Good evening from the BDN Portland office on Congress Street. We hope you have a spooky evening.
What we’re talking about
Two candidates for Portland City Hall have raised remarkable amounts of money this campaign season: At-large City Council candidate Pious Ali raked in more than $20,000, while District 3 incumbent Edward Suslovic’s war chest swelled by a grand total of $0.
Ali is running in a three-way race with current Councilor Jon Hinck and homeless Libertarian Matthew Coffee and has the cash on hand to outspend them both several times over. Coffee raised $195 between July and Oct. 25, with $80 coming from a George Coffee. Hinck raised $450 over the same period, which, combined with earlier fundraising and leftover funds from the last election, brought campaign coffers to just over $4,000.
With a fundraising operation that started early and drew heavily on donors from around the country, Ali raised a total of $22,397.50. The sum is significantly more than any other City Council candidate in the last six elections and much of it was raised through ActBlue, a political action committee that does online fundraising for Democrats across the country.
Suslovic said he had opted not to fundraise this campaign and recycled campaign signs from the last election. His challenger, Maine Medical Center nurse Brian Batson, brought in $1,855.
Suslovic said he would be interested in seeing the city introduce public campaign financing before the next election. — Jake Bleiberg
In other news
Being an adult is so hard for some millennials, a new startup in Portland is offering classes on it — The Adulting School is a new program devoted to helping people learn skills they might not have picked up in college or from their parents. “We are targeting millennials who grew up in the recession,” one of the founders told Kathleen Pierce.
Here’s how to raise the dead tonight — Troy Bennett finished his monthlong series on people buried around Portland. He did some really excellent work. You can check out his whole series here.
From today, his last post:
In the Western Cemetery, there are hundreds of unmarked graves. As sad and decrepit as this place is, with broken and toppled stones, it only hints at the number of people in the ground.
As early as 1853, they were burying the friendless and penniless under the lanes here, with no stones to mark them. It’s the same in Eastern Cemetery, too. At one point they were burying strangers, two to a hole.
Those people had hopes and dreams, too. But it’s hard to know their stories without tombstones or burial records.
But if this really is the time of year when the wall between this world and the next comes down, if we walk these lanes, listening to the wind whisper through the pines, if we touch the earth that they sleep in, if we sit, very still, and wait for them to come to us, we might just hear them.
This whole creepy clown thing is tough on real clowns — Nick Sambides wrote about the local impact for actual clowns of this recent, weird rash of creepy clown sightings. Check out Troy’s video of Michael Trautman teaching a clowning class at Circus Maine in Portland.
Bernie Sanders will be in town tomorrow to stump for Clinton — The rally is scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. at Deering High School on Stevens Avenue.
The Big Idea
‘What Daily Life Looks Like at Different Income Levels’ — From the Atlantic’s City Lab:
In a 2015 TEDxStockholm talk, Rosling Rönnlund described how photos and snapshots are often used to create “fairytale” images of other countries, capturing stereotypical scenes of poverty and wealth, and ignoring the vast array of incomes and lifestyles in between the two extremes. People in other countries, Rosling Rönnlund says, are often portrayed as exotic or unknowable. “This has to change,” she says. “We want to show how people really live.”
Got any interesting story ideas, suggestions or links to share? Email Dan MacLeod at dmacleod@bangordailynews.com, or tweet @dsmacleod.
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