Eloise Reyes

  I've been saying that Newsom's first choice is Secretary of State Alex Padilla... but I now hear from a reliable source that I've been wrong. The people around Newsom favor Padilla, but Newsom has a mind of his own. The Governor wants a Hispanic senator as part of his legacy-- and part of his own run for Dianne Feinstein's soon-to-be-former seat when she dies, retires or gets shipped off to a home for the criminally insane.

Tuesday night Jimmy Gomez became the first Democrat to win a House seat since Trump was elected president. He won pretty overwhelmingly-- 60-40%-- in a deep blue Los Angeles district. Generally Republicans don't even try in districts like CA-34. The jungle primary, in fact, resulted in 2 candidates with "D" next to their names facing off this week in the general election.

Assemblyman Jimmy GomezYesterday, Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, who represents a huge swath of hipster and Hispanic Los Angeles (Silverlake, Echo Park, Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Montecito Heights, Cypress Park, Chinatown, East L.A.) yielded to an animated draft movement by progressives in his district to run for the congressional seat Xavier Becerra is giving up to become California Attorney General.

A few years ago Blue America's list of endorsed candidates had the biggest success rate of any PAC recruiting and endorsing candidates. We beat NARAL, the Sierra Club, the Human Rights Campaign and the League of Conservation Voters that year-- not to mention the NRA and Club for Growth. I laughed when I read the stats. Blue America isn't about picking candidates who will make the PAC look good.

Our last post on Tuesday night was about how Latinos tried but couldn't do it on their own. In two little discussed California races Blue America was active in, though, Latinos, helped progressives beat two truly horrible and corrupt conservatives. Nanette Barragán appears to have come from way behind to beat state Senator Isadore Hall for the congressional seat the Democratic Party Establishment tried to give him.

Blue America spends most of its time and energy on House races. As far as the 2016 Senate races go, after Donna Edwards (MD), PG Sittenfeld (OH) and Alan Grayson (FL) were defeated in their primaries by establishment candidates the only Senate endorsements we have left are for Russ Feingold (WI), who looks like he'll probably win a week from tomorrow, and two long-shots who beat their more conservative opponents, Ray Metcalfe (AK) and Misty Kathrine Snow (UT).

-by Samuel HagarHow to cross party lines for votes without abandoning your ethnicity-- The first thing a pollster tells you when you ask “how do you win a Democrat on Democrat” general election (a phenomenon we're finding more and more frequently on the West Coast due to the somewhat dysfunctional jungle primary system) is:

EloiseYesterday, Jon Wiener, writing for The Nation picked at the ugly scab of California's Democratic politics, something few outside the state know about, namely that deep blue California has a Democratic Party very much under the thumb of corrupt conservatives calling themselves, i

Last week you may have caught Señor Trumpanzee's telepromter speech in Cleveland on education. You could tell it was read from a teleprompter because he sounded like he was on Ambien and because he didn't say he would model the American education system on Trump University. Instead he pushed the charter school industry's privatization agenda.

We spend an awful lot of time here talking about Trump-- way too much-- and a lot of time talking about Congress. We put too little energy into down-ballot races. But I do need to mention that this week there was a great result in a hard-fought legislative primary race in Massachusetts.