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Marijuana legalization won out big time on election day. California, Massachusetts, and Nevada legalized recreational weed, and Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota voted to legalize medical marijuana. Some form of pot use is now legal in the majority of U.S. states, but what will marijuana legalization efforts look like under a Trump presidency?
Source: Marijuana Policy Project
Voters approved recreational marijuana in 4 states on November 8 – California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada. Further, an additional 4 other states passed medical marijuana provisions: Florida, Arkansas, North Dakota, and Montana, with Montana loosening restrictions on an existing law. In fact, election day was the biggest day for marijuana reform since 2012, when voters approved it for recreational use in Colorado and Washington. [1] [2]
This morning at 10:30 I walked down the hill to my polling station and there was a line, first I ever saw there, but that was more because of an illiterate poll worker who was non-functional than because of voter enthusiasm per se. The whole process from arming my home alarm to disarming it took 19 minutes-- and that was a tough walk back up in the hill in the hot sun.
When Blue America polled issues that would motivate suburban voters to support our progressive candidates around the country, we found gun safety high on every list in every single district. Based on that, two of our mobile billboards, on in NV-04 (North Las Vegas) and one in NY-02 (Long Island's South Shore), are all about gun safety. The DCCC has talked a good game on this but DCCC head Ben Ray Lujan is a quiet backer of gun groups and is one of the few Democrats in the House still taking bribes from gun manufacturers and their lobbyists.
Today at 10 AM our first mobile billboard truck rolled down the road; well actually last night it drove into NH-01 so I guess that counts too. I mean, people saw it as the driver made his way to Nashua. We have four of them starting this week, spread out around the country. And the one we deployed for Carol Shea-Porter officially started in Nashua, New Hampshire this morning.
Trump didn't enjoy the skit. The thin-skinned authoritarian wasn't amused. Early Sunday morning he tweeted what amounted to a classic SNL advertisement that belongs on the sides of buses and that they would be crazy to not use:Virginia has produced more presidents than any other state-- George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor and Woodrow Wilson.
Drought status in the U.S. as of 2015. Note the color-coded legend in the lower-right portion of the graphic (source; click to enlarge) by Gaius PubliusI've written in the past about two of the most climate-vulnerable regions of the U.S., Florida and the American Southwest.
