Learning
Jo Freeman: There’s Plenty To Do at the RNC – If You Have the Right Credentials
by Jo Freeman
Every national nominating convention has plenty of auxiliary events, some authorized, some not. Getting space can be a challenge; getting the word out even more so. But they do it nonetheless. Press were given a RNC 2024 Master Event Calendar, which was updated a few days later. Events began on Sunday and ended on Thursday. The actual convention sessions were just one item on the list. The calendar said if an event was Open or Closed to press, and also whom to contact to register. I’m going to describe some of the events, including a couple I went to, and a couple I was turned away from.
Since my focus is on women, I obviously wanted to go to those events – if I could.
The National Federation of Republican Women is the largest grassroots Republican women's organization in the country with hundreds of clubs. Founded in 1938, its members made the phone calls and knocked on the doors that elected Republican candidates for decades. It’s Tuesday luncheon featured Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders. The Master Calendar said it was SOLD OUT and they wouldn’t let me in. I was able to get into their lounge at the Fiserv Forum Wednesday evening, where I was repeatedly asked if I was a member, and if not, would I join. “I’m press,” I said. “I can’t join anything partisan.” I then said: “What brings you here?” On hearing that, finding anyone willing to chat with me was like pulling teeth.
Moms for Liberty met in a concert hall that afternoon. I had pre-registered, and I got in. From high in a balcony seat I listened to several people talk about the evils of transgenderism. It’s webpage says WE BELIEVE Power Belongs to the People. Sound Familiar? With a focus is on parental rights, it wants to “STOP WOKE indoctrination.”
Tuesday I went to “The New Mavericks” reception co-hosted by the Black Republican Mayors Association and the Georgia Republican Party. They honored Sen. Tim Scott, four Congressmen and two Georgia delegates – all male. There was only one mayor on stage, from Aurora, IL. The chair of the Georgia Republican Party was the one white man on the stage. At that event, women served; they didn’t speak. The RNC reported that 55 delegates to the 2024 convention are Black, up from 18 in 2016.
I missed the Independent Women’s Forum toast to “Women Who Make Our Country Great” because I went to Convention Fest: The Official Delegate Experience, which was held in the streets outside the Fiserve Forum and Baird Hall as well as some space inside Baird. To get to that one you not only needed a credential of some sort, but a USSS pass (which I have).
Concerned Women for America parked its pink bus across from the Baird Center the week before the RNC. No one was home. When Convention Fest opened on Tuesday afternoon, they set up a pink tent, from which its leaders preached to whomever passed by. It calls itself “the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization” but its focus is evangelical Christian. The slogan on the side of its pink bus captures this emphasis: “She Prays, She Votes.” A prayer precedes each sermon.
2022 Election: I Was a Ballot Chase Participant; A Part of Get Out the Vote
At our house a few weeks ago, four of us sat at our kitchen table and addressed envelopes to the voters that we wanted to reach with a message from candidates! Here were some instructions: "If you want to do a VBM Chase program and win on Election Day you must get message early. A mail program accompanied with a digital campaign targeting early voters and absentee voters will give you a leg up over your competitors. When you get your mail out early to mail-in voters you can start the hard work of identifying them. But you must get your mail out or there will be nobody to identify – because they won’t know who you are. So get your mail into the early absentee voters as early as possible and target them with your emails, Facebook ads, and text messaging."
How to Win an Election by Chasing Vote by Mail Ballots
by Con… more »
Julia Sneden Reprise: Still Learning; Learning Differently
Julia Sneden Wrote: "I think about Leonardo da Vinci, whose mirror writing is well-known. Somehow, I doubt that whoever taught him to write said to him: “You are writing backward, stupid boy! Do it like this!” It’s quite possible that that teacher said something like: “Wow! That mirror writing is amazing! Show me how you do it.” What a foxy teacher that would have been! In helping young Leonardo to understand why others would have difficulty reading the backwards writing, he would lead the child to discover what needed to be changed so that others could read it. (Lest we grow too fond of my little fantasy, I should note that I believe that Leonardo was left handed, in which case he may have been writing from right to left simply so that his hand wouldn’t smear the ink, and cover what he’d just written. We’ll never know.)" more »
"The 2022 midterm election returns could ... be marred by a rush to judgment by political leaders or news outlets"* Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy
"When presenting popular vote results, context will matter more than ever — the percentage of the statewide vote reflected in the count, the rough percentage of outstanding ballots that are mail-in ballots and when they will be tabulated, the locations within the state that have reported returns, the tendency of these locations to vote Republican or Democratic, and so on. Attention to these factors would signal that there are many more votes yet to come and could dissuade viewers from hasty conclusions or from believing a party’s premature claim to have won control of the Senate." more »
At "Toward an Inclusive Recovery," a research seminar sponsored by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C.
"Education outcomes, including learning losses and achievements, take time to measure, aggregate, and analyze. As we enter the fourth academic year affected by the pandemic, data on student performance are becoming more available. Much of this early data confirms our initial concerns. For example, early test scores show that throughout the country nine-year-olds suffered a decline in learning outcomes during the pandemic. But other data also indicate that learning losses were unequal and disproportionately affected low-performing students and low-income students. It is likely that the sudden shift to online classes contributed to the learning declines. According to the Board's 2020 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (the SHED), only 22 percent of parents with children attending virtual classes agreed that their children learned as much as they would have attending classes in person at school."
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