An interesting guest piece on ’s Substack which imbues me with (a little) confidence and faith in electoral resilience (the most important democratic mechanism, at the end of the day):
"The pandemic brought our dysfunctional public safety and education systems to the forefront of our politics: San Francisco’s school board elections have traditionally been a fairly inside baseball affair, because the percentage of San Franciscans with kids is famously small. However, the pandemic meant that a particularly ideological school board was left to handle a particularly fraught situation, and the results were…not pretty. General frustration with school closures and remote learning boiled over when board members generated national headlines over school renaming efforts denouncing Abraham Lincoln and bizarre tweets stoking racial resentment towards Asian-American students. The voters got the message that San Francisco’s educators had priortized ideology over their kids’ education and they didn’t like it, which is why the School Board recall succeeded with 70%+ of the vote and a ballot proposition urging SFUSD to reverse its removal of 8th Grade Algebra passed with 80%+ of the vote. This has been very damaging for the reputation of San Francisco’s “progressive” coalition.”
-Armand Domalewski
