The former coeditor of n+1, Nikil Saval, has been elected to represent the first district in the Pennsylvania State Senate. The New York Times Style section covered Saval’s candidacy in May.
At The Nation, D. D. Guttenplan reports on progressive activists in Pennsylvania: “Let the record show that if Joe Biden wins here, he was carried to victory on the backs of the Latinx and immigrant activists in Make the Road, the young Green New Deal enthusiasts in the Sunrise Movement, and the self-organized collection of mostly Bernie Sanders alums who provide the muscle behind Pennsylvania Stands Up.”
As votes continue to be counted in Michigan, it’s worth revisiting Eli Day’s October New Republic article on the state’s radical Black tradition and the ways in which Democrats have taken Black votes for granted while, as Day writes, “making racial appeals to whites, by engaging in a low-grade version of the same dog-whistle politics that Republicans pioneered and mastered.”
Jon Allsop rounds up election coverage so far, including historic state elections, Fox’s early call that Arizona would swing blue, and Trump’s false victory declaration. “Election night was so widely covered that it’s hard to generalize about how the media did, even if we narrow our analysis to TV alone. To varying degrees, though, it feels true to say that we’ve felt more heat than light.” Print outlets have “generally been more sedate about the results than their TV counterparts,” and today, “we’re all chewing over the same unknowns, on loop.”
Jewish Currents staff sat down with Hannah Black, Isaac Brosilow, and Tobi Haslett “a few days before the election, as the country prepared to put its own fantasy about democratic process to the test” to discuss The Trail of the Chicago 7, Aaron Sorkin’s new film of the 1969 trial of Black Panther, Students for a Democratic Society, and Youth International Party leaders.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes that national exit polls breaking down how different demographic groups voted, conducted by Edison Research and presented by the New York Times as preliminary estimates, “require more analysis than what is currently circulating” on Twitter. Taylor encourages waiting “to see how the election actually materializes and then to think about it in complicated ways, not simple ways.”
