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Well here we are, halfway through the year! I’m composing this at lunchtime on Monday, as Hannah and I went away last night after our son’s debut for his new basketball team. They absolutely destroyed the other team in a friendly, and he scored a 3-pointer on the final buzzer, which was pretty special.
The reason we went away was ostensibly it being 21 years tomorrow since I proposed to her on Prince Edward Island in Canada. That was half a lifetime ago for both of us, and we have fond memories. It’s also two years tomorrow since her mum died, so there’s sadness mixed in there too.
The kids stayed with my parents for the first time in a year. Our son doesn’t really need babysitting as he’s 16, but it’s only fair that he goes along with our 12 year-old daughter. It seems they had a good time. Hannah and I certainly did, basically replicating what we did last time we went away: getting an upgrade at the Crowne Plaza and going for dinner and cocktails at Khai Khai.
Last week, my son started doing some work for WAO, ensuring that we have transcripts for all of our podcast episodes. He’s doing a good job so far. We’re recording another couple of episodes today for Season 7, with Laura currently releasing episodes of Season 6 we recorded over the last couple of months.
I started doing some user research for the workers.coop around Member Learning group. We’re following-up on responses to a survey which asked people for their learning preferences, etc. so that we can create targeted, relevant offerings. In related news, I updated a consent form for Bonfire user research, taking into account Hannah’s feedback (she’s a user researcher for NHS England).
WEAll, one of our clients, decided against using Hylo after testing it in May. This was mainly based on our recommendation due to the lack of effective moderation tools. Now, they’re planning to test Discourse, which is a much better option. So John and I were scoping that out.
Anne’s still finishing off her dissertation and final year of uni work, but she’s rejoined us for a couple of days per week. This is good as she’s very organised (not that the rest of us aren’t!) and brings a different angle and energy to our work, particularly with Participate.
In other news, we’ve had more house viewings but no offers yet. Everyone’s expressed how lovely they think it is, but I guess the housing market is a little slow at the moment. I just hope we don’t miss out on the place we want to move to.
This week is the last one of a crazy few weeks of football trials for my daughter. She was offered a place at Sunderland’s ETC with the final trial for Newcastle’s ETC being on Friday. It’s her choice, but I’m keen for her to join the former as she’ll be mixed with girls a year up, and it’s a more established setup. She was in Newcastle’s ETC this last season, and if she’s offered a place and opts to stay there it’s no bad thing.
So this week I’ll be continuing with client work, doing a bit of business development for September, and considering whether to respond to UNESCO’s call for contributions r.e. the definition of algorithm literacy and data literacy. It’s a tight deadline, but Ian O’Byrne and Tom Salmon have expressed an interest in collaborating, so we’ll see. Ideally, I would have read Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI this weekend, but… I didn’t.
The post Weeknote 26/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.I was in Amsterdam from Monday to Friday this week, for MozFest House and a WAO meetup. We ran a session entitled ‘Fostering Transparency and Building a Cooperative Economy’. I also lied about my personal details and preferences to get free iced coffee, hung out on a boat, and melted in the heat.
Our house went on the market while I was away, as things moved more quickly than I envisaged. This is a good thing, as we had five viewings booked in yesterday. I was out with my daughter, who was at a Future Lioness event and then represented East Northumberland in the discus at the area athletics championships. She had to run from that even to take part in the relay, and then pretty much kept on running to do the first leg!
I’m keeping this short as we’re about to go and view a house that would potentially be a backup plan to the one we really want. I published a single blog post this week, other than this one, which I called On the paucity of ‘raising awareness’.
Next week it’s back to work in my home office. I hope it’s not too hot, as the lack of sleep from late nights and being in a really hot room with no openable windows while in Amsterdam really took it out of me.
The post Weeknote 25/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.The ‘photo’ above was generated using a new tool from Secta Labs. Yes, I paid money to feed in 25 real photos and get back 300+ images that it generated. Some looked like my weird American cousin, as in they kind of looked like me, but not really. There were 15 I was happy enough with, so I asked friends and family which ones they liked and then… ended up using a different one! 😂
To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m using scare quotes for ‘photo’ given that most people use their smartphones to take photographs these days, and those have ton of AI processing going on. As far as I’m concerned, the image above represents how I think I look better than any photos that have been taken of me recently.
(Pro tip: you can use DALL-E to generate more of the area around your head if you get something that’s too closely-cropped on one side, as I did.)
Anyway, enough of the narcissism! Back to the introspection.
This week has been in which a lot of things have happened. Some of them have been work-related, so let’s get those out of the way first. I’ve been:
Laura remembered on Thursday lunchtime that she’s not working next week and had booked it off in our calendar towards the beginning of the year. She doesn’t work Fridays, so it was a slightly abrupt “see you in Amsterdam!” 😅
I mentioned last week that my daughter is going to seemingly a million football trials in the month of June. We found out this week that she got into what is the best team in the north east of England for her age group, which she’s delighted about. She also went to an England development pathway event and got a callback, and to a mixed team trial.
About the latter: anyone who’s been a teacher or coach can often tell what’s about to happen next in certain situations. The decision is only whether or not to intervene. And so it was on a unseasonably cool evening that my wife and I, both former teachers, watched someone in charge of 30+ twelve year-olds. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that, despite them offering our daughter a place in their best team, she won’t be going back. I don’t have a lot of time for poor organisational skills.
My son is continuing with his GCSE exams, and will enter his final week of them next week. I think he’s doing alright, but I am a bit concerned about his on again – off again relationship with revision. You can lead 16 year-olds to the waters of study, but you can’t make them drink (as it were).
Just to add more things into the mix, we’re doing a second viewing of a house next week and taking the kids along. Our house isn’t on the market yet, as we said we’d wait until the GCSE exams to be finished.
We’re also thinking of leasing a car to replace our 10 year-old Volvo V60, which has served us really well and I really like. The rear passenger side suspension snapped this week and, although we got it fixed quickly, it just reminded us that we’re in the realms of Serious Things Going Wrong. I took our daughter for a test drive of a Volvo XC40 today, but I’m leaning towards the lovely-looking Cupra Formentor.
Exercise-wise, I’m back to running properly after my ankle injury. I also went swimming for the first time in ages with my son, as he’s doing a lifeguard course next month and needs to get his water fitness back. Both of us used to swim competitively, but that doesn’t mean much as you lose anaerobic stamina super-quickly. Anyway, it was fine, we’ve both got new prescription goggles, and the pool at the new leisure centre is great.
I took my daughter to the gym, ran on the treadmill, did weights, my first 10k outside for a while, and generally started pushing myself a bit more. Weirdly, the thing I found hardest this week was a 20-minute Pilates for Runners routine I did via YouTube. Oh. My. Days.
Next week, as I mentioned, Laura’s away and so I’ve got to prepare for our meetup and MozFest House session in Amsterdam. I’ve also got a list of small things I need to do, writing I need to start / get finished, and things to tidy up. My daughter’s got more trials, my son’s got his last week of exams, so I need to find something that’s acceptable to everyone as a way of celebrating the latter being over.
Busy times, but not overwhelming. I get bored easily, so it’s it’s all good, I guess 🤘
The post Weeknote 23/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.This week has been half-term for the kids. Hannah took the week off as it contained a Bank Holiday and she doesn’t work Fridays; so she got 10 days off in a row by only taking three holiday days.
I’m not sure why I bothered even trying to work, to be honest, especially as I took Monday and Friday off and attended a funeral for an elderly neighbour on Wednesday. All of this explains why I managed a total of 12.5 hours of work this week…
There was a lot of admin (invoicing, paying corporation tax, claiming back expenses, etc.) this week as we crossed the end of May / start of June boundary. I did get to do a bit of work on client projects, though, including launching the free How to set up a worker co-op email course over at workers.coop.
I also did a bit with Laura for Participate relating to their new platform, with John for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance relating to testing their new community platform, and with Ivan on some Bonfire UX stuff. I’ve also been working on transcripts for Season 6 of The Tao of WAO podcast, the first episode of which has just been released.
We’re into football trials month. Except, because it’s junior football, you have to call them ‘open sessions’. Our daughter is going to approximately a million of them, whereas our son switched basketball teams last week but is staying put for his football team. What with it being the middle of GCSE exams, I feel like parenting is my full-time job at the moment and I just work around it.
Next week is back to a bit of normality. Except, I suppose, my son is now on study leave so I’ll have to make sure he’s got some sort of routine…
Photo of Public Enemy #1: a Common Horse Chestnut tree near our house which seems to have a pollen machine-gun.
The post Weeknote 22/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.It’s Bank Holiday Monday and I haven’t yet written last week’s weeknote. That is to say, I’m writing it now, a day late. I haven’t got the energy or inclination to use florid language, so you’re getting bullet points.
Last week, I was mostly:
This week is half-term and Hannah‘s taking time off to spend with the kids. I’ve got today, which I’ve largely wasted by sleeping in, going to the gym, reading, and playing video games. Oh wait, those are the things I enjoy doing 😂
Image from a page of Sarah Bakewell’s excellent Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, which I’m reading at the moment in hardback. There’s a great interview with her about the book and its origins in this podcast episode.
The post Weeknote 21/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.There are many ways of measuring time. These weeknotes are one way. Calendars are another way, with my favourite way of marking the months being the French Republican Calendar. We’re just entering Prairial, my favourite month! As a reminder of this, I subscribe to daily updates from the Republican Calendar bot on the Fediverse. (I also find the Moon Phases bot handy.)
This week, then, there’s been a lot on. My son started his GCSE exams, my wife went away on a work trip, and I gave my daughter a ‘Golden Boot’ trophy for banging in 42 goals in all competitions this season. Yes, I’ve turned into one of those parents, but it’s a form of recognition and encouragement.
Now that I’ve got access to ChatGPT’s plugins and ability to browse the web, I’ve been using it to conversationally explore options for our 20th wedding anniversary in September. The user experience of doing that by having a chat with a chatbot is approximately a million times better than miserably trawling through sites full of ads. Although I’m sure that the advertising will arrive soon.
Work-wise, I continued working on the WAO projects with which I’m currently involved. I can’t talk about the Greenpeace work, sadly (because it’s pretty great), but we’ve been setting up Hylo ready for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance to test as their new community platform. It’s going well so far. I’m waiting for feedback on the three projects for workers.coop, and there hasn’t been loads to do on the stuff for Participate recently. There will be once we get people in the bigger tent on their new platform.
At the suggestion of Joe, from whom we subcontracted some of the work, WAO ran a retrospective on the project for CAST that was funded by Sport England. Although we delivered some really useful stuff, it was a frustrating project to be involved with in many ways. It turns out that was largely to do with change of project leads, staff turn over in the National Governing Bodies (NGBs), and a miscommunication between whether (and how) we should interact with the NGBs directly. Lesson learned.
Laura hit publish on a post we’d been working on together entitled Practical utopias and rewilding work which came out of our last couple of co-op days. It features a graphic that I created with five topics/areas for us to focus on. As ever, it’s the intersections and overlaps that are interesting. Related: Laura, who’s awesome at ensuring things get written-up, published a wiki page entitled Our principles even-over everything else. Even-over statements are powerful things for any group of people.
On the exercise front, my ankle is still bothering me. It’s over three weeks since I went over on it while running through some mud, and then had to keep on going because I was a long way from home. I’ve aggravated it since then by stumbling on an uneven bit of path while looking at my phone, and so recently I’ve been on the exercise bike instead of running. It’s very boring, and with one of the exercise bikes out of action at the gym, like a game of musical chairs but with old people pedalling slowly and reading books.
The weather always gets much better at this time of year, and so I’ve been up at the field at the top of the hill near our house with the kids a few times. We’re accumulating more equipment as my daughter, in particular, gets older and wants to improve her technique. So we had the cones, speed ladder, and ‘top bins’ for free kick accuracy training. It’s good fun, and my job is mostly encouragement, ball retrieval, and giving out tips to which they sometimes listen.
It’s the sharp end of the football season and, although my team (Sunderland) took a 2-1 lead to Kenilworth Road, they were out-muscled on a tiny pitch by Luton Town. It’s a shame, but I’m not too sad; another season in the Championship to build the squad before being promoted to the Premier League is no bad thing. We’re watching all of the football on TV at the moment. Manchester City might have won the league and Southampton been relegated, but it’s otherwise all to play for!
Inspired by the social documentary photography I discussed in my last weeknote, I got out my mirrorless digital camera (a Sony NEX-5 from before smartphone cameras got much better). It reminded me that you can stuff as much AI as you want into a camera, but the lens makes a huge difference. I’ll probably start taking it out and about with me a bit more, but in the meantime, I also had some fun generating some AI art which looks like black and white photographs from last century.
I’ve been messing about with my Steam Deck, finally buying a fitted case and screen protector for it, in addition to the travel case which it comes with. For some reason, I’d never installed the Heroic Launcher so that I could get the Epic Games store, and therefore Rocket League. It’s amazing on that form factor, and because it’s all cross-play, I’ve got six years of progress on there from playing on the PlayStation.
Over at Thought Shrapnel, I posted:
Next week, we’ve got some planning to do as our MozFest House proposal was accepted. We also need to figure out what else we need to get done while in Amsterdam next month. That, for me, includes which Japanese arcades to experience. We also need to do some business development, and discuss whether or not we’re redesigning our website. I think we should aim for radical simplicity, like this (but more design-y).
Photo taken on field near our house on grass-cutting equipment.
The post Weeknote 20/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.Philosophy East and West needs reviewers for the books listed below. Interested reviewers should send a copy of their CV, a representative book review (or other piece of academic writing), and a short statement about their expertise on the book’s matter to [email protected]. (Anyone interested in reviewing a book not listed is also encouraged to email with the same information. Reviewers should have a Ph.D. in a relevant scholarly field or be a Ph.D. student.)
Kataoka, Kei and John Taber, Meaning and Non-existence: Kumārila’s Refutation of Dignāga’s Theory of Exclusion. The Apohavāda Chapter of Kumārila’s Ślokavārttika; Critical Edition and Annotated Translation
Maharaj, Ayon, ed. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-research-handbook-of-vedanta-9781350063242/
O’Brien-Kop, Karen. Philosophy of the Yogasutra. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/philosophy-of-the-yogasutra-9781350286184/
Sarbacker, Stuart Ray. Tracing the Path of Yoga: The History and Philosophy of Indian Mind-Body Discipline. https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Tracing-the-Path-of-Yoga
Uskakov, Alexander. Philosophy of the Brahmasutra
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/philosophy-of-the-brahmasutra-9781350150003/
This was my last week at work for three weeks. Just as I did in 2022, this year I’m taking three weeks off in April, August, and December, as well as a few days here and there. I find that it’s only in the third week away from work that I can truly unwind.
Unwinding is different to relaxing. I’m not really someone who find pleasure in long periods of relaxation, if I’m perfectly honest. Life is short and I need things to do. So I’ll be spending my time on holiday with Team Belshaw in Scotland, doing DIY, and walking at least half of The Pennine Way. I’ve swapped running for walking 20,000+ steps each day in preparation for the latter. In fact, I’m just back from a walk with the rest of Team Belshaw which encompassed some of the best of Northumberland (mud! beaches! ice cream!)
Talking of exercise, Morpeth Riverside Leisure Centre, which I’ve been to ever since moving here nine years ago, closed on Wednesday. That is because the new leisure centre (also next to the river, just a bit further round!) opens next Wednesday. I’m not sure why they had to have a week inbetween, and they haven’t informed us of a refund. But you can have a look around the new place for yourself (no, it’s not a parody! I like their enthusiasm).
Also on the exercise front, our kids haven’t had any football matches this weekend, nor have they any scheduled for next weekend. As a result, I was up on the field at the top of the hill helping my daughter with various skills. The photo above shows the high-tech solution I came up with to practice getting it in ‘top bins‘. My son has been a little unwell and so hasn’t been playing sport or training this week.
Blog posts continued tumbling out of me this week:
I also finished the resource for Catalyst on Open Working. On the same topic, Anne published a post rounding up the work we did via CAST for Sport England. Adam Freeman-Pask, who is Head of Digital Innovation for Sport England also published a post heavily influenced by the programme. That’s the end of that project, which we started back in May last year.
We’re replacing this work on our roster with three smallish projects for the Member Learning group of workers.coop. We’ll be turning the MVP of the CoTech Digital Candle service into something a bit more fully-featured. In addition, we’re creating an email-based course (see others) on the basis of worker co-ops, as well as doing some user research to see what kind of support existing network members would like.
In addition, I worked on other client projects for Greenpeace, Participate, and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. That involved doing a whole range of things from to figuring out badge pathways, installing and configuring a wiki, booking flights to Badge Summit, and writing more of a digital strategy. I had some interesting conversations including about Navigatr, drafted another email course (on ‘Reframing Recognition’), did some invoicing, and submitted a proposal for ePIC 2023 in December.
Next week I’m on holiday and walking around a lot.
The post Weeknote 13/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
— In one of the biggest elections of the calendar year, a Democratic-aligned justice appears favored in next week’s Wisconsin state Supreme Court election. But that was also true in 2019, when a Republican-aligned justice pulled an upset.
— Democrats often underperform in such races in Milwaukee, so that is a key place to watch.
— Judicial voting patterns largely reflect voting in partisan races, but there are some key differences.
Next week, Badger State voters will head to the polls to weigh in on what has been billed as the most important judicial election of the year. If Democratic-aligned Judge Janet Protasiewicz prevails, liberals will assume a 4-3 majority on the state’s highest court. If voters send Daniel Kelly, a former justice who is effectively the GOP nominee in the contest, back to the body, conservatives will retain control.
From what we can tell, Protasiewicz is a favorite, although given the marginal nature of Wisconsin, we wouldn’t rule out a Kelly win. One indicator has been fundraising. Given the stakes, the race has been expensive: the two sides have combined to spend at least $26 million. Protasiewicz has significantly outspent Kelly, although the latter is getting a late boost from third party groups. Though there has been no public polling, Protasiewicz reportedly leads in private surveys. Early voting has been in progress for over a week, but Wisconsin is a largely Election Day-voting state, so we would not read much into early tallies — indeed, one map that considered the early vote, posted yesterday, has a decidedly “choose your own adventure” feel.
With that, we are going to look at a few areas of the state that may be useful to watch next week. We are assuming anything from a double-digit Protasiewicz win to a narrow Kelly win is possible.
But first, a bit of context. For the tables in this article, we’ll consider returns from 4 recent statewide races. In the 2019 state Supreme Court race, liberal judge Lisa Neubauer was seen as a tenuous favorite but lost to now-Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, by fewer than 6,000 votes. The 2019 result is reason enough to not rule out a conservative win this time. The following year’s election, 2020, went better for Democrats. In the spring, Democratic-aligned Jill Karofsky defeated Kelly, who was appointed to the court in 2016, by a better-than 55%-45% margin. Then, in November, as Joe Biden patched up the Democrats’ Midwestern “Blue Wall,” he narrowly beat Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Though this was not a court contest, we’ll examine some differences between coalitions in partisan and judicial races. Finally, we’ll consider results from late February, which was the “first round” of this contest. As we covered at the time, in a 4-person race, Democratic-aligned candidates combined for 54% of the vote to 46% for the GOP-aligned candidates.
To start, Wisconsin’s two most populous counties are Dane (where Madison is located) and Milwaukee — both are deep blue. As a pair, they typically cast about a quarter of the votes in statewide elections, which gives Democrats a relatively high “floor.” In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden netted just over 180,000 votes out of each county. While both counties have voted heavily Democratic in most recent state Supreme Court races, the turnout dynamics don’t always mirror those of presidential (or partisan) races. Table 1 breaks down the 4 recent races there.
One pattern is that Democratic-aligned state Supreme Court candidates overperformed Biden in Dane while running a few points behind him in Milwaukee. The simple explanation for this seems to be that the Madison electorate is made up of higher-propensity voters. The Democratic base there — including students, University of Wisconsin faculty, other state employees, and white collar professionals — has a front row seat to state government (and all the tumult that has come with it over the past decade or so). In recent presidential elections, Milwaukee County cast upwards of 100,000 more votes than Dane, but in each of the last 3 supreme court races, the pair has been much more evenly balanced (when Karofsky won in 2020, for example, Milwaukee cast 200,000 ballots to Dane’s 196,000). Even while losing statewide, Neubauer came close to surpassing 80% of the vote there, a few ticks better than Biden’s showing 19 months later.
Table 1 separates Milwaukee City, which makes up about 60% of the county’s population, from the rest of the county, which includes a diverse selection of suburbs. Neubauer’s share was 7 points lower than Biden’s in the city itself and 5 points lower in the suburbs — something that proved costly in a close race. Though Karofsky carried the suburbs by a better-than 60%-40% spread, she underperformed Biden in Milwaukee City. As a result, despite doing about 10 points better than Biden statewide, Karofsky did 5 points worse in Milwaukee County.
So the bottom line here is that, if Protasiewicz wins next week, she’ll likely clear 80% in Dane County, but will probably fall short of 70% in Milwaukee County, even if she wins by double-digits. In February, the Democratic performance in Milwaukee tracked closely with Karofsky’s showing — which should put Protasiewicz in a strong position if it holds. If Protasiewicz is stuck in the low-60s in Milwaukee County, though, Kelly may have a path to win.
Though each is exhibiting distinct trends, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties are often grouped into the memorably-named “WOW” counties category — and it is hard to discuss Wisconsin’s electoral landscape without mentioning them. Generally speaking, the WOW counties, which border Milwaukee and take in many of its exurban communities, have been the state’s “GOP heartland” for much of recent history. The area was former Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) electoral bread and butter, and its voters boosted Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) in his come-from-behind reelection win in 2016. In fact, in 2019, Neubauer’s weakness in the Milwaukee area was not limited just to the city and its closer-in suburbs: as Table 2 shows, Hagedorn outpaced subsequent conservative candidates there.
Though Table 1 considers all 3 WOW counties, Waukesha County, which is the most populous, often tracks closely with the group as a whole. Essentially, Ozaukee and Washington counties seem to cancel each other out — the former, which is directly north of Milwaukee City, has seen some blue trends, while Washington, which has a more exurban character, is the reddest of the three.
In February’s result, Republican-aligned candidates combined for 64.5% of the WOW vote, which was an improvement from either of the 2020 contests listed on Table 2. However, both Kelly and his leading GOP-aligned rival, Judge Jennifer Dorow, hailed from Waukesha County, so it seems possible that Kelly has room to fall if Dorow’s voters are not enthusiastic. Put somewhat differently, 15.1% of the total votes in round 1 came from the WOW counties. As Hagedorn won in 2019, that share was a slightly lower 14.9%, suggesting that any Republican enthusiasm from February may be hard to maintain next week, although Dorow was quick to endorse Kelly.
As with the blue counties we discussed earlier, Kelly’s path to victory would be to basically replicate Hagedorn’s showing by carrying the WOW counties by a roughly 70%-30% spread. If Democrats are having a good night, Protasiewicz could keep Ozaukee County within single-digits (actually carrying it may be too heavy a lift) — in that scenario, she would likely be close to 40% among the group as a whole.
As an aside, another important contest will be taking place in the WOW counties on Tuesday, although one on the legislative front. If Republicans win a special election for state Senate District 8, located in the northern Milwaukee metro area, they will claim a supermajority in the chamber. While they could not override Gov. Tony Evers’s (D-WI) vetoes (they are a few seats short of a supermajority in the state Assembly), state Senate Republicans could theoretically impeach officers in other branches of government. In fact, the GOP nominee, state Assemblyman Dan Knodl, recently threatened to vote to impeach Protasiewicz, should he be elected. Donald Trump carried SD-8 by 5 points in 2020, so a Knodl win would not be a surprise.
So, thus far in our survey, we’ve learned that Dane and Milwaukee counties should heavily favor Protasiewicz while Kelly should sweep the 3 suburban WOW counties — in other words, the allegiance of those counties is not in question, it’s just an issue of margin and turnout.
But moving further north, the BOW counties — a moniker that is, by now, well known to followers of state pollster Charles Franklin — are a more marginal group of counties. Sometimes referred to as the major counties of the Fox Valley, the BOW counties consist of Brown (Green Bay), Outagamie (Appleton), and Winnebago (Oshkosh). This manufacturing-heavy stretch usually accounts for 10% of the ballots cast in most statewide elections. Table 3 considers the BOW counties’ voting patterns.
In each race, every BOW county has voted at least a point or so more Republican than the state. They typically vote together, but not always, and they have some interesting idiosyncrasies. Biden, for example, despite winning the state, performed slightly worse than Neubauer did there a year earlier — a fact that speaks to Biden’s relative strength in the Milwaukee area.
If next week’s vote is close (either way), expect Kelly to carry all 3 by relatively modest margins. But if Democrats are replicating their first-round performance, Protasiewicz will likely at least carry Winnebago, the most Democratic of the trio. In 2012, Barack Obama won the state by a comparable 7-point margin — he carried just Winnebago County while keeping the other 2 very close. Finally, if Prostasiewicz is running away with the race, the dam may break, as it did in 2020 when Karofsky swept the BOW counties.
Finally, in something of a catch-all category, don’t be surprised if Protasieiwicz carries at least a few Trump-won rural counties — this will probably be necessary, but not sufficient, for a Democratic win. Specifically, keep an eye on the state’s western border. If she is carrying most of the counties in the southwestern corner, that would be a great start, but if she sweeps most of the western border counties, that would probably signal a win.
We say this because, in 2019, Neubauer won over several Trumpy counties in western Wisconsin — she even carried the Obama-to-Trump 3rd District — but was done in by her underperformance in Milwaukee. Map 1 shows the difference.
So, for Protasiewicz, we’d expect some strength in southwestern Trump counties like Crawford, Grant, and Vernon. In Karofsky’s 10-point 2020 win, she added a few Trump-won counties around the Eau Claire region to her coalition, like Dunn, Jackson, and Pierce — all 3 of those counties favored Democratic-aligned judges. Even further north, Iron County was 1 of 2 Kerry-to-Romney counties in the state, with the other being Pierce. Iron County is smaller and considerably more rural than Pierce, though — Karofsky didn’t carry Iron County, but it narrowly favored Democrats in February. If Protasiewicz holds Iron, it could be another sign that Democrats are beating expectations in rural areas.
Throughout this survey, we’ve emphasized Democratic softness in the Milwaukee metro in past state Supreme Court races, as it has typically manifested to at least some degree. But it’s possible that this year’s contest is so nationalized that a more “presidential” coalition takes form, with Protasiewicz making considerable gains in urban areas while doing worse than expected in the west and north — this would essentially be the opposite of Neubauer’s result.
Finally, to name one last county we’ll be watching, we’ll sneak a more urban county into the non-metro section of the article. We flagged this one in our initial February write up, but Kenosha County, in the southern orbit of Milwaukee, will be interesting. Typically a purple-to-light blue county in state races, it was the scene of nationally-watched riots in the summer of 2020. It has since not voted for any statewide Democrats in partisan races, although Republicans have not carried it in blowouts. Democratic-aligned candidates took a small 50.6% majority there in February, so if Kelly is making up ground, look for Kenosha to turn red again.
Next week’s contest will be the most closely-watched Wisconsin state Supreme Court race since 2011. A dozen years ago, conservatives narrowly came out on the winning side of a contest that was seen as a referendum on then-newly minted Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation. This time, issues like abortion and gerrymandering seem to be animating the electorate, if asymmetrically so, to the benefit of Democrats. Still, again, we cannot rule out a conservative win.
With that, we’ll end on something that we can be fairly certain of: next week’s race will be a high turnout affair, at least for a judicial race. In February, 961,000 ballots were cast, which was a 36% increase from the 2020 spring primary — it dwarfed the 2016 and 2018 primaries by even larger amounts.
I boiled snow for the first time this morning. Last night, I wild camped somewhere in The Cheviots as the clocks ‘sprang’ forward. Waking up before dawn, I put my iPod on shuffle, skipped one track and listened to Surprise Ice by Kings of Convenience. The song couldn’t have been more apt, given that my tent was covered in snow and ice!
The overnight camp was in preparation for walking at least half of The Pennine Way in a few weeks’ time. I’ve got all the kit I need, so I was just testing the new stuff out and making sure the existing stuff was still in good working order. The good news is that it’s very unlikely to get colder during my walk than it did last night, and I was warm enough to sleep!
This week, I’ve been helping WAO finish off our work (for now) with Passbolt and Sport England, continuing some digital strategy stuff for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, doing some work around Greenpeace and KBW. I updated a resource I’d drafted on open working for Catalyst, and put together a proposal for some badges work under the auspices of Dynamic Skillset.
We had a co-op half day on Tuesday in which we ran, and eventually passed, a proposal about experimenting with a ‘drip release’ model for our content. Essentially, this would mean that we would have patrons (platform TBD) who would get our stuff first, and then everything would be open a few weeks later. This emerged from an activity of us individually coming up with a roadmap for WAO for the next few years. We were amazingly well-aligned, as you’d hope and expect!
This week, I published:
I also helped a little with this post from Laura, and she helped me with one that I’ve written but has yet to be published. I’ve also drafted another couple of posts and an email-based course. I also (with a little help) created a weather app using the OpenWeatherMap API. Which brings us onto…
I’ve continued to find ChatGPT 4 really useful in my work this week. It’s like having a willing assistant always ready. And just like an assistant, it sometimes gets things wrong, makes things up, and a lot of the time you have domain expertise that they don’t. AI-related stuff is all over the place at the moment, especially LinkedIn, and I share the following links mainly for future me looking back.
While I got access to Google Bard a few days ago, the experience Google currently provides feels light years behind OpenAI’s offering. This week there were almost too many AI announcements to keep up with, so I’ll just note that ChatGPT was connected to internet this week. Previously it just relied on a training model that cut off in 2021. Also, OpenAI have announced plugins which look useful, although I don’t seem to have access to them yet.
There are lots of ways to be productive with ChatGPT, and this Hacker News thread gives some examples. I notice that there’s quite a few people giving very personal information to it, with a few using it as a therapist. As Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin point out in the most recent episode of their podcast Your Undivided Attention, AI companies encourage this level of intimacy, as it means more data. However, what are we unleashing? Where are the checks and balances?
Writing in Jacobin, Nathan J. Robinson explains that the problem with AI is the problem with capitalism. Robinson’s attitude reflects my own:
It’s interesting that we talk about jobs being “at risk” of being automated. Under a socialist economic system, automating many jobs would be a good thing: another step down the road to a world in which robots do the hard work and everyone enjoys abundance. We should be able to be excited if legal documents can be written by a computer. Who wants to spend all day writing legal documents? But we can’t be excited about it, because we live under capitalism, and we know that if paralegal work is automated, that’s over three hundred thousand people who face the prospect of trying to find work knowing their years of experience and training are economically useless.
We shouldn’t have to fear AI. Frankly, I’d love it if a machine could edit magazine articles for me and I could sit on the beach. But I’m afraid of it, because I make a living editing magazine articles and need to keep a roof over my head. If someone could make and sell an equally good rival magazine for close to free, I wouldn’t be able to support myself through what I do. The same is true of everyone who works for a living in the present economic system. They have to be terrified by automation, because the value of labor matters a lot, and huge fluctuations in its value put all of one’s hopes and dreams in peril.
If ChatGPT is going to revolutionise the economy, we should probably decide what that should look like. Otherwise, we’re running the risk of Feudalism 2.0. We’ve heard the hyperbole before, but if AI systems are exhibiting ‘sparks’ of artificial general intelligence (AGI) then we shouldn’t be experimenting on the general population. Perhaps Nick Cave is correct and that the problems with the world are “certitude and indifference”.
Next week is my last before taking three weeks off. I’m very much looking forward to a family holiday and am psyching myself up for my long walk. Ideally, I’d like to do the whole 268 miles in one go over a two-week period. But I don’t think my family (or my body!) would be up for that…
The post Weeknote 12/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)
He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”
I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today’s date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)
Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)
Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.
(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)
Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.
This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:
Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work, all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.
I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.
Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.
Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.
I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.
Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.
Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.
It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today, so I’d like to take the opportunity to thank both my own mother and my wife, Hannah, for being fantastic mums. I spent time with both of them, separately, at Druridge Bay this week. It’s a wonderful place.
Laura‘s been back to work this week which I’ve been delighted about. We recorded the first episode of Season 6 for The Tao of WAO, submitted proposals for The Badge Summit, co-worked on various client projects, and ran community calls. I’ve also done some co-working with John and Anne, did some more work with the workers.coop Member Learning group, and enjoyed my chats with James Polansky, Tim Riches, and Abi Handley.
It’s only a few weeks now until I’m walking the first half of The Pennine Way, going form north to south (Kirk Yetholm to Middleton-in-Teesdale). I think I’ve bought everything else I need now, including the Rab SilPoncho which can double as a tarp. I’m still weighing up whether to replace my cheapo Mountain Warehouse Carrion 65-litre rucksack which I used for Hadrian’s Wall with the latest version of the Sierra Designs Flex Capacitor (60-80l). It’s probably £175 I don’t need to spend at the moment, to be honest, although the buckles on the Mountain Warehouse pack do my head in.
This week I published:
Last week I ‘admitted’ to effectively just copy/pasting from ChatGPT to create posts on LinkedIn. I’ve actually found a better workflow:
It’s interesting to see just how little some people know what’s going on with large language models (LLMs). There is no ‘there’ there, so anthropomorphising platforms makes no sense. It just makes those doing it look daft.
Next week, it’s a pretty normal week as these things go. I’m taking three weeks off in total in April, so there’s a few things I want to get done so that I haven’t got anything hanging over me, work-wise, before my break.
Photo taken at Druridge Bay on Sunday
The post Weeknote 11/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.I’m going to start this week’s update with a bit of an admission. A post I’ve shared and has got plenty of traction, especially on LinkedIn, was written in the following way:
Is there anything inherently ‘wrong’ about this? The only reason it can write in a somewhat similar style to me is because it’s been trained on a huge corpus of data that’s included my writing.
Although it wasn’t focused on this particular episode, Niall Winters asked an interesting question when I mentioned I’d found ChatGPT useful in my work this week.
I was surprised by the question. I’m not sure why or when it would or should be expected in my line of work to acknowledge this? I don’t really see it as much different to having an assistant doing some research. After all, if people can’t tell the difference between my writing and ChatGPT imitating my writing, then doesn’t that free me up to do other things?
Here’s another example. I know a bit of HTML and CSS, but have never really used much JavaScript (JS). So it was amazing to me when I discovered this week that it’s possible to create simple games using HTML, CSS, and JS using ChatGPT. I’ve created a couple which are moderately fun to play and which were entirely created by me providing prompts. ChatGPT provided the code, and iterations upon it. You can find the games via this blog post.
I’m not particularly interested in the moral panic around AI, but I am interested in getting manual, repetitive tasks done more quickly. I’m also very interested in an assistant that can help me be more creative, as has been the case with some of the work I’ve done this week, as well as the games I’ve created.
Here are the posts I’ve published this week. You’ll have to decide which ones were pretty much fully written by ChatGPT, which were the ones where I used it as an assistant, and which were written entirely by me. Answer at the end of the post.
On Wednesday night, Anne and I ran a session as part of Open Education Talks on entitled Integrating Open Recognition into program and course designs. The linked post not only contains the slides, but also a pre-recorded version of our 15-minute session. It uses Anne’s experience attending The University of Lapland for five months as a lens for how Open Recognition useful augments microcredentialing.
This has been the third and final week of Laura being away. Much as I’ve enjoyed working with John and Anne, I’m looking forward to Laura’s return as she’s my main partner in crime. On Friday afternoon I created a long etherpad of all of the things she needed to be caught-up on, and then recorded a Loom video talking her through it.
I’ve been working on client projects with and for Greenpeace, Participate, Passbolt, Sport England, and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. I’ve also been doing some work as a member of the Member Learning group of workers.coop. It’s looking like we’re going to have a bit more capacity earlier than we though, so from mid-April WAO is available for additional client work.
There’s been a fair bit of snow here this week, and our combi boiler decided to stop work on Friday. Thankfully, the broken part was easy to repair so we weren’t cold for too long. However, it has meant that all of our kids’ football training sessions and two of the matches were called off. They enjoy their sport, but they’ve also enjoyed the additional time they’ve had to hang out with friends.
Although we’ve booked to go away on holiday to Scotland for a few days in the Easter holidays at the start of April, we haven’t yet booked a summer holiday for Team Belshaw. Part of the reason for this is that we were planning to take our youngest out of school for a week after our eldest has finished his GCSEs. However, by the time we found out when that would be, everything is super expensive. And I mean like at least twice as much as I would expect it to be.
So that plan might be out of the window and we could just be taking him for a nice meal instead. That would mean that we could drive to the south of France for a couple of weeks during the school summer holidays. It’s still up in the air, to be honest.
Next week, Laura’s back and I’m expecting her to come in like a hurricane wrecking ball, even though I’m sure she’ll be very chilled after a few weeks in Costa Rica. I’m looking forward to finishing off work for one of our clients and doing some more planning for my Pennine Way expedition next month. Hopefully the kids’ sporting activities will be back to normal and it will be warm enough for me to run outside again.
Photo taken looking out from the top of our house taken by my wife, Hannah, and then edited by me. The first two posts in the list were written entirely by me. ChatGPT helped me with the third one, and I only really tweaked the last two.
The post Weeknote 10/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
| Dear Readers: This is the latest edition of Notes on the State of Politics, which features short updates on elections and politics.
— The Editors |
The 2020 election came fairly close to ending in an Electoral College tie. While Joe Biden won the national popular vote by about 4.5 points, his margins in several key states were much narrower. Specifically, Biden’s 3 closest wins were by 11,779 votes (or .24 percentage points) in Georgia, 10,457 in Arizona (.31 points), and 20,682 (.63 points) in Wisconsin. Had these states voted for Donald Trump and everything else had been the same, the Electoral College would have produced a 269-269 tie, leaving both candidates short of the magic number of 270 electoral votes.
If this ever happens, the U.S. House of Representatives would have to decide the election — we’ll have more about how this would work in tomorrow’s Crystal Ball. But before we do that, we wanted to look at whether there are plausible paths to 269-269 in 2024.
Changes to the electoral vote allocations as a result of the 2020 census have altered the overall math slightly. Using the new allocation based on the 2020 results, the election would have been slightly closer: 303-235 Biden, instead of the 306-232 edge he enjoyed in reality. The 2020 map with the new Electoral College totals is shown in Map 1.
This also would have changed what would have happened had Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin voted for Trump. Under the new allocation, that map would produce a 272-266 Republican victory as opposed to a 269-269 tie.
So the new apportionment of electoral votes alters the potential Electoral College tie scenarios and, as we assess the map, makes such a scenario less likely, because the specific pathway apparent back in 2020 is now closed. But a tie is still possible, even if one restricts hypothetical Electoral College scenarios to only include changes to the states that were the closest in the 2020 election. In other words, one doesn’t have to go to absurd lengths — such as a blue Wyoming or a red Massachusetts — to come up with a tie.
Using 270toWin — our go-to site for Electoral College strategizing — we played around with realistic scenarios for an Electoral College tie. We locked most of the 2020 Electoral College results into place, not altering any states beyond the 7 from 2020 that were decided by less than 3 points (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). As part of this scenario, we also locked in the 2020 electoral vote allocations from Maine and Nebraska, the only 2 states that award electoral votes by congressional district. Both states split in 2020, and under the new district lines, Donald Trump would have carried Maine’s 2nd District by about 6 points, with Joe Biden carrying Nebraska’s 2nd District by about the same margin.
So that set a baseline electoral vote floor for each side at 226-219 Democratic, with 93 electoral votes from the 7 most competitive states outstanding. Using these Electoral College puzzle pieces, we came up with 3 scenarios, although scenarios 2 and 3 are very similar.
Map 2 shows the first tie scenario. This one would effectively be a realigning map, where Democrats lose the old “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — states that Donald Trump won in 2016 but not 2020 — as well as Nevada, a state that Trump never carried but where Democrats only won by a little under 2.5 points in both 2016 and 2020. Meanwhile, Democrats would hang onto Arizona and Georgia and also flip North Carolina, which was Trump’s closest win in 2020. We don’t find this scenario that plausible because we don’t envision a world in which Democrats are winning Arizona but not its usually bluer northwestern neighbor, Nevada. Nor do we see North Carolina — clearly, to us, the reddest of these 7 states and the only one that backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 — going blue while 4 of the others go red. The Tar Heel State also is the only one of these 7 states where Democrats had no statewide success in 2022, losing both an open-seat Senate contest and a pair of high-profile state Supreme Court races, making it even harder to imagine it voting Democratic while any of the others are going Republican.
Map 3 shows another scenario — and this one seems a bit more plausible. Democrats again hang onto Arizona and Georgia. They also keep Nevada and lose North Carolina. All of those states would be replicating how they voted in 2020. Meanwhile, Republicans claw back Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Democrats hold Wisconsin. While this doesn’t require North Carolina to vote blue, it does require Michigan and Pennsylvania to both vote more Republican than Wisconsin, which neither did in 2016 or 2020 (although Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had almost identical margins in 2016). Wisconsin still seems the shakiest for Democrats of these 3 states — Republicans did, after all, defend Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) there last cycle and kept the gubernatorial race much more competitive than in Michigan or Pennsylvania, and Biden’s margin was under a point there in 2020. But these states still vote similarly enough that scenario 2 is not out of the question.
Finally, Map 4 is identical to Map 3, except North Carolina votes blue while Georgia votes red. This one seems less likely than the second scenario, as Georgia has pretty clearly trended blue in recent years while North Carolina has not.
Overall, an Electoral College tie remains unlikely — landing on a specific 269-269 outcome is something we would not rule out, but we wouldn’t bet on it, either, without getting great odds.
Again, we’ll have more to say about how an Electoral College tie would be decided in tomorrow’s Crystal Ball. But we first just wanted to say that, yes, it’s possible, even under the new Electoral College allocation and even if you just focus on the states that were most competitive in 2020.
In January, the first Democratic Senate retirement of the cycle came in a light blue state. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who has held elected office in the state since the 1970s, announced that she would not seek a 5th term. Though Stabenow’s retirement announcement was, in some reporting, considered to be an ominous sign for her party’s prospects, it came at a time of triumph for Michigan Democrats: They had a nearly perfect 2022 cycle. Democrats won most of the marginal House districts, flipped the legislature, and won each of the state’s 3 statewide races with comfortable majorities — their biggest disappointment was the Macomb County-centric 10th District narrowly slipping away.
Surely, with the Michigan Democrats’ large bench, there would be a flurry of candidates ready to get into the open-seat Senate race, right?
Instead, the past several weeks were relatively quiet on that front. If anything, the Democratic “shadow primary” seemed defined by the process of elimination. Almost immediately, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was just reelected to a second term, ruled out a run. Other prominent Democrats followed, with the more notable exceptions of 7th District Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Though Benson and a few other notable Democrats are still considering the race, Slotkin announced her campaign on Monday.
The Republican field, meanwhile, remains in flux, although Rep. John James (R, MI-10) — the party’s nominee in the 2018 and 2020 Senate races — recently filed for reelection to the House. While that deprives Senate Republicans of a potential recruit, it does give House Republicans an incumbent to seek reelection in a swingy seat next year.
Slotkin, who was first elected amid the 2018 blue wave that crashed in the House, ran after serving in the Obama administration and has a background in the U.S. Intelligence Community. In the House, she has been part of a bloc of center-left Democrats that have taken an interest in national security issues — other examples from the 2018 class include Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D, VA-7) and Mikie Sherrill (D, NJ-11), both of whom could also be future statewide candidates.
Slotkin’s district, which is essentially the successor to a seat that Stabenow held in the late 1990s, is centered on Lansing but extends into the Detroit metro area. Numbered MI-8 last decade, Slotkin flipped the seat by 4 points in 2018 after it gave Donald Trump a 7-point margin 2 years earlier. As Trump carried the district again in 2020, Slotkin replicated her 2018 margin, making her one of only 7 “crossover seat” Democrats that year.
For 2022, redistricting turned Slotkin’s seat into a Biden-won seat, although his margin there was narrow (he would have carried it by less than a percentage point) and it would have narrowly voted against Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) in 2020. Though the district was a bit friendlier to Democrats, Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett represented much of the area that was new to Slotkin, making him almost a co-incumbent in the race. Overall, the MI-7 contest turned into 2022’s most expensive House race. But as Map 5 shows, the result was a clear win for the (actual) incumbent: Slotkin won a third term by just over 5 points.
Note: Map 5 uses unofficial data, but the official result was almost identical
Source: Jackson Franks
Barrett is running again, and his candidacy could deter other GOP entrants (he was unopposed for the nomination in 2022). Democrats have several prospects for the seat, but it seems possible that whomever they nominate will have a home base in Lansing’s Ingham County — the blue bastion of the district, it gave Slotkin over two-thirds of the vote each time she was on the general election ballot. Aside from running up the score in Ingham County, one of the keys to Slotkin’s electoral success has been keeping Livingston, the district’s second-largest county and the one directly east of Ingham, relatively close. Livingston County essentially consists of the exurban communities between Detroit and Lansing, and Slotkin has held the GOP margin there to under 20 points. The Crystal Ball is starting the open MI-7 race as a Toss-up.
The last time Michigan saw an open-seat Senate contest, in 2014, now-Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) had no opposition to succeed the late Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). A competitive primary may force Democratic contenders to better establish themselves with Black voters, although any statewide Democratic campaign in Michigan worth its salt should emphasize outreach to minorities. At the time of his election to the Senate, Peters was in the odd position of being a white member who represented a Black-majority House district — the credibility that he established with the Black community likely helped him in 2014 and 2020. Slotkin’s district is only about 7% Black by composition, a number half the statewide 14%, so look for her campaign to aggressively court that key demographic.
Speaking of majority-minority districts, let’s take a quick detour to our home state. Last week, we wrote about the special election in the 4th District, a heavily Black seat that elected Rep.-elect Jennifer McClellan (D), who will be leaving the state Senate to enter the U.S. House. McClellan’s victory was not a surprise but her margin was — her roughly 3-to-1 edge was notably better than what most Democrats get in the district.
Turnout dynamics often are different in special elections than typical general elections, which sometimes accounts for odd partisan results. In one fairly recent example, Louisiana had a special election for state treasurer in 2017. The treasurer runoff election was held concurrently with a mayoral runoff in heavily Democratic New Orleans. With the mayoral election on the ballot, Orleans Parish cast close to a quarter of the votes in the statewide treasurer’s race (the parish usually casts more like 10% of the state’s votes). With New Orleans exerting a disproportionate influence, the Democratic nominee for treasurer, Derrick Edwards, took close to 45% against now-Treasurer John Schroder (R). Considering the lean of the state and his lack of funding, Edwards’s showing was respectable. But when the office was up again, in the regularly-scheduled 2019 election, things looked more typical — Schroder was reelected by 25 points.
Along those lines, we wondered if McClellan’s margin was padded by a disproportionately strong showing in her home area, Richmond. As it turns out, that wasn’t really the case. Richmond City and neighboring Henrico County are 2 of the largest, and bluest, localities in the district. Last week, the pair cast exactly half the total vote in the election — that was up only slightly from the 49% they accounted for in 2022. So McClellan’s showing was more of a broad-based overperformance than anything else.
As a bit of a thought experiment, we took the 2022 result from the 4th District and applied a uniform swing. In other words, last year, the late Donald McEachin (D) was reelected by 30.1 points; last week, McClellan did 18.9 points better, winning by 49%. How would an across the board 18.9% swing towards Democrats compare the actual result? Table 1 considers this.
As it turned out, McClellan ran slightly behind “expectations” in both Richmond and Henrico, although she obviously carried them overwhelmingly. Her biggest overperformance was actually from another locality that she currently represents in the state Senate: Charles City. One of the smaller counties in the district (it only has 3 voting precincts), it was the commonwealth’s most Democratic county in 1990s-era presidential elections, but its blue lean has eroded in recent years. McClellan’s 44-point margin there was 33 points better than what McEachin earned, and 14 points more than what a uniform swing would suggest.
McClellan ran ahead of expectations in several rural Southside counties, one of which was Surry. Just south of Charles City County, Surry County has been undergoing similar larger-scale trends. In 2021, now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin became the first modern GOP nominee for governor to carry this historically deep blue locality (although he did so by just 12 votes).
When McClellan is next on the ballot, in 2024, it seems likely that she’ll have a more “typical” Democratic coalition. Next year, a much larger presidential electorate may be in a more straight-ticket mood. The 110,000 votes that were cast in last week’s election represent just a quarter of the nearly 400,000 ballots the district would have cast in the 2020 election. Still, we’ll be watching to see how McClellan’s initial rural appeal translates with an election held under more “normal” circumstances.
From Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2005):
If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day, but you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day. You have to be prepared, but you really don’t command the enterprise.
Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise — we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it’s perfectable — you’re not gonna get it all straight.
I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….
You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpiece…
And also: “You have to write down what you’re going to abandon.”
I’m not sure what proportion of the North East population is in London for the Carabao Cup Final this weekend, but it’s sufficient that there are no sporting activities for our two kids on Sunday. That means Team Belshaw can go out for Sunday dinner as a family for the first time in a while. I’m looking forward to it.
This past week has been half-term for our two, while Hannah and I have taken a couple of days off work. It’s also been the first of three weeks of holiday that Laura is taking, so both home and work have been different. It’s amazing how those two worlds can collide, especially this week where we successfully used nonviolent communication techniques in a family setting to defuse some issues.
During my three days of work this week, I’ve been:
Other than that it’s been the usual taxi service for my kids and standing on the touchline watching them play football and basketball.
My daughter played for Newcastle United’s U12 ETC against Doncaster U13 ETC and Tyneside Tigers, a recently-formed 11-a-side team comprising players from a futsal team — including several Sunderland ETC players. She played well, although for some reason they played her in defence for part of the Doncaster match! In her grassroots team’s game this morning she scored a hat-trick while playing in midfield and then striker, so it was business as usual.
My son is playing basketball this afternoon. Last night, we went to see Team GB vs Belgium at the arena where he also plays his games. Unfortunately, Team GB were well beaten, but it was a good atmosphere. Tonight, we’re planning to go and watch Plane (2023) at the cinema until late while my daughter and friend have a sleepover at our house.
Next week, I’m planning to lead a session on storytelling for the OSN Open Recognition working group, holding the fort a little while Laura’s away, doing regular client work, leading the workers.coop session mentioned above, and finding out more about North East rural co-working via a local in-person session.
The post Weeknote 08/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
| Dear Readers: Tonight’s event with Bill Kristol and David Ramadan has been postponed, although we are hoping to reschedule it for some time in the spring.
— The Editors |
— In Virginia, Democrats have held the Richmond-area 4th District with state Sen. Jennifer McClellan. Her nearly 50-point win represented a notable overperformance.
— The most important judicial race of this year will be in the closely-divided state of Wisconsin, where control of the state Supreme Court is on the line.
— In last night’s judicial primary, Democratic-aligned candidates took 54% of the two-way vote in Wisconsin. This could bode well for liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz, who will face conservative Daniel Kelly in April, although there have been surprises in past state Supreme Court elections.
Last night, in what was probably the most widely followed election night so far this year, Democrats overperformed in several special elections across the country. With the 2022 general election out of the way, last night almost seemed like a return to form: After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in summer 2022, Democrats routinely overperformed President Joe Biden’s margins in a string of congressional elections leading up to November.
Kicking off last night’s electoral festivities — yesterday was Mardi Gras, after all — was a special election in our backyard. Following the untimely passing of then-Rep. Donald McEachin (D, VA-4) last year, his district, the heavily-Black VA-4, was left open. Shortly before Christmas, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan won the Democratic nomination in a “firehouse primary” with a smashing 85% of the vote.
In the special general election for VA-4, McClellan again ran extremely well. Though there was no question that Democrats would retain the seat, her overperformance was notable. In a district that reelected McEachin by a 65%-35% margin last year, she prevailed by a nearly 75%-25% vote. Though McClellan is from Richmond, she carried some GOP-trending Southside localities by comfortable margins. In the process, McClellan will also make some history, as the first Black woman to represent the commonwealth in Congress.
Does McClellan’s landslide win mean that Democrats are on track to make gains in Virginia’s legislative elections later this year? Not necessarily. But McClellan, despite standing for election in a safe seat, obviously ran an active campaign. This could be a model that both parties may want to follow: candidates in noncompetitive races should not simply rest on their laurels.
In any case, with VA-4 slated to be filled soon, Congress will be back up to its full 435 members for a time. We say “for a time” because yesterday, Rep. David Cicilline (D, RI-1) announced that he will be resigning from Congress on June 1. Cicilline’s departure will open up another deep blue seat — last year, Republicans made a serious attempt at the more marginal RI-2 but fell about 4 points short. Any number of Democrats could run for the open seat, and we would start it as Safe Democratic.
Now, back to last night’s elections. The most closely-watched election was actually not for anything federal. Wisconsin, one of the nation’s most quintessentially purple states, has spring elections for its state Supreme Court. The court’s 7 justices each run for staggered, 10-year terms. Though judicial elections are nominally nonpartisan in Wisconsin, the parties (and other political groups) get involved on behalf of candidates.
Importantly, the stakes this year are especially high in Wisconsin: currently, 4 justices are Republican-aligned while 3 were elected with Democratic support. The seat up this year is held by the retiring Justice Pat Roggensack, a conservative who was first elected in 2003. If Democrats can flip the seat, they will take control of the court. A friendly court would be a major boost to Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI), who was reelected last year after battling with an overwhelmingly Republican legislature for much of his first term.
Under Wisconsin’s rules, if only 2 candidates file to run for a seat, a single election is held in April — this was the case in 2015 and 2019. But if 3 or more candidates run for the seat, an initial February election is held, and the top 2 candidates meet in April. Last night’s field featured 4 candidates: 2 liberals and 2 conservatives.
Democrats largely coalesced behind Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz. Throughout the campaign, she emphasized her stances against gerrymandering and for abortion rights — two issues that the court may weigh in on in the near future. Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell tried to position himself to Protasiewicz’s left but did not get much traction.
With Protasiewicz essentially a lock for first place, a pair of GOP-aligned judges battled for second place. Judge Jennifer Dorow presided over the trial that ensued after the 2021 Christmas parade attack in Waukesha County. The trial gave her some national exposure, and Roggensack endorsed her. Daniel Kelly was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2016 by then-Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) but lost decisively when the seat came up in 2020. Shortly after leaving the bench, Kelly was involved in the state GOP’s “fake elector” scheme after the 2020 presidential election. Democrats have taken this as evidence of his willingness to subvert the democratic process in the pursuit of his partisan goals. Democrats also preferred him as an opponent instead of Dorow (a liberal group attacked her on television in advance of the first round of voting in what was effectively a bid to boost Kelly).
Map 1 shows the result of last night’s primary.
Protasiewicz finished a clear first, taking just over 46% of the vote. Aside from dominating in the 2 usual Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison — she took 55% in the former and close to 70% in the latter — she also fared well in rural western Wisconsin, an area that has been drifting away from Democrats in partisan races. In fact, she took majorities in some counties that voted against Evers last year (although, again, these judicial races are somewhat different from partisan contests).
Dorow’s base of strength was in the Milwaukee suburbs, an area that has been the backbone of the state GOP coalition in recent years. But Kelly took second place overall due to his strength in the rural areas. In what may be a sign of the times, this dynamic is becoming a pattern in state Republican primaries. Republicans like Scott Walker in 2010, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016 all prevailed in contested primaries because of their margins in the Milwaukee area. But as with last year’s GOP primary for governor, the victor was the Republican who had the more rural coalition. A slight caveat is that the blanket primary format Wisconsin uses for judicial races is different from that of a partisan primary, but it will be interesting to see if this pattern holds going forward.
As the second image on Map 1 shows, Democratic-aligned candidates combined to outpoll their GOP counterparts by a roughly 54%-46% margin. One county to note may be Kenosha, the state’s southeasternmost county. In 2020, it was the scene of some high-profile protests over policing. It was a swing county until then but has since not voted for any statewide Democrats in partisan races, even some of the successful ones (although its margins have been close). So since 2020, it seemed that the Democratic brand there had taken a hit. But Democratic-aligned candidates took a slight majority there last night.
So, what do last night’s results portend for the second round? While they certainly seem promising for Democrats, we do not have a large sample of recent court races to look back on.
The 3 most recent GOP victories came in 2016, 2017, and 2019. In 2016, the second round was held in conjunction with the presidential primary. As Republicans outvoted Democrats by just over 4 points, now-Justice Rebecca Bradley won by that exact margin — she also finished slightly ahead of her main Democratic opponent in the initial round. In early 2017, Democrats, who were apparently still in shock from Donald Trump’s upset in the state, didn’t even field a challenger to now-Chief Justice Annette Ziegler. In 2019, conservatives scored something of an upset when Brian Hagedorn beat liberal Lisa Neubauer by less than 6,000 votes. But for our purposes, 2019 may not be very informative, as there was no initial February round (with only two candidates, the sole bout was in April).
On the other side of the court, none of the 3 most recent Democratic wins were close. In 2015, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, now the body’s most senior member, was easily reelected by 16 points. Democrats are probably hoping that the open-seat 2018 race will be most comparable to this year’s result. The February round, where Democratic-aligned candidates took 54% of the combined vote, lined up nicely with now-Justice Rebecca Dallet’s 11.5-point win in April. In 2020, Kelly, running for the seat in his own right, took a majority in the February vote — but unfortunately for him, Wisconsin does not use Louisiana-style rules and that early result was less predictive. In what was one of the first pandemic-era elections, Democratic-aligned Jill Karofsky prevailed by a margin similar to what Dallet got. That the Democratic presidential primary was still nominally active at the time of the election (even as Joe Biden was clearly on his way to the nomination) also likely helped Democratic turnout.
Finally, with control of the court on the line, it seems likely that turnout will be high in April. Last night, close to a million votes were cast in the primary — this is significantly higher than the 2020 primary, and is almost double what 2016 and 2018 saw.
Note: There were no state Supreme Court races in 2021 or 2022.
Source: Historical data from OurCampaigns, 2023 unofficial data from DecisionDeskHQ.
Wisconsin, which was the tipping-point state in the last 2 presidential elections, will almost certainly be one of 2024’s top electoral prizes. But even in a sleeper year for electoral politics, Wisconsin will remain center stage, at least until April.
Spring, as they say, has sprung.
(I was going to write this weeknote on Friday night, but it felt too early to do so. And then I completely forgot to do so over the weekend.)
Some quick bullet points on last week:
This week it’s half-term for our kids, so I’m taking Monday and Friday off. It’s a bit easier when they’re older as you don’t have to entertain them as much; it’s more like just encouraging them to get off their phones…
The post Weeknote 07/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
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