Welcome to your Thursday open thread. How many of you have the day off of work tomorrow for Good Friday? I’m going to work, but I’m hoping the rest of you are off the roads tomorrow.
Wisconsin is still generating headlines. JoAnne Kloppenberg has formally filed for a recount in the Supreme Court race (she’s unlikely to prevail) and now Wisconsin Democrats are filing recall petitions for a fifth Republican state senator.
Dems will file a massive amount of signatures tomorrow to trigger a recall election against a fifth Wisconsin GOP state senator, I’m told.
Graeme Zielinski, the spokesman for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, confirms to me that Democrats will submit approximately 30,000 signatures for the recall of Alberta Darling — nearly 150 percent of the 20,343 required.
This is the fifth time Dems have collected far more signatures than necessary for a recall — all but ensuring that all five recall elections will actually happen.
This comes as there are signs that Republicans may be able to trigger two recall elections against Dems, though in one case Republicans have apparently only collected a couple of thousand more signatures than required, which isn’t much of a cushion. Republicans have less than a week until their deadline, and they still haven’t filed anything, though that appears ready to change tomorrow.
So now there’s a possibility of 7 recall elections and Democrats are still gathering signatures on three more Repiblican state senators so there is the possibility of more elections. This summer will be very interesting for election obsessives.
According to some new polls, same sex marriage is now supported by a majority of voters. It’s interesting how fast a wedge issue used by Republicans has turned against them.
The trendline — derived through regression smoothing — estimates that about 50 percent of Americans now support gay marriage and that 46 percent are opposed, with a small percentage of voters undecided. By contrast, at this time two years ago, the numbers were 42 percent in favor and 53 percent opposed, according to the same technique.
The change — about a 4 percentage-point shift in favor of gay marriage in each of the last two years — is about double the longer-term rate of progress for supporters of gay marriage, which has been between 1 and 2 percentage points per year.
I think it won’t be that long until we see full marriage equality but it will take longer than we want it to. Keep up the pressure on your elected officials and point them to these polls.