Tuesday is Election Day in FLorida

Michigan Democrats rally against Trump's visit to Macomb

Shelby Township — Democrats are showing their opposition to President Donald Trump’s campaign-style visit Saturday to Washington Township.

A crowd of 50 and growing are gathered at UAW Local 400 in Shelby Township for a counter-demonstration and potluck teach-in event. They hope a blue wave of Democrats will get elected in November to help the party retake control of Congress and statewide offices in Michigan.

Dan Colling, a Lake Shore Public Schools board trustee and event organizer, said the rally was important to hold because of Macomb County voted 54 percent to 42 percent for Trump in 2016.

“The spotlight was on Macomb after the election, and people were wondering how could a county that elected Obama twice vote Republican, and that’s because Macomb often votes for change,” said Colling of St. Clair Shores. “They voted for Trump because they don’t see conditions getting better for working families and are worried about public schools.”


https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/28/democrats-counter-protest-trump-macomb/34360759/

California Democrat threatens to sue The Intercept over reporting on 'fabricated' voicemail

Gil Cisneros, a California Democrat running for the state’s 39th Congressional District, is threatening to sue The Intercept for reporting about a short voicemail he claims was fabricated, The Washington Post reported.

The voicemail, which was reportedly left on his opponent’s wife’s phone, is just a few seconds long and states: “Hi Andy. It’s Gil Cisneros. I’m gonna go negative on you.”

His opponent, Andy Thorburn, apparently provided the audio recording to The Intercept, which then wrote a story about the incident that featured the audio.

Cisneros says the voice in the recording is not his and threatened to sue The Intercept if it did not take down the story by the 3 p.m. Pacific time deadline, which The Intercept has not done.

The Intercept has said that it is standing by the story and noted that Cisneros refused to respond to questions until after the story was published.

“Multiple sources familiar with Mr. Cisneros identified the voice as the candidate’s voice,” The Intercept’s legal team penned in a statement to the Post. “The context, including the fact that Mr. Cisneros’s campaign did, in fact, go negative soon thereafter, supports the authenticity of the tape message.”


http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/385353-california-democrat-threatens-to-sue-the-intercept-over-reporting-on

Rep. Devin Nunes is no longer 'safe' in his race for re-election, forecaster says.

The race for congressional District 22, held by longtime GOP incumbent Devin Nunes, has been downgraded from “safely Republican” to “likely Republican” by a closely watched political forecasting website run by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, run by University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, cited the enormous amount of money raised by Democratic challenger Andrew Janz as one factor making the race more competitive.

Campaign filings show Janz has raised nearly $1.4 million in the last year, including $600,000 in the month of February alone.

However, Nunes has raised $2.6 million in the same amount of time, giving him over $4.5 million in cash on hand as of this month. He has also outspent Janz at $1.3 million to $783,000.

District 22 is a historically Republican district, the Crystal Ball noted, although one where Donald Trump did worse in 2016 than Mitt Romney did in 2012. It runs from Tulare County north to Clovis and parts of Fresno.



http://www.sacbee.com/news/article209984614.html#storylink=cpy

MA-GOV: Rabid homophobe forces Charlie Baker into a primary

Border patrol agents strolled around a bus station asking non-white people if they were citizens

FLIPPABLE: Kevin Higgins for MA-07 Plymouth

Kevin is a committed public servant with years of experience in advocacy, community outreach, and non-profit work.

Since the start of Kevin’s professional career, he has dedicated himself to advocating for senior citizens, individuals with disabilities, and working families in the South Shore of Massachusetts. Growing up in a working-class household faced with the challenges of addiction and financial hardship, Kevin intimately understands the issues facing families of Abington, East Bridgewater, and Whitman.

Kevin’s dedication to public service began at 17 years old in his last year at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School, he began volunteering at Cerebral Palsy of Massachusetts’ night class program. From there, he began supporting a local family as a caregiver for an adult woman with Down syndrome and her mother who recently had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Kevin remained as a caregiver for the family until both the mother and daughter passed away and he describes this experience as the solidifying moment in his decision to pursue a lifelong career in public service.

After graduating from Whitman-Hanson Regional High School, Kevin attended Massasoit Community College before transferring to UMass Boston, where he graduated from the College of Public and Community Service. Currently, Kevin is concluding a Master of Public Administration at Roger Williams University. Throughout his undergraduate years, Kevin worked full-time in the nonprofit sector providing case management, employment support, and vocational education, to young adults with developmental disabilities. In his last year of college, Kevin developed an interdisciplinary transition services model that worked to bridge the gap between public schools and community-based programs, supporting young adults with disabilities.

After college, Kevin began working at Old Colony Elder Services, one of the state’s (ASAPs) aging service access points, as a long-term care counselor. He was appointed to serve on the agency’s ethics committee and also elected to represent the bargaining unit as a steward with SEIU Local 509. Kevin’s role focused primarily on ensuring that seniors and individuals with disabilities had all of the resources needed to avoid long-term care placement and remain living in the community with the least-restrictive environment possible. As many of Kevin’s clients had co-occurring service needs, from substance abuse to foreclosure prevention, he had the opportunity to work with nearly every stakeholder in our state’s coordinated systems of care.

Whether it be from Kevin’s personal or professional experience addressing the challenges working families face, he intimately understands the issues of all families in Abington, East Bridgewater, and Whitman.

Kevin will be a voice for constituents who have been left out of the conversation on Beacon Hill and he believes that eliminating “politics as usual” is a critical step in achieving our shared goal of increasing opportunity and equity for all families in Abington, East Bridgewater, and Whitman.






https://electkevinhiggins.com

FLIPPABLE: Tram Nguyen for MA-HD18 Essex

A legal aid attorney who serves the most vulnerable people in Massachusetts, Tram T. Nguyen will apply the advocacy skills she practices for her clients to fight for the people of the Andover, North Andover, Tewksbury and Boxford and give them voice at the state house.

Tram believes in the importance of community and will work to ensure the district remains welcoming to new residents, as well as affordable for those who have long lived here. As state representative, Tram will fight for the funding and resources the district needs to address its social and economic challenges and help this community thrive.

When she was five years old, Tram and her family fled the hostile communist regime of Vietnam and immigrated to the United States, where they settled in the Merrimack Valley. Her family’s humble start in this country includes her father’s work, through retirement, as a technician, and her mother’s continued work as an assembler. Tram has first-hand knowledge of the struggles working families face and will fight to ensure all workers make a living wage, have adequate job protection, and can battle wage theft and exploitation.

Tram is a proud graduate of Massachusetts public schools; she attended grade school in Lawrence and Methuen and went on to graduate from Methuen High School at the top of her class. She believes that investment in our public schools will benefit the Commonwealth for years to come, and she wants to keep our schools fairly funded so that all children, no matter their backgrounds, have opportunities to succeed.

Tram’s family came to the United States to pursue hope, opportunity and freedom. She embraces those American values and seeks to keep the American Dream within reach for all.

Tram has dedicated her career to public service and has been a champion for people who needed one. She is a staff attorney with Greater Boston Legal Service (GBLS) and serves as the project coordinator for the Civil Legal Aid for Victims of Crime (CLAVC) Project. She helps victims of crime in myriad ways – assisting them in getting restraining orders against abusers, representing their interests in contested divorces, helping them combat wage theft, preventing them from being wrongfully evicted, helping them navigate the legal system to obtain immigration status, and more.

She was previously an Equal Justice Works Fellow in the Asian Outreach Unit, where she represented victims and survivors of domestic violence in the Vietnamese American community who face difficulties due to the clustering, segregation and isolation they experience as racial and ethnic minorities. To help these clients – who have undergone mental, emotional, physical and even sexual abuse – Tram served as their attorney in the court room and their advocate outside it, connecting them with resources that helped them to rebuild their lives. Tram later became a staff attorney with the Employment Law Unit of GBLS, where she helped low-wage workers gain access to legal services and navigate the legal system. She also engaged in legislative advocacy to push for policies and programs that promote economic justice and provide better support for working families.

Tram has received the Lawrence Bar Association Merit Award, Vietnamese American Bar Association Public Service Award, and Reginald Heber Smith Award in recognition of her achievements and dedication to public service.

As someone accustomed to fighting on the front lines, Tram will lead the 18th Essex district to be a model for the state in its support of inclusion and equality, affordable health care for all, resources for children with special needs, mental health services, environmental protection, and strategy to defeat the opioid crisis.

She will work for all residents by creating opportunities for homeownership, supporting senior services, boosting businesses, supporting smart growth and sustainable development, and increasing affordable housing.

Tram will bring her experience, work ethic, passion and commitment to serving the people of the 18th Essex district to advocate for our communities in the Massachusetts State House.




http://votetram.com

Democrats Suddenly Competitive In Rural Districts Too

Last year’s special election for Tom Price’s (R) seat in suburban Atlanta “became the most expensive House race ever, about $50 million on all sides, and while Democrats lost, it was by a narrow margin in a wealthy suburban district the Republicans used to win easily. It led Democrats to believe their initial strategy of focusing on the suburbs gave them a path to the majority,” the Washington Post reports.

“However, the more telling special elections might have been a handful in more rural districts President Trump won by overwhelming margins. Five special elections have been held for seats where Trump won 56 percent to 60 percent of the vote — in Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Arizona — and in each of those races the Democrat did much better than expected, winning one and getting very close in two others.”


https://politicalwire.com/2018/04/28/democrats-are-suddenly-competitive-in-rural-districts-too/

NYT: Trump refuses to believe that Republicans might lose the House