Hector Morales

Tuesday is primary day in Texas. The most closely followed races are in TX-07 (Houston), TX-32 (Dallas), TX-23 (Rio Grande Valley), and TX-21 (Austin-San Antonio), races that are considered flippable in November.

The Texas primaries are less than a month away-- March 6. And the races are crowded. Or at least the seats that look the most flippable are crowded, even after lots of candidates have dropped out. Texas has 36 congressional districts. The very last one, TX-36, southeast Texas in the Houston area, is so red, that the DCCC isn't even contesting it.

Neither Will Hurd (R-TX) nor Pete Aguilar (New Dem-CA) are very popular in their districts and, frankly, neither deserves reelection. A Democrat is likely to beat Hurd, although the DCCC and the Castro Machine have its fingers on the scale for a worthless Blue Dog in South Texas. And it will take some time before a progressive is in position to primary Aguilar in the Inland Empire. They’re both useless back-benchers from overwhelmingly Hispanic districts and this week they co-sponsored a DACA compromise-- a “discussion draft” ahead of Trump’s January 19 deadline.

Gene Green is one of the worst Democrats in Congress-- very conservative and very corrupt, a pairing that you often find together. And he's retiring early. No realistic explanation why since he's been raising money hand over first all year. He raised $474,164 so far this year and has a campaign war-chest with $1,272,398 as of the September 30 FEC filing deadline.

The New DemsIf you've been with Blue America for enough years, you'll remember the excruciating battles we backed for Donna Edwards, Beto O'Rourke and Matt Cartwright when they took on corrupt old conservative Democrats in, respectively, Maryland, Texas and Pennsylvania. All three, running as reformers and progressives, prevailed.

Imaginary candidate: he is gung-ho on Medicare-for-All and is eager to sign onto John Conyers' HR 676 as soon as he's elected. In fact, his campaign is based not just on Medicare-For-All, but on free state colleges, a higher minimum wage, getting corrupting cachet of elections. He's adamantly pro-choice and adamantly in favor of equality based on gender, race, religion, etc. He even wants to crack down on banksters and put them in prison. So why isn't he on the Blue America endorsement list? He's not quite sure about Climate Change. He has some good feelings about it but...

Thursday morning's tweet from Ro Khanna (D-CA)-- above-- is a good example of how someone can promote genuine economic populism. The program he, Bernie and virtually all progressives back to make state colleges free again is incredibly popular-- far more popular than Schumer's and Pelosi's recycled Papa John's Pizza slogan.

Shouldn't Nancy Ohanian be commissioned to do the official Trumpanzee family painting?Drawing on an historical perspective, author and activist Danny Goldberg bemoaned the left's circular firing squad for Nation readers yesterday.