Category: Election

>Editordude: We asked D2 candidate Nicole Crosby to send us a position paper and we’d publish it without edit (we also asked Richard Bailey the same) — but at this date, she has not. So, here is a lengthy statement from her campaign website:

Make San Diego More Affordable

Nicole’s vision is for stronger neighborhoods that keep longtime residents in and connected to the heart of our communities by focusing on projects that are community-centered, close to schools, work, recreational spaces, and other essential amenities.

Rein in the cost of living by focusing on projects that expand opportunity for home ownership and keep rents affordable.

Work with the San Diego Housing Commission to create programs that expand housing opportunities and subsidies for seniors and working families.
Programs that help support families and seniors access childcare, healthcare, and essential services needed to thrive in their neighborhoods.

Fix San Diego’s Potholes, Sewers, Sidewalks, and Roads
Our infrastructure in District 2 is in desperate need of repair. As your next Councilmember, she will work alongside our County and State partners to ensure execution of a one year, five year, and ten year roadmap that will deliver world class streets service and infrastructure to our communities. Nicole’s safe street priorities include:

A small group of Mayor Gloria loyalists have attacked Frank Gormlie –“Editordude” at the OB Rag, the Rag itself and Ocean Beach in a recently published book — as well as in online interviews.

Authors Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew grouped a series of interviews of local San Diegans into a book published in 2025, which included interviews with three individuals who all disparaged the Rag and Gormlie. They include Doug Porter who Gormlie lifted from obscurity after a 30-year hiatus from San Diego into becoming an early writer for the online Rag, and Ricardo Ochoa, a local attorney whom Gormlie has never met and vice versa.

This clique of Gloriaistas has supported and endorsed the mayor over these last six or more years, despite any evidence that he has been worthy of their support, and have opposed those who are critical of the mayor — like Gormlie and the Rag. While the Rag supported Gloria’s opponents, like Democrat Barbara Bry and Geneviéve Jones-Wright (probably the most left-wing mayoral candidate in San Diego’s history), Miller and others dumped on those with the Rag.

The most inflammatory interview by Miller and Mayhew was with Gregg Robinson, a retired college professor, who went on a rant which attacked Gormlie and the Rag in a red-baiting, terrorist- baiting, defamatory screed, filled with lies, half-truths and hypocrisies. (In a 9-page rant, nearly a third was used to attack Gormlie and the Rag.)

For one example where Robinson personally attacked Gormlie, in the interview published online, Robinson without any proof accuses Gormlie of selling drugs at West Point — which Gormlie attended for a couple of years. This was a gross lie, which could be potentially actionable as defamation.

The charges of of red-baiting and worse stem from a series of accusations against Gormlie’s early history as a community organizer in Ocean Beach. Robinson accuses Editordude of being Weather Underground, a militant anti-war group that evolved out of the movements in the sixties and early seventies. Robinson uses the group’s name three times in an obvious attempt at smearing Gormlie. Many in those former movements understand what the group was, but Robinson plays on people’s fears and trepidation with hopes that people will equate the group as a domestic terrorist organization and then, nullify the community work Gormlie did, including launching the original OB Rag newspaper in 1971. This, then, is clearly red-baiting and an example of terrorist-baiting.

The disparagement of Gormlie and the Rag comes at a dangerous time in modern American history, as the Trump administration is going after journalists, progressive media, and attacking progressive groups like the ACLU, Southern Poverty Legal Center and the National Lawyers Guild. Not only that, but centrists Democrats are currently red-baiting Democratic Socialists who have been winning primary elections.

What’s going on here?

Bailey says the city should ‘return to 2015 staffing levels’ by cutting 1,054 employees and the services they provide.

By Michael Zucchet Voice of San Diego

City Council candidate Richard Bailey continues to promise budget fantasyland to San Diegans.  He says the answer to San Diego’s persistent budget shortfalls includes no new fees, no increased taxes, and no service cuts whatsoever – in fact he claims that somehow service levels will magically improve – if we simply “return to 2015 staffing levels” in the city of San Diego.

Bailey moved to San Diego last year, changed his political party affiliation this February, and within days announced that he was running for City Council.  Since then, and again last week in an interview with NBC’s “Politically Speaking,” he has repeatedly claimed that if we just “return to 2015 staffing levels,” the city’s general fund budget will swing from what he says is a $100 million annual deficit to more than a $300 million surplus with “no need to cut any services.”

By Michael Angelo

On day one of the second Trump administration, a flurry of executive orders were signed reshaping immigration enforcement in the country by declaring a national emergency at the southern border, redirecting military funds for border enforcement, and restricting asylum access to anyone engaged in a so-called invasion of the United States.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was also directed to immediately and aggressively escalate operations and surge arrests by establishing high daily quotas which management would be held accountable for missing (increasing the likelihood of non-criminal arrests).

Just shy of 600 days later, we can see the direct and harrowing results of these actions. A recent ACLU research report titled Agents of Chaos and Cruelty documents the widespread violation of civil rights being committed by ICE agents during the second Trump administration’s first year. Across eight states, the report found more than 400 of the over 1,200 ICE incidents examined involved misconduct by agents. The report also emphasizes no one was off limits, and found dozens of instances of agents detaining U.S. citizens, asylumsees, and people with disabilities.

Agents were also reported to have “targeted, used force and intimidation against, and arrested” legal/ community observers, protesters, journalists, elected officials and their staff, and even members of the clergy. This cruelty has resulted in the killing of at least seven people during enforcement operations including 23 year-old Colombian immigrant and father Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, whose car was allegedly rammed by agents before he was fatally shot through the windshield a little over a month ago, and 37 year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti, who was shot multiple times and killed by ICE agents back in January.

At the end of May, the Rag published an article titled ICE Capades in San Diego, compiling actions taken by ICE in recent months to explore how the agency has been conducting itself in America’s Finest City. Here is an update on recent events and articles involving ICE in San Diego:

Chaotic scene unfolds around Federal Agents in City Heights

Change Begins With ME Overpass Alliance Marks One Year of Weekly Bridge Activism For 52 weeks,

Change Begins With ME volunteers have returned to the bridge with changing messages and one enduring call: Pay attention. Stay engaged. Vote.

On Monday, August 10, 2026, Change Begins With ME (CBWM) will celebrate the one-year anniversary of its Overpass Alliance, marking 52 weeks of sustained grassroots activism above San Diego freeways.

Since August 11, 2025, volunteers have gathered every week at the I-5 overpass at Clairemont Drive, holding large-scale banners and handmade signs addressing some of the most consequential issues facing our country and communities.  Each week, those messages are seen by thousands of passing drivers—and thousands of potential voters—giving CBWM’s Overpass Alliance a unique opportunity to reach people where they are.

The messages change from week to week, responding to current events and issues ranging from democracy and immigration to civil rights, government accountability and the rule of law. One of our messages was picked up by Congressman Mike Levin on Instagram, taking it viral with Meidas Touch and Occupy Democrats!

By Jacob Knutson / Democracy Docket / Aug. 6, 2026

For the past year and a half, President Donald Trump has been trying to take control of U.S. elections.

He largely hasn’t succeeded. The reason is simple: The U.S. Constitution gives the president no lawful authority over how states run elections. And courts have said as much while knocking down many of his efforts.

But with each loss, Trump has grown more desperate and his actions more brazen, raising the risk that he will try something even more lawless as he struggles to stave off a Republican loss in the midterms.

With just under three months until Americans head to the polls, election officials across the country have been meeting privately to discuss how Trump may try to undermine a fair vote and to game out their responses to such attempts.

While officials have largely been tight-lipped about what scenarios they are preparing for, it’s not difficult to identify — based on the statements and actions of Trump and his allies — several alarming ways the president could undermine Americans’ right to vote this year.

Restricting mail voting

Though he’s voted by mail several times, Trump has relentlessly attacked mail voting as a vehicle for election fraud, going back to his first run for president in 2016.

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” Trump declared on social media last year.

Council Candidate Went Down to Defeat Because He Was Out-of-Touch With District 2 Voters Despite Spending $80 Per Vote

By Paul Krueger / Special to OB Rag

Josh Coyne and his supporters raised more than $450,000 in his run for the San Diego District 2 City Council seat.

That money was not well spent.

Coyne finished a very distant third in the June primary, with just 5,622 votes. First place finisher Richard Bailey got 14,800 votes; Nicole Crosby was second with 14,325.

Bailey is a Republican-turned-Independent who raised and spent less than Coyne. He was also the target of $148,000 in negative ads sponsored by labor unions. But the former Coronado mayor still beat Coyne by more than 9,000 votes.

Democrat Crosby’s cost-per-vote total was even more impressive. She and her supporters raised $153,000 — one-third of Coyne’s war chest — but she beat him by almost 9,000 votes.

The starkest comparison is Coyne versus fourth-place finisher Mandy Havik, who raised just $45,000, or one-tenth of the money raised and spent on Coyne’s behalf.

Havlik is a long-time Democrat stalwart and beach-area activist who campaigned on limiting ADU and highrise development and empowering neighborhood planning groups. She captured 4,750 votes, at about $10 per vote, compared to Coyne’s $80 per vote.

By Paul Krueger

July has slipped away, and with it, the best chance we had to force City Hall to reopen the 13 Mission Bay restrooms closed in pursuit of  so-called “fiscal responsibility.”

We now have little more than a month until the traditional end of summer to find a solution to this civic embarrassment. And I’m not optimistic.

The city council is on vacation until mid-August, so we can’t organize a protest outside city hall and try to shame council members during non-agenda public comment for their lack of unified response to this actual threat to public health.

Mayor Todd Gloria is only seen in public at pre-scripted ceremonies where he cuts ribbons and fills potholes. So there’s no opportunity to confront him about his false narrative that City Hall can’t spare the $550,000 needed to reopen the restroom doors.

And the council member who should be speaking loudest about the need to protect public health has been regrettably – though predictably — silent on the issue.

Jen Campbell, whose District 2 includes Mission Bay, is a family physician. She knows public health is at risk when people can’t find a restroom.

New CNN Poll Reflecting Changing Winds of Younger Dems

By Edward Wu /  CNN / July 30, 2026

About a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as democratic socialists, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

They’re some of the party’s staunchest supporters, but many are also raring for a party overhaul at a time when democratic socialists are seeing new momentum at the polls.

Building on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo last year, candidates describing themselves as democratic socialists have secured the Democratic nomination in several US House races around the country, including defeats of incumbent Reps. Adriano Espaillat in New York and Diana DeGette in Colorado.

Primaries over the next few weeks will test whether the trend can expand beyond Democratic strongholds – with recent polling on the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin finding democratic socialist Francesca Hong leading the field in that critical battleground state.

by Ernie McCray

It’s great
that we continue
to chant and sing
“No Kings”
and constantly scream
at ICE
and other such things
but now
it’s time to
take-to-the streets
and demand
the termination of Donald J’s presidency
before he makes our democracy
look like a ship
sinking in a turbulent sea,
and we should do so
for any number of reasons
that we could list randomly,

Ongoing

Every Saturday at 10:30 am. San Diego Climate Mobilization Coalition Meetings.  August 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th. Keep up to date on climate issues and Climate Action events. To register email Jon Findley at jon@climatemobsd.org.  More info: https://www.facebook.com/SDClimateMobilization/

Every Saturday 10 am – 12 pm Peace Vigil for Palestine: Advocate for Peace and Justice in Gaza and Everywhere Join CODEPINK SD, San Diego Veterans for Peace, and Palestine Pals every Saturday at 10:00 am at Ocean Beach Gateway Plaza, on the corner of Sunset Cliffs Blvd. and W. Point Loma Blvd.  Wear pink and bring a peace-related poster if you have one!  Contact: Nathanael sandiego@codepink.org  More info:  https://www.instagram.com/codepinksd/

The San Diego River Park Foundation has volunteer opportunities in Ocean Beach: San Diego River Mouth Habitat Restoration on August 11th. For other volunteer opportunities go to https://sandiegoriver.org/

Indivisible is a grassroots movement of thousands of local Indivisible groups with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda. For places, dates and details go to: https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/  Also check out their Change Begins with me calendar: https://changebeginswithmesite.wordpress.com/events/

Every Sunday 1:30 pm – 3:15 pm Otay Mesa Vigil Otay Mesa Detention Center 7488 Calzada de la Fuente San Diego 92154

District 4

On election night during the June 2 California Primary, incumbent Henry Foster and challenger Martha Abraham secured the top two spots and will face off in November.

On that fateful night, Abraham led Foster by 249 votes when final election night totals were posted in the early morning hours of June 3.