Republican county commissioner has been unseated in Michigan after losing to her Democratic challenger by 20 percentage points.

Chris Kleinjans won an Ottawa County election on Tuesday with 60 percent of the vote share, while the Republican incumbent Lucy Ebel lost, having received 40 percent.

Michigan is a battleground state that will be key to November’s presidential election. Donald Trump won the county with 61 percent of the vote in 2020.

  • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Holy shit. I’m not sure people understand how big a deal this is for Ottawa County.

    Ottawa County contains the town that voted to close its library over LGBT books. Ottawa County is where Betsy DeVos lives. Ottawa County had their commission taken over by a far right group called Ottawa Impact that tried to oust the county health officer and replace her with someone completely unqualified because of mask requirements.

    Ottawa County is home to a congressional district that hasn’t gone Democrat since the civil rights movement.

    This is kind of huge.

      • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Is this Holland michigan? With the windmills and shit?

        Yes. I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted. Specifically this commissioner represents parts of Holland Township and Park Township, apparently.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Michigan is a battleground state that will be key to November’s presidential election.

    Friendly reminder that, thanks to the US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, we saw fully 13% of Democrats refuse to support Joe Biden in the Michigan primary

    This, in a state where Democrat primary turnout was 768,158 relative to Republican primary turnout of 1,113,719.

    This war is going to Jimmy Carter the Democrats in November, if they don’t change course in a hurry.

    • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      13% of democrats submitted a protest vote. That is not the same as refusing to vote for Biden in November. I hope that anyone who supports the Palestinian cause can recognize just how much worse it will get under a Trump administration.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        That is not the same as refusing to vote for Biden in November.

        That’s a clear signal by registered Democrats of their abstention of support for Biden.

        House Reps aren’t seeing these huge protest votes.

        I hope that anyone who supports the Palestinian cause can recognize just how much worse it will get under a Trump

        I hope that Biden realizes he can’t wait until 2025 to change course in Palestine. Not when 1.4M lives are on the line.

    • kescusay@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      You can definitely expect more. Democrats are consistently over-performing versus the polls.

      Polling is kinda broken right now.

        • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Even if Dems are outperforming polls, I don’t want anyone feeling comfortable that Biden is going to win. Literally everyone needs to feel panic and dread about the upcoming election, and vote in downticket races as well.

      • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        I blame phone companies for that. They’ve had the ability to block scam calls for a while but haven’t because it makes them money. Now people don’t even bother answering their phones anymore, especially if it’s an unknown number, so the only people who respond to polls aren’t representative of the population.

        • mkwt@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          And really people are not making phone calls nearly as much as they used to. The pollsters need to find a reasonably unbiased method to sample people on other communication methods.

          • MrPoopbutt@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I get texts about polls but I would rather jump on a live grenade than answer an unsolicited communication, be that a text or anything else, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.