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In Somerville’s election, a heptad of Bernie-inspired aldermen victories

In Somerville, all seven aldermen candidates who were endorsed by a local affiliate of the Bernie Sanders-inspired Our Revolution won Tuesday: Matthew McLaughlin in Ward 1, JT Scott in Ward 2, Ben Ewen-Campen in Ward 3, Jesse Clingan in Ward 4, and at-large aldermen Bill White, Mary Jo Rossetti, and Will Mbah, according to unofficial results posted to the city’s web site.

Our Revolution is a political group that seeks to harness the progressive ideas that Bernie Sanders ran on during last year’s presidential election. Its web site says the group is looking to “transform American politics to make our political and economic systems once again responsive to the needs of working families.”

A Somerville affiliate of that group made endorsements for the city’s municipal election on Tuesday. About 50 people were involved in the endorsement process, said McLaughlin. All seven of the group’s aldermen endorsements were elected.

McLaughlin, who was the chairman for Sanders’ campaign in Somerville during last year’s primary, said he thought the results reflected that the city’s residents wanted “progressive change.”

“Locally this is mandate for change in Somerville and the affordable housing crisis specifically,” he said.

A triumph of decency over dread

THE TRIUMPH of Democratic Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam in Virginia’s gubernatorial election Tuesday was a victory of decency, civility and moderation over fear, dread and barely veiled racist coding. The outcome reinforced what has become Virginia’s quintessential, if imperiled, idea — that of a determinedly centrist Southern state that has repeatedly rejected efforts to coax its electorate to the toxic margins of American politics.

Mr. Northam — understated, personally gracious and so lacking in partisan fire in the belly that Republicans once took a shot at recruiting him to their ranks in the state Senate — led in the polls from the outset. Yet his win still contained a measure of surprise. It was a repudiation not only of Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate, but also more fundamentally of the racially divisive Trump campaign playbook, which Mr. Gillespie, ditching his reputation as a traditional and fair-minded conservative, embraced whole-heartedly.

Virginians have now rejected President Trump’s tawdry, tasteless, taunting brand of politics in consecutive years — in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the state by a greater margin than President Barack Obama managed in 2012, and again on Tuesday, when Democrats swept all three statewide offices and gained perhaps a dozen or so seats in what had been a GOP-dominated legislature. The rest of the South may be Trump country — though even that is uncertain given the president’s anemic poll ratings — but Virginia most assuredly is not.

Virginia voters suffered through a barrage of Gillespie campaign attack ads vilifying illegal immigrants by equating them with violent gangsters; celebrating the candidate’s support for Confederate monuments immediately after they were the rallying cause of racist and neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville; and attacking Mr. Northam, a pediatrician, for his ostensible support for restoring voting and other civil rights to child sex abusers. Eschewing the pocketbook issues Mr. Gillespie himself said mattered most to Virginians, his ads aimed to inflame and frighten.

Democrats Sweep Mayoral Elections In New York, Other Major Cities

It was a good night for Democrats in some of the nation’s largest cities.

New York’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, a forceful critic of President Trump, easily won a second term. And Democrats also won several major cities and closely watched races, including those in Boston, Charlotte, N.C. and Seattle.

With all of the precincts counted, de Blasio had 66 percent of the vote to 28 percent for his main rival, Republican Nicole Malliotakis.

“It’s a good night for progressives,” de Blasio said at a victory party, according to The New York Times. “For the first time in 32 years, a Democratic mayor was re-elected in New York City. But let’s promise each other: This is the beginning of a new era of progressive Democratic leadership in New York City for years and years to come.”

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◾Charlotte, N.C., elected Democrat Vi Lyles, its first female African-American mayor. In the primary, she defeated incumbent Democrat Jennifer Roberts. On Tuesday, Lyles easily outpaced Republican City Councilman Kenny Smith largely on the strength of early voting, winning 58 percent of the vote. The Hill reports that Lyles, who had previously served as assistant city manager, “ran on a platform promoting economic and social justice in Charlotte, including improving the relationship between Charlotte’s police department and citizens and increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour.”

Socialism, the “Tea Party of the Left”

So, what exactly is democratic socialism? It’s a system in which true, anti-capitalist socialism is brought about through voting instead of revolution. Under democratic socialism, the means of production are government-owned and private ownership of property and wealth is abolished. This public ownership may take the form of social ownership (worker-owned cooperatives) or state ownership in industries such as steel and energy. In short, it’s straight-up, Soviet-style socialism—and more leftist than anything Bernie Sanders proposed in 2016

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Within the past year, membership in DSA has soared from just 8,000 dues-paying members to over 25,000. Compared to the current population of the United States (almost 325 million) DSA isn’t big enough to pack much of a political punch; but its growth and potential impact may have a surprising precedent… on the Right.

The Tea Party, a conservative movement, claimed only 67,000 members in April 2010 – yet it managed to win 47 seats in the House of Representatives the previous November. The power behind the Tea Party wasn’t in dues-paying members, but the millions of Americans who supported the movement with their votes – and without ever signing up formally. These unofficial members continue to form a strong voting bloc, backing Tea Party-affiliated Republican candidates.

DSA leaderships claims that they’re following a similar trend. By positioning themselves as the legitimate heir to Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, they believe they can gain the support of voters who might not pay the membership fees but support the ideals behind democratic socialism and, thus, will show that support during election season. With almost 29 percent of Americans and 43 percent of people under the age of 30 viewing socialism at least somewhat favorably, DSA’s theory may be proven correct in a future election season.

Democrats picked up 2 seats in the Georgia state legislature, too

As part of a larger wave of Democratic wins on Election Day 2017, Democrats picked up two seats in special elections held for Georgia’s House of Delegates.

Deborah Gonzales won House District 117 with 53 percent of the vote and Jonathan Wallace won House District 119 with 56 percent of the vote. Both seats are in the Athens area and both were vacant, hence the special elections. But not only were the two seats previously held by Republican incumbents, they were uncontested in the 2016 elections.

Superior Democratic recruiting in these kind of races is both a cause and a consequence of a national political environment that is now Democratic leaning. It’s much easier to get people excited about running for office when the climate is favorable, so the uptick in recruiting is itself a result of Donald Trump’s unpopularity. But it’s also the case that no matter how unpopular Trump is, you can’t win elections without fielding candidates. In 2016, Democrats didn’t have candidates in these races. In 2017 they did, and they both won.

The result in HD-117 should be particularly alarming for Republicans. Mitt Romney won it by a crushing 54-44 margin back in 2012. Donald Trump fared much worse than that, winning by just 49-46, but nonetheless winning. That’s a broadly similar pattern to what Jon Ossoff faced earlier this year in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District. But while Ossoff failed to improve on Hillary Clinton’s narrow loss, Gonzales ran 7 points stronger than Clinton and flipped what had been an overwhelmingly Republican district as recently as five years ago.

Why Donna Brazile’s Story Matters – But Not for the Reason You Might Think by Matt Taibbi

There are a lot of people who are going to wonder why so much time is being spent re-litigating the 2016 campaign. It sucked, it’s over: Who cares?

It does matter. That race is when many of the seeds of what will be the defining problems of our age first began to be sown.

The rise of Trump and the crypto-fascist movement that crushed establishment Republicans is half of the story. The sharp move among many white middle American voters away from Beltway Republicanism toward something far darker and more dangerous crystalized in 2015-16. So it has to be studied over and over.

But there is an ugly thing on the other side that also began at that time.

This is when establishment Democrats began to openly lose faith in democracy and civil liberties and began to promote a “results over process” mode of political thinking. It’s when we started hearing serious people in Washington talk about the dangers of “too much democracy.”

This isn’t about Hillary Clinton. It’s about a broader movement that took place within the Democratic establishment, and spread rapidly to blue-friendly media and academia.

It’s a kind of repeat of post-9/11 thinking, when suddenly huge pluralities of Americans decided the stakes were now too high to continue being queasy about things like torture, extralegal assassination, and habeas corpus.

Im not the biggest fan of Braziles, but when it comes to the last two sentences I post, I’d say its both, not an either/or choice.

The DNC “Cancer” Is Donna Brazile

Voices on the left haven’t just excoriated Democrats for weak messaging—they’ve offered a clear and specific idea of what the party’s messaging could have been like in 2016: a forceful rhetoric of economic empowerment aimed at advancing progressive goals like single-payer health care, fighting rising inequality, and curbing corporate power. Over the summer, party leaders nodded in that direction with the introduction of their “Better Deal” package of proposals, including a $15 minimum wage and a reinvigoration of antitrust policy. Nothing that’s emerged from Hacks indicates that Brazile herself believes the party’s most significant problems are ideological—a call to Sanders announcing Clinton’s replacement with Joe Biden would presumably have been just as unwelcome to Sanders and his supporters. This suggests a faith that rancor over the Clinton campaign’s machinations during the primary and her belated denunciations of them alone will carry her into the party’s future

It’s unlikely they will, and that future remains a good while away. Brazile’s now on the outs with a party establishment that is still firmly entrenched, and seems to be having second thoughts about her claims. In a Tuesday interview on CBS This Morning, Brazile called the primary a “fair fight,” praised Clinton for helping restore the party’s finances, and dismissed pointed questions about her change in tone. “Like most campaigns, you have family squabbles,” she said with a smile. “I fought with my family.”

This kind of slipperiness, which has served Brazile well over the course of her long career, will now doom her. For both the enemies she’s making in the establishment and the activists she’s gesturing to on the left, she will survive mainly and perhaps only as an example of the very self-interested corruption that she decries: a craven, calculating striver, incapable of being trusted, and loyal not to ideas or a particular vision for the country but a career now in need of resuscitation. A political “operative”—that greasy word—through and through and to the last, who nevertheless pretends an implausible ignorance of basic facts regarding a party she was chosen to run. Brazile’s future is precisely as dim as it ought to be. The cancer within the Democratic Party last year wasn’t some fundraising agreement. It was figures like her.

In ‘Twisted’ Push, Trump Admin Encourages States to Impose Work Requirements for Medicaid

In a move called “twisted” and “absolutely awful” by healthcare experts, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Seema Verma said Tuesday that the Trump administration will encourage states to force work requirements on people enrolled in Medicaid.

In a speech to the National Association of Medicaid Directors, Verma explained her approach to managing CMS, which emphasizes deregulation and transferring more control to the states. Verma vowed to fast-track approvals of states’ proposals for amending how they implement Medicaid and denounced the Obama administration’s rejection of work requirements for Medicaid recipients, promising to “approve proposals that promote community engagement activities,” which she defined as “working, volunteering, going to school, or obtaining job training.”

“Believing that community engagement requirements do not support or promote the objectives of Medicaid is a tragic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations consistently espoused by the prior administration,” she said. “Those days are over.”

New York Medicaid director Jason Helgerson said he was “shocked” and “appalled” by Verma’s “absolutey awful” speech. He told the Washington Post it was “completely reprehensible” for Verma to use the phrase “soft bigotry” to describe state programs that don’t impose extra requirements on low-income people who seek health insurance coverage through Medicaid.

Judy Solomon, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, called the statement “twisted,” and emphasized that Medicaid’s purpose is to enable low-income individuals to access healthcare.

‘You’re Not Supposed to Say This Out Loud’: GOP Lawmaker Admits Pushing Tax Scam to Please His Rich Donors

“Get it done or don’t ever call me again.”

That was the ultimatum a major donor reportedly gave Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) as the House GOP readies for a vote on their tax bill as early as next week.

As Common Dreams has reported, the Trump-GOP tax plan will overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans, but it is rare for a member of Congress to express with such clarity the fact that the priorities of rich donors are so often placed above those of the majority of Americans.

“Oops. You’re not supposed to say this out loud,” Topher Spiro, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, wrote on Twitter. “Putting donors over 38 million middle-class Americans.”

According to an analysis by the New York Times published Monday, “Nearly half of all middle-class families would pay more in taxes in 2026 than they would under current rules if the proposed House tax bill became law, and about one-third would pay more in 2018.”

St. Paul picks Carter for mayor; Minneapolis keeps counting

St. Paul voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly chose Melvin Carter as the city’s next mayor.

Carter, a former St. Paul City Council member, won about 51 percent of the vote, dominating a crowded field in the race to replace Mayor Chris Coleman. Council member Pat Harris came in a distant second winning about 25 percent of the vote.

The fact that Carter won more than 50 percent of the vote decided the matter relatively quickly Tuesday night.

Both Minneapolis and St. Paul this year used ranked-choice voting, a system that allows voters to rank their candidates, giving contenders a chance to win even if voters didn’t consider them a first choice.

Ohio Issue 2 on drug prices fails; Issue 1 on victims’ rights passes

Ohioans rejected Issue 2, a proposal proponents said would lower drug prices, in a costly battle funded by drug companies opposing the initiative.

Supporters of Issue 2 billed the match-up as a David and Goliath-style fight. Drug companies raised more than $58.2 million to defeat the measure, which would have required Ohio’s state-managed health care programs, such as Medicaid, to pay no more for medicine than the discounted price paid by the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

“What we have learned is that $75 million can convince people to vote against their own best interests,” said Dennis Willard, spokesman for proponents of Issue 2, estimating how much drug companies spent against Issue 2. Supporters intend to pursue ballot initiatives in South Dakota and Washington D.C. “We will be back to fight another day.”