November 16, 2018

Katie Porter Wins the CA45; Mimi Walters Throws a Tantrum

I don’t know how this slipped my mind yesterday, but Katie Porter has beaten Mimi Walters to win my home district in Irvine:

Porter is now 6,000 votes ahead and rising. CA45 has been officially called.

The sad part of this is that a couple of days ago, as it became clear which way the wind was blowing, Mimi Walters pulled a Trump and started claiming that the vote count was corrupt. “I’m currently up by 1 point, but the Democrats are already preparing for a recount to try and steal this Republican seat after the fact,” she wrote in a fundraising email. This is a shameless and reprehensible thing to say. She knows perfectly well that Neal Kelley is a very well regarded Registrar of Voters and that there’s no evidence at all of even the slightest fraud or incompetence in his office.

But I guess that’s how things go in the GOP of the Trump era. If you lose, you lash out. Yesterday I said I had nothing special against Walters other than the usual disagreement of a liberal toward a conservative. Now I do. What a terrible way to go out.

POSTSCRIPT: On a possibly interesting note, I wavered on who to vote for in the Democratic primary this year. It was a fairly nasty race between Porter and Dave Min, who was the more centrist candidate.¹ For that reason he seemed more likely to win a general election fight here, which is, after all, still a pretty Republican place even if Orange County as a whole voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the end, though, I decided to support the more progressive candidate and hope for the best. In any other year that probably wouldn’t have paid off, but this year it did.

¹This is a new thing for us. Normally, the local party has to beg to get even one person to run, and doing so is considered a good deed, not a serious effort to win the district. Thanks to Donald Trump, though, it looked like there was a real chance of winning this year, and that brought out the nastiness.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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