We are now just one week away from electing Kamala Harris as the 47th President of the United States and sending Donald Trump and MAGA to the dustbin of bad ideas. For real. Say it in the mirror. Repeat it while you’re meditating. Speak it into existence, because it’s the only reality any of us should want to live in a week from today.
So, in order to we doubled up the interviews for this episode, starting with the imitable Nadine Bridges, Executive Director of the state’s flagship LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, One Colorado, and Susy Bates, campaign manager for Freedom to Marry (aka Yes on Amendment J). We discussed the strongly bipartisan path that Amendment J took to the ballot, the history of LGBTQ+ rights and equality in Colorado, the THIRTY anti-trans initiatives that were defeated before they could even get to the ballot, and the future of the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in Colorado and beyond. You’re not going to want to miss the secret polling data they shared with us, or the insight into their hyper sophisticated campaign in the first block.
Then we met up with State Senator Jessie Danielson from the podcast’s home district in Jefferson County! Senator Danielson told us the tale of Senate Concurrent Resolution 1, or, The Child Sexual Abuse Accountability Amendment (brief aside, when I worked at the capitol we would regularly think about the names of bills, as would the Republicans down the hall and in the Senate. There was always a little bit of a “let’s see if they’ll really vote against the Ralph Carr Freedom Defense Act” gamesmanship because basically anybody with a brain knows that voting against a bill even partially called “Freedom Defense Act” would be pretty hard to explain when running for reelection. I digress.).
The TL;DR version of this conversation is, unlike the bipartisan Amendment J referred to Colorado voters by all but the most freakish and out of touch weirdos in the state legislature, SCR001 never made it to the ballot because every single Republican in the State Senate voted against referring it to voters. You heard that right. All they needed was one Republican, just one, to get the 2/3rds of Senators needed to refer this to voters, so that victims of childhood sexual abuse could finally seek civil accountability for their perpetrators, and every single Republican voted in unison to not allow Colorado voters that choice.
We’d tell you that we’re shocked, but honestly, very little shit like this even phases us these days, sad as that is to admit. You’re not going to want to miss this conversation, and hopefully it will help you convince your friends and family members who haven’t voted yet that now is not a particularly good time to send any Republicans to the State Senate, anywhere in Colorado.
We then talked about a bunch of other topics like General John Kelly going on the record to talk about how Donald Trump literally praised Hitler pretty much all the time, leading to Donald Trump not even really denying it, but, you know, counterpoint:
We also correctly predict that a dude named Mark Baisley (you know, one of those Republican State Senators who VOTED AGAINST THE CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE ACCOUNTABILITY AMENDMENT) will not be governor of Colorado or, probably any other state despite the fact that someone with perhaps too much money and not enough brains seems to have thought otherwise:
Before we let you go this week, I wanted to flag two articles for those of you who are straight dooming all the way to Election Day (it’s fine, we’ve all been there, but it doesn’t help, you know what does help? grabbing a volunteer shift to talk to voters in swing states):
This superb post by Patrick Dillon (free for all):
This deeply thought through and well-argued piece by ettingermentum (paywalled, but worth subscribing to):
That’s it for us this week! If you loved listening to it as much as we loved recording it, you can thank us by subscribing to the pod wherever you listen, following us over on Nice Twitter aka Threads, and forwarding this email or sharing this post with your friends, your enemies, and every single Republican in the State Senate! THANK YOU so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time!
Episode 213: The Election That Is and Was Not (feat. Nadine Bridges, Susy Bates, and Sen. Jessie Danielson)