Tina Peters was a county clerk in western Colorado who was convicted of tampering with voting machines, as she tried to show that Trump had won the election. Although she certified that the election was fair, she allowed an unauthorized person to access Mesa County’s voting machines and copy their hard drives. In her conservative county, she was sentenced to nine years in prison. President Trump was furious that one of his avid supporters was in prison, and he pressured Democratic Governor Jared Polis to commute her sentence. In mid-May, Polis ordered Peters’ release, and she was freed on June 1.

Many Democrats were appalled that Polis would set free a prominent and unrepentant election denier.

Two members of the Governor’s clemency board went public in opposing his decision. Polis fired them.

The New York Times reported:

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado on Wednesday fired two members of his clemency board after they spoke out against his decision to commute the prison sentence of the election denier Tina Peters.

The board members, Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi, had objected to Mr. Polis’s decision in May to release Ms. Peters from prison after pressure from President Trump.

After the commutation, Ms. Proff and Ms. Taslimi revealed that the board — appointed by Mr. Polis — had twice voted unanimously to reject Ms. Peters’s application for a shortened sentence. Mr. Polis, a Democrat, has the final decision, and overruled the board. 

The board normally operates in secret, and does not disclose the pardon and commutation recommendations it makes to the governor. Ms. Proff and Ms. Taslimi said they had been compelled to pierce that veil of secrecy in Ms. Peters’s case.

On Wednesday, they said they had paid the price. They received a letter from the governor saying they were being dismissed for violating the board’s confidentiality standards.

“You breached the required duty of confidentiality by publicly divulging board members’ votes,” Mr. Polis wrote to each of the women, who shared the letters with The New York Times.

Ms. Peters, a former county clerk in conservative western Colorado, had been sentenced to nine years in prison after being convicted in 2024 in a plot to tamper with voting machines under her control in an attempt to show that the 2020 election had been rigged against Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump spent months attacking Mr. Polis and demanding that he free Ms. Peters, but Mr. Polis has said that the president’s harangues played no part in his commutation decision.

On Wednesday, Ms. Proff and Ms. Taslimi said they had known that they might be removed. The women, who are former public defenders now working as lawyers in Denver, said the public had a right to know how the governor’s clemency board had grappled with one of the most consequential cases to ever cross its desk. 

Still, they said they were disappointed in Mr. Polis. 

The dissenters: Azra Taslimi and Hannah Seigel Proff 

“He’s saying the public doesn’t have the right to know his own advisory board told him no — twice,” Ms. Taslimi said. “He’s not protecting a process. He’s protecting himself from scrutiny.”

Ms. Peters has hardly stayed in the shadows since getting paroled. She has appeared on right-wing podcasts and a conservative “Freedom Fest” event in Colorado, where she continued to promote election conspiracies. This week, she met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

Ross Wiener worked for Education Trust, a DC-based advocacy group that claimed to support low-income children of color. Funded by the Gates Foundation, among others, Education Trust enthusiastically defended No Child Left Behind and standardized testing as ways to improve the lot of the neediest students.

When NCLB was reauthorized in 2015, critics of standardized testing hoped that Congress would remove the testing mandate (every child in grades 3-8 was tested every year, and their schools and teachers were held accountable). Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said that Senate Republicans were open to changing the mandate.

Democrats, however, defended the most punitive elements of the testing regime, responding to the Obama administration and Education Trust, which continued to believe that high-stakes testing helped the poorest kids. The testing remained in the new Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.

Now we know that NCLB did not “leave no child behind.” Many children were left behind by tests that invariably produced results that favored the kids from the most advantaged homes. The very nature of the normed tests guaranteed that half the students would rank below the norm and e patience the stigma of failure.

And we also know by now that not every student succeeds in the era of ESSA.

Now comes a remarkable article by Ross Wiener, high-level staff at Education Trust, recanting his views. His article appeared in The New York Times. This is a gift article.

He wrote:

New data from Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project confirms what close observers already knew: America’s test scores are slipping. The pandemic worsened the decline, but the slide began years before. In one-third of school districts, students are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015.

The new data is emboldening calls to restore something like the No Child Left Behind Act, the stringent, test-based accountability policy that defined American education from 2002 to 2015 and imposed penalties on schools whose students did not meet proficiency requirements on state standardized tests. The Atlantic captured that impulse in a 2025 podcast episode titled “Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing.” In it, Margaret Spellings, a secretary of education under President George W. Bush and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, argues we need to restore “the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment.” Rahm Emanuel, exploring a 2028 presidential run, said in April that Democrats have abandoned standards and accountability and must return to them.

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now.

From 2002 to 2009, I was the policy director for the Education Trust, one of the most influential education reform organizations in the country. I testified before Congress, built coalitions for standards-based reform, and published analysis to advance No Child Left Behind, genuinely believing it was the path to public schools that better served low-income students and students of color. The early results seemed to vindicate us: Test scores rose, especially in elementary math among Hispanic and Black students, though much less in middle school, and never much in reading.

But there was a question I couldn’t shake: Were the outcomes we were holding schools accountable for the ones that actually determined whether a young person flourished? I still remember when I first encountered research showing that high school G.P.A. predicted college graduation better than standardized test scores. I went to my boss’s office to discuss it, expecting her to help me push back, but she confirmed it was true, and always had been. If so, I recall thinking, why are we fighting so hard for test scores to be the arbiter of quality education?

Years later, research from the University of Chicago Consortium would show that schools’ effect on students’ social well-being and work habits predicted academic gains about as well as test performance did, and was more predictive than test scores for students’ graduating from high school, enrolling in college, and staying out of the criminal justice system.

Accountability policy gave unprecedented authority to the idea that standardized test performance is the most important outcome schools produce and made it the organizing principle of American schooling. What could be easily tested gained importance. What could not — the practical, civic, relational and developmental — was pushed to the margins.

Over time, I became convinced that, with the best of intentions, I and many others in the education reform community had transferred our moral commitment to children over to the standardized tests. We had done this earnestly, not cynically, but we still did damage.

In 2023, 40 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. One in five had seriously considered suicide; nearly one in 10 had attempted it. Research from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins found that 40 percent of Gen Z believes political violence can be justified, compared with 11 percent of baby boomers. Too many students experience school as an obligation with few opportunities for agency or meaning; recent survey data indicates that large shares of students find school boring and irrelevant and are struggling with engagement in the classroom. The academic crisis and the human crisis are not entirely separate phenomena.

The strategies that produced the early gains of the No Child Left Behind era depended on a social contract: comply with adult-designed systems, defer questions of meaning and purpose, and the payoff will come. Earlier generations may have endured school that felt boring or disconnected because they trusted that adults and institutions knew better. Many young people today do not share that trust, and they are not going to push aside their own questions of meaning and purpose on the assurance that compliance will eventually be rewarded.

You cannot accountability-pressure your way to better educational outcomes when chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, misbehavior is common, students are disengaged and skeptical that school prepares them for the lives they want to lead, and teachers feel not just tired but stripped of the professional trust that makes the work meaningful.

The reality has changed. Too much of the old reform playbook has not.

Four years ago, the nonpartisan think tank Populace, which conducts opinion research that seeks to uncover what Americans actually believe, not what they say for social approval, asked adults to rank their K-12 priorities. Practical skills ranked first. Critical thinking ranked second. Demonstrating good character ranked third. Preparing for college was 47th on the list. Standardized test performance was 49th.

Meanwhile, young people are placing more emphasis on purpose, relationships and contribution than on older markers of status. For a generation, the reform coalition took its validation from economists and accountability metrics, while treating parents, students and communities as mere functionaries rather than partners in a shared civic enterprise.

Taking their priorities seriously would mean broadening what we expect from the classroom. Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.

Federal policy has an essential role to play in public education: protecting civil rights, funding quality data and research, and encouraging promising practices to spread. But the formative mission cannot be mandated by Washington. Belonging, the foundation of both learning and civic commitment, is relational and starts local; it cannot be standardized or scaled, but must be cultivated by schools that are responsive to the communities they serve.

In 2010, at Springfield Renaissance School, a public school in Springfield, Mass., serving mostly low-income students of color, ninth graders were trained by city engineers to conduct energy audits of school buildings. They collected data, ran cost-benefit analyses and produced a report recommending how the city could lower its carbon footprint and reduce energy costs. The mayor invested in their plan; the city began recouping its investment within a year. Organizations like EL Education, High Tech High and Big Picture Learning have built whole school models around a similar approach: rigorous academic learning embedded in real problems, with real audiences and real stakes.

Public schools educate nearly nine in 10 American children, in cities, towns and rural hamlets across the full range of our diversity and divisions. The era of national, test-based education policy helped turn schools into both targets and drivers of polarization. Renewing public education requires balancing firm commitments to excellence and fairness for every child with the recognition that public schools, at their best, are civic institutions that communities recognize as their own.

Peter Greene was a teacher for 39 years. Since he retired, he has become the most prolific blogger ever, ever, ever, patiently exposing how things work and why the current privatization movement can’t replace public schools. Privatization is promoted by the rich under the guise of helping the poor, but it always ends up benfitting the haves and leaving the poor even worse off.

Privatization advocates are always stuck with the fact that the founders of public education were never on their side. Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and Catherine Beecher we re well aware that some wealthy families sent their children to private schools and would continue to do so, but they saw the public school as a hallmark of a democratic society, one in which the banker’s son learned alongside the laborer’s son.

So the privatizers can’t claim that they are returning to the original goals of the founders. In fact, they are justifying the inequities that the founders sought to overcome.

In a recent post, Greene reviewed the fundamental problem with school choice.

He writes:

There has always been an obstacle to public education in this country. It’s real, its effects are punishing and far-reaching, and school choice doesn’t provide the slightest solution.
Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Jessica Poiner is recycling an old reformster falsehood that is baloney wrapped around a kernel of truth. “Traditional public schools aren’t open to everyone,” she declares. The “So there!” is mostly silent.

Poiner spins the pro-public ed statement into a “falsehood” by interpreting it as “All traditional public schools are open to all students,” and she is absolutely correct that such a statement is absolutely false. Her assertion, however, doesn’t really advance the argument because nobody has ever tried to make that argument.

Poiner goes on to make the argument that between different schools and school districts we find considerable difference in quality and resources, and that access to the “better” schools is inequitable because of the American system ties school attendance to buying a house. Economic inequity is bakes into the US public education system; doubly so in areas where redlining (historically explicit or currently implicit). Poiner appears to be super-pissed that Ohio’s voucher program, EdChoice, has been successfully challenged in court by public school districts, suggesting that districts hypocritically trap families so that adults can enjoy the benefits of the public system; students can’t just go to the better schools because their parents didn’t buy a house in the right place.

I don’t know of anyone who denies that some schools are better supported than others (though there’s a whole discussion to be had about how we “know” that East Egg schools are better than West Egg). This points us to one of the most fundamental, long-standing problems of education– how are we going to provide a good (enough) education for Those People’s Children?
There have been a variety of solutions on the table:
1) Guarantee that every single child, no matter where they live, falls within a school district that must provide that child with an education. The use a system of state and federal taxation to even out the disparities between local tax bases.
2) Attach to every family some money and let them search out a school that they’d like to attend, public, private or charter.
3) Do nothing. Let people sort it out on their own. And maybe cut everyone’s school taxes.
Well, 3 is not an actual solution, but it’s the MAGA way. Cut all government support for health care, food and nutrition, and education. Some people will end up on the bottom– sick or ignorant or even dead– but that’s just nature’s way of separating the meritorious from the undeserving, and we should not be interfering with God’s Plan. But we need to acknowledge 3 because it is not only current federal policy, but it can also easily infect solutions 1 and 2.
The trouble with 1 and 2 is that they share a critical problem– both of them require taxpayers with money to help pay the education freight for families with much less money. When that doesn’t happen in the public system, the result is schools without enough resources to fully serve their students. When that doesn’t happen in a choice system, students just don’t get a choice. Which is really the choice supporters’ complaint. After all, we have always had school choice; the choice movement has not been about creating choice, but about getting tax dollars to subsidize it. Well, some of it. For some students.
The obstacles to school choice are not policy or bureaucrats or teachers unions or entrenched adult interests. The main obstacles have always been high cost and discriminatory policies.
Poiner puts it this way:

The bottom line is this: If you’re rich enough to buy or rent a home in a high-performing district, your kid gets to go to an excellent school. The world is your oyster. If, however, you can’t afford to pay your way into one of these districts, then most—if not all—high-performing public schools are closed to you.

She’s not wrong. My problem is that modern taxpayer-funded school choice programs don’t really change that at all. Your voucher dollars aren’t enough to get you into East Egg Academy. Worse, East Egg can reject you for any reason. The public school system promise is that wherever you are, there is a public school that must provide for your education; wherever you live, there is no charter or private school that has to provide for your education.
I posted that last bit on the dead bird app, and Derrell Bradford replied with an alternative reformster view.

Wherever you live there is a public school with the power of compulsory attendance and the ability to tax based on your inability to leave or choose no matter how near or far you are from it.

Bradford leads choice advocacy group 50CAN and works with pretty much every other pro-choice group out there, and he’s about the most civil reformster out there (sort of the anti-DeAngelis). And here he pretty much encapsulates the point of view that views a local public school as a “have to” instead of a “get to,” an infringement on rights rather than a means of exercising them. On this, we disagree.

What I see as a commonality between the two views is the need for more resources. I’ve seen one true school choice program in the country, in tiny Croyden, NH, where the deal was that, lacking a local high school, the district would pay full tuition to any school of a student’s choice.

But I only learned about the program because the local Libertarians were trying to chop its budget.

A choice program that fulfilled the promise of an good education for every child, would A) cost a bunch of money, B) require charter and private schools to stop discriminating against students they wanted to reject and C) require useful measures of “good education.” A public school program that fulfilled its promise would take whatever steps necessary to make sure that every school in every was providing a good job, which would A) cost a bunch of money and B) require useful measures of “good education.”

Both visions are up against the same challenge– people whose approach to education is some version of, “Yeah, education is important, but can’t we do it for a lot less?” And if you let them keep talking, some version of, “I don’t mind educating my own kid, and I welcome government help to do that, but I don’t want to pay taxes to make a nice school for Those Peoples’ Children.” Also, a suggestion that compulsory education is a bad thing.

It has never not been an issue, going back to the days when many folks just didn’t need a fancy education for anything (in 1950, 34.3% of Americans over age 25 had a high school diploma) all the way through to the days when Brown v. Board of Education spurred white taxpayers to bitch and moan about the Communist plan to take their money to educate Those Peoples’ Children all the way up through recent history when states argued that students on the McDonald’s track don’t need courses like algebra. As a culture, we wave vaguely in the direction of the importance of education, but we’d rather not pay for it for Other People (see also: health care, food, families, and children).
There are many many more issues to wrestle with in the larger education debates, but I’m trying to focus on just one point. Economic inequity is manifest in our education system.

Modern choice programs, welded to free market ideology, do not offer a real solution to that inequity, and in many ways promise to make it worse.

Tulsi Gabbard recently resigned as director of national intelligence, in charge of nearly a score of intelligence agencies. At her co formation hearing, she answered questions about her ties to a cult leader, and she responded that she was unfairly tarnished because of her Hindu faith. She was duly confirmed.

Jon Swaine of The Washington Post remained curious about her ties to a man of mystery in Hawaii named Chris Butler. Butler was the leader of a breakaway Hare Krishna group, called the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF). Gabbard’s parents had senior posts in Butler’s group.

Swaine interviewed former members of Butler’s group, who told him that “Butler controlled his followers’ major life decisions and demanded total obedience and secrecy.”

In November 2025, Swaine spoke to one of Gabbard’s campaign workers, Rebecca Saltzburg, who assured him that Tulsi took instructions from no one.

Nine months later, Saltzburg called him to say she wanted to talk. She had had a falling-out with SIF, and she decided to talk to Swaine.

She turned over hundreds of emails between Gabbard and someone at SIF who gave her instructions while she was in Congress.

Their content was extraordinary.

Dozens of attached memos appeared to document directives and advice for Gabbard from her time in Congress. Some contained instructions on what legislation she should propose, which policies she should embrace and how she should conduct herself on television. They had an air of authority. A memo about a proposal to partition war-torn Iraq into three states quoted an unnamed person as saying it was “time for TG to come up with this idea…”

Swaine asked Saltzburg about the identity of the person who was telling Gabbard what to say and which policies to support.

When I asked Saltzburg about this, she seemed amused. It was Butler, of course, she said. No one else could speak to Gabbard like that, she added. Saltzburg said the memos were unattributed precisely to mask Butler’s identity if they ever became public.

Saltzburg eventually shared more than 25,000 emails and files to Swaine, showing the relationship between Gabbard and SIF.

A number of emails to Gabbard gave her instructions that she followed precisely.

An Oct. 12, 2015, memo labeled “CNN Wolf Blitzer Talking points (Final)” contained this language about reports that she had been asked by Democratic leadership not to attend a presidential debate: “It’s not a ‘boohoo, I don’t get to go to the party’ situation, Wolf.” I dug up the clip of her appearance that day and found that she had used the line almost verbatim: “The issue here is not about me saying boo-hoo, I’m going to miss the party.”

The limited remarks attributed to Gabbard in the memos appeared to show her enthusiastically embracing the guidance. “TG: That’s perfect, that line right there,” said one transcript labeled “Iraq notes — call.” A line attributed to “TG” in another transcript said, “That’s a great way to put it.”

Here’s another example of Tulsi Gabbard complying with instructions from SIF:

A January 2015 memo documented an unnamed adviser’s proposal to attack John F. Kerry, then secretary of state, for saying violent activity by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda was rooted not in Islam but in “alienation, poverty, thrill seeking and other factors.” If that were true, the adviser said sarcastically, the way to deal with terrorists would be to “give them a trophy, a big hug, increase their self-esteem, give them a good paying job.”

In a Fox News interview later that day, Gabbard repeated the Kerry quote and gave a similar mocking punch line. “If that’s really the cause, then the solution would be give them a trophy, give them a hug, give them a good-paying job,” she said…

The time frame of documents we reviewed meant they could not show whether Gabbard continued receiving guidance after she left Congress and eventually joined the Trump administration. But I found echoes of years-old guidance in her more recent remarks. One phrase in particular stood out.

In 2014, Hoen emailed Gabbard a statement for posting online that said Gabbard made every decision through the prism of “the safety, security, and freedom of the American people.” She repeated that phrase in the first paragraph of her 2024 memoir, and after she was nominated by Trump, Gabbard made it her mantra, using it in her Senate confirmation hearing, her inaugural statement as DNI, her presentation of this year’s annual threat assessment and many other occasions.

On May 20, having received no answers from Gabbard to my questions for two months, I emailed her, her press secretary and her chief of staff. I let them know we planned to proceed with a story about her association with Butler. I again invited Gabbard to address my questions.

Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard — whose departure had been rumored for months — would be leaving the position of DNI this month because her husband had been diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. Some commentators observed that she still had a promising political future, maybe even more so because she was not aligned with Trump on the Iran war and other unpopular policies.

Jeff Bezos has done his best to defang the great newspaper he bought. He’s done his best to avoid alienating Trump.

But the newspaper still has some great and fearless reporters.

Cait Conley is a highly decorated military veteran running for Congress in New York’s District 17. This district covers parts of Westchester County and Rockland County, including Mt. Kisco and Ossining.

The primary election is tomorrow.

Republicans want to keep incumbent Mike Lawler in office. Trump visited the district to help Lawler. Republicans even created a phony political group–“Progressive Champions PAC”–to fund attack ads against Cait Conley.

Simon Rosenberg recently interviewed Conley:

Simon Rosenberg:
Welcome everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with another great event today. Joining me is Cait Conley who’s running in NY-17, working to flip one of the most flippable seats in the country. Cait, welcome. Thanks for being with us today.

Cait Conley:
Are you kidding me, Simon… thank you for having me and thank you for highlighting this race and the importance of this race for the country.

Simon Rosenberg:
Well, listen, we’re going to get to the specifics of the primary in a second, but just tell us your story. Let’s start by talking about, you know, your’e a fourth generation member of your community. You’ve got a pretty storied military record. Walk us through the story and why you decided to run for Congress.

Cait Conley:
Yeah, so, very proud come from blue collar roots that go back here in the district for generations. To my great grandfather and grandfather who worked in the Montrose Brickyard to my dad, born and raised in southern Dutchess County as a construction worker. To my mom, born in Peekskill, who worked for the U.S. Postal Service for 48 years, serving communities up and down the Hudson Valley. And so it is really the values that my family and my community instilled in me — of service and standing up for what’s right, and doing the work that led me to pursue this path of public service.

I was a junior in high school when the terror attacks on 9/11 happened and our community got hit really hard. And so it was that — that inspired me to go off to West Point… that and Demi Moore and G.I. Jane, the 1997 classic… but went off, graduated the top of my class, and then went off and served 16 years as an active duty Army Officer. I deployed overseas six times. I had the privilege of a lifetime leading America’s sons and daughters in defense of this nation… was one of the first women in special ops leadership.
And then [in] my last two years in the Army, I was actually at the White House. I served as a Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff — the first two years of Biden and then went off and served as a senior executive at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency where we work to ensure the nation’s critical infrastructure security, including election security. I led the election security mission for 2024, pushed back on Trump’s lies that 2020 was rigged or stolen.

And Simon, so much of why I’m doing this today is because after everything I’ve seen and done, to truly believe that the greatest threat to America and to our future is coming from within our own borders right now, you know, I’m watching the country that I was willing to die for, that I’ve lost countless friends defending, becoming something I barely recognize. And Mike Lawler’s been complicit in that.

Simon Rosenberg:
Well, big time, actually. I mean who I think Mike Lawler was the first incumbent that Trump did a campaign event for, just in the last few months. That’s how important Mike Lawler is to Donald Trump — that he was the first person that he did in a campaign event for in this reelection period. So this is a deep ally and friend of Trump’s in one of these districts that we simply have to flip if we’re going to regain the House.
I’m having you on today because something’s happened in the race. I mean, we traditionally don’t get involved in primaries unless there are sort of special circumstances. And what’s happened across the country in recent months is Republicans have decided that they’re going to try to pick our candidates and not let the voters or the party pick our candidates. They’ve decided that they don’t want you to be the nominee, even though you’re ahead in the polls. They’re now running ads against you to sort of degrade you and take you down. Can you talk a little bit about what’s happened, and why all of a sudden it’s important that Democrats rally behind you?

Cait Conley:
Simon, right now, Mike Lawler and MAGA Republicans are so scared to have Mike Lawler face me in November because they know I will beat him… that they stood up a super PAC to run $1.5 million in attack ads against me, lying about my service and record to try to influence and direct the outcome of this Democratic primary. I have to tell you, if they think they’re going to intimidate me, they have no idea who they are messing with. And if they think they’re going to change the hearts and minds of voters here in New York 17, They are grossly underestimating them.
Because voters here are going to see through it. And I will tell you, though, them doing this is a reflection of how much the Republicans know I will beat Mike Lawler in November. They are so desperate to try to avoid that, they’re pouring everything they have to try to stop me here in the primary. But we’re not going to let them succeed.

Simon Rosenberg:
And in fact, a poll came out yesterday. It showed you up by 10 points in the primary. And I want to just be as clear as I possibly can about this to the audience here.

Republicans would only spend money against a candidate like Cait, like they’ve been doing in other places around the country, if their research assessed that Cait would be beating, would beat Mike Lawler and would be much more likely to beat Mike Lawler. They’re not doing this because they’re bored or they have tons of money flowing around. They’re doing this because they’re scared of her and they don’t want to run against her in November. So this is a confirmation that she is the strongest candidate, which is why we’re rallying for her today and asking the Hopium community in an emergency fundraising drive that we’re kicking off this afternoon to support her to make sure that she prevails in this primary, which is next week, right? Six days away.

Cait Conley:
Simon, I am so grateful because I will tell you right now, right, with the 1.5 million dollar infusion and attack ads in this final week they are out spending me and outreaching voters almost two to one. And so with that, now we’ve got to do as much as we can to tell voters the facts and to make sure that voters are making informed decisions, not being swayed by the political dirty tricks that MAGA is trying to throw at them. This is a fight I know I can win, but I can’t win it alone. And so the help, Simon, is so appreciated because, as you can imagine, we plan for a lot of things in this campaign, but a $1.5 million attack campaign by MAGA Republicans was not one of them… And what we’re being told is that is the floor, not the ceiling. So that number could keep going up and up…
We’re not backing down. We’re working hard to reach voters. But I will say defending democracy is a team sport and asking for folks’ help, putting the jersey on, getting out in the field with me because as you said, the voters of New York 17 and Democrats should know the truth and make their decisions based on that. Republicans shouldn’t get to pick what Democrat they face in November and that’s what they’re trying to do.

Simon Rosenberg:
I will say, you know, they’ve spent more than 1.5 million in some of these other races. They spent 1.7 million against Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania… in the millions down in Texas. So, I think you’re right. I mean, this is a sign of their desperation right… they know in the House the national tide is moving against them, and they’re now trying to pick candidates in these key late primaries that they’re much more likely to beat.
And so, you know, Cait, it’s an affirmation for you. Even though you’re a first time candidate, of the strength of your candidacy. And I want to ask one last thing before you go… I can’t keep you too long… you’re six days away from your election. You’ve got to be out with voters. How have you found the retail part of this? I mean, you’d been a soldier and a warrior for our country, you’d served in government, you know, going out and just being with people is sort of a new thing. I mean, how is that part of the campaign been for you?

Cait Conley:
Simon, in so many ways it’s very similar to leading soldiers. Right, as an Army Officer, your job is to go out and to tackle problems, remove obstacles so that your team, your unit can achieve the mission, can be successful. I think it’s a similar mission and responsibility as an elected official. You’re still a public servant. You’re there to serve. And with that, your job is to go out there, and government’s job is to solve problems. And what I’ve felt over the last year plus on the campaign trail is hope. What people are craving is hope that America’s best days are still ahead of us and that America can work for working people. And to have leaders that they can believe in again, where the dysfunction can end and we can get back to doing the necessary work to solve people’s problems. And so in that way, it really is the same.

It’s serving this country. It’s serving our community. It’s working hard to make sure America’s best days are still ahead of us.