Blue America doesn't endorse many candidates running for state legislatures-- only men and women we feel have the potential to make profound impacts on their state and significantly strengthen the Democrats' congressional bench. Unlike most states, where people will elected their legislatures in 2020, Virginia is electing theirs in 2019-- 8 months from now.
You've heard the argument that any white men who grew up on the Virginia Peninsula at the time Northam did can be expected to be somewhat racially insensitive. Virginia's 3rd Senate District is mostly on that peninsula and it is represented by Tommy Norment, the Republican majority leader, who, as it turns out with his yearbook editor-- a yearbook filled with racial and antisemitic slurs... and picture of young men in blackface.
Part I can be found here and I don't want to repeat anything. Instead, I want to start with a few Sunday thoughts from Rev. William Barber's Washington Post OpEd:
"He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.""Go... And Sin No More."Last weekend, I felt I had no choice but to say a few words about the Northam thing in Virginia. I hate his kind of conservative Democrat so I was only too happy to remind DWT readers that he's had a long, horrible, conservative career in Virginia politics. For starters, he admits he voted for George W. Bush-- both times. In his own 2013 campaign, Northam said "I don’t consider myself as a liberal...
Northam now says it wasn't him in the photo. Was it Joe Biden?Ralph Northam has a long, horrible, conservative career in Virginia politics. For starters, he admits he voted for George W. Bush-- both times. In his own 2013 campaign, Northam said "I don’t consider myself as a liberal... I think the less government, the better" and said he is "very conservative fiscally." He has a record in the state legislature to back it up.
This week, Erik Loomis' essay at Lawyers, Guns & Money, The Big Electoral Story of 2019 reminds us that "we don’t pay nearly enough attention to how power is actually built–through local and state races and organizing.
I'm sure by now everyone has seen Trumpanzee's scolding tweet aimed at Paul Ryan yesterday. "I guess we all know who Trump plans to blame for our losses next week," a top Republican House staffer told me minutes after the tweet. "This guy is so fucked up... He's like an albatross around our necks." But it's not just Trump-- well, it's mostly Trump.
If there was a Howie Klein Award for Political Truth-Telling and I got to award it, last week's would have gone to DailyKos diarist Tom Brock for his Saturday essay, Former Republican Chairs Local Dem Committee...
On Sunday, DWT went out on a limb-- not just making a random prediction about how many seats would flip red to blue but doing what so few pundits ever do-- predicting which seats would flip.
