The Atlantic Current, Ep. 46: Byelection Madness
The pod gives instant analysis of the contests in Dublin Central and Galway West
Vince and Tull wrap up the key by-elections in Galway West and Dublin Central. The takeaways in each district, what they mean for two of the major parties (and their leaders), and where Ireland goes from here.
Episode Links:
2018 Disinformation On Election Day
(A quick note: these notes will be quite short, as we raced to get the pod up as close to the end of the results as possible. We’ll have more on elections as a whole later this summer and will use that opportunity to give more color on some of the broader issues across the two countries.)
As Vince noted, 2018 saw some strange disinformation campaigns around the mid-term elections for the U.S. Congress that year. The Brennan Center for Justice compiled some of the cases that stood out, including the posts Vince highlighted in the pod.
Tom Barrett
As noted, in the 2024 election, the campaign of Republican Congressional candidate Tom Barrett printed an ad in a Black-owned newspaper in Lansing, Michigan, giving the wrong election date. Opponents called for an investigation. For its part, the Barrett campaign claimed the ad — unusual for Republican candidates, which as Vince noted generally garnered infinitesimal vote shares among African-American voters in Michigan cities — was part of a broader strategy to reach out to the entire electorate.
In fairness to Barrett, that strategy was echoed by Donald Trump at the top of its ticket. Trump, for instance, held a rally in the heavily Democratic Bronx borough of New York City. And whether the strategy was a legitimate explanation or not, it was successful: Barrett won election and is currently in the House of Representatives.
Episode 37 On E-Voting In Ireland
For newer readers/listeners, in Episode 37 we executed one of our trademark detours into electronic voting in Ireland. The show notes there feature the story of how it went wrong, along with Tull’s quote from the opening of this episode on the ‘blood sport’ of pen-and-paper PR-STV system:
Tull’s Money Quotes
On the high expectations for Micheál Martin:
I seen people moaning and giving out on social media that that they need to change their leader. You know, de Valera could come back and they still wouldn’t make abloody difference, you know? They could clone de Valera, have him reconstituted, have him re-elected and there’s no way Fianna Fáil will ever get back to their glorious days of taking forty percent of the electorate.
Super analysis of both by-elections
By all accounts it was good sport watching the counts!