Left-leaning challengers in the Rust belt are throwing chaos into a divided party struggling to rebuild after Trump’s win
From Detroit to Pennsylvania to Buffalo, New York, and here in Ohio, insurgent, progressive Democrats are defeating their long-established colleagues in dozens of school board, city council and mayoral races, throwing the already-divided national party into chaos, even as polls indicate it stands to potentially benefit at next year’s midterm elections due to the Trump administration’s divisive policies.
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, one of seven swing states whose voters in recent years have decided the country’s presidential election, 37-year-old Jaime Arroyo was elected mayor on 4 November, becoming the first Latino mayor in the city’s 295-year history. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, another swing state, Shaundel Washington-Spivey, the city’s first Black and out gay mayor, beat a fellow Democratic party candidate with extensive local government experience last April.
Candidates such as Turner-Sloss, Arroyo and Washington-Spivey are campaigning on combating rising housing costs and providing better public transit infrastructure at a time when affordability issues and federal government policies are driving many working families into crisis.
We’d have had one fewer senator organizing the Dem capitulation caucus. We’d have also had one fewer senator capitulating to Trump in March. Maybe, just maybe, someone willing to fucking do anything about Trump would’ve been in office. Also if he was replaced in, say, 2019 there would have been one fewer pro-genocide reactionary voting to give Israel everything it wants.
*Delayed. It would’ve been delayed, just as it was in 2020, because that’s the thing: Democrats don’t fucking do anything. Their favorite excuse is the filibuster, but they can just get rid of it. It’s literally that simple. Whether this is incompetence or malice (though it’s obviously the latter), the Democratic establishment needs to go before anything resembling progress can happen. You’ll never get fewer Republicans if their competition is Joe “nothing will fundamentally change” Biden or Kamala “most lethal army in the world” Harris. Trump is the result of 50 years of Democrats gargling corporate balls is Trump, and you’ll never get rid of Trump if you don’t do something about the corporate balls.
We might not have 1 less capitulating to Trump, we might have another Republican.
DNC have had 48 or often less seats for over 10 years. They talk about getting rid of the filibuster but doing so would just give Republicans the same free reign that they have currently.
The last time the DNC had a real majority, not even a supermajority, was the most productive congress in decades. Dems have spent decades taxing corporations and limiting their ability to influence politics and they get no credit for that endless uphill battle.
Whenever Dems relax the rules, like when they made a simple majority required for Cabinet Picks under Obama, it ended up backfiring, such as getting used by Republicans to put oil barons in charge of foreign policy, private school executives in charge of the Department of Education, Coal Lobbyists in charge of the EPA, and Pete fucking Hegseth in charge of DoD.
Dems dont have a magic bullet for all your problems, we need to vote into power a substantial majority or even a supermajority.