Late last month, a group of five national progressive organizations announced their support for Marie Newman, a Democrat running for Congress in Illinois. Nothing unusual there: Newman is a down-the-line progressive on everything from economic populism, immigration, LGBT rights, gun violence, and a woman’s right to choose.
What made the move so unusual is that there is already a Democrat safely in the seat.
In a year defined by fierce resistance to President Donald Trump, the move marked the most aggressive challenge to a sitting Democrat this cycle, because it wasn’t organized by groups that have been set up specifically to challenge Democrats from the left, but rather by ones that often support those who’ve already been elected, while training their fire instead on Republicans.
The groups broadly come from the activist wing of the party that is comfortable working with establishment Democrats, if at occasionally an arms-length distance: NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. The five joined Daily Kos, which had previously endorsed Newman.
As a signal of how significant the move was, take note of who did not join in the endorsement: Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, or organized labor.
The latter absence is not hard to explain, as Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., much like his father before him, has long commanded the loyalty of unions in the district, who are closely tied to the party machinery, a machine that can still move a lot of ground in the state. “We’ve been gunning for Lipinski for something like 10 years now, and until organized labor abandons him, it’s always an uphill slog. But he certainly has no business being a Democrat and would love to see Newman catch fire,” Markos Moulitsas, head of Daily Kos, told The Intercept.
But for Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List, the abstention is a window into the power of incumbency and the influence of the national Democratic Party.
The letter “D” might come after Lipinski’s name, but he doesn’t vote like a Democrat in 2017. Anti-choice, skeptical of LGBT rights, and often on the side of anti-immigrant efforts, Lipinski’s record is far out of step with his district, which went for Bernie Sanders by roughly eight points in the Democratic primary, and to Hillary Clinton by about 16 points in the 2016 general election.
On paper, there is no question which candidate EMILY’s List or Planned Parenthood would be supporting in a straight-up race between a pro-choice, progressive woman and an anti-choice, conservative man. Newman knows the 3rd District well; she was raised in Palos Park, attended Carl Sandburg High School, and currently resides in La Grange with her husband and two children. She comes from a corporate background and made her career as a marketing professional, but she became a rights advocate and formed a nationwide coalition of anti-bullying nonprofits after her child, who is transgender, was bullied at school. More recently, Newman met with state and federal lawmakers to discuss gun control, as part of her work with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
EMILY’s List is specifically dedicated to electing pro-choice women and didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on its decision not to back Newman. Erica Sackin, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said that the organization has yet to make decisions on 2018 elections, but did not look fondly on the record of Lipinski. “It’s essential to elect people who will be champions for reproductive health and rights,” she said in a statement. “We’ve seen over the years that Rep. Dan Lipinski has not been a champion for women or women’s rights, and in fact has only a 23 percent voting record rating from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.”
But the race is not fought on paper, but rather in the world in which taking on the establishment and losing can come with payback. “I’d welcome their support,” Newman told The Intercept.
Just how dramatic those consequences would be for EMILY’s List is not obvious, however. The fact that NARAL and HRC, which often work closely with establishment Democrats, are willing to challenge Lipinski openly suggests that party leadership is not going to war to defend Lipinski, who couples his conservative politics with an abrasive personality. If Lipinski loses his primary, the party is no worse off, as Newman would easily win the general election.
The calculation for Planned Parenthood is different, as the Illinois machine controls some of the purse strings that keeps the organization funded. And that machine has been good in Illinois on abortion rights. In a move that was seen as a way to box in Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, Democratic state House Speaker Mike Madigan pushed the most progressive pro-choice bill in the country on to the governor’s desk. If he signed it, he’d get a primary from the right, and if he vetoed it, Democrats would use it to crush him. He signed it and got a primary.
Madigan was a longtime ally of Lipinski’s father and is tight with the younger Lipinski, as well, whose career he is partly responsible for. Lipinski became a member of Congress in 2005, when he inherited his father Bill Lipinski’s public service career. He is staunchly opposed to providing federal funding for abortions and has continuously voted against including abortion coverage in qualified health care plans. This was partly the reason why he was the only Illinois Democrat who voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, even though he is currently one of Obamacare’s public defenders. Most recently, he supported a bill that would criminalize abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
“Congressman Lipinski is way out of touch with the values of his district. He used his position in Congress to advance an anti-choice, anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant agenda,” said James Owen, NARAL states communications director.
If a member of Congress is out of step with his district, one way to remedy it is to change the district. In the 2010 redistricting, controlled by the Illinois machine, Lipinski swapped some of his voters out for new ones. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, a fellow Illinois Democrat, watched it happen. “All of a sudden, one day I woke up and I saw the 2011 map that I was going to run in 2012 under, and I said, ‘Whoa! What happened to Bucktown? Wicker Park? What happened to all my inner-city folks? All of a sudden I have cul-de-sacs, I have Brookfield Zoo, I have southern suburbs. Doesn’t sound like part of a Hispanic congressional district, right?” Gutiérrez said. “But I guess the question is, why did he jettison them?”
The answer is simple: to make his district more conservative and fend off a primary challenge from the left. In a redistricting that affected a number of different members of Congress, Lipinski gave up white, lefty enclaves like Brookfield and Riverside in exchange for more conservative white voters. “He gerrymandered it to suit his very far-right, radical needs,” is how Newman put it.
Whether Newman can pull it off will likely depend not just on national progressive groups and the power of the local machine, but in how active the local immigrant rights community decides to get.
Lipinski has a deplorable record on the issue, in a community dominated by immigrants both recent — a third of the district is Latino — and less recent, like those from Poland. While Lipinski has major labor groups locked down, the Hispanic American Labor Council has gotten behind Newman. Gutiérrez, who represents the 4th District in Illinois and is outspoken on immigration issues, told The Intercept he’s “definitely going to sit down with the challenger.”
“Lipinski on a whole array of issues is outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” he said.
On immigration, Lipinski has voted yes to building a fence along the Mexican border and voted against the DREAM Act in 2010. But then in July, he co-sponsored a bill that would protect the recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program from deportation.
Lipinski voted against government recognition of same-sex marriage and was the only Democrat to co-sponsor legislation that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT people based on their religious beliefs.
Lipinski hasn’t responded to The Intercept’s interview requests but told The Hill that his voting record is “very much in line” with his district. The suburbs in the southwest side of Chicago tend to vote conservative, according to Dick Simpson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and former Chicago alderman.
In March, frustrated constituents organized a town hall meeting and aired their grievances at a cardboard cutout of Lipinski. Newman told The Intercept that without polling or surveying his constituents, Lipinski “has no idea what his district wants.”
The Illinois primary race is surfacing as “a battle for the soul of the Democratic party,” according to Kate Sweeney, press secretary of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
“There is this belief that the way forward for the Democratic Party runs through going moderate, or supporting corporate issues, or doing for Republicans more than you do for Democrats. It’s a broken translation. It’s false. We saw in Virginia just a month ago that you can engage a whole new generation of voters by really putting economic populism at the center of your campaigns,” she said.
But going against Lipinski will be an uphill battle for Newman. Lipinski’s campaign has $1.5 million cash on hand, to Newman’s $97,600. The odds are also in his favor: Incumbents have a 90 percent re-election rate.
Newman said she has spoken with 40 or 50 unions and that while some unions will continue backing Lipinski, “ultimately some of them will end positively with me.” Even though Newman seems like a more logical candidate for labor unions, they wouldn’t want Lipinski as an opponent, because of his powerful position in Congress, particularly on transportation issues.
Newman told The Intercept she has received support and mentorship from individuals within the Democratic Party, but no financial support from the party as a whole. Both Lipinski’s father and son were supported by the Chicago Democratic machine, which puts in precinct workers who go door to door and make sure Democratic voters show up and elect their chosen candidate. It’s in the Illinois Democratic establishment’s interest to support Lipinski, because his congressional district controls a lot of the southwest side wards that Rahm Emanuel would need to secure another term as mayor.
When asked if there might be repercussions to coming out against the establishment-backed Democrat, Neil Sroka of Democracy for America said he doubted it. “I think if the national Democrats are smart, they’ll stay the hell away from this race, because few representatives in Congress more poorly reflect where the Democrats are right now than Dan Lipinski,” he said.
Newman added an additional reason that progressive groups might want to get behind her: she plans to win. “Never bet against Marie Newman,” she said. “Don’t do it.”
Update: Dec. 12, 2017
This story was updated to include comment from Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
Top photo: Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., and fellow Democratic members of Congress hold a news conference to voice their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal at the U.S. Capitol on June 10, 2015 in Washington, D.C.
Let’s get these DINOs out!
Twenty – one million Americans say the political term which most closely describes them is “prolife Democrat.” And the Democrats are insistent on driving the very few prolife officeholders who are Democrats out of politics?
The stupidity makes me gasp.
Elections in a country as diverse as ours are won by coalition building, not by an insistence on uniform ideological purity. If the Democrats of today could get over their contempt of non – coasters/non – city dwellers, serious Christians, Southerners, and those who haven’t had the economic and cultural advantages they themselves have had, repudiate corporatism, and embrace true, radical economic populism, they could control the government indefinitely.
You can remain prochoice, but if you adopt the mindset of Tom Perez, the DNC Chairman ( and major dolt ), who says there is “no place” for Democrats who are prolife in the party, you’re showing yourselves to be such political naifs you’re unqualified to run someone’s campaign for a seat in a state legislature.
To hell with the right-wing, corporate-financed, establishment Democrats! Go progressive!
Republicans have been primarying incumbents who are not right wing and/or conservative enough for years. It’s about time Democrats start doing the same thing to incumbents who aren’t progressive enough. Not that I have any faith in this corporate party, but this would be a small step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, winning against the Illinois (actually, pretty much the Chicago) machine will be very tough. I grew up in Chicago under Mayor Daley I, and this machine has an iron grip on electoral politics, so much so that Mayor Daley was said to have given the election to John Kennedy in 1960. Harold Washington was able to beat the machine and become mayor for a short time, but that’s the only loss for the machine that I remember.
Hey Intercept, this is the Southwest suburbs….not south or west sides of Chicago. Lipinski is exactly what these people want…..a right leaning democrat. It’s cool to not be a Republican in this area but the interests here are much to the right. A simple review of the demographics will show who is welcome and who need not apply.
From the article:
“Lipinski’s record is far out of step with his district, which went for Bernie Sanders by roughly eight points in the Democratic primary”
Is that why Sanders won the primary?
It seems there are always enough democrats who are supposedly “liberal” who will defect from a progressive vote on any given corporatist agenda issue. Where it doesn’t matter to the corporatist agenda, the liberal votes will be made.
I’m preaching to the choir here, but if a candidate takes Big Money donations, they are corrupt, at a minimum, on the issues that particular big money donor wants, regardless of their constituents’ views and needs. The Buffets and Cloobecks and their ilk need to be demoted to one vote, as in democracy. The ONLY way forward is to support true grassroots democrats like JusticeDemocrats, whose first plank is don’t be corrupt, and that is followed by progressive positions on other issues. I am extremely skeptical of the “rising stars” in the party who talk the talk but who take big money. Corey Booker’s PhRMA vote against drug reimportation is a great example.
When taking Big Money donations becomes THE marker for corruption and is publicly shamed…we will start to see progress in gaining political control back from the .01% who control both arms (left and right) of the media puppeteers and the parties. It obviously will have to start from the left. Evangelicals are not clear-eyed enough to stop stabbing themselves in the eyes and vote against corruption. But if the democratic party is overrun by candidates who refuse big money and that (refusing big money donations) becomes a “thing”, hordes of Independents will vote democrat and may even become democrats. That may even ultimately influence the republican party to some honest form of honorable conservatism. Pie in the sky, but social movements do happen from time to time. The damage from the Clintons to progressive political power must be undone.
All democrat candidates and office holders use corporate funding.
Anyone who attended their conventions was there because corporations
hold the purse strings for the party, just like the republicans.
Sanders proved that it didn’t have to be that way. The Corporations drowned him for the sake of the party. Burn down the party and the Corporations don’t have a say. At least for a short while. Purity is actually quite efficacious as long as it’s full of venom.
Sanders diverted people from giving money to real
third party candidates and then he turned around and
used his supporters energy in support of a devious corporate warmonger.
Campaign Finance Reforms – it’s what is truly needed and the only way to stop and regain control for the people; Is it to late? Ask Bill Clinton…..perhaps The Foundation will help elect progressives who want progressive change to start at reforming these laws.
Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood, also had some inroads into the Clinton/Kane team. I guess Planned Parenthood is waiting for the Clintons to make the decision on which approved cronies will hold the Democratic ticket and access to funds.
The stench of Clinton wreaks. The Democratic party needs to purge every Clinton crony.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecile_Richards
The link for Cecile Richards bio.
Looks like HRC has a history of working with Planned Parenthood and doing things behind the scenes without HRC’s fingerprints.
#SmokingGun, #HRCisCorrupt, #PurgeTheDNCNow!
Perhaps that’s because Newman is not an approved HRC candidate. After all, the head of Emily’s List, Ellen Malcolm was HRC’s 2008 co-chair in her failed 2008 presidential run.
The creepy Clinton hand from the grave continues to stretch out its influence.
https://www.emilyslist.org/bios/entry/ellen-malcolm
They didn’t used to call it “mortmain” for no reason. A dead institution controlling living things for the sake of greed. That’s the Clinton’s and the DNC.
I’m thrilled someone is finally challenging Lipinski. He’s consistently voted terribly. He’s one of the most conservative Democrats in the House. Every time he makes another bad call–voting against the ACA, co-sponsoring bills outlawing abortion, voting against visas for immigration–I call his office and tell him I’m disappointed. He doesn’t care what his constituents actually want. He’s never had to fight for his seat. His dad gave him his seat in a sleight of hand, and since then he’s just done whatever he feels like.
I really hope Newman wins the seat. She sounds like she really knows and cares about issues I care about. And if she doesn’t win, I hope at least she pushes Lipinski to be a little less conservative.
Modern Democrats are the Republicans of 1980, which is why this country is in such a pile of dung right now; there’s nobody fighting for We, The People. And FAR too many are caught up in identity politics, thinking anyone with a D on their back will do.
Well, our fight these days is in the primary, so HELL YES , Lipinski has to go, and lets cheer on Marie Newman! If I was wealthy, I’d put a lot of $$ behind her.
Meanwhile, the article cited: NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and Daily Kos.
I can’t speak for the others, but I know first hand – from personal involvement – that MoveOn.org and Daily Kos are sheep-dogging to keep the fascists in power. OK, they’re on the Democratic Wing of the Fascist Uni-Party, but they’re pro-fascists no matter how you look at it. And, there’s more than a little evidence to say that DFA is right in there with MoveOn and Daily Kos as a fascist supporting organization.
It REALLY pisses me off to see them manipulate people into not expressing more Progressive views that most people certainly have. Yet, fight these three groups we must – right along with fighting the Republicans that openly wear red and have an R on their backs.
Come on, I looked at Lipinski on OpenSecrets and one of his two top single contributers is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, who also put up an initial $1 million behind both Obama and Clinton in 2008 – but who only backed Clinton over Sanders in 2016.
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=N00027239&cycle=2018
Where Warren Buffett leads, the corporate Democrats follow. Illinois is also known as a “Democratic coal state” (Warren Buffett’s BNSF hauls a lot of coal, Exelon, the major utility, burns a lot of coal. Career-wise, BNSF railway is Lipinski’s to contributor, at about $75,000. Standard Democratic coal-state Congressmember, that’s Lipinski.
Guess who the other top contributor (in the 2018 cycle) to Lipinski is? Arms dealer Raytheon, who relies on Saudi Arabia to buy its missiles and got a nice bumb from Trump’s recent missile attack on Syria.
I really do not understand why opensecrets is not the very first resource political reporters turn to, nor why it is never featured in their discussions of politicians. Nor why there is this progressive reluctance to talk about Warren Buffett, who clearly pulls as much political weight as the Koch Brothers do. You can do better.
Thanks for that, Photo.
I think everyone (except the Wingnuts) can agree that the Democrats aren’t much better than the Republicans. In fact, they destroy and cause more set backs than the Republicans themselves. Whether they’re playing dead, going along or simply doing their own thing, they’re as destructive and corporate-compliant – or even more so – than their opponents.
The Democrats are the party of no ideas. The Republicans are the party of bad ideas. And the lesser of two evils is still evil.
No, no they’re not. Democrats overwhelmingly vote against destroying net neutrality while Repubs do the opposite. Dems overwhelming vote to protect and expand access to social programs while Repubs would love nothing more than to undermine and destroy them.
Repubs wrote the damn book on taking corporate money while dems simply followed suit in the lates 80s/90s lead by the Clintons. Dems lost their way for sure, but the same? Not even close.
“Dems overwhelming vote to protect and expand access to social programs…”
If, by social programs, you mean private prisons, welfare to work, destruction of k-12 public education, corporate welfare, privatization of most social programs wherever possible, no-bid military contracts to defense companies, bail-outs for Wall Street corporations – then I guess you’re right. It’s pretty easy to argue for expanded social services when your party is in the minority and can’t pass anything. It wasn’t that the Dems lost their way; the country lost its way, and the Dems were pleased to help it on its way down that road. They still are.
It really depends on the issue. One can make a list of issues where Democrats and Republicans vote in unison with one or two exceptions (bloated military budgets, Wall Street bailouts), where they are always opposed on party lines (often these are cosmetic issues, but as you say, there are exceptions), and then there are issues in which both parties are fractured (approving domestic mass surveillnace, which a subset of Republicans and Democrats have joined together to oppose).
There are some pretty interesting quotes from Hillary Clinton’s private paid speeches on this, by the way:
What does that mean? Two parties to act as puppets for Wall Street’s Punch & Judy show, run by the same set of wealthy donors? That’s what people mean when they say there’s little difference between the two.
Let’s see if wikileaks links can be posted here, this is the summation of Hillary Clinton’s no-reporters-allowed private Wall Street speaking points that Team Podesta was trying to ‘fix':
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/927
You can definetly pick individual issues in which Democrats are markedly better than Republicans, but overall, they’re terrible. The Democrats, with Clinton (Bill) effectively took over the political ground formerly held by Republicans, freeing the Republicans to shift into hard-right complete insanity.
But I, like Pepito, and DONE with being forced to elect old-school Republicans because the modern Republicans are so much worse. And the ONLY WAY we can get the Democratic Party to reform – or fail – is to go to its left, constantly, consistently, every damned time. Otherwise, it has zero incentive to change.
In 2016 the democrats insisted that a devious, warmongering,
corporate predator named Hillary Clinton was the best they could
come up with. Her former friend Trump decided to be the republican
candidate instead of seeking the democrat nomination (he has given
money to both democrats and republicans in the past and he and
Bill Clinton are golf buddies).
I dare you to find any policy area where Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney
have opposed each others policy choices in the past 20 years.
The only difference between Cheney and the Clintons are the words
they use to manipulate the suckers.
Well, you convinced me. I’m voting Democrat as soon as I can so they can protect my interests…just because you said so and because I’m totally stupid and blind and can’t see what they do.
Thanks for the chuckle, dude. I needed that today.
Ajit Pai, the corporate toady FCC chair who is killing NN, was first appointed by Obama in 2012.
Democrats are often as bad as you say, but as bad, nearly all the rest are like a battered wife who supports her husband despite his assaulting her constantly.
Excellent analogy, Art. And you’re absolutely right. If/when the Democrats are not guilty of the deed themselves, they certainly are complicit. It appears that their leaders (i.e. Clinton, Obama) do more damage than actual Republicans and get away with abuses they wouldn’t permit of the other party. When a Democrat is in office, their followers fall into a stupor and give him a pass for anything, no matter how egregious.
I learned that first hand with Bill Clinton as president. -ugh-
I dumped my D voter registration and switched to I because of his actions. After Team Hillary stole the primary last year, I dumped my I registration for Green Party – ON election day!
LOL…Art. I think Bill Clinton can be credited for disenchanting more Democrats than anyone can imagine. I was never partisan; however, the last time I voted was on his second campaign. I looked at the ballot and assessed who would be the candidate most likely to get the least amount of votes and found a woman named Monica “something or other” (can’t remember her last name) and voted for her. To this day, she probably wonders who was that person who who was not part of her close family or in her circle of friends and still voted for her. The irony of picking someone named Monica to cast my last protest vote has never escaped me. :)
As I discovered, not voting has an added bonus: not being called to serve on jury duty, another one of my pet peeves. If that system ever changes and I get called to sit on a jury again, you can rest assured that no matter what the defendant is accused of having done (short of being a bankster, war criminal or politician) he or she will walk; I will make sure of that.
…I figure we must all ALWAYS vote, and make it a protest vote if you have to. The most important time to vote that most people sit-out are the primaries. If we can get truly progressive candidates on the ballots, things WILL change. I encourage you to re-sign up and help us fix this broken system.
BTW, here in my area, jury duty isn’t based on voting but drivers license or identity card – if you have one, you’re on the list to serve. However, I have often gotten notices late and never responded. Once I did call up to apologize and the clerk was shocked! They said something to the effect of, “It’s your civic duty, but we understand people are struggling to live; if you can make it, please do but we’re not going to prosecute you for missing a jury summons.” :-)
Maybe you just need to move?
More reasons to vote for Marie Newman aside from the cultural issues discussed above:
https://www.marienewmanforcongress.com/issues/
Supports progressive taxation and raising wages
Against trade agreements that benefit corporations instead of workers
Supports Healthcare for all
Supports campaign finance reform
In contrast the incumbent does not even mention these issues on his platform / issues page:
https://lipinski.house.gov/issues/
I will give him credit for this however:
That is a big deal and something every American needs to support. Buy American!
Actually, buy local. If you live in San Diego or Los Angeles, better to buy something from northern Mexico than from Chicago or Ohio.
Democrats are zombies – dead and don’t know it. Until the progressives put them in the dirt they will continue to walk about creating chaos.
I’ve been shoveling for a while now. Here, I have some spare shovels! Start digging!
Am I suppose to believe that the only points of disagreemement between these candidates are on cultural issues? That seems unlikely to me.
a good article for anyone who doubted Bernie Sanders last year when he pointed out that — for all their essential work — Planned Parenthood is very much a part of the “establishment.”
That is not correct, what Bernie was referring to was the LEADERSHIP (Cecile Richards for PP) people who were ignoring the wishes of their members, like other organizations whose members voted overwhelmingly for supporting Bernie Sanders but their ‘leader’ gave support to Hillary anyway.
PP is very important and should be supported and right now more than ever.
CR “….You can look at Health and Human Services now. It has been completely stocked with people who are against not only Planned Parenthood, not only against safe and legal abortion, they’re against birth control now. I mean, that’s what we’re seeing from leaked memos from the White House. They now want to take away family planning money and redirect it to teaching women—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And who, specifically, are some of those people? So that—
CECILE RICHARDS: Well, you can look at Teresa Manning, who is the head of what’s called the Title X. It’s the national family planning program, signed into law by a Republican president. It serves 4 million women, mainly low-income women, across the country. She doesn’t even believe in birth control. She’s not a supporter of contraception. And what we’re seeing now is that they are going to try to unravel a program that has led to, I mean, two important victories to me. We have the lowest teen pregnancy in the history of the United States of America and a 30-year low for unintended pregnancy. What I fear from this administration is they’re now putting, of course, their politics ahead of women’s health, and we’ll see those rates begin to rise again.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/12/cecile_richards_mike_pence_is_orchestra
I just moved to Chicago and my word is it rotten lol. Third party now
Lipinski is probably aware that what he is doing is almost exactly
how Obama moved from a state senator to a U.S. senator.
After the census of 2000, Obama re-drew his district and by doing so
he dropped the poorer areas to the west of Washington Park
and gained access to North Michigan Avenue’s corporatists
like Penny Pritzker with the help of the Daley machinery.
If Newman was the real deal, she would not be a democrat
because the democrats will take her ideas and make sure
they are prevented from being a problem for their republican allies.
For a lot of the country, there is no Green Party to work with. So, it’s either pick D or R or sit it out entirely.
From 8 December 2017:
Rep. Raúl Grijalva is joining Justice Democrats! That’s a bold move and he’ll probably hear about it from his colleagues in the House. But what it shows is that JD has serious momentum heading into the primaries that are only a few months away. We now have TWO sitting members of Congress joining forces with us: Reps. Ro Khanna and Raúl Grijalva.
justicedemocrats.com/platform
We have Alison Hartson running against DiFi.
DiFi represents the only vote I’ve ever made in my life that I truly regret, though I did make a bad call on Clinton back in… um… 92?