Democratic (Party) Direction

What can I say, it's rank out there

in other news, a couple of DSA folks (Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato) won their Philly state rep primaries

If Kristen Gillibrand is on the ballot in November 2020, I will vote for her without half a second's hesitation. It is true, moreover, that she has distinguished herself in her opposition to Trump, her advocacy on sexual assault, and all the rest.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) January 5, 2018

That said, I do not think it is dumb or bad to point out, for instance, that her positions on immigration in the House were basically Trumpism. https://t.co/YxRmBHoZMu pic.twitter.com/oVSxLbeZbG

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) January 5, 2018

It is nonsense to say that switching positions makes her non-viable and it is likely true that women get more scrutiny for this than men. That said, I think there are sensible reasons to scrutinize Kirsten Gillibrand, which I wrote about late last year. https://t.co/2PZog0zBWy

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) January 5, 2018

scrutiny is what separates us from the animals I guess

nailbiter in pa-7 for anyone who's interested.

https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/pennsylvania-house-district-7-primary-election

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pennsylvania-7th-district-lehigh-valley-democratic-primary-future-of-party_us_5af5b771e4b00d7e4c1a2ab9?a1

two big dsa wins in Pitt, Lazio winning, Fetterman winning, seems like a good night. Is there a guide somewhere to the entire set of primaries/what other races have unusually left candidates in them?

Penn roundup is here

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/15/us/elections/results-pennsylvania-primary-elections.html

Worth reviewing key policies of @SummerForPA, who won D primary near Pittsburgh:

-- Abolish cash bail
-- Moratorium on all prison building
-- Create a millionaire's tax
-- Single payer in PA w/ zero copays
-- Universal free pre-k
-- 100% renewable energyhttps://t.co/bSwQjUld6U

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) May 16, 2018

Sounds good to me

roundup at wapo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/05/16/daily-202-the-far-left-is-winning-the-democratic-civil-war/5afb5fe230fb042588799528/?utm_term=.cbaecf9fa42b

in b4 sic

?utm_term=.cbaecf9fa42b

All this hand-wringing about the electability of Dems who hold wildly-popular positions (pot decriminalization, background checks for gun purchases) makes me nuts. It would be so lovely if these "far-left" candidates kicked ass in November.

Some of em probably will, weed and Medicare are both crossover winners I think.

winning in November is the only metric that matters. The handwringers w/in the party are mostly worried strictly about where to best pour resources/money - if these folks don't poll well/look like they don't have a shot, that money/support is going to flow elsewhere where the races are closer.

but yeah I don't think the weed + medicare positions are much of a threat. gun measures are a little harder to predict in somewhere like PA.

This WaPo article is a masterpiece of received thinking and stale framing.

Tuesday was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Democratic moderates.

and

- Statewide, John Fetterman — a small-town mayor with a bristly beard and tattoos on both of his arms — toppled Pennsylvania’s incumbent lieutenant governor, Mike Stack, thanks in part to the strong endorsement of Bernie Sanders,

why not call him a beatnik too?

The handwringing will only make it sweeter when they kick ass in November :)

I think all of the DSA-backed candidates won their races? A good day, in any case.

huge if true

<3 silby

Before the Fetterman thing, I had no idea that 18 states elect the governor and lieutenant governor separately. Fuckin' weirdos.

Virginia elects its governor, lt. governor, and attorney general separately; they can be from different parties (and often are).

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/jeff-beals-new-york-midterms-w520302

xp Georgia too

John Fetterman’s home is A+ real estate porn if you’re into that. He and his wife converted an old car dealership in the town he’s mayor of.

http://www.designsponge.com/2016/07/in-pennsylvania-a-car-dealership-becomes-an-industrial-home.html

Child me would have killed for the ramps between floors and probably have snapped my neck on a scooter.

The big race in my neck of the woods was for DA, between some Soros-backed guy who was in favor of criminal justice reform and a guy endorsed by literally everybody else in the county. Since I just moved out here last year, this is my first encounter with the mythological boogeyman. Not sure why he doesn't spend his money on something more useful, like a fleet of yachts or something.

(For the record, I voted for Soros' stalking horse because I'm in favor of criminal justice reform, but I did have to drink heavily first.)

that was the washington county da race right? i did a tiny bit of work on that.

yeah, washington county. seriously i can't see why people didn't jump to vote for a guy whose funding came pretty much entirely through shadowy PACs from, presumably, someone who likely couldn't find washington county on a map.

Living in H.Boro now, huh?

somewhere in that general vicinity, yeah. am enjoying the ongoing low-level contempt from urbanites who assume that i'm a mindless corporate drone who prefers to live in a mcmansion chain-store wasteland.

Tammy Baldwin was on NPR this morning. I guess she might have presidential ambitions but my god this was some weak ass tea toward the end.

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/17/611869641/sen-tammy-baldwin-on-familys-opioid-struggle

[N]o more than about a quarter of eligible adults younger than age 30 have voted in any of the past five midterm elections.... In 2010, voters under 30 represented just 12 percent of all voters, exit polls found, down from 18 percent in 2008. The share of ballots cast by voters under 30 likewise skidded from 19 percent in 2012 to 13 percent in 2014. Each time, the proportion of the ballots cast by seniors spiked by comparable amounts. In 2010 and 2014, the vote share cast by minorities also dropped 3 percentage points from the previous presidential races. These shifts helped trigger congressional Democrats’ landslide losses in 2010 and 2014, just two years after each of former President Barack Obama’s victories.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/the-gop-is-betting-its-majority-on-older-white-voters/560537/

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/democrats-need-unusually-high-millennial-turnout-in-midterms.html

Good xpost from Alfred's site: https://wp.me/pzXeC-7Ks

Thrillary to endorse Cuomo in NY gov primary.

They don't learn, do they?

Stick to what uh works

with a bristly beard and tattoos on both of his arms

have they been out anywhere in this country lately

texas and the rest of the bible belt would be saudi arabia if it weren't for new york and california

what do you mean by that

theocratic monarchy?

With lots of oil and awesome headgear?

all hail radical cleric paul ryan

qualmsley taking a stand against shithole countries

really don't think that's true for texas. Alabama though, maybe.

https://splinternews.com/so-you-want-to-overthrow-a-party-establishment-1826225125

While the base of the Democratic Party has moved to the left in their preferences, the left has nothing even remotely equivalent to the right’s network of powerful, ideological organizations to translate that shift into primary wins. The right has billionaires like the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Robert Mercer who will financially benefit from their ideological investments. They each plow tens of millions into conservative challengers and an ideological ecosystem that ensures the GOP complies with conservative orthodoxy. The left has no friendly billionaires that fund progressive challengers to the party establishment. Even the major donors most potentially sympathetic to progressive causes, like George Soros, would materially be quite hurt if the left were to take power, so they tend to focus on non-economic policy priorities, and generally support the Party establishment, not left-populist challengers or organizations.

The right also has a unifying ideology, while the left does not. The right can use white nationalism as the glue that binds imperialism, Christian conservatism, and corporate greed into a coherent ideology, but the left is made up of an extremely diverse range of peoples with very different interests. The left has yet to fuse together racial justice, economic justice, gender and sexual justice, and environment justice into a shared political project with a common political identity.

qualmsley is a brilliant satirical performance of a resistance liberal by a Trump republican

not clear on why imperialism/christianity/corporate greed make a more coherent ideology than racial/economic/gender/social justice tbqh, seems the opposite.

The left has no friendly billionaires

So job 1 needs to be creating more socialist billionaires.

not clear on why imperialism/christianity/corporate greed make a more coherent ideology than racial/economic/gender/social justice tbqh, seems the opposite

broadly, no scruples vs. lots and lots of frequently competing scruples, though "multi tendency" orgs like DSA are arguably gaining some ground in fixing this

So job 1 needs to be creating more socialist billionaires.

― kilohertz so good (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, May 23, 2018 8:24 PM (three minutes ago)

i could totally imagine this article appearing in slate

The article suggests that unions can somehow fill the role of billionaires in funding the left