Oakland mayor losing recall vote after A’s departure, if anyone still cares

I would love to report here on what the results of the U.S. presidential and congressional elections will mean for stadium and arena subsidies — and they are undoubtedly going to mean a lot, for a whole hell of a lot of things — but that’s going to have to wait until I can do a deeper analysis of the fine print of Project 2025. (And see what the likelihood is of even half its proposed economic policy changes happening, especially if the second Trump Administration gets bogged down in figuring out how to detain and deport 13 million people.) In the meantime, there looks to be one likely stadium-related outcome of the just-completed vote:

Early election results Tuesday evening showed 65% of voters favoring the recall of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, the labor-backed progressive who has struggled to build trust around the city during the first two years of her term…

The early returns indicated that Thao, who was elected in 2022 to a four-year term, was on her way to being removed from office, with voters supporting her recall by nearly a two-to-one margin — the culmination of an expensive recall effort that has focused primarily on Oakland’s crime woes.

Thao’s recall doubles the number of U.S. mayors who have seen sports teams leave their cities and then been removed from office during the next vote, to two. (Former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels appreciates finally having some company.) While the A’s moving to Sacramento and thence to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ was certainly a factor in the recall, most of the vote was drummed up by a recall campaign funded by a hedge fund billionaire who doesn’t even live in Oakland and inflamed by a moral panic about street crime; if Nickels’ epitaph will be “didn’t shovel the snow,” Thao’s will likely be “didn’t save In-N-Out Burger.”

Still! The A’s leaving clearly didn’t help Thao: It’s one of the top four accusations leveled against her on the recall’s campaign site. While it’s still more likely for elected officials to be removed from office for approving sports subsidies than opposing them — George Petak, Tim Lee, Carlos Alvarez, and several others have entered the chat — they both have their risks, as does pissing off the local coal baron, apparently.

More on this breaking story as news develops. Meantime, I gotta go read me some Heritage Foundation plans for world domination — banning unions for government workers and requiring states to report to the federal government who’s having abortions, you say? Cool, cool.

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Friday roundup: Deadspin est mort, vive Deadspin (also baseball may be dead again, film at 11)

This was another shitty week in what feels like an endless series of shitty weeks, but with one undeniable bright spot: On Tuesday, the former staffers of Deadspin announced the launch of Defector, a new site that will be everything the old Deadspin was — sports and news reporting and commentary “without access, without favor, without discretion” — but this time funded by subscriptions and staff-owned, so safe from the threat of new private-equity owners decreeing that they stop doing everything that made the site both popular and worthwhile. I’ve already explained why I thought Deadspin desperately mattered for anyone who cares about sports’ role in our greater lives, or just likes great writing that makes you both laugh and think; you can read here my own contributions to the old site before its implosion (not sure why the article search function is listing every article as written by Barry Petchesky, who knows what the private-equity people are up to). Needless to say, launching a DIY journalism site in the middle of the collapse of the entire journalism business model is an inherently risky prospect, so if you want to give the Defector team a bit more of a financial foundation to work from, you can subscribe now. I already have.

But enough good news, let’s get on with the parade of sadness and horror:

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