The Big Realignment: How Many Core Values Are The Democratic Party Establishment Willing To Give Up?

Is Lesser Of Two Evils Good Enough For You?

The DCCC has gotten behind some really horrible characters this cycle— in some cases even worse than putrid Democrats like Joe Lieberman, Joe Manchin, Rahm Emanuel and Kyrsten Sinema— and it’s hard to say who the worst of the worst is. If I had to just pick one, I would have to say John Avlon, the anti-union fanatic who’s pretending to have something to do with Suffolk County so he can run against Nick LaLota. And it’s candidates like Avlon who our new found conservative Republican “allies” are backing. As though the New Dem-controlled DCCC wasn’t already putting its fingers on the scale against progressives already, now we have people like Liz Cheney endorsing the most Republican-like Democrats in the field. This is not good.

Yesterday, Andrew Solender reported that, besides Avlon, Cheney had endorsed three other right-of-center Democrats: Blue Dog Abigail Spanberger (VA), and New Dems Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Susan Wild (PA). Their ProgressivePunch lifetime ratings:

• Spanberger- F

• Slotkin- D

• Wild- B

So be careful when you feel joy over all these conservatives Republicans coming over to the Democrats. We’re going to wind up with a two party system— a fascist MAGA Party and a corporate-friend conservative party. Yesterday, Mary Akers wrote that “More than 100 Republican officials who support Kamala Harris for president plan to join the vice president in Pennsylvania on Wednesday for a stunning public rebuke of Donald Trump, their own party’s presidential candidate. ‘He just cannot be in the Oval Office again,” former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) told the Daily Beast Tuesday night during her drive up to the Keystone State for the event. And she predicted: Harris will prevail. ‘I think there’s a silent majority,’ she said. ‘I think there’s a silent group of women who will crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump and who will quietly vote for Harris.’ These Harris supporters are far from liberal.”

Yeah… very far from liberal. And Kamala is running into it with all her might. Bloomberg noted yesterday that she’s “intensifying efforts to convince Republicans to cross the aisle and back her campaign in a bid to expand her electoral appeal… Harris advisers and allies say the ranks of right-leaning voters determined to prevent Trump from returning to power have grown significantly since the last election.”

There’s been a lot of talk about the creation of a “permission structure,” while Kamala talks about a bipartisan advisory council and backs away from some of Biden’s modestly progressivish policies. I wonder how she’ll govern knowing she’ll need these people as part of her 2028 coalition, especially as more disenfranchised progressive voters drop out?

Republican pollster Frank Luntz said the Harris campaign is miscalculating with its emphasis on threats Trump could pose to democracy and should instead focus on economics.

In focus groups, he’s found persuadable GOP voters often living in the suburbs of swing-state cities “don’t like Trump personally” but fear that Harris’ policies could hit them in their wallets.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is already running the most conservative roster of House candidates in at least 2 decades. Of the 33 candidates in the DCCC’s Red-to-Blue program, only one is a full-fledged progressive— and the DCCC is starving her campaign of support— while 5 others might be worth taking a chance on. Of the rest, at least 6 are so bad that I can’t even bring myself to “hope” they win for the sake of a House Democratic majority— that bad. One of the demonstrably worst Democratic candidates, Rudy Salas, in California— ultra conservative and as corrupt as anyone who ever served in the California state legislature— has been supported by the DCCC and House Majority caucus to the tune of $5.2 so far. The two organizations have, combined, invested $400 in Sue Altman, the New Jersey progressive.

And of the Senate candidates challenging Republican incumbents, the best one— by far— isn’t even a Democrat, but an independent, Dan Osborn running in Nebraska, and generating the kind of enthusiasm that shitty corporate Democrats with tens of millions of dollars are not generating, despite running against widely despised national villains.