Last night surpassed even my most delightful socialist utopian dreams. I’m going to ask you to indulge me in just one paragraph of unbearable, puerile gloating before I get to my serious political analysis.
Suck it, Nancy! Suck it congressional black caucus, you miserable, sell-out fools. You endorsed a terrible candidate who showed (at best) complete apathy for the outrage over what happened to George Floyd, and what’s happening to black people all across the country. The world is leaving your sell-out corporate asses behind, and I can’t be more delighted.
Okay, I’m done.
There were a few really, really exciting upset victories here in NYS last night including Richie Torres, who won against Rubén Díaz Sr. Diaz is one of those republicans who calls himself a democrat, just to be viable in New York. Mondaire Jones crushed Adam Schleifer, a former federal prosecutor who spent $4M of his own money.
In addition to Jamaal Bowman, the other high profile race yesterday was in Kentucky. Chuck Schumer pumped $45M into Amy McGrath’s campaign. That’s just the cost of running the primary. $45 million dollars. By contrast, Charles Booker – the progressive grass roots funded candidate had less than $4M. Most of that was raised in the last 3 weeks leading up to the election. He essentially ran his campaign on less than a million dollars.
In America, 82% of all senate races are won by the candidate with the most money. That number goes up to 94% for house races.
The fact that Booker came as close as he did is a giant victory, even if McGrath wins. This was his first statewide race so he started with virtually no name recognition and none of that gigantic pile of corporate cash that was bestowed upon McGrath. If he doesn’t win this one, he’s very likely to win his next state-wide bid.
I never thought that McGrath was going to beat McConnell. That’s why I haven’t posted a single thing about her on my social media. I didn’t feel the need to pee on the establishment-faithful’s parade but I see her as another John Ossof nothing burger. The fact that Charles Booker did so well against her in the primary with no money and no name recognition tells me that if she wins the primary, she is 100% guaranteed to lose to McConnell.
Let me show you the basis for that belief.
Remember the 2017 special election in Georgia where Schumer spent over $40M running John Ossoff? Remember how the party faithful drank the kool-aid and thought that “we” had a real shot at winning that congressional seat? Remember that? After $40M and a lot of press coverage, Ossoff only managed to get 125,500 votes.
Now let’s look at the governor’s race in Georgia a little over a year later. Stacey Abrams spent $27.4M on her campaign. For that $27M, she received 1,923,685 votes.
That’s a pretty big fucking difference in voter turnout. That’s the difference between excitement and no excitement.
Amy McGrath and her milquetoast republican-light platform = no excitement. That’s just a fact. It’s the same uninspiring platform that John Ossoff ran on. All the money in the world isn’t going to make this turd shine enough to excite voters to come out. Republicans are going to turn out to vote for their highest profile senator, who stole them a Supreme Court seat. Trust that.
Democrats don’t show up to vote against people. They show up to vote for people. George W Bush never would have won a second term if democrats voted like republicans did. Hillary would be president right now if democrats voted like republicans do. I don’t know why democrats keep assuming that turnout will be high to vote against someone. I have not found one instance where that was true.
Democrats came out in droves to vote for Barack Hussein Obama. There’s never been a less “safe” nominee than a black guy whose middle name is Hussein, 7 years after 9/11. I have a friend who keeps advocating for establishment candidates because “now is not the time to gamble”. Again, this opinion runs contrary to the evidence. What some people see as a “gamble” is what others see as progress.
Democrats have done the same damned thing for the past 40 years: focused on electing “moderates” that republicans can accept. I’ve literally, never once in my life heard a republican advocate for electing a moderate that democrats could get behind. Never.
The result has been a massive rightward shift. The center is now the hard right. Not the far right, but the hard right. The far right includes racists and religious whackadoodles. The hard right is where all of the working class-fucking economic policies lie. We call it neoliberalism now, as if it’s somehow different than hard right wing policies. Every single president and congress in the past 40 years has redistributed wealth to the top. Every single one.
Obama actually pulled off the single biggest wealth redistribution this country has ever seen. I know that we’re not allowed to say anything bad about Obama, but these are the facts. If Obama had given the working class more than just the crumbs off the table, Trump never would have happened.
The worse democrats get, the more monstrous republicans get. Both sides keep lowering the bar in ways that were unimaginable 60 years ago. If democrats would just do one meaningful thing for working people every generation, we wouldn’t be seeing republicans devolve into neanderthals. All democrats have to do is one great thing every 15 years. That’s it.
I’ve said this many times before, and I will say it many more times: democrats only win presidential elections when they run preternaturally charismatic candidates. Republicans win by running literal human garbage.
This is not what winning looks like.
I used to believe that electing a shitty democrat is better than letting a republican win. I no longer believe that. Over the past 40 years, I’ve seen shitty democrats pave the way for increasingly monstrous republicans. I no longer see the value in voting for a Joe Manchin over a republican. It may feel like you’re slowing down the bleeding but in the long term, you’re really just opening up another gaping wound in another part of the body. Amy McGrath is another Joe Manchin. Believe me.
Incumbents win over 90% of elections. The fact that incumbents are suddenly losing their primaries is a great thing. We need better democrats in order to stop more monstrous republicans from getting elected. If democrats manage to pass Medicare for all, that wins them 30 years of elections. Voting for democrats that aren’t willing to do something that sweeping just makes a more horrid version of Trump possible. Remember when we thought that W was the worst president this country could possibly ever elect? They have gotten worse, and there’s no reason to believe that trend won’t continue.
It’s time to do this a very different way. This 4 decades long experiment in neoliberalism has failed spectacularly.
The next big race to watch is in Colorado where Andrew Romanoff is running against John Frackenlooper. On the one hand, we have a progressive democrat. On the other hand, we have this fucking douchebag:
He’s a wholly owned subsidiary of the fracking industry, and he’s got the full support of the DNC. Cory Gardner is going to lose the general. I’m 99% sure of that. So the question now is who do democrats want in that seat? A guy who wants to frack the shit out of the country until we have no safe drinking water left, or someone who wants every American to have health care?
This seems like a no-brainer to me, especially since the winner of this primary is almost certainly going to be the next senator from Colorado.
Please Colorado, elect a better democrat so that we don’t get a more vile version of Cory Gardner down the road.
Another election to keep an eye on in November is the West Virginia senate race. Paula Jean Swearengin has already won that primary. You might remember her from Knock Down The House. She was one of the 4 progressives who ran in 2018. That documentary was edited to be all about AOC since she was the only one of the 4 to win, but watch it again to see what Paula Jean is all about. If she manages to pull of a victory in November that smashes the Joe Manchin compromise argument to hell once and for all.
We are slowly but surely electing better democrats. I am hopeful for the future of our country, and I will keep advocating for good candidates to defeat useless incumbents until the entire democratic party has been taking over. The time for change is long overdue. This isn’t going to be fast, but it’s happening much more quickly than I would have imagined 5 years ago.
