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Democrats trying to unseat each other III

 
 
 
lpetrich said:
Back in 2021, India Walton primaried him, but he then ran as a write-in candidate in the general election, supported by Republican businessmen and the like who spent a lot of money on his sore-loser candidacy. He won.
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As I wrote at the time, this shows the failure of a system based on partisan primaries where the general election is not competitive. The partisan primary becomes a de facto general election, but because few people participate it's easier to elect unpopular extremists. IW was so unpopular, even a write-in candidate could beat her.
If NY had a jungle primary with top two advancing to the general election, it would better reflect the heavily democratic electorate of Buffalo. Partisan primary plus a general election between the winners of these primaries only works well when the general election is competitive, which in too many cases it isn't. A jungle primary and ranked choice voting should be adopted nationwide to better reflect whom people actually support.
The next mayoral election in Buffalo is this year.
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Who is running?
 
Justice Democrats say primary challenges are back on the menu - POLITICO - 01/14/2025 10:00 AM EST - “There is something wrong with this party as a whole right now,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for the group.
Despite our opposition, part of the appeal Donald Trump has with many voters is a willingness to challenge a status quo that isn’t working for them,” he said. “Voters want to see a Democratic Party that is serious about taking on the wealthy elite and getting big money out of politics, not parade around billionaires as campaign surrogates.”

Justice Democrats aren’t yet naming any specific districts but plan to recruit in deep-blue seats that either have a Democratic incumbent or are open, not ones that are vulnerable to a GOP takeover. Likely targets include first-term Reps. George Latimer (D-N.Y.) and Wesley Bell (D-Mo.), who ousted Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, respectively, in primaries last year with the help of tens of millions of dollars of outside money.
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lpetrich said:
Summer Lee and Delia Ramirez on the Squad, AIPAC, and Paying Rent in DC | Teen Vogue - September 4, 2024
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Cry me a river! These congresscritters make $174k. That's 67th percentile for household income and 79th percentile for individual income in DC. They should be able to find a suitable apartment with that salary.
Teen Vogue said:
"We are creating a home for liberated Black and brown folks," says Lee. "We're creating a home for liberated, marginalized folks who are like, you know what, electoral politics might not be our God, but it is a weapon."
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Why just black and brown? Kinda racist, innit?
 
To Be the Party of the Working Class, We Need More Working-Class Leaders in Congress - Jan 14, 2025 - by Usamah Andrabi and Alexandra Rojas of the Justice Democrats
In Congress, mostly through AIPAC’s Super PAC, this also included over $30 million specifically into Democratic primaries to unseat two of the most working-class members to ever walk the halls of Congress – former nurse Cori Bush in Missouri and former middle school principal Jamaal Bowman in New York.

After AIPAC’s success in these two primaries, the cryptocurrency industry ran a carbon-copy strategy – funneling millions from Wall Street into our elections to buy bipartisanship cover for their policies. Crypto companies have accounted for nearly half of all donations made by corporations this election cycle and, most notably, spent over $40 million to beat anti-crypto, pro-worker Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio last year.
I think that cryptocurrency lobbyists want two things: (1) less regulation of them and (2) willingness to bail them out if need be.
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The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, also recently vowed to fund ‘moderate’ primary challengers to incumbent Democrats in deep blue seats when he doesn’t get what he wants. All this at a time when 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and, according to a 2017 study, three billionaire families own more wealth than the bottom half of the country.
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Then about the Congressmembers that JD has supported.
They come from the working class and were elected by the working-class voters of their districts. They won with grassroots donations and refused corporate PAC and lobbyist money, so they are unbought and unbossed. They have forcefully taken on Donald Trump and the GOP over these last six years, and, when necessary, have challenged the leadership within their own party to ensure poor and working people aren’t left behind in policymaking and governance.

Whether it is standing with striking workers on the picket line; delivering historic levels of student debt relief and climate investments; sleeping on the Capitol steps to keep people in their homes; or for over a year, fighting to end the genocide being carried out against Palestinians with our tax dollars ...
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JD politicians have been active in their activism.
We cannot lose sight that the same billionaires funding AIPAC and crypto's super PACs are the same billionaires flying Samuel Alito out on a private jet, who are the same billionaires who funded Donald Trump and JD Vance’s victory in November.
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Sunrise Launches 'People, Not Billionaires' Pledge for DNC Chair Candidates | Common Dreams - Jan 14, 2025
As Democratic National Committee members prepare to vote on the next party chair in February, leading progressive advocacy groups on Tuesday launched an open letter to candidates to warn that Democratic leaders "must decisively show that the party is for the people—not billionaires or corporations."

To do that, said the Sunrise Movement and several allied organizations, the winning candidate must pledge to revive the Obama-era ban on corporate lobbyist donations to the DNC and to ban super PAC spending in Democratic primaries.
The groups, which also include Gen-Z for Change, Justice Democrats, and the Green New Deal Network, are calling on candidates to sign the "People, Not Billionaires" pledge.
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Derec said:
Cry me a river! These congresscritters make $174k. That's 67th percentile for household income and 79th percentile for individual income in DC. They should be able to find a suitable apartment with that salary.
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These congresscritters need residences in both Washington DC and in their home districts.
 
lpetrich said:
Progressive Group Launches House Recruitment Drive to Defeat Corporate Dems | Common Dreams - Jan 14, 2025 - Justice Democrats.
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A similar purge of moderates 2018-22 or so is what got us into this mess. The squady Democrats were a minority, sure, but they were loud and ever-present. They gave us things like calling for defunding police, abolishing ICE or, like ex-congresswoman Cori Bush, sleeping on Capitol steps to protest against people having to pay rent. They damaged the Democratic brand and helped get Trump reelected.
The JD's did not recruit any candidates for 2024, wanting to play defense instead for Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.
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Good riddance!

Justice Democrats said:
“To be the party of the working class, we need more working class leaders in power,” said Alexandra Rojas, Executive Director of Justice Democrats. “Leaders like the elected Justice Democrats in Congress have shown us another way of doing politics is possible and represent the promise of uniting our fractured nation into a multiracial democracy where everyone thrives and no one is left behind.
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How does this Rojas woman even define "working class"?

The average age of a House member this Congress is over 57, nearly one in three are 65 and over (including Jamaal Bowman’s replacement), while only one in six people in the United States are 65 or older.
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It's natural that the House is older than the population at large, since the latter includes many children and young adults who are not even legally eligible to be elected to the House.
a quarter of all US adults under 40 have student loan debt.
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That is skewed by the US adults in school who are not paying off their student loans. According to Pew, the percentage drops to only 14% in the 40-49 cohort. There really should be a differentiation between 18-29 and 30-39 cohorts in the data, as including ages where people tend to still be in school, be it for undergrad or graduate studies, skews the data.
Last Congress ended with fewer than 2% of members of Congress coming from working class backgrounds, this Congress will be even smaller.
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Again, that really depends on how we define "working class".
 
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Osama Something and Alexandra Rojas (via lpetrich) said:
In Congress, mostly through AIPAC’s Super PAC, this also included over $30 million specifically into Democratic primaries to unseat two of the most working-class members to ever walk the halls of Congress – former nurse Cori Bush in Missouri and former middle school principal Jamaal Bowman in New York.
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Wait, their definition of "working class" includes nurses and school principals? I find it hard to believe only 2% of the outgoing Congress were "working class" with a definition this broad.
After AIPAC’s success in these two primaries,
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And there it is, the anti-Israel stance.
the cryptocurrency industry ran a carbon-copy strategy – funneling millions from Wall Street into our elections to buy bipartisanship cover for their policies.
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I'll give them this one. Crypto is way overhyped and mostly a scam.
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, also recently vowed to fund ‘moderate’ primary challengers to incumbent Democrats in deep blue seats when he doesn’t get what he wants.
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Had Elmo not gone full MAGA, that would have been welcome news. We need more moderates on both sides of the aisle.
All this at a time when 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and, according to a 2017 study, three billionaire families own more wealth than the bottom half of the country.
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I must call shenanigans on this claim. Not even somebody like Robert Reich claims that. He claimed, in 2023, that 728 billionaires owned more than the bottom 50% of the US, and Snopes found that this was apparently true. These 728 billionaires do not belong to only three families, obviously. Not even the Waltons are that numerous.
Whether it is standing with striking workers on the picket line; delivering historic levels of student debt relief and climate investments; sleeping on the Capitol steps to keep people in their homes; or for over a year, fighting to end the genocide being carried out against Palestinians with our tax dollars ...
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  • Striking workers like the pampered, overpaid stevedores in Baltimore who are fighting against bringing US ports into the 21 century?
  • Student loan forgiveness, when college graduates earn significantly more than non-graduates and Dems have a big problem attracting non-college vote? "Working class" is mostly non-college graduate, right? You don't find many plumbers with PhDs outside of Weird Al songs.
  • Sleeping on the Capitol Steps to protest against people having to pay rent? Pushing Old Man Biden into issuing an executive order extending the moratorium on evictions even though even he knew he did not have the authority to do so.
  • There is no "genocide" in "Palestine". There was only Israel defending itself from aggression from Gaza.
 
lpetrich said:
To Be the Party of the Working Class, We Need More Working-Class Leaders in Congress - Jan 14, 2025 - by Usamah Andrabi and Alexandra Rojas of the Justice Democrats
In Congress, mostly through AIPAC’s Super PAC, this also included over $30 million specifically into Democratic primaries to unseat two of the most working-class members to ever walk the halls of Congress – former nurse Cori Bush in Missouri and former middle school principal Jamaal Bowman in New York.

After AIPAC’s success in these two primaries, the cryptocurrency industry ran a carbon-copy strategy – funneling millions from Wall Street into our elections to buy bipartisanship cover for their policies. Crypto companies have accounted for nearly half of all donations made by corporations this election cycle and, most notably, spent over $40 million to beat anti-crypto, pro-worker Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio last year.
I think that cryptocurrency lobbyists want two things: (1) less regulation of them and (2) willingness to bail them out if need be.
Click to expand...
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, also recently vowed to fund ‘moderate’ primary challengers to incumbent Democrats in deep blue seats when he doesn’t get what he wants. All this at a time when 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and, according to a 2017 study, three billionaire families own more wealth than the bottom half of the country.
Click to expand...
Then about the Congressmembers that JD has supported.
They come from the working class and were elected by the working-class voters of their districts. They won with grassroots donations and refused corporate PAC and lobbyist money, so they are unbought and unbossed. They have forcefully taken on Donald Trump and the GOP over these last six years, and, when necessary, have challenged the leadership within their own party to ensure poor and working people aren’t left behind in policymaking and governance.

Whether it is standing with striking workers on the picket line; delivering historic levels of student debt relief and climate investments; sleeping on the Capitol steps to keep people in their homes; or for over a year, fighting to end the genocide being carried out against Palestinians with our tax dollars ...
Click to expand...
JD politicians have been active in their activism.
We cannot lose sight that the same billionaires funding AIPAC and crypto's super PACs are the same billionaires flying Samuel Alito out on a private jet, who are the same billionaires who funded Donald Trump and JD Vance’s victory in November.
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Well, we just got our asses kicked. We need to increase our tent and appeal to more moderates. We went a little too left last election and got beat.
 
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