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San Diego City Councilman David Alvarez was elected to serve City Council District 8 in 2010. Since then he's served on a number of committees and ran for mayor in 2013. Alvarez announced recently that he intends to run for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors representing District 1 in 2020 when Greg Cox is termed out. Alvarez also made headlines recently when he announced he would become active in the San Diego Community College district. He will run for a board spot in the time he ter

The point of electing Centrist Independents is to empower the political center, to build a bridge between Republicans and Democrats, and to get things done. As I’ve written before in our Finding Common Ground series, there are a host of issues on which Centrist Independents could be the catalyst for productive legislation: infrastructure, health care reform, even gun policy. But there are also times when a handful of Centrist Independents might play a crucial role in stopping a legislative tra

Mass-Care is the name of the Bay State’s campaign to bring affordable health care to all Massachusetts residents under a single-payer system. Such a system could serve as the archetype for all of the US. However, even making strides at the state level can be difficult in the current political climate. Massachusetts lawmakers seem open to the idea. The State Senate recently voted 33-6 (with all Republican senators dissenting) to further explore the single-payer option after prolonged debate and

Level the Playing Field filed new documents in their case against the “nonpartisan” Commission on Presidential Debates. Among them is a brief that includes a blistering response to the FEC’s argument that the CPD -- as an organization -- doesn’t have a conflict of interest, even though the majority of its board is made up of high-powered Democratic and Republican insiders. Plaintiffs in Level the Playing Field, et. al. v. FEC say the federal commission has ignored a “mountain of evidence” again

Liberal democracy is in crisis, but there are reasons for hope. That is the message coming from several voices in the reform community, including CA FWD's Lenny Mendonca and Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. In a recent opinion piece, Diamond says that in order to fix democracy on the broader national and global scale, "we must first address toxic partisanship and polarization here at home." He writes: "The United States and its liberal democratic al

During a time of deep political dysfunction in the United States, it is easy to assume that American democracy has gone off the rails, perhaps for good. But if Americans can look past the slow-motion travesty unfolding in Washington, DC, they will find that it is still within their power to effect meaningful change. BERKELEY – It has been one year since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and America’s democratic institutions are clearly under strain. A mere 20% of American

Rasmussen published the results of a new survey Tuesday that showed a sizable percentage (around a third in each state) of likely voters saw the elections in New Jersey and Virginia as a referendum on Trump. The larger take way, however, is that voters are just sick and tired of the parties and their candidates on both sides of the aisle. Given the low turnout in both states, it appears most voters were sending a much bigger message than how they felt about the president: * Most voters are t

Shortly after the Second World War, a Republican legislator sought to temper criticism of a Democratic president. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Arthur Vandenberg declared that we should stop “partisan politics at the water’s edge.” Today, partisan warfare knows no bounds. Democrats and Republicans routinely rationalize placing their own interests ahead of the national interest. Their mutual, unceasing attempts to subvert the other party’s political fortunes are now subverting a co

The New Jersey primaries produced gubernatorial candidates that are speaking only to two ideological extremes. Politico reported Tuesday that in the 2017 governor's race in New Jersey, neither Democrat Phil Murphy nor Republican Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno appear to be reaching out to voters outside their party's base. "Together, in one of the first statewide races of the Trump era, Democrat Phil Murphy and Republican Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno are demolishing the conventional wisdom that centrists wi

With Election Day just a week away, New Yorkers are getting bombarded with millions of dollars worth of negative messaging about the constitutional convention. While I used my previous column to detail why voters should ignore the information being spread by the “vote no” coalition, I want to focus here on some of the positive outcomes that could result from holding a convention for the first time since 1967. For starters, I should say that the possibilities of a convention are truly endless.