Radical in-your-face left-wing candidates are gaining new electoral momentum in the already radical Democratic Party.
As Townhall’s Matt Vespa opines, far-left candidates have been making “a meal of the establishment, knocking off the more centrist candidates in primaries across the country.”
While Democratic enthusiasm appears to have stalled according to some polling, it was not apparent in [this month’s] primaries. There were historic numbers of Democratic voters turning out in Idaho and Pennsylvania, the latter of which is key in the Left’s road to retaking the House.
May 15 “was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Democratic moderates,” according to the Washington Post.
The success of very liberal candidates in primaries across four states is causing a new bout of heartburn among party strategists in Washington, who worry about unelectable activists thwarting their drive for the House majority. But it also reflects a broader leftward lurch among Democrats across the country since President Trump took office.
In Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, Kara Eastman, a social worker who supports “Medicare for All,” unexpectedly picked off former one-term U.S. Rep. Brad Ashford, who had been backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Eastman is a walking, talking leftist cliché. She supports hiking taxes, decriminalizing marijuana, and imposing universal background checks on gun purchases.
“I’m tired of hearing Democrats don’t have a backbone, that we don’t stand for anything,” she said in a campaign ad. “That changes now!”
Democrat strategists believe they have an opening in Pennsylvania’s 15th congressional district after the recent resignation of annoying NeverTrumper Rep. Charlie Dent (R) from his seat.
The early Democrat leader in PA-15, local district attorney John Morganelli, was defeated by lawyer Susan Wild, who was backed by EMILY’s List. Morganelli opposes abortion rights and so-called sanctuary cities and said positive things about Trump, which helped to seal his doom.
In Pennsylvania’s 1st congressional district, young Navy veteran Rachel Reddick, was beaten despite an endorsement by EMILY’s List. “Proud progressive” Scott Wallace triumphed over Reddick by attacking her for being a registered Republican up until two years ago. Wallace, the grandson of kooky communist-sympathizer Henry Wallace, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s vice presidents, said in his victory speech, “Together, we can make America sane again.”
John Fetterman, mayor of tiny Braddock, Penn., outside Pittsburgh, bested incumbent Pennsylvania lieutenant governor Mike Stack (D). Fetterman supports universal health care and legalizing marijuana. He was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who campaigned for him across the Keystone State.
Two small-c communists, Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato, knocked off Democrat state representatives Dom and Paul Costa.
As the Post reports:
“Since it was founded in 1982, the Democratic Socialists of America has played virtually no role in the country’s elections,” Clint Hendler writes for Mother Jones. “That’s begun to change, fueled by the organization’s 2016 endorsement of Bernie Sanders and a growth spurt led by the activists and organizers he inspired. In Pittsburgh, the local DSA chapter is 500 members strong and hosts Marxist reading groups, organizes against controversial anti-abortion pregnancy centers, and works to reduce police stops by fixing residents’ brake lights. … Pittsburgh’s DSA group is one of the first chapters in the country to have launched a political action committee …”
In the governor’s primary in Idaho, Paulette Jordan took out business owner and school board member A.J. Balukoff, who enjoyed widespread support from the establishment.
Jordan, who has generated a lot of media coverage because she could become the first Native American governor in the country, built her campaign around protecting more public lands, as well as promising to expand Medicaid, relax marijuana laws, reduce incarceration and limit corporate tax loopholes. She garnered 58 percent of the vote.
Meanwhile, leftist billionaire George Soros is injecting big money into district attorney races across America as part of a larger effort to install extremist prosecutors who will refuse to enforce inconvenient laws that liberals and progressives don’t like.
Local elections for district attorney are relatively low-key, small-scale affairs that rarely see the kind of money Soros has been throwing around. By pouring millions of dollars into the campaigns of various extreme-left district attorney candidates across America, Soros has provided his preferred candidates huge financial advantages over their rivals.
Soros, who turns 88 in August, has been underwriting district attorney races because he wants to dismantle the criminal justice system, empty the prisons, and sabotage the enforcement of immigration laws. Soros supports state and local efforts to resist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and wants to cripple police in order to advance the neo-Marxist abstraction known as social justice that simplistically breaks the world down into race, class, and sex or gender. Radicals claim that American laws and institutions are inherently corrupt and that these systems protect, for example, wealthy, white, native-born, non-disabled males at the expense of everyone else.
Getting people who share Soros’s worldview into public office at every level is key to promoting his ugly vision of how America, which he calls “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” should look.
So far Soros has pumped $1.5 million into the San Diego County, Calif., prosecutor’s race to support the candidacy of radical left-winger Geneviéve Jones-Wright, the Democrat candidate and deputy public defender in the county. The primary vote is June 5.
Soros money helped to knock off Bexar County (San Antonio), Texas, District Attorney Nico LaHood, a Democrat who opposes sanctuary cities and describes himself as “a conservative guy.” The billionaire’s cash also helped Kim Ogg unseat incumbent Republican Devon Anderson to become DA in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Ogg promised a “significant culture change,” including greater leniency in marijuana possession cases and making it easier for criminal defendants to make bail.
A flood of Soros cash helped elect radical leftist Lawrence (Larry) Krasner (D) as Philadelphia DA. In private practice, Krasner had sued police more than 75 times and represented Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter. Soros lucre also helped reelect Portsmouth, Va., Commonwealth Attorney Stephanie Morales (D).
But not all uber-radical challengers have been meeting with success.
Despite stealing the spotlight away from incumbent New York Gov. Mario Cuomo (D), a leftist hell-bent on destroying the Empire State’s struggling economy, actor Cynthia Nixon’s insurgent campaign was brutally snuffed out at the state’s Democratic Party nomination convention on Wednesday. Nixon, a longtime backer of now-defunct ACORN and its affiliated Working Families Party, tried to push Cuomo even farther left.
And she’s not finished with Cuomo yet. Although Nixon fell far short of the 25 percent she needed to secure a spot on the primary ballot, she plans to launch a petition drive to get on the ballot.
“I’m here because I think it’s important that at a Democratic convention there be at least one Democrat running for governor,” she said, accusing Cuomo of governing like a Republican.
“I’m not a protest candidate. I’m a viable candidate who is really running hard for the Democratic nomination, and that’s why I’m here, to say this is my party, too. I’m not afraid, and I’m here. You can’t shut me out.”
Progressives don’t trust the governor, Nixon said before the convention vote.
“I think that Andrew Cuomo can get all the endorsements that he wants,” she said. “The fact of the matter is people are going to be voting on his record, which is not very progressive.”
And polling suggests the much-vaunted “blue wave” Democrats keep saying will end GOP control of Congress in November may not be coming.
A new poll from Reuters suggests Democrats are taking a serious (and well-deserved) beating from voters for their vile antics in recent days as they unashamedly defended the murderers, rapists, and kidnappers of MS-13.
The healthy lead among registered voters that Democrats had over Republicans last month in generic congressional balloting for the approaching November midterms has evaporated, giving way to a modest 2.3 percent Republican lead over Democrats. More significantly, this is the first time in at least the previous 12 months that Democrats have failed to outpoll Republicans.
Republican support stood at 39.0 percent compared to Democrats at 36.7 percent for the poll of registered voters for the week ending May 20.
After President Trump called the diabolically evil members of MS-13, the transnational criminal gang whose motto is “kill, rape, control,” “animals,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and a chorus of left-wingers and NeverTrumpers including whiny CNN fussbudget Ana Navarro, useful leftist idiots Dara Lind of Vox and Vann R. Newkirk II of the Atlantic, attacked the president for speaking the unvarnished truth about these disgusting head-cutting savages. Pelosi and Feinstein, in particular, lied, claiming Trump was talking about immigrants in general.
If these left-wingers keep up with the crazy talk, perhaps Republicans will defy historical trends and hold onto the Congress while their party holds the presidency.
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared May 25 at FrontPageMag.