Weekly Update – 6.10.18
It’s been another productive week for Your CDP Team. See below for a recap of this week’s activities.
We Got Out The Vote. Now It’s On To November!
Your CDP Team is proud to extend our congratulations to Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom on winning his landslide first-place victory on Tuesday. He has been a trailblazer and an icon of progress and inclusion, and will no doubt lead our statewide ticket to another clean sweep in November. And for all the talk… and talk… and talk… of a Top 2 disaster for California Democrats, we have strong challengers in every battleground district!
(Here’s a Fun Fact from Tuesday: it was actually the Republicans who ended up getting shut out in AD 76, where two Democrats will advance to November in an Assembly seat being vacated by Republican Rocky Chavez).
Thank you to everyone who helped propel the overwhelming majority of our CDP-endorsed candidates to victory on Tuesday. Thanks to your efforts, our statewide candidates for partisan office – Alex Padilla, Betty Yee, Fiona Ma & Ricardo Lara – all won handily, and Tony Thurmond will advance to November in the non-partisan Superintendent of Public Instruction contest.
CDP Battlegrounds Tour
In the days leading up to the Primary, CDP Chair Eric C. Bauman rallied the troops at battleground headquarters across the state. At every stop – from Jessica Morse HQ in Roseville, to the hundreds of volunteers at No On Recall HQ in Fullerton, to a rally with the Pod Save America crew at a beautiful park in CD 48, the CDP team was proud to spend some time with the candidates and grassroots activists who are powering the Big Blue Wave.
They Stole it Fair & Square
Tuesday was generally a good night for us, with one exception: the recall of Josh Newman. Democrats from across the state, not just in Orange County and Los Angeles, worked their hearts out for Josh Newman. The No On the Recall team ran an intensive and creative program to reach out to voters, and the grassroots response was extraordinary: easily over 1,000 people from across the state turned out to Get Out The Vote last weekend, including CDP Political Director Clark Lee and Communications Director John Vigna.
But as many of our Red County Democrats know, it’s possible for us to do everything right and still come up short. Josh Newman got a raw deal. He cast a principled vote to fix an urgent and critical problem, and the Republicans lied and cheated for over a year. The Recall of Josh Newman has made clear the Republican Party is rotten to its core. And the only thing Republicans proved is that winning requires them to lie, cheat and steal every step of the way.
Josh is a class act, and a true public servant. We sure as hell hope he comes back to retake this seat in 2020.
Summer Executive Board Meeting
The CDP Summer Executive Board meeting will be held the weekend of July 13-15 at the Oakland Marriott. The CDP room block is selling out quickly – complete your hotel reservations here.
To complete your registration for the Executive Board, or to purchase tickets for the Luncheon please click here. Our luncheon keynote speaker is Steve Phillips, author of Brown is the New White – don’t miss his exciting and informative presentation.
For more information, please visit the CDP’s Executive Board page.
A brief word on scheduling… Our Executive Board meeting unfortunately coincides with San Diego Pride weekend. Your CDP team makes every effort to ensure that our Party meetings don’t conflict with major events important to communities within our Party. But occasionally, we do find ourselves without any wiggle room on the weekends available to us, and that’s why our meeting conflicts with SD Pride this year. We truly appreciate the commitment and dedication of our grassroots activists, and we certainly appreciate everyone’s understanding when these kinds of conflicts become unavoidable.
We Have No Reservations About It… Tony Bourdain Will Be Missed
Your CDP Team was a big fan of Anthony Bourdain, and we were truly saddened to learn of his suicide yesterday. In these last months of his life, Anthony Bourdain became an outspoken and unflinching voice in support of the women leading the #MeToo movement. His fearless reflection on his own toxic masculinity, and his vocal support for justice for the victims of predators like Harvey Weinstein made him the all-too-rare example of a man willing to call out other men for their unacceptable behavior.
We will likely never know what it was that brought him to the point of taking his own life. His suicide is a haunting reminder that we simply don’t provide enough support to those struggling with mental illness, depression or post-traumatic stress. We need to dramatically expand access to counseling, therapy and mental health services in this country. And we need to challenge a culture that stigmatizes those who seek help for their mental health.
