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It Shouldn't Even Be Close: Harris Must Ditch Genocide and Embrace Working-Class Politics
Winning should be a breeze for Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the other Democratic candidates. What's going on?
Oct 05, 2024
With little more than four weeks to go before the November elections, polls show the Trump/Harris race as “too close to call.” Winning should be a breeze for Harris and the other Democratic candidates. The GOP’s Congressional votes and policies are bad for women, children, and workers. The GOP doesn’t recognize and act against climate violence, it protects the corporate-favorable tax code, it is soft on corporate crooks, it scuttles regulatory protections for the peoples’ health, safety, and economic wellbeing and mocks the dire necessity of preparedness for future pandemics. (The military Empire with its violent war crimes and runaway budget-busting drain on our domestic necessities is supported by both Parties and not in electoral contention.)
Why so close, then? Because for years, the Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP. It has hired corporate-conflicted political consulting firms that control campaign messages, strategies and has excluded access by citizen groups to candidates, generally preferring corporatism over democracy, regardless of its rhetoric.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country—the red states—and surrender them to the Republicans. The mountain states and North and South Dakota used to have Democrats representing them in the Senate. Failing to compete in these low population states concedes about ten Senate seats at the outset.
Most telling in these last remaining days is the refusal for Kamala Harris and most Congressional candidates to have front and center proven and proper vote-getting agendas reflecting the New Deal.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country—the red states—and surrender them to the Republicans.
To begin with I’m referring to raising the GOP frozen federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour from its present $7.25. Democrats need more than a throwaway line on wages. They need to pour some of the billions of dollars raised into media and groundgame campaigns around the slogan “go vote for a raise, you’ve long earned and been denied by the Republicans.” That, authentically conveyed by thousands of Democratic candidates will get the attention of 25 million underpaid and struggling workers, who make our real economy run daily. Why aren’t the Dems ringing that bell?
Another winner for 65 million elderly voters is to pledge with full throttle to increase Social Security benefits frozen for half a century and to raise the Social Security tax on the wealthy to pay for it. Astonishingly, Kamala Harris and her handlers are not championing the “Social Security 2100 Act” which had 200 sponsors in the Congress, led by Congressman John Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal. The throwaway line is that they “will protect social security” as it deficiently exists. Talk is not enough. The Democrats need to organize and communicate to drive this message.
Third, they should be championing government-paid child care, maternal and family sick leave and the child tax credit—all opposed by the Wall Street GOP. Paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy—this issue is an 85 percent poll winner. Instead, Harris and the Dems mumble with some general rhetoric that nobody really believes. Western countries have long had such social safety net protections for families and children.
The Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP.
Get-out-the-vote efforts are still inadequate. The Party has trouble listening to Rev. William Barber who argues that just a ten to fifteen percent increase in low-wage voter turnout from 2020 would win the November elections. Instead of scapegoating the Green Party and spending money to block Third Party ballot access, the Democrats should try harder to tap into the 80 to 90 million non-voters who stay home, many of whom don’t see anything benefiting them coming from bloviating, hypocritical politicians.
If readers want more ideas for ways to get more votes, such as midnight shift campaigning, and cracking down on corporate crooks, they can obtain my usable new book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” and go to winningamerica.net.
Are you wondering why Tim Walz didn’t do better against J.D. Vance in the VP debate? Vance managed to normalize criminal felon Trump with his serial lies and law violations, corruption, abuse of women, awful presidential record (recall his lethal mocking of the early Covid-19 pandemic), because Walz was muzzled by the Harris campaign operatives. He was told what not to speak about and to hew to the narrow Party line. That kind of advice may sink the genocidal Democratic Party with its insular cowardliness in November.
Will these observations get the attention of the tiny number of ruling Democratic Party operatives who make most of the major decisions for their rank and file? Probably not. But similar advice from loyal party columnists like Dana Milbank, Michelle Goldberg, Eugene Robinson, Charles Blow, E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, among others, may breach the upper deck’s aloofness.
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The GOP Is Keen to Tackle the Non-Threat of Noncitizen Voting
The nonissue is being milked by Republicans in order to curry favor with Trump and gin up distrust in the electoral process so that Trump and his allies can again claim fraud if he doesn’t win in November.
May 27, 2024
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has emerged as a big backer of a bill now pending in Congress to keep people who are not citizens from voting, even though there is no evidence that this occurs except in extremely rare and isolated cases. He has argued that if we wait for this to become a real problem, we’ll miss our chance to do something about it.
“We cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur,” Johnson said at an April 12 news conference at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. “Especially when the threat of fraud is growing with every single illegal immigrant that crosses that border” with Mexico.
A month later, on May 8, Johnson told reporters on the Capitol steps that the issue was being driven not by evidence but intuition:
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that—it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states.”
Republican lawmakers are mobilizing in Congress and in statehouses across the country to pass laws to make voting by noncitizens even harder to do. Why? As with so much else within the Republican party, it’s because Donald Trump wants them to.
In fact, voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections already is illegal in all 50 states. And multiple attempts to quantify the scope of the problem have all affirmed that it is all but nonexistent. A study by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice of voting in immigrant-heavy jurisdictions in the 2016 general election found 30 cases of suspected—not confirmed—noncitizen votes out of 23.5 million cast.
Others note that when noncitizens try to vote, it is often due to a misunderstanding or mistake. They may believe that just because they are in the country legally, working and paying taxes, that they have a right to vote. Moreover, those convicted of illegally voting in a federal election face up to a year in federal prison and may face deportation and revocation of their legal status under immigration law. And all just to cast a single vote.
“This is a crime where not only are the consequences really high and the payoff really low,” says Sean Morales-Doyle, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice. Registering to vote and voting itself creates “a government record of your crime.” In sum, he says, voting by noncitizens is “very easy to catch, and you will get caught.”
In Georgia, a 2022 review ordered up by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger turned up 1,624 cases in which noncitizens attempted to register over a 25-year period. In every case, elections officials intervened and blocked the registration.
Still, Republican lawmakers are mobilizing in Congress and in statehouses across the country to pass laws to make voting by noncitizens even harder to do. Why? As with so much else within the Republican party, it’s because Donald Trump wants them to.
The bill now before Congress and being championed by Speaker Johnson, known as the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” or “SAVE Act,” is the brainchild of Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).
It would require states to scour their voter rolls, as Georgia did, in search of noncitizens. And it would mandate that voters present proof of citizenship before receiving a ballot. The fact that they already must in most cases prove their citizenship to obtain the documents they need to register to vote is not good enough.
Additionally, at least six states have placed measures to curb voting by noncitizens on the November 5 ballot. In my home state of Wisconsin, voters will have a chance to approve a state constitutional amendment that has already passed two consecutive sessions of the legislature.
While it will be too late to change the rules for the next election, having it on the ballot will help draw those who think that voting by illegal immigrants is a problem to the polls. And these are people who tend to be Trump supporters. For MAGA Republicans, it’s a win-win.
Trump has long contended that between 3-5 million illegal immigrants broke the law and voted for his Democratic opponent in 2016, which was the only thing that kept him from winning the popular vote as well as the electoral college. He even appointed a commission, headed by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, to look into the issue, which disbanded after months of work without finding any evidence of significant fraud.
Kobach responded indignantly, declaring: “For some people, no matter how many cases of voter fraud you show them, there will never be enough for them to admit that there’s a problem.”
In Washington, D.C. on May 16, a hearing of the House Administration Committee was held to look into what more can be done to prevent noncitizen immigrants from voting. Said the committee chair, Republican Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, “American elections are for American citizens, and we intend to keep it that way.”
On the same day back in Wisconsin, a hearing on illegal voting by immigrants was held in the Wisconsin State Capitol. It was an enlightening event.
At this hearing Christina Boardman, deputy secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, which issues driver’s licenses and voter ID cards, painstakingly explained how anyone seeking either document must attest to citizenship. She said she wanted to make it clear that “WisDOT is required to provide free identification cards for U.S. citizens that request them for the purposes of voting, and that to be eligible for that free identification card, one must be a U.S. citizen.”
According to Boardman, there have been 23 instances in the last 10 years in which people were referred to law enforcement for fraudulently requesting voting IDs. In nine of those cases, documents were issued that would have allowed people to vote.
Confronted with evidence that existing rules are working well, the GOP lawmakers declared these aren’t tight enough. They said it isn’t enough to just require that a person getting a driver’s license have to prove they are a citizen; the license itself should say so, right on it. Boardman said that would require a change in the law. Rep. Scott Krug, the Republican chair of the Assembly Campaigns and Election Committee, said hold my beer.
“We should do a bill,” he replied, vowing to “make it my mission this summer” to require state agencies to share more information to root out noncitizen voting.
One of the Democratic lawmakers in attendance, state Rep. Lee Snodgrass, drew national notice with her comment wondering why such a small problem is such a big concern: “I’m trying to wrap my brain around what people think the motivation would be for a noncitizen to go through an enormous amount of hassle to actively commit a felony to vote in an election that’s going to end up putting them in prison or be deported.”
The nonissue of voting by noncitizens is being milked by Republicans in order to curry favor with Trump and gin up distrust in the electoral process so that Trump and his allies can again claim fraud if he doesn’t win in November.
“It appears the lesson Republicans learned from the fiasco that the former president caused in 2020 was not ‘Don’t steal an election’—it was just ‘Start earlier,’” said New York Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, during a recent hearing. “The coup starts here. This is where it begins.”
And this is where it needs to end.
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This Progressive Democrat Could Help Improve Millions of Lives — and American Democracy
Jamie McLeod-Skinner is trailblazing the effort to forge a new path for the Democratic Party, with detailed plans to address the concerns of the many rural and small-town constituents in her district and far beyond.
May 17, 2024
Tuesday’s Democratic Party primary in Oregon’s vast 5th congressional district just might hold the key to defeating MAGA Republicanism and renewing American democracy.
Sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not. If one of the two top contenders in the race, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, wins next Tuesday and in November, she will transform the Democratic Party for the better – and, by doing so, alter the 50/50 balance that defines American politics.
The reason for this is simple, the Democratic Party has all-but-abandoned small town and rural America. This is evident to anyone paying attention, but it is still a somewhat absurd state of affairs. After all, on balance, things have not been going well across small town and rural America for many decades. So, you’d think that the more progressive of the two major partes would be responsive to the needs of so many people and communities in distress, but that simply hasn’t been the case. Rather, small town and rural America is effectively ruled by one party: the GOP.
The Democratic Party has all-but-abandoned small town and rural America. This is evident to anyone paying attention, but it is still a somewhat absurd state of affairs.
This is doubly confounding since things, on balance, have been going so badly for so long. For rural and small-town Americans, the past four decades have been defined by: the hallowing out of thousands of small towns, the precipitous decline in social services, widespread poverty, epidemics of drug addiction; and about as much free-floating anger and despair about the wholesale implosion of family farming from the 1970s onward that it matches the ire of the residents of industrial towns whose factories were offshored. When things are that bad, you’d think the party out of power would have a huge opportunity to suggest a different path. But nope, the “mainstream” of the Democratic Party seem content to continue writing off the vast majority of the country’s geography.
That is, until now. Jamie McLeod-Skinner is trailblazing the effort to forge a new path for the Democratic Party, with detailed plans to address the concerns of the many rural and small-town constituents in her district.
As it turns out, there are compelling proposals that address the myriad problems facing small towns and rural America. Yet there is no current Member of Congress or high-profile candidate elsewhere in the country who champions such ideas more than Jamie McLeod-Skinner.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation magazine, one of the linchpins of American left-liberalism (and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party), wrote an article highlighting a recently published proposal designed to lift up the economies of small town and rural America, called The Rural New Deal. This detailed document speaks to the crises impacting tens of millions of Americans, and their root causes – and proposes a set of solutions, all of them readily achievable, drawn from listening to the concerns of actual small town and rural Americans.
Jamie McLeod-Skinner was a prominent consultant on the drafting of the Rural New Deal. I know because I helped draft the document.
The Nation summarizes the Rural New Deal’s transformational potential this way: by “championing bold solutions… Democrats could inaugurate a progressive renaissance in places that have been misconstrued as irretrievably lost—and bolster enthusiasm among core voters:
Imagine networks of family-owned farms, powered by solar panels, plowed by workers earning a livable wage, all organized around iconic small-town courthouse squares. Imagine students at the local school taking vocational courses to pursue a trade—future carpenters, mechanics, and electricians getting free training that they can supplement with online research via universally available high-speed broadband.
This is what life could look like after a Rural New Deal… (which) consists of 10 pillars of fearless but practical policy proposals.
If Jamie enters congress in January, she will find a broad base of support for the Rural New Deal; but currently, there is no Democrat in Congress as well suited to lead the effort than McLeod-Skinner.
In other words, right now, Jamie McLeod-Skinner is the key. This is not surprising. If you read Jamie’s campaign website, you’ll see that she’s the right person to carry this forward. Her entire career reflects a deep commitment to the hard-working people of small town and rural America, in the best tradition of American progressivism.
So, as you see, simply electing this one member of the U.S. House of Representatives could dramatically alter the entire Democratic Party’s approach to small town and rural America.
Detractors will counter by saying, there are many reasons why small town and rural Americans votes overwhelmingly Republican. But, at the end of the day, no reason is greater than the mere fact that the Democratic Party doesn’t compete there; and the mainstream of the party seems to have no impulse to even try.
Of course, there are other reasons, most notably what are usually referred to as “cultural issues.” These are real. But it is absolutely contemptuous of the people of rural and small-town America to hide behind cultural differences and effectively say there’s no point in addressing their economic hardships and proposing an agenda for revival and prosperity that matches the scope of the problems.
Let’s be real: Compared to what they’re doing now, the Democratic Party will attract support if it addresses the crises of small town and rural America in the manner of the Rural New deal and Jamie’s platform proposals – thereby reversing the ever-downward performance of the party across the American outback.
This would spark a compound victory of the highest significance: 1) it would generate hope that tangible improvements for the long-suffering communities of small town and rural America are possible and; 2) even a 5% shift in voting to the Democrats across small towns and rural America would swing the national balance in their favor—which would, in turn, almost certainly engender the demise of the MAGA GOP’s offensive against our democracy.
So, Democrats in Oregon’s 5tdistrict, please cast your primary ballot for Jamie McLeod-Skinner.
A victory for Jamie on Tuesday will pressure the Democratic Party to return to working for all Americans, thereby helping tens of millions of our fellow citizens and residents across this vast land, and, by doing so, preserve our democratic republic.
That’s of, by, and for the people, exactly what we always need in America.Keep ReadingShow Less
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