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Welcome to High Country - politics in the American West. My name is Sean Diller; regular listeners might know me from Heartland Pod’s Talking Politics, every Monday.
Go to heartlandpod.com for information on all our political podcasts, and a link to support our work on Patreon. Sign up as an Official PODhead for just $5 per month to access all our premium podcast segments and political writing. To join the conversation on Twitter, find us at THE Heartland POD.
Alright! Let’s get into it:
NEVADA CURRENT: The Cowardly Lombardo.
In his first public event since being elected governor of Nevada, Joe Lombardo refused to allow the Nevada Current and the Las Vegas Sun to cover what was billed as a victory speech.
Shutting the Current out of his celebratory event was an extension of the Lombardo team’s practice throughout the campaign – along with multiple Republican candidates nationwide – to refuse to provide campaign statements, notices of events, or other information to the press.
The campaign told the Current Monday morning that they couldn’t be allowed to cover the event because it was “at capacity for press right now.” Subsequent photographs of the event showed that statement from the campaign was patently false - with row upon row of empty seats in the sparsely populated high school auditorium where Lombardo gave his victory speech.
Such mendacity from Lombardo and his team comes as no surprise.
But most concerning going forward, is the prospect that as governor, Lombardo, his office, and publicly financed executive branch government offices under his purview, will refuse to provide independent journalists and other media organizations with public information.
Lombardo’s campaign presented its candidate to the public as an upright lawman of character, honesty, integrity and strength. But subverting the people’s right to transparent and accountable government, and hiding from the press is just cowardly.
COLORADO NEWSLINE: With Lauren Boebert slightly ahead in Colorado, the race to cure ballots is on.
The extremely tight race between MAGA darling U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert and moderate Democrat Adam Frisch became a contest of cured ballots this week, as the two candidates worked to rally their voters and ensure every one of their ballots is counted.
On Tuesday afternoon, the difference between the candidates’ totals remained at over 1,000 votes: a narrow spread for sure, but still above the threshold that would trigger an automatic, state-funded recount. At the current numbers, if Frisch comes within about 830 votes, then a recount would be triggered.
Vote tallies will change through the end of Wednesday as ballots continue to arrive from military and overseas voters, and as flawed ballots are “cured'' by voters.
When tabulators reject a ballot, often due to a discrepancy between the voter’s signature on the ballot and the official state voter registration records, the voter has an opportunity to resolve, or cure, the problem and have their vote count.
The Frisch team is trying to win cured ballots this week by getting the word out to voters about the curing process, encouraging use of the state’s TXT2Cure mobile phone-based curing system, and on-the-ground voter engagement.
A Frisch campaign spokesperson said “A lot of the curable ballots tend to skew a lot younger, and others who don’t have as much experience voting. We think that we probably will perform better among younger voters, so we think that probably there’s more curable ballots for us than for Lauren Boebert.”
The Frisch campaign also believes cured ballots from unaffiliated voters, not just registered Democrats, will skew their way.
That sentiment was seconded by Matt Crane, a Republican who heads the Colorado County Clerks Association.
Crane said. “Unaffiliated voters wanted to punish the hell out of the Republican Party in Colorado this year. And they sure did. It’s probably a better pool for Democrats to go and try to cure unaffiliated ballots than it is for Republicans, just based on the way the election went.”
A spokesperson for Boebert did not reply to a message seeking comment.
Ballot curing must be completed by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, and updated results are expected to be available Thursday.
Colorado law requires an automatic recount, also known as a statutory recount, if the apparent winner is ahead by 0.5% or less. During such a recount, the secretary of state’s office would delay certification of the race and neither candidate would be declared representative-elect until resolution of the recount, which must be completed by Dec. 13.
COLORADO NEWSLINE: Congresswoman Caraveo focused on healthcare and climate change.
Yadira Caraveo, a Colorado state representative, stood at a lectern Thursday in the backyard of her childhood home in Adams County north of Denver. Her parents, who immigrated from Mexico and moved to the Denver-area home when Caraveo was in second grade, watched from a balcony as their daughter addressed reporters for the first time as the Democratic U.S. representative-elect from Colorado’s 8th Congressional District. And the first Latina to represent Colorado in Congress.
Dr Caraveo said “This hill behind me is where my siblings and I used to slide down and make mud piles, and the house behind us is where I spent many, many hours studying to get through high school, through college and through medical school,” Dr. Caraveo is a pediatrician in the community. She went on to say she was able to do this because of the hard work of her parents.
The new 8th District was the state’s most competitive based on previous elections, and unofficial results show Caraveo won by a margin of less than one percentage point. The district also has the highest concentration of Hispanic residents, at 39%, and includes the northern Denver suburbs, extending into parts of Weld County and Greeley.
Caraveo said her top priorities in Congress include health care and climate change. She cited the obstacles she faced as a doctor trying to treat young patients.
“The medical training that I had was not enough to beat the system that we had,” she said. “And so a lot of my effort is going to go into that system to make sure that it’s not about insurance companies or drug companies.”
Caraveo alluded to striking a balance on her environmental agenda. The 8th District includes parts of Weld County, which produces the most oil and gas in the state, by far .
“We have a very important oil and gas industry that gives people like the families at my clinic great jobs, but I also see kids struggling to breathe every single day and I’ve had to send them to the hospital to be put on oxygen.” she said
The Colorado delegation from Colorado that will join Congress in January will also include Democrats Diana DeGette from the 1st District, Joe Neguse from the 2nd District, Jason Crow from the 6th District and Brittany Pettersen from the 7th District; and Republicans Ken Buck from the 4th District and Doug Lamborn from the 5th District.
The race for the 3rd District between Republican incumbent Lauren Boebert and Democratic challenger Adam Frisch is still too close to call.
ARIZONA MIRROR: Republicans are falsely claiming that Arizona used to know final election results on Election Day.
Republicans in Arizona and elsewhere have insisted that the days-long tabulation of early ballots, particularly in Maricopa County, is a sign the election might be being stolen.
They’re flat wrong about the history, however: Final election results have never been available on Election Night in any Arizona county.
What’s changed isn’t anything about the vote-counting, but that Arizona has gone from a ruby red state where Republicans dominated most elections — to a deep purple state where races up and down the ballot have been extremely close.
Those close races mean candidates, voters, pundits and the national media are focusing intently on Arizona’s post-Election Day tallies.
For example: in the Nov. 2, 2004 presidential election, the final results came on November 15, 13 days later.
In the Nov. 7, 2006 midterm election
Final results: Nov. 19
Lag time: 12 days
Nov. 4, 2008 presidential election
Final results: Nov. 21
Lag time: 17 days
Nov. 2, 2010 midterm election
Final results: Nov. 17
Lag time: 15 days
Nov. 6, 2012 presidential election
Final results: Nov. 20
Lag time: 14 days
Nov. 4, 2014 midterm election
Final results: Nov. 18
Lag time: 14 days
Nov. 8, 2016 presidential election
Final results: Nov. 18
Lag time: 10 days
Nov. 6, 2018 midterm election
Final results: Nov. 20
Lag time: 14 days
Nov. 3, 2020 presidential election
Final results: Nov. 13
Lag time: 10 days
None of that has stopped Arizona GOP candidates and their allies across the country from crying foul about the process that has existed in the Grand Canyon State since the early 1990s, when Republicans here pioneered no-excuse early mail-in voting.
Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor, has insisted that Arizonans knew the Maricopa County results and the overall result of their elections on Election Night - until 2020.
Records from Maricopa County elections over the past 22 years show that has never been the case. Media outlets, like the Associated Press, might have called races in the past when election night returns showed that one candidate would clearly win, but the fastest the county has released final results in a midterm election since 2000 was six days, in 2002.
In Maricopa County, a record 290,000 people dropped off their early ballots on Election Day this year. Elections workers didn’t even begin to start counting those ballots until Wednesday morning. Before those ballots are tabulated, their barcodes are scanned to ensure that they came from a registered voter who hasn’t cast another ballot in this election. Then elections workers check the signature on the envelope against past signatures from the voter. After that, a bipartisan team separates the ballot from the envelope and checks that the voter received the correct ballot.
Once all those steps are completed, the county can tabulate the ballot. All the ballots have never been counted in one day.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN PBS: Colorado legalizes psychedelic mushrooms.
Ten years after leading the nation in legalizing the sale of cannabis, Colorado became the second state in the U.S. to permit psilocybin, or "magic," mushrooms. Oregon was the first state to do so.
As of 2 p.m. on Nov. 10, data from the Colorado Secretary of State's Office showed the Natural Medicine Health Act — voted on as Proposition 122 — was on the path to a slim approval, with 51.6% of voters supporting the measure.
The measure will allow people 21 and older to grow and share psilocybin mushrooms, as well as create state-regulated centers where people could make appointments to consume the fungi. The proposition will also create “healing centers” to give clients mushrooms in a supervised setting, but will not create "mushroom dispensaries," in the same way cannabis is sold and purchased.
Proponents of the ballot measure claim mushroom consumption has helped address their mental health issues in ways traditional pharmaceuticals did not, particularly when the mushrooms were taken in small doses, a method called microdosing.
Gov. Jared Polis has until Jan. 31 to appoint 15 members to the Natural Medicine Advisory Board, which will report to the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
CONCERT PICK OF THE WEEK: Next Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving - The Last Waltz - with Warren Haynes, Jamey Johnson, Kathleen Edwards, and more. Tickets at FillmoreAuditorium.org
Welp, that’s it for me! From Denver I’m Sean Diller. Original reporting for the stories in today’s show comes from the Nevada Current, Arizona Mirror, Colorado Newsline, Rocky Mountain PBS, and Denver’s Westword
Thank you for listening! See you next time.
