2020 congressional elections

I don't know if I would have had the guts Ryan Grim showed earlier in the week when he went on Chris Hayes' show on Comcast-TV and denounced the network-- Hayes, as he noted, is the exception-- for blocking out Bernie. Corporate media-- corporate everything, corporate America-- is at war. They're at war with us. We need to fight back. Bigly.Yesterday, AOC sent out a fundraising letter for Bernie. "The first time I heard about Bernie Sanders," she wrote, "I was waiting tables at a greasy spoon diner.

Texas is very much up for grabs this cycle. There are at least half a dozen Republican-held seats that are flippable. TX-12, though, isn't on anyone's radar, primarily because incumbent Republican Kay Granger, first elected in 1996, is so well-liked by her constituents. She usually wins reelection by between 65 and 70-something percent.

Within a couple of hours of the AOC endorsement video that went up on Saturday morning, there were over a million viewers across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. I'd rather you just watch it again than read anything I could possibly say about it.

This map of Chicago from The Economist shocked me as the magazine makes the point that if you take a ride along Chicago's red line-- a rail service running north-south for 23 miles-- life expectancy varies by 30 years from one end to the other! Thirty years! In a developed country! In the richest country in the world!

I talk to candidates all day, 7 days a week. I'm so sick of hearing from "progressives" who back Medicare-for-All but are afraid to say the words... or of Democrats who believe in the Green New Deal as much as I do but have been counseled to not use the term or to speak out about it too much.

South Carolina Blue Dog freshman Joe Cunningham chose to vote with the Republicans for his entire first term. Will any amount of money save him in an R+10 district?Last year, the pundits and Beltway prognosticators who take Nate Silver seriously did the same thing they're doing this year.

This DCCC messaging memo on impeachment isn't something you would expect to come from them, considering it seems like just minutes ago when they were raging against Democratic candidates who dared to even talk about impeachment. Cheri Bustos sent this memo out to all House Dems last night. I wonder what she's telling candidates now.

Last year's campaign was fiery-- and so will this cycle's beDuncan Hunter, a far right congressman from the reddest southern congressional district was one of the first two Republicans in Congress to have endorsed Trump. Like the other one, Chris Collins of New York, Hunter was indicted and arrested on dozens of financial fraud charges, including wire fraud, falsifying records, campaign finance violations, and conspiracy.

Back in 2009, when union activist and author Jonathan Tasini was running for Senate against Kirsten Gillibrand, I wrote that sometimes I have to pump some political courage into our candidates and incumbents and coax them to support difficult or controversial items on the progressive agenda. Not Tasini, whose politico-spiritual mentor is Paul Wellstone. I wrote that he's the kind of figure who I fully expected to call me and ask me why I'm not working harder to round up more votes for the most difficult progressive positions in Congress.

Tuesday at midnight was the FEC deadline for campaigns to get their quarterly fundraising reports in. A few candidates got extensions for one reason or another. But I wanted to share a few bits and pieces with you. Before I get to the congressional races-- which is what I want to talk about-- I have one presidential factoid to make clear.