Bee Opinionated: Young voters showed up + Twitter’s wasteland + Poor Kevin McCarthy
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It’s Robin Epley with The Sacramento Bee’s Editorial Board once again. I hope everyone remembered to vote on Tuesday, as some of these local races came down to just a handful of ballots.
Some of these numbers will still change with continued counting, but as of Friday afternoon:
In the Sacramento District 3 City Council race, Karina Talamantes is ahead of Michael Lynch by just 216 votes.
In the Citrus Heights District 5 City Council race, incumbent Porsche Middleton is ahead by a mere 27 votes over challenger Natalee Price.
And in the Elverta Joint Elementary School District, Bond Measure P looks is up by just 17 votes.
Your vote matters, arguably more so when it comes to local issues and local representation. Across California and the country, in the counties and cities we live in, and right down to the local school boards, your vote can change a lot.
Now … who’s ready for 2024?
The Red Wave That Never Came
“The lesson of the legend of Faust, if you recall, is that his deal with the devil brought him power and parlor tricks but not happiness, or even contentment. (We coulda told him, right?) Like GOP California congressman Kevin McCarthy, he sold his soul to a con artist and got only some hard lessons in return,” metro columnist Melinda Henneberger wrote last week.
McCarthy seems to me to be the dog that caught the car. Now that he has it, what to do with it?
“Having long since traded his soul to Donald Trump, whose preferred candidates once again underperformed in Tuesday’s midterm election,” Henneberger wrote, “McCarthy’s reward will be to have to bow to the dubious cast of congressional characters whose morally reduced circumstances made independent voters favor Democrats.”
In an editorial last week, after the elections shook out, the board opined that any midterm gains for McCarthy and company “should not be overinterpreted as a mandate for their un-American politics. U.S. elections remain heavily influenced by structural factors that currently favor Republicans regardless of their drift into anti-democracy.”
The “Red Wave” that many had predicted simply never materialized, thanks in part to young millennial and Gen Z voters, who continued a recent pattern of voting decisively for Democrats. Exit polls also showed that unmarried women, who tend to be younger, preferred Democrats to Republicans by 37 percentage points.
As my colleague Hannah Holzer put it in her own column last week (in a statement I fully endorse as an unmarried, millennial woman myself):
“As an unmarried, Gen Z woman, I’d like to say: You’re welcome, America.”
Goodbye, Mr. Twitter
“Here lies Twitter, we knew ye too well. A tiny blue bird that flew too high before crashing last week, thanks to a joyriding, spiteful billionaire clutching its $44 billion tail feathers.”
Twitter gave us Bean Dad, Cinnamon Toast shrimp tails, Zola’s hoeism, 30-50 feral hogs, Jorts the cat, the greatest day on the internet and plenty of milkshake ducks.
It also gave us unbridled hate speech, racism, misogyny, fatphobia, Nazis and a whole era of unhinged, Trumpian tweets that will live in history books forever. (I pity the A.P. U.S. History students who in two decades might have to learn how to spell “covfefe” for their final exam.)
I got to write last week about the possibly imminent demise of the popular microblogging platform bought by electric car billionaire Elon Musk. He seems determined to crush it into oblivion because some people have used it to criticize him. Last week, he fired about half the staff … then brought some of them back when he realized that was probably a bad idea.
Musk’s management style has been compared to that of a younger sibling who makes up a game and then keeps changing the rules when they realize they’re not winning.
Despite all of that, the internet — and Twitter particularly — has been a place for me and many others to find community and friends. Even if you never used the site, that’s something to appreciate about it.
Now if only Musk would buy the GOP …
Opinion of the Week
“Defense lawyers have argued that the group’s faux-Italian feast suggests they weren’t so serious about sedition, having left the Capitol at their movement’s high-water mark just to gorge themselves on mediocre pasta in the suburbs.” — Deputy Opinion Editor Josh Gohlke with possibly the best headline I’ve ever read: “Mussolini alfredo: Is the Olive Garden the most seditious restaurant in America?”
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Tune in next week; same bat-time, same bat-email,
Robin Epley
