lesser evilAll-- not some-- of the public polling show the Republicans losing the Senate in November. The newest Marist poll of Arizona voters, for example, was released yesterday by NBC News.
Ask a progressive challenger to lay out a roadmap to beating a conservative incumbent and inevitably you will hear about a muscular voter registration drive. That becomes a lot trickier with a pandemic raging. But not impossible. In Arizona there are quite a few organizations that work to register people who are likely to vote for Democrats.
West Virginia was the ultimate blue state starting with FDR's first election in 1932. Two years earlier, the Democratic Party won the state House and held it, uninterrupted from 1930 to 2012. The state's voters even went for Adlai Stevenson against Eisenhower in 1952, for Hubert Humphrey against Nixon in 1968, for Jimmy Carter against Reagan in 1980 and for Michael Dukakis against George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Sure, they can't all be this good-- but we should aim high... especially in primariesFor Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Ro Khanna, Jamie Raskin, Alan Grayson, Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, Ted Lieu, Randy Bryce and, of course, Bernie, the Democratic Party is, first and foremost, a vehicle for making the country a better place. These are values-rich progressives who are all about policy solutions for real problems.
There's a fantastic candidate running for the U.S. Senate in West Virginia: Berniecrat Paula Jean Swearengin. And she's running against the worst Democrat in the Senate, Joe Manchin. Under normal circumstances, we'd be urging everyone to get on board the Swearengin train immediately. Normal circumstances? Remember them?
