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tomorrowusa · 6 months

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Are you a high school senior who will be 18 years old by 13 February 2024 and who lives in George Santos's old district (NY-03)? You can make a big difference in the first US House election of 2024.

While Republican Santos won in NY-03 in 2022, Joe Biden carried this area in 2020 by a comfortable margin. The February special election is rated as a TOSSUP by pundits across the political spectrum.

With the expulsion of Santos, there are now 221 Republicans, 213 Democrats, and 1 vacancy in the US House. With the impending resignation of Kevin McCarthy, the GOP total will drop to 220; it's uncertain when a special election would take place for McCarthy's seat. So a Democratic victory in NY-03 in February would narrow the margin to 220 Republicans, 214 Dems, and 1 vacancy. And a victory in February would also give an advantage to Democrats in that district in the November general election.

The February election in NY-03 is being looked upon as a national bellwether. A Republican defeat would not bode well for Trump and his plans to become a dictator.

9,000 18-year-olds have an opportunity to register and vote in the election to fill George Santos’s vacant seat. Most 18-year-olds in the district are not yet registered to vote. The third Congressional District includes parts of Queens and Nassau County. In these counties, only 6.4% and 18.5% of 16- and 17-year-olds, respectively, were preregistered to vote as of February 2023. The registration rates for 18-year-olds today are unlikely to be dramatically higher than these preregistration rates.

You don't have to be 18 to register, but you must be 18 on or before Election Day to actually vote; that means February 13th for the NY-03 special election.

New York has relatively easy online voter registration, but you'll need a NY official ID to register.

Online Voter Registration | New York State Board of Elections

Personally, I think it's a good idea to register in person. The clerks can directly answer any questions you have without having to go through a complicated menu. Plus it feels like a rite of passage when you do it in person. You also have the advantage of getting some sort of hard copy receipt which can be useful if there's an electronic glitch.

For a map to find the cities and town in the district, click here.Then ask everyone you know in the district to make sure they are registered to vote and that everyone in their family has registered, as well.

This is a general map. NY-03 covers parts of Queens and Nassau County – but not all of Queens and Nassau County.

This site is best known for letting people know who their state legislators are. But if you scroll down a bit on the left to Federal it will tell you which congressional district you're in.

^^^ So they haven't removed Santos from the search results. But the important thing is that it shows you're in the 3rd US House district in New York.

Of course any US citizen over 18 in NY-03 can vote in the February election. So share this information with anybody who you think isn't registered or has moved since the last election.

If you've moved since the last election, even if just across the street, you need to register at your new address. Voter registration is based specifically on geography.

#george santos #special election #ny-03 #new york #us house of representatives #queens #nassau county #high school seniors #register and vote #election 2024

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anghraine · 2 years

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Darcy & Wickham backstory headcanon (1/?)

PART ONE, in which Mr Darcy (senior) meant well, but

I’ve always thought this quote from Elizabeth, about Wickham and Darcy, is really interesting:

“There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.”

Jane argues that this isn’t wholly accurate or just. Darcy did not ever seem devoid of goodness to her. But because the dialogue moves on without narrative comment, it’s not clear whether we should interpret this as Jane being Jane, or as a suggestion that Elizabeth has never really been fair to Darcy (which is how she takes it), or as something else.

The point about education is intriguing, though, given that this is a novel deeply concerned with the education of young people and parental failures, and that Darcy does end up attributing his flaws to his parents’ influences, but with very careful phrasing to avoid really blaming them for anything in particular, and no mention of Wickham.

This is more in the realm of headcanon than canon, but I think an interesting possibility is that ... Elizabeth is right. Maybe there was some pretty substantial mismanagement with both the younger Darcy and Wickham.

There’s no indication that Lady Anne, less amiable though she may have been, ever had much to do with Wickham. He mentions her name, but only to connect Lady Catherine to Darcy. The person who impacted both Darcy and Wickham was the late Mr Darcy, Wickham’s (allegedly) beloved godfather and Darcy’s father.

Mr Darcy was apparently a great guy: principled, upstanding, lovable, generous, kind, everything amiable. Nobody has a word to say against him apart from Darcy’s generalizations about “my parents” and their collective mistakes, and even then he stops to stress how great his father specifically was.

And yet, something went wrong.

It’s one thing with Darcy, who turned out basically okay even before his character growth. He was the heir, he was spoiled, there might be an implication that his parents taught him basic principles but kind of left him to do his own thing, insofar as that was possible. None of this is shocking for that kind of family and it doesn’t have to reflect that badly on any of them.

But there’s also Wickham, who did not turn out okay, and we don’t actually know why. According to him, he was raised at Pemberley in the mansion. He and Darcy were “objects of the same parental care” and they spent their boyhoods together. He even claims that he was often given preference over Darcy. Now, this is all coming from Wickham, who is a very dubious source, so it’s worth looking at what the other people involved have to say.

It turns out that Wickham was, indeed, raised by Mr Darcy at Pemberley (Mrs Reynolds says so). Mr Darcy had a miniature of Wickham painted, and treasured it with pictures of his own children so much that, five years after his death, Darcy still hasn’t had the heart to get rid of it despite everything Wickham has done. Darcy describes Wickham as the companion of his youth and “the acknowledged favourite of my father.” This doesn’t incontrovertibly back up Wickham’s account because “favourite” had multiple meanings and didn’t necessarily refer to parental favoritism, though it could and frequently does in P&P. At any rate, it’s not a contradiction.

That’s why this is ultimately a headcanon matter. There’s really no way to know if Wickham is lying about Mr Darcy’s favoritism because his story mixes truth, lies, and a bunch of deceptive omissions. He doesn’t tell many outright falsehoods in his story, but there are a couple, and Darcy is not clear on this point, so it’s basically up to the reader to decide which alternative they want to go with.

As for my own headcanon? I think Wickham actually is telling the truth about this, to a point.

Okay, I realize that my relentless Darcy stanning could make my judgment somewhat suspect. I do have reasons other than woobifying Darcy, though—I think that Wickham genuinely being the favorite actually fits really well into the overall backstory and explains quite a few things about them both.

So, jumping fully into headcanon land: let’s go back to 28 years before P&P. Mr Darcy and Lady Anne have been married for an unknown period of time. Her sister, Lady Catherine, is married to Sir Lewis de Bourgh, while Mr Darcy’s steward, Mr Wickham, is married to the extravagant Mrs Wickham. All three women are pregnant.

I speculated in a recent post that Lady Anne and Lady Catherine may have shared some kind of genetic issue that led to difficulties bringing pregnancies to term. We don’t know this, but we do know that Darcy was an only child for a long time (potentially the entire 12 years between him and Georgiana) and that Lady Catherine’s daughter is truly an only child. To go by the plot to unify Rosings and Pemberley through Darcy and Anne’s marriage—planned when both were infants—it doesn’t seem that the Fitzwilliam sisters expected Lady Catherine to ever have another child.

My headcanon is that both sisters had suffered multiple miscarriages by the time that Darcy and Anne were conceived, that few people around them expected these pregnancies to turn out any better, and the fact that they were able to carry both pregnancies to term, that they did so at around the same time, and that the children turned out to be a girl and a boy, looked a lot like Providence to them.

I don’t imagine either thought very much about the Wickhams’ baby at the time. But it was different for Mr Darcy.

Darcy says in his letter that he is nearly the same age as Wickham, which technically doesn’t have to mean Wickham is older, but IMO suggests it. There’s leeway here, but I imagine that Wickham is about six months older than Darcy. When he’s born, Lady Anne is already pregnant with Darcy, but neither Mr Darcy nor anybody else yet realizes she’s not going to miscarry this time.

So the birth of the Wickhams’ son is somewhat bittersweet—Mr Darcy is a genuinely kind-hearted man with considerable affection for his steward, so he’s happy for them, but doesn’t know if he himself will ever have any children. And he understands that a child will strain the Wickhams’ finances and that Mr Wickham certainly won’t be able to provide much in the way of formal education or career opportunities for this child. Mr Darcy is touched at the request to stand as godfather and eager to do whatever he can for the baby. Mr Darcy does have a lot of other things going on, but baby Wickham is extremely adorable and he wants to do more.

We don’t know when he took on responsibility for Wickham’s upbringing and it doesn’t seem like he tried to sever Wickham from his birth parents, since the Wickhams already lived at or near Pemberley. Nevertheless, Mr Darcy takes on a very big role even for a godfather, and it’s possible that he offered to raise Wickham and had significantly bonded with him before Darcy was even born.

All the while, Lady Anne’s pregnancy is progressing—perhaps with difficulties, but obviously, she makes it through and delivers a son. Mr Darcy is undoubtedly thrilled, he goes along with naming the baby after her family (I think Darcy owes his first name to Fitzwilliam pride, not Darcy tradition), and while Mr Darcy is not directly involved in the Darcy/Anne engagement plot, he’s okay with it (Wickham is actually the first to mention it in P&P, so it seems to have genuinely been accepted or at least under discussion at Pemberley). The arrival of their son is more complicated than it would otherwise have been because of baby Wickham, but obviously, Mr Darcy is capable of loving two different children and he does.

As the babies grow into young boys, though, things become even more complicated. Wickham is open, outgoing, and lively. I suspect he somewhat mimics Mr Darcy’s manners—not out of childish malevolent intent, but because that’s who his role model is as a child, and it comes to him easily. In any case, I think it’s possible that this is the sort of person that Mr Darcy prefers in general, given that at the end of his life, he ends up selecting Lady Anne’s 25-year-old younger nephew (who has a similar temperament if more intelligence and morals) to act as the executor of his will and co-guardian of his 11-year-old daughter.

But their own son is ... different.

If you’ve followed me for much time or run across many of my Darcy-centric posts, you probably already know that I am adamantly opposed to the idea that reducing all of Darcy’s social issues to his arrogance is the best reading of him, much less the only correct one. Additionally, my personal headcanon is that he isn’t shy but is neurodivergent—specifically, that he’s on the autism spectrum. This interacts with his later arrogance but does not contradict or diminish it. So that’s part of this headcanon, too.

We don’t know a whole lot about very young Darcy, but we do know that he’s four when Mrs Reynolds comes to Pemberley, and that she notices he never speaks crossly to her, even then. She seems to consider this pretty amazing in a child of that age. There seems an unspoken contrast going on there—perhaps just with other children in general, but possibly, circumstances offered a very obvious contrast in Wickham.

I’m not suggesting that four- or five-year-old Wickham was already monstrous, because that’s not the case. But given that Mrs Reynolds believes that children’s natures give a decent idea of what they’ll become as adults, and that she also believes Wickham is “wild,” I suspect that young Wickham and young Darcy struck her as very different personalities from the first, and that she preferred Darcy’s.

For Mrs Reynolds, Darcy never expressing irritation towards her, even as a tiny child, is a sign of his virtue and good nature. And certainly, that’s part of it. But it may not be the only part.

Adaptations tend to make Darcy into a visibly brooding and somber sort of person, but Elizabeth never really sees him that way. Her characterization of his usual demeanor in the first half of the book is “sedate.” Charlotte actively looks for signs of his interest in Elizabeth when they’re in Kent (interest which we know he feels), but can’t tell from his expression if he’s interested or just absent-minded. He admits that he has trouble looking interested in people he’s unfamiliar with and in catching their tone of conversation.

Even when he’s actively working to be as agreeable as is humanly possible for him at that point, with the Gardiners, there’s something about his air that strikes them as formal and lacking liveliness (though it’s not a big deal for them). He tries to compliment Mrs Bennet late in the book, and even to Elizabeth, his manner comes across as cold. Nobody guesses that something went on during his and Elizabeth’s multi-mile engagement walk, because Elizabeth’s feelings are complicated before talking to her parents and because Darcy is so inexpressive in company. Later, Elizabeth ends up shielding and guiding him through the social occasions around their engagement.

So, my headcanon is that part of the reason four-year-old Darcy doesn’t ever speak crossly to Mrs Reynolds is that he’s a sweetheart, yes, but part of it is that he has trouble translating what he feels into tone and expression anyway. Consequently, we’ve got Wickham, who is energetic and open and dramatic and charming, and then there’s Darcy, who is demonstrative through action more than demeanor.

He’s quiet, quick at his lessons, and if you’re in a position to notice, sweet and generous in a way that Wickham apparently never has been—but there’s something peculiarly stiff about Darcy’s mannerisms and how he talks (when he talks at all), even by the standards of the time. He’s off-putting to many of these eighteenth-century people around him. Towards his parents, his manner seems respectful but not all that affectionate, especially by contrast to Wickham (though in fact, Darcy idolizes his father, and loves his mother and extended family).

I think Darcy’s father may well have simply found young Wickham more endearing, more conventionally boyish, and easier to bond with. He wasn’t unkind to Darcy by any means, but he did have a stronger rapport with Wickham and this would only become more marked as they grew older and their personalities became more pronounced.

But I also headcanon that Mr Darcy felt pretty guilty about preferring Wickham to his own child—his only son and heir, no less, and at the time, his only biological child. He felt even guiltier because his preference didn’t really have anything to do with some clear misbehavior that could be addressed. And it’s not like he didn’t love him. So, far from being harsh as a father, his affection and guilt led him to over-correct his approach to his son. He indulged Darcy, and while he took care to teach him the things he considered important for Darcy to learn and carry on as his heir, he otherwise mostly gave him his way and left him to do whatever he wanted.

At the same time, he didn’t want to penalize Wickham for being more likable, so he also was indulgent towards him, and on top of that, didn’t take as many pains to impart his principles because a) Wickham seemed to have them naturally and b) Wickham wasn’t the heir.

I think B ended up being really important for the development of both of these boys in such radically different directions. Mr Darcy essentially treated Wickham like another son, but at the end of the day, Wickham was not his son. No matter how engaging, how personable, how endearing, how beloved Wickham might be, he was never going to be the heir. He’s the oldest, he’s the favorite, he’s the most likable, but Darcy is still going to get everything.

It’s not like Mr Darcy was planning on just treating his godson like another son and then leaving him out to dry. Wickham essentially gets the younger son treatment—a good education to prepare him for a career in the church that will socially make him a gentleman. I don’t think Wickham was seething with resentment over this at, you know, eight or nine years old, but it was old enough for him to understand that their expectations were very different, and all the favoritism in the world was not going to change that.

I think it’s additionally possible that Wickham’s very virtuous father, who was also in the picture in some capacity, was deeply grateful, and expected young Wickham to also be grateful. But for Wickham, the obvious point of comparison in terms of his expectations was not the children of other servants, it was Darcy.

Wickham claims in P&P that Darcy was jealous of his father’s preference for Wickham from early in life, despite their boyhood friendship. Darcy, on the other hand, says that it would have been a depravity to do nothing for Wickham because he was the favourite of Darcy’s father and had been brought up as a gentleman but was completely dependent on the Darcys. Even though Darcy thinks quite poorly of Wickham’s character by age 23, he feels obligated to do something for him and hopes, even if he can’t quite believe it, that it’ll turn out okay.

I don’t think Darcy’s reasoning here sounds at all like someone given to jealousy, honestly. I’ve seen it occasionally suggested that he is jealous of Wickham, actually, or that in some more nuanced earlier draft of P&P that he was jealous and Wickham was less awful and blahblah, but I don’t think so. I think this is where the deception on this issue lies. Wickham was indeed the favorite, but Darcy wasn’t that jealous of him. He was jealous of Darcy.

It wouldn’t be horrible if Darcy had been jealous, to be clear. It would be a very understandable emotion for a child in this situation to feel. Nevertheless, he doesn’t really seem to have been.

I think part of this is that he’s not a particularly jealous person by temperament (fandom sometimes assumes he is, but I disagree). Part is that he tends to process things in his own very particular way that doesn’t always follow the paths you would expect. But part, I think, is that while he was somewhat hurt by the situation, what jealousy he might have felt was headed off very early.

There was another important figure in all this, after all: Lady Anne.

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