By Kathy Bradford —
I enjoyed the Democratic National Committee show this last week, even if it was only about an hour a night (or two, if you were on PBS). I hope you did, too. By the time this is published, the RNC will have had its days of glory, too. Next come the debates scheduled for:
| September 29 | First Presidential Debate (Cleveland, OH) |
| October 7 | Vice Presidential Debate (Salt Lake City, UT) |
| October 15 | Second Presidential Debate (Miami, FL) |
| October 22 | Third Presidential Debate (Nashville, TN) |
The last day to register to vote online or by mail for the November 3, 2020 General Election is October 19, 2020. County election offices will begin sending vote-by-mail ballots to California voters beginning October 5, 2020. Ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by November 3, 2020; ballots returned at a secure ballot drop box must be deposited by 8:00 p.m. on November 3, 2020. Check out our VOTING Newsletter Article for specifics on voting by mail or in-person.
There is still more than two months of campaign available to bring home the election for the Democrats. To find out how you can effectively campaign from home during our pandemic, see the California Democratic Party site www.majority.us/cadem/ for a list of events where you can participate from your computer or phone. The CADEM recommends campaigning for Biden/Harris in the Nevada and Arizona elections, and there are links there to hook you up to phone banking through your computer microphone and screen; or texting if you prefer.
Your PV Dems club is hosting the 4th Sunday of each month for phone banking for Harley Rouda of Orange County District 45. You can also find phone banking for Christy Smith, Gil Cisneros, and others at www.majority,us/cadems/event/297118.
The Los Angeles County Democratic Party, LACDP, has a new site https://action.lacdp.org/. You can search for events throughout our county that you can attend via Zoom. Some of the buttons on this site have not been finished yet though.
Our club supported the “Save the Post Office Saturday” Day of Action at PVP USPS last Saturday, August 22nd. Read about it here.
Here are some fun and informative election websites you might enjoy exploring.
www.270towin.com Has an interactive presidential election electoral vote map. This map aggregates the ratings of ten organizations (more to be added as they become available) to come up with a consensus forecast for the 2020 presidential election. It has a mode where you can make your own assumptions and see how the match comes out. It also has a feature where you can select the display of senate, house, governor, and state senator or assembly displays by party. Just go to “How to use the interactive map” link on the right side of the page.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/ A product of ABC news. It collects polls for presidential, Senate, House and gubernatorial races in addition to presidential approval polls and congressional generic ballot polls at the national level and displays the aggregated results in a friendly manner.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/ Another map from a collection of poll results and opinions curated by Andrew Tanenbaum, a US citizen who is currently a computer science professor living in Amsterdam. Also has opinion pieces by Christopher Bates, a California history professor (AKA Zenger).
As the campaigns all ramp up, it becomes imperative to fact-check the stuff you see from the candidates and their proxies. Wikipedia has a site, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fact-checking_websites, that lists fact checking web sites by geographical region and country. Under the United States, it lists nine fact checking sites, one on climate change and eight news and politics sites.
https://www.factcheck.org/ A product of the Annenberg Trust Public Policy Center. It has good articles, but finding them in their search engine takes more than one try. Search on DNC Convention, for example, and it will give you all the fact-checking they did for each night of the convention.
https://www.politifact.com/ Short, to the point articles about current national news items; it also has webpages by state (select at bottom of first page), but it lacks a search engine.
https://www.opensecrets.org/ A resource for federal campaign contributions, lobbying data and analysis. Do a search under California, for example, and get funding of campaigns by congressional district. For District 33, for example, Ted Lieu had raised $1.2M by end of June, and his opponent James Bradley had only raised $25K. In District 45, Harley Rouda had raised $3.7M, and Michelle Steel had raised $3.4M.
These are just a few of the ones I’ve had fun using over the last month. I hope you can use your computer to help the Democrats campaign for 2020 as well.
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