The daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants, Mejia ran on an adamantly anti–Donald Trump message and secured a whopping 70 percent of the vote as a result. The Associated Press called her victory shortly after the votes started rolling in.
70 percent… wow!
The progressive Democrat’s positions echo several of the policies that made Sanders a national phenomenon, including support for universal health care coverage, tuition-free college, student loan forgiveness programs, and strengthening unions and expanding labor protections in order to bolster America’s middle class.
She sounds like a Democrat who wants to win and is against genocide.
Mejia has also been vocal in her criticism of Israel, publicly denouncing the state’s war on Palestine as a genocide. That caught the attention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which funneled money into the race to bolster her opponents. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby’s efforts may have been one of the reasons that voters in New Jersey sent Mejia to Congress.
Awesome!
Oh boy, can’t wait to see what new rule changes the Dems will come up with this time!
What the article fails to mention is that for many people, the bigger issue is how lobbyist groups can throw dark money behind candidates and get them elected. People want money out of politics.
AIPAC is the most egregious because they are working to funnel tax dollars to a wealthy apartheid state engaging in genocide, but they are just the a part of the problem. People know the Dems are bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists and mega donors and they are sick of it.
And people don’t realize that voting a lesser evil is still voting for evil. That people can compromise their morals and rights justify it as harm reduction confounds me anymore. I’m tired of being stabbed in the proverbial back.
The counter point is don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
But voting for the lesser of two evils is exactly what’s gotten us here. I’m 38. The Democrats have been running the “vote for us or it’s the end of the world, this is the most important election of our lives! Harm reduction fam!” bit for my entire adult life. And when they get in power, they never bother to put in place reforms that would actually prevent future authoritarian takeovers. They bitch about not having 60 votes in the Senate, while refusing to do the things they can with the power they have.
How often do you hear Democrats talking about dismantling the post-9/11 security state? Biden ran on opposing fascism, but he didn’t lift a finger to dismantle the tools of fascism. Instead, he just wanted to use those powers for himself.
The screw up that your generation made was merely voting for the lesser evil, and not attempting to run and campaign for the furthest left people that would create real change. You don’t stop at voting for the lesser evil, you also push into the next election with the goal to shove them out
Which generation is this?
This has been going on for some time; lack of participation in primaries to result in poorer candidates. I recall around 2010 Americans being warned about poor participation, especially in primaries and midterms and the reaction was to be told that it was their right not to vote and to mind their own business. I’d say those who didn’t participate around then are probably more responsible than anyone else for the current Democrats.
At least to millennials and later Gen X this has been a thing, so it’s covered a couple of generations. I’d probably say even earlier, maybe. At least since Gingrich and Ryan held their positions and started obstructing.
When they aren’t good, then you’re just voting evil. Stop voting evil like it makes things better.
Abraham Lincoln thought black people should not marry whites. I guess we should have let the slavers win because we don’t want to vote for the lesser evil. The slaves will just have to suffer — I can’t have voting for the lesser evil on my conscience.
Man, false dilemmas everywhere.
Stop waiting for perfect. Good change happens over time it’s rarely immediate. If you wait for perfect you’re liable to miss people doing enough good to allow perfect to happen later.
People are nuanced and we don’t live in a black and white world. Hillary. Kamala. Gavin. Obama. None of them are perfect but they’re on the path there.
People need to stop being so pious around their politics.
I’m not pious, I’ve just realize neither party represents the people and are a detrimental. I’ll vote in primaries for better representation but if Newsom is their candidate in 2028, they’re losing.
Yeah fuck them dems, all they’ve done for people is pass stuff like student loan forgiveness (that SCOTUS fucked with bad logic), legalized gay marriage, made pot legal in Dem states, and a whole lot of other progressive shit, right?
They’re not representing the people at all clearly.
I can cherry pick too! Such as Biden being a rider on the bill to make student loan debt harder to discharge, often times the Dems will vote for more police funding, and the authorization for military force in 2001 that got us into the war on terror. Also check out who contributes to them and see it’s the same as the Republicans and try to explain that one jackass.
Sometimes moving in the wrong direction is necessary before moving in the right direction. Progress isn’t linear. Often a weak and useless candidate on the correct side needs to lose before a competent and effective candidate can actually stand a chance. If Al Smith had won, we wouldn’t have ever had FDR.
Hillary. Kamala. Gavin. Obama. None of them are perfect but they’re on the path there.
I don’t think any of these people are on the path to defeat fascism. They’re all fascist enablers. They don’t want to fight fascism, they just want to pause it or slow it down a bit.
So you’re an accelerationist. Pray tell, why should you be seated at the table to form a new government, when you did not vote to stop the fascists, and when people have tried to stop them all guys like you do is passive aggressively talk about their morals, while doing nothing to stop the nazis?
I can only hope that other democrats learn from this.
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But then how will tankies keep complaining about the democrats and how electoral systems don’t work and aren’t worth participating in, to justify their own inaction?
Actually, I don’t care. This is great news.
And the comments already show that tankies are already finding ways to complain about it. Wonder!
“but don’t you know it’s just the duopoly behaving as designed; wake up man”. I’ve heard all the arguments.
They won’t have an issue doing that still. It literally takes them doing a single thing they dislike to shun them entirely. It’s actually absurd most of the time.
It’s almost like they didn’t reason themselves into their positions, but rather started with their own presuppositions and then built arguments around rationalizing their positions.
For the unenlightened, that’s not how intelligent people use discursive reasoning.
They’ll find a reason to pout on the sidelines and cry about how they personally didn’t get their own pony and a flying broom.
As leftists in America, we all must realise: This is our party, and we need to fight to win it back.
Your vote in primary election can often be more influential than your vote in the general election. And any campaigning activity you do in the party’s primary will be twice as impactful as activities during the general.
I want to vote in the primary, but every option I’ve looked into in my district just looks to be more of the same conservative light nonsense. I do find it funny that one of the options has a site that looks straight from the 90s, at least the one Ballotpedia links to. This is the closest to a “progressive” candidate, but getting any of them to speak on AIPAC is like pulling teeth.
I’m not going to lie and say that this is someone who I would enthusiastically vote for, but based on her campaign website I think that’s still a decent candidate. Personally, I’m ideologically a social democrat and that candidate’s campaign statements smell a bit too liberal for me to get excited over it, but she seems passable. If that’s the best out of this year’s batch, then vote for them and start agitating for people who you think would do a better job to run in 2028.
This is just the kind of stuff that keeps so many of us from even bothering in red states. I vote every chance I get in big and local elections, but damn is it hard to have it feel worth the time waiting in those long lines just to either vote for a moderate dem that most likely won’t win or a third party that even more likely won’t win. I feel better just working with the smaller political parties in my area that aren’t aligned with the major 2 to do things cause at least they understand what’s needed (shout-out to the upcoming May Day general strike that none of the Dems running here have acknowledged). They just don’t have the funds to run for an individual state.
This is a serious suggestion, however blasphemous it may seem: Change your registration to Republican and then vote in the Republican primary for the most respectable person who is running. Changing your registration doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t affect anything. The Republican Party will also send you election material by post which you can simply discard or send back empty donation envelopes to waste their money on postage.
Oh you don’t register with a party here in Missouri. You just tell them which ballot you want when you go to vote between Democrat, Republican, or Independent. This does mean we get postage from every party either asking for donations or just the usual “why my opponent sucks” ads.
I mean, you live in Missouri, man.
You’re not going to get AOC to run in your district. Those people wont win the primaries. I lived in bum-fuck rural Pennsylvania, and people there called me ‘big city boy’ because I moved to that area from the suburbs of fucking Phoenix. And this was like 20 some years ago, so Phoenix was not exactly a big city in the slightest.
A dem like this, means that other more progressive dems have people they can reach out to, and get to vote on legislation that they sponsor.
Even if they vote 75% of the time with an AOC dem, that’s 75% more yes votes than you’ll get from a republican.
I’m not asking for AOC. I know the people here view her and people like Mamdani as traitorous communists (not to mention the racist smear campaigns ran against Cori Bush who was one of 2 Missouri government officials against AIPAC). I literally just want an acknowledgement of the genocide and to say they won’t accept AIPAC money or vote alongside conservatives as a whole no matter what (all of them just single out Trump which to me sounds like they still view the GOP as worth saving).
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it needs to be smashing the corrupt in the face and taking it, not lobbying slowly for it to change.
Twice is an understatement. Way less people vote in primaries.
Here’s hoping the mid-terms aren’t cancelled as trump declares an election can’t happen while the US is at war.
Let people celebrate a win.
Hence the hope!
She sounds like a Democrat who wants to win and is against genocide.
Here’s how evolution of politicians goes:
- is it better-or-equal in all things that matter to you? Vote for that person.
That is it. It’s not more complicated. If perfection isn’t achievable in this run because of limited viable options, then choose better. EVOLUTION.
Every time we choose better. Every time we vote for someone who’s an improvement. We slowly drive this country further left as we pull nail and tooth to get the moderates to understand how much better everything could be
I had not really experienced them until this last primary. I saw a lot about it here but they had roots in a lot of ads when I looked into it. They did not actually “win” in that their seemed to be favorites who they backed the most did not win but they did disrupt the process. I think kat might have won without them along with several others. The primaries are more important than ever and this spoiler effect is going to mess up any chance we have of fixing the republican problem.
Totally not the point of the article, but “Analilia” is a beautiful name. I hadn’t heard it before and it immediately went into my “if I ever accidentally have kids” name list.
