Taniel Profile picture
1 Dec, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Time for a story about a DA race in Georgia, again.

It won't top my 😮thread from June about the DA race in Muscogee (see below). Could anything? But it's still worth your time.

This time, it's about Athens.
Act 1: Deborah Gonzalez jumps in the DA race as a reformer.

Act 2 (Feb. 2020): The incumbent resigns. He'd be in office since 2001 & had already announced retirement, but he couldn't wait a few more months. His deputy becomes acting DA, a perceived advantage for Nov's election.
Act 3: Gov. Kemp keeps not appointing anyone to fill the vacancy. This triggers a law that outright *cancels* the 2020 election, leaving the acting DA in power until 2022 without facing voters.

(Sidenote: Kemp does the same for Supreme Court elections: theappeal.org/politicalrepor…)
Act 4: Gonzalez sues against the cancellation. & wins! Court restores election for Nov. 3!

Act 5 (Nov. 3): Gonzalez (48%) moves to runoff alongside James Chafin (who's been more reform-skeptic). Acting DA, who almost got to just keep the office thru 2022, is outright eliminated.
Act 6: The runoff. It's today. We'll know how the story ends in roughly 12 hours or so.
Update: Deborah Gonzalez won the DA runoff, bringing this story -- and thread -- to its conclusion.

Some more info in this thread.

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More from @Taniel

2 Dec
It's Election Night! (In Georgia no less!)

Clarke (=Athens) & Oconee counties voted for their DA in a runoff, which pits a candidate who carried the criminal justice reform mantle (Deborah Gonzalez) & a candidate more skeptical of reforms (James Chafin).
Turnout will no doubt be far smaller than last month (twas was left for today even as other runoffs are on 1/5) making it harder to predict.

The mere fact that election is being held is a story, since Kemp's maneuvers briefly cancelled it. See my thread:
Right now there is a difference of... 66 votes between the two candidates out of roughly 20,000 counted!

But: Oconee County, where Chafin is up HUGE, is done. There's a way to go in Athens.

(One note: The very small time between Nov. 3 & Dec. 1 made mail-in voting harder.)
Read 4 tweets
30 Nov
.@EliNSavit won the prosecutor’s race in Washtenaw Co. (Ann Arbor) on a reform platform. (theappeal.org/politicalrepor…)

And he's now appointed @VBH4Justice as his chief assistant. She's a progressive who unsuccessfully challenged Detroit’s prosecutor in the Dem primary in August.
Victoria Burton-Harris ran a strong reform campaign but lost against a longtime incumbent.

Here's @kira_lerner reporting this summer on how the issue of juvenile life without parole was a major fault line here (picture is of Burton-Harris): theappeal.org/politicalrepor…
Perhaps strongest promise Savit made during his campaign was over cash bail.

"I categorically oppose cash bail, and will not seek it in any case," he told me in July. (By my count, he'd be just the 3rd prosecutor in country to adopt such a rule if he implements it.)
Read 4 tweets
29 Nov
GOP has done this trick for years: introduce bills to restrict access to voting in the name of fighting the *loss of trust* caused by (their) allegations of fraud, even when they end up granting there’s no basis to them.

Pay attn to this sleight of hands now. It’s everywhere.
Here’s a Trump-era example of it from Washington State:

Here’s another from New Hampshire, a product of Trump’s lies about 2016: .
Now they’ve laid the groundwork to amp this up massively. “I said there was smoke!’

See how this sleight of hands works with Loeffler here. She has nothing to justify fraud, but she no longer needs that: “lost of faith” is all she needs for what’s next.
Read 4 tweets
25 Nov
The French Assembly just adopted this bill.
Update: huge turnaround in France. Macron’s Cabinet has announced it’ll be “rewriting” the bill before final adoption, even as it already passed the main chamber. Huge protest planned against bill.

Context: new police brutality case making huge headlines: mobile.francetvinfo.fr/faits-divers/p…
Hundreds of thousands marched in France today against Macron’s provisions expanding surveillance and criminalizing the sharing of footage of law enforcement: nyti.ms/3qku1vY
Read 4 tweets
24 Nov
Ongoing thread: New Jersey Dems are justifying renewing an ICE contact — a reversal — as a way to make money and help their budget via detaining immigrants for ICE.
Wow: the meeting is still ongoing. The Dem board is still likely to renew its contract to hold ICE detainees, but an impressive show of organizing.
Read 5 tweets
24 Nov
💥 New York Dems are now convincingly leading in, or have won, enough seats to clinch a supermajority in NY’s Senate & legislature.

Game changed for redistricting.

The decisive seat? Defeating Rob Astorino, the former executive of Westchester who’d so fought affordable housing.
NY Republicans were in power until the 2018 midterms.

Within 26 months, GOP lost their IDC allies; then they lost the majority; and now have collapsed further! Sea change.

And Dems are still likely to win at least one other seat as count continues. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
Hard to overstate extent to which NY State’s GOP anchored its legislative campaigns on the endorsement of police unions & on aggressive messaging against state Dems’ bail reform. These are Astorino’s final 2 tweets before Election Day.

He lost, they lost. Dems solidified power.
Read 4 tweets

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