Good morning, RVA! It's 48 °F, and today, with its highs in the upper 60s, is a cool interlude before tomorrow brings summer temperatures back—maybe for the last time! Celebrate last night’s election results by spending a bit of time outside in the beautiful fall weather!
Water cooler
Election results! What a big night for things I care about at both the state and local levels! Last night, as positive results from various interesting elections started to roll in, I realized (or maybe even re-realized again) that not every election will be as shocking or traumatizing as the one in 2016. Recently, some of them have even been surprising and positive and don’t end in fear and quiet weeping in the bathroom at work. Anyway, great work everyone, and here’s a breakdown of interesting results (all pulled from the Virginia Public Access Project, which is where you should point your browser this morning to dig into the numbers).
Casino 2.0 crashed and burned, with 62% of folks voting against. That’s 24,765 votes for, which means Urban One and friends spent somewhere around $400 per vote—which seems like a huge number to not even end up with a casino. A risky gamble, you might say. Looking at it another way, with almost 14,000 fewer YES votes than last time around, they spent about $715 per person convincing folks to flip and vote against their own casino proposal or to not vote at all. Just incredible. After the results were clear, Mayor Stoney released the following statement: “I will continue to be a voice for communities that have been historically overlooked and underserved. I will work for more accessible and affordable child care, for good paying jobs, and for an abundance of opportunities for ALL Richmonders – no matter their zip code or socioeconomic status.” Now, we’ll all take a quick breather before moving directly into budget season, when we’ll get to see if the Mayor and City Council’s commitment to affordable child care is something that extends beyond Casino 2.0. But, until then, and to quote Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams, my parting thoughts on the casino are: “Bye!”
Democrats not only kept their majority in the State Senate but flipped the House! This means Governor Youngkin had a very bad night, but, more importantly, the odds of horrible rights-revoking legislation passing the General Assembly next year have mostly vanished. Turns out that’s not a platform that reliably resonates with a majority of Virginians, and that makes me feel good. Lots of smart people will write lots of smart things in the coming days about What It All Means, and y’all should send me the best of those articles, but I liked this take from journalist Lydia Polgreen: “I think it’s fair to say that Glenn Youngkin got really, really lucky in 2022 and there is not much to learn from that weird election.”
Henrico will have a new-look Board of Supervisors, with fresh-faced members in the Fairfield, Three Chopt, and Tuckahoe districts. I don’t know a lot about the newcomers, and technically these are non-partisan positions, but Democrats now have a 4-1 majority on Henrico’s Board of Supervisors. This is maybe even more shocking to me than the Casino 2.0 results! I’m really interested to see what progressive leadership means in a County that has both a ton of money and the ability to execute efficiently.
Shockingly, in a real checks notes moment, Democrats also took control of the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors, too, winning the Dale, Clover Hill, and Midlothian districts. I’m not trying to get too far ahead of myself here, but I’m already thinking of what sort of regional cooperation could kick off with (generally) like-minded folks in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield leadership positions.
Hanover County’s push to move from an appointed to an elected School Board remains too close to call. The status quo leads by 2,450 votes at the moment, but 12,694 early votes still need counting. I think this is a good example of a “both things can be true” situation: More democracy in Hanover is better, and I’m not super hopeful that an elected School Board in the County will bring forward less extreme policies.
Susanna Gibson lost her House of Delegates race in Western Henrico by 966 votes. I don’t know if Gibson’s Chaturbate scandal made the difference in this election or if a district made up of large chunks of suburban Henrico and rural Goochland is just a challenging place for democrats. I’m thankful that control of the House didn’t come down to this one race, though.
There’s a bunch of other news I wanted to write about this morning, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow! One follow up from earlier this week, though: City Council did not end up introducing an ordinance to reduce the real estate tax by five cents. I don’t know what happened or where it went, but (thankfully) it doesn’t appear in the list of ordinances introduced at this past Monday’s special meeting.
Ack, sorry, two more time sensitive things that you should probably know about!
- Tonight from 5:30–8:00 PM the City will host a “Speed Management Fall Symposium” at Main Street Station (1500 E. Main Street). Stop by and hear directly from engineers and planners how the City is “using road design and engineering, reducing speed limits and applying enforcement efforts to increase roadway safety for everyone.”
- Richmond Public Schools’ Dreams4RPS process kicks off tonight at 6:00 PM at the Broad Rock Library (4820 Warwick Road). If you want to get involved in the school district’s strategic planning process on the ground floor, this is the meeting for you!
This morning's longread
Fact-checking isn’t enough. We need fact-crusading.
This seems like an appropriate longread to share as we move past 2023’s election and right on into The Big Election Season of 2024. We need journalists—at the local, state, and national levels—to do a way better job of covering these impending elections than they have in the past. Honestly, if they could all follow Jay Rosen on Threads, that’d be great, too.
As the right wing keeps pushing disinformation, journalists keep fact-checking. They dissect quotes. They consult experts. They cite statistics. But it’s not enough. We need fact-crusading, not just fact-checking. Yes, fact-crusading. News media must hold the facts in such high regard that the enemies of truth become their adversaries – to be called out and confronted, not just corrected. Journalists’ job is to give people information that helps them navigate their lives. Liars sabotage what journalists do, and journalists ought to be offended. If you were a barista and someone slipped toxic sludge into your coffee drinks, you wouldn’t just warn your customers that their drink had sludge in it. You’d try to keep the sludge out of the drink.
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Picture of the Day
Always vote for emergency pizza.
