/4 of the state’s population. Between Sussex and Kent counties they should have nine full districts, as a small portion of Sussex could be folded into the large fraction of a district Kent should get along with three full districts. That leaves New Castle with 12 full districts, and ideally only the one should be split between Kent and Sussex.

In the House, New Castle has 24 full and one partial district, but that number should decline by one based on the population trends. Sussex should return to 10 full seats (where they were for the previous decade) while Kent will retain the last seven seats.

So like the federal redistricting seems to be shifting southward, so should the state’s. It may help a little in 2022, although the interesting question is which Democrat machine politicians in New Castle will be lumped together in a district created because they gained population more slowly than the rest of the state. (Or, will they finagle the districts to keep an extra one they don’t deserve, which may well be the case.)

I don’t think they’ll do too much with my district since I live close to the corner of the state in a rural area, but it will be interesting to see how they subdivide the more populated section of Sussex County.

The local impact races

Longtime readers of monoblogue may recall that, for years, one of the goals my cohorts and I on the Wicomico County Republican Central Committee had was to change our county’s school board from all-appointed to all-elected. (Over the years I had a lot to say about the subject, such as this appeal to the public and this one to opponents.) And there were extremely good reasons for this.

At the time, Wicomico County was one of just a few counties in Maryland still relying on the appointment system, which was a convoluted process for us on those occasions where we had some input: because it was dictated that the party in the governor’s office would have four of the seven WCBOE seats and since turnover was so slow (as members served five-year terms) there were just a few years where we had the task while our friends on the Democrat Central Committee had the other years.

In order to facilitate the process when it was a Republican’s turn, the WCRCC would first find out if the board member could be re-appointed (since they were eligible to serve two terms, and often did – which was one reason turnover was slow.) I think there was only one time where we sought to appoint a non-incumbent in place of someone who could have been re-appointed, but assuming a new person was needed we would screen several applicants and send a name or two to the Secretary of Appointments – who would generally laugh and select the person our local elected officials in the General Assembly preferred (a person who didn’t necessarily go through our process.) It got to the point where the Democrats were demanding they get to interview “our” appointments because they were the ones who made the selection (at the time, Maryland was saddled with Martin O’Malley and his hand-picked Secretary of Appointments.) For all we know they did since it often wasn’t the person we chose who got appointed.

Of course, being in charge for many years meant the Democrats liked the process so they were the ones who resisted the change since it needed enabling legislation in the General Assembly. We had three giant roadblocks for the first eight years I was on the CC: Rick Pollitt (who was County Executive), and Delegates Rudy Cane and Norm Conway. Once all three of them were eliminated in the 2014 election, the process to finally getting an elected school board went very quickly and, despite a last-ditch effort by local Democrats to install a “hybrid” board of five elected and two appointees, the majority of voters in 2016 demanded an all-elected school board. (To his credit, our then-State Senator, Democrat Jim Mathias, was generally – if not necessarily completely – supportive to our efforts.)

Now I’m not going to lie to you and say the school board elections have turned out as I would have hoped, but the accountability is there and the system seems to work well – it was tested early with the sad passing of David Goslee, Sr., who was one of the loudest proponents of an elected school board (as a fellow member of the WCRCC) and barely (as in by ONE vote out of over 6,000 cast) won his seat in the first election – only to die in office shortly afterward. Interestingly enough, including Goslee, three of my former mates on the WCRCC were elected in the first school board balloting in 2018.

All that is a 500-plus word prologue to my main point: here in Delaware, they have long won the fight we waged for a decade or more in Wicomico, electing school boards for years. With that in mind, this May my district in Laurel has one of just two elections in the state where four participants are chasing one (open, since the incumbent chose not to seek re-election) seat. (The other one is in the Brandywine school district, which is much larger population-wise being on the northern outskirts of Wilmington hard by the PA line but has sub-districts. Ours is an at-large seat.) Out of 15 districts in Delaware having elections (a total of 20 elections, including sub-districts) there are just the two elections with four candidates, three with three, eight with two, and seven where just one person filed.

The one thing that I don’t like about Delaware’s system, though, is that it’s rather activist-proof: our five-member board only turns over one person at a time, so it would take three years for a correctly-minded majority to hold sway. Moreover, to make the most rapid reform, you have to win three elections in a row, which eliminates the element of surprise to opponents such as the teachers’ union. A gang election like Wicomico’s can be ambushed rather easily, but this can’t.

Since I voted over the summer in the 2020 rendition (which had three candidates, including the incumbent who lost) I also know this is a non-partisan election like Wicomico County’s school board election is.

My insider friend gave me the skinny on some of these candidates, and I’ve gleaned a little more from briefly scoping out social media.

The first to file was David B. Nichols. And I said to myself, “that name sounds familiar.” Reason being: a D. Brent Nichols ran last year and was the sole incumbent in the entire state to lose. After two terms, apparently voters had had enough but it seems he doesn’t agree – so he’s going to try and fool the voters into voting for new blood? (Honestly, I thought maybe this was his son or something.)

Next in line was Diane M. Snow, who my insider posited was a “come here” based on the phone number provided. It was another name that sounded vaguely familiar, and what stuck out at me in looking her up was her strong support for U.S. Senate candidate Lauren Witzke (presuming it’s the same person, of course.) If so, that is intriguing: I wonder how that translates into school-related issues?

Third is Ivy Bonk, who I was told was a former principal at a local Christian school, so that lends interest, too. I looked her up on LinkedIn and indeed, there is an Ivy Bonk fitting that description so I guess that’s her.

Last is Joseph Deiter, who my source didn’t know well enough to comment on. But a person with that name is on social media and it looks like he’s active as a youth coach.

I think what I’m looking for is a person who will carry a discussion of what public schools really should be. They should be strongly in favor of school choice and money following the child, even if it hurts the local school district in the short-term until they improve enough to compete with private schools and homeschooling. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if they were on the losing end of a lot of 4-1 votes this year so long as they are on the winning end of 3-2 votes two years hence – in other words, they have to be the tip of the spear.

And if that wasn’t enough, the town of Laurel has its own elections on March 25. (I don’t live within town limits, though, so I’m just an observer.) One interesting quirk about its election is that they have a separate registration, which is something they plan on addressing going forward. (In the meantime, anyone who lives in Laurel has until this Thursday to be registered.) Initially four positions were up for grabs, but since two of them only had one filing those lucky souls (both incumbents, by the way) win by acclamation. There is one Council seat (which appears to be an open seat with no incumbent) and the Mayor’s office, where the incumbent mayor has a challenger, still in contention so the whole town gets to vote. Let’s hope they do.