We need candidates that flex the empathy muscle

Paul Waldman, in his Substack The Cross Section, discussed why the Democratic Party fears its best candidates. At the top of the article is a photo of Mallory McMorrow running to be the candidate for the US Senate race in Michigan and who is in this situation. She’s a great candidate (I like what she’s done in the Michigan Senate) and described as “young, smart, charismatic, adept at social media.” McMorrow will likely be up against Rep. Haley Stevens. She’s a four-term member of the House from a reasonably safe district and has proven she can win. She doesn’t make voters excited, but doesn’t make them angry. I rebut the comment that Stevens proving she can win makes her a better candidate. McMorrow is currently in the Senate, which means she has also won. A difference is that Stevens is in Washington and McMorrow is in Lansing. The Democratic Party impulse is to clear the field for their preferred candidate by telling McMorrow to hold off until Stevens decides. What the party should do is let all candidates run in the primary and let voters decide. Primaries are good (though not perfect) in showing who is better. Yeah, I know, the voters might decide to approve a candidate that can’t win in the general, and if they do they’ll get to Washington and stir things up too much. The party rewards insiders and discourages innovation. The want to protect their highest-ranking (also known as stodgiest) members. Another young star in the party is Zohran Mamdani, running for mayor of New York. He’s got fresh ideas and is charismatic. And the Democratic establishment is wavering on endorsing him because, as Waldman says, they’re cowards and Mamdani scares them. The mayoral candidate represents a future that doesn’t have a place for the old guard. That cowardice is why so many voters say Democrats are weak. The party “sees the best candidates as a threat and not an opportunity.” Amanda Becker, in an article for The 19th posted on Daily Kos, wrote about Kat Abughazaleh, who is running for the US House from Chicago. She appears to be a punk-rock candidate that the Democratic party in Washington is afraid of.

“This is not just about me getting into Congress — I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life,” Abughazaleh told them of her campaign. “I’m 26 and this is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, it is the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done. How do people do this for decades and decades? The conclusion I’ve come to is that they stop doing it right. And what we need right now is representatives that talk to people, that listen to them, that flex empathy like a muscle, and then leave this job … for the next generation.” When Abughazaleh launched her bid to represent Illinois’ 9th District on March 24, her 26th birthday, she joined a growing cohort of young Democrats who have concluded the stakes for democracy are so high — and the party’s old guard is so reluctant to give up power — that they need to push their way into the political arena, even if they are met with resistance. ... Abughazaleh’s campaign slogan is a question: “What if we didn’t suck?” The “we” are Democrats. In a direct-to-camera launch video, she says, “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling our country piece by piece and so many Democrats seem content to just sit back and let them. So I say it’s time to drop the excuses and grow a f---ing spine.” ... At a Pride Month event, Abughazaleh gave anti-LBGTQ+ protesters the middle finger during a clash, prompting outrage online from the political right. “Yes, I did flip off some bigots for telling children they’d go to hell and, no, I’m not going to apologize,” she said in a video response. The campaign designed a “Kat isn’t sorry” t-shirt with her image, middle finger raised. The shirt urges people to “stand up for trans kids.”

Thinking about these two candidates reminds me I have also long believed the billionaires who are directing the Republican Party also control the Democratic Party. Democrats say great things and did wonderful stuff during the Biden years. But they didn’t do and are not doing things to protect democracy – especially voter rights and banning gerrymandering. Biden also installed Merrick Garland as his Attorney General, which many rightly saw as a guy who would do as little as politically required to prosecute the nasty guy to get him off the stage prior to the 2024 campaign. Democrats, under the control of billionaires, did not and are not interfering with the push to end democracy. I frequently talk about Republicans as doing everything to maintain themselves near the top of the social hierarchy, behind only the rich, who control them. But Democrats also believe in the hierarchy and put their position in their own hierarchy above the needs of the party, the country, and the working and poor people they say they champion. I’m very hopeful for these renegade Democratic candidates will shake up the party – if we have a 2026 election.