Thanks Andreas. I figured it out. I think there is a bug in wix with the time portion of Date/Time, and if you have a value in the time portion, the call will just fail to return anything. But, when I set the hours to zero, then it worked (using setHours(0,0,0,0)). Also, using Date.now () was ok, but not necessary, as today = new Date(); is sufficient. Working code below:
today = new Date();
today.setHours(0,0,0,0);
$w(’ #dataset1 ‘).setFilter(wixData.filter()
.contains(‘provinceState’, $w(’ #iState ').value)
.ge(‘date’, today)
.contains(‘visibility’,‘public’))