ELECTION RESULT: A team of city council members in Rolla, Missouri, have been pushing anti-LGTB policies, including a ban on drag shows and book censorship.
Voters just ousted all three of these city councilors who were running for reelection, backing candidates backed by a local LGBT group.
The city of Glendale, in Los Angeles County, announced today that they're quitting an agreement with ICE thad allowed ICE to house its detainees at the Glendale police department.
mynewsla.com/crime/2025/0...
I follow French politics a lot, as many of you know. Any effort for mass layoffs of public sector employees there would create such huge strikes and marches, the level of disruption and paralysis would be biblical.
Two ICE agents tracked down a woman *inside a polling place* yesterday. Why?
They demanded that she take down an Instagram post in which she named Jonathan Ross as the man who shot & killed Renee Good (after the Star Tribune identified Ross). www.syracuse.com/news/2026/06...
This has not gotten much attention, but it should.
Virginia under Youngkin returned to an insanely harsh system where people convicted of any felony lose their voting rights FOR LIFE.
Dems' win this week mean they'll get to advance a constitutional amendment to end lifetime disenfranchisement.
NEW: Abigail Spanberger this afternoon ordered that all state agencies leave ICE's 287(g) program.
This means that the state police (and some other agencies) will no longer be empowered to detain and arrest people for ICE.
Big, big move by the governor within weeks of coming into office.
Washington, D.C., has a population roughly equivalent to Alaska's.
And it has zero senators. If D.C. had senators, the GOP megablil bill would have failed today.
Instead, Murkowski got carve-outs and money for Alaska, and then voted to subject DC to the bill
The Virginia legislature today passed four constitutional amendments, all by day 3 of 2026 session:
—protect abortion rights
—repeal the same-sex marriage ban
—allow mid-decade redistricting
—greatly expand voting rights restoration.
These will all go to 2026 referendums.
The nation's fifth most populous county, San Diego, just chose its political future today—and appears to have chosen to have a Democratic local government—and it's crickets everywhere. Quite the eye-popping example of the NY/East-Coast-bias of how elections get covered.
Indiana’s Senate has voted AGAINST the GOP gerrymander that’d have locked in a 9-0 map.
This keeps the 7-2 map in place, saving two Democratic seats heading into 2026.
The vote failed big, 19/31.
The MAJORITY of the GOP senators opposed it!
RESULT: Omaha's Republican Mayor Jean Stothert just lost to her Democratic challenger John Ewing.
Stothert, who was running for a fourth term, resorted to anti-trans ads and messaging around who uses bathrooms in the final stretch of the campaign.
Ewing will be Omaha's first Black mayor.
Eric Adams pretty much agreed to sidestep NY sanctuary protections, & make his city's immigrant residents more vulnerable to iCE, in pursuit of naked personal gain & a shield from corruption charges.
Local media is calling it: Katie Wilson will be the next mayor of Seattle.
Wilson ousts Mayor Bruce Harrell after running as a progressive challenger.
Her win is a west coast companion to Mamdani’s as a statement victory for the left.
JUST IN: Democrats flip a red seat in the Texas Senate.
Taylor Rehmet wins against Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist who helped lead right-wing efforts to take over TX school boards.
With all early vote, and 95% of precincts, in, Dem up 57/43.
Trump won this seat by 17% in Tarrant County.
JUST IN: Democrats tonight have flipped a GOP-held state House seat in Florida.
And not just any seat: This is the district that contains Mar-a-Lago. (It voted for Trump by 11% in 2024).
That's right: Trump will now be represented by a Democrat, Emily Gregory, in Tallahassee.
ELECTION RESULT from Alabama: Paul Prine, the former police chief of Mobile who was fired last year while facing a damning report about his department’s use of force against Black residents, has lost the mayoral race.
He came in third, and will not move forward to the September runoff.
a big runoff last night, in New Orleans:
Calvin Duncan was exonerated after spending *28 years* in prison; he tried to get his own case records from the New Orleans city clerk—but the office dragged its feet.
So Duncan ran to become city clerk himself, and yesterday ousted the incumbent.
TN07 is a story about gerrymandering: the GOP cracked Nashville into 3 districts when it redrew the 2022 map, destroying the Dem seat there.
Fast-forward: a section of Nashville, which just 5 years ago had a Dem representative, is now voting Dem by huge margins but it's been designed to not matter.
BIG NEWS: A Wyoming judge just struck down WY's abortion bans.
And get this: The judge invoked a constitutional amendment codifying a right to make health care decisions... that was passed in 2012 by conservatives who thought it'd screw Obamacare! Just backfired.
We explained this lawsuit here:
Texas conservatives who've championed book bans & anti-LGBT policies suffered big losses tonight in school board races.
And They seem to have lost their working majorities to pass their policies in big school boards.
I tracked these results in FOUR boards tonight. So a 🧵 on each ICYMI.
Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated last night, was the Speaker of the Minnesota House in the 2023-2024 session, when Democrats ran the state government.
That means she had a leading role in shepherding the many landmark reforms that Dems adopted in that period—an important legacy. Brief 🧵.
Bombshell in North Carolina: the state's GOP-dominated Court of Appeals just sided with the GOP candidate in last year's supreme court race.
Their decision would toss roughly 60,000 ballots (!) that have been counted, & likely hand the election to GOP instead of incumbent Dem Justice who won it.
the Senate's small-state ultra-bias is never more maddening than when one senator uses it to get benefits for her 740,000 constituents while openly acknowledging the bill she's supporting will harm the nation's 339 million other residents.
Still blown away by all the rapid growth on here.
👋 I’m a journalist who covers politics, criminal justice, and voting rights. I created the publication Bolts ago to have room for this work, & to map who has the power to do what. oh, plus sprinklings of drag race commentary & French politics.