Meagan Day at Jacobin interviewed Lee Carter, the openly democratic socialist Democrat who beat Virginia’s Republican majority whip in one of delicious victories in the Nov. 7 contest that saw Democrats flip at least 15 seats in the state’s House of Delegates. An excerpt:
Buoyed by the enthusiasm around the Bernie Sanders campaign and backed by the Washington DC chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, [Lee] Carter successfully campaigned on single-payer health care, getting money out of politics, and putting the interests of working-class Virginians above those of big donors.
Running in Virginia’s 50th district, which includes the city of Manassas, Carter won with a nine-point spread, 54 to 46 percent. His Republican opponents distributed red-baiting mailers comparing him to Stalin, and the state’s Democratic Party abandoned him when he refused to tone down his message, especially his opposition to Dominion Energy’s plans for a natural gas pipeline.
MD: Why did you run on the Democratic Party ballot line, rather than as an independent? And how did the Democratic Party interact with your campaign?
LC: Running as an independent in Virginia would have been completely prohibitive. In a swing state, you can only really run without an established ballot line in smaller races, like city and town council, district attorney, and even mayoral races. But when you have an electorate of eighty-five thousand people and you’re trying to get their attention in an off-year, when they’re not normally inclined to pay attention to politics in the first place, that’s one hurdle that you just don’t need.
As for the Democrats, it made the most sense to me to build a coalition of groups focused on the things that the Democratic Party’s voter base and the Democratic Socialists of America have in common, such as fighting for an inclusive society, fighting for economic empowerment of working people, fighting to eliminate poverty, and transitioning away from fossil fuels.
The groups whose support I relied on included grassroots member-led Democratic organizations as well as labor unions and DSA. I did, however, end up in conflict with the state party itself, particularly its more right-wing elements, and ultimately ran without the support of the state’s party leadership. But I was only able to do so and win because I had the support of a large section of the Democratic Party’s actual base. [...]
MD: When did you join Democratic Socialists of America, and what did it mean for your campaign?
LC: I’ve always been a bit disgruntled as a Democrat, but it was the Sanders campaign that got me past my fear of the s-word, as it did for millions of others. So I got to reading some works of economic theory (Jacobin, books from Verso press, the economist Richard Wolff) and realized, hey, this big scary boogeyman is just democracy in the workplace. Over the winter of 2016 and 2017, it clicked.
So I joined DSA and started paying dues in April, and being with a bunch of like-minded folks who are engaged, who are organized and organizing, and who got out there and delivered a message to tens of thousands of residents in my district made all the difference. My campaign knocked over twenty thousand doors in the last four days before the election, and almost half of that was from DSA volunteers. [...]
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TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2013—No, food stamps don’t cause obesity:
A recent story in the Washington Post provided a look at the cheap food options affordable on a food stamp budget, and the health problems and obesity that diet causes. All well and good, but reporter Eli Saslow's big question was "Has the massive growth of a government feeding program solved a problem, or created one?" The chain of thought that got him to that question:
Hidalgo County has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation ... which has led almost 40 percent of residents to enroll in the food-stamp program . . . which means a widespread reliance on cheap, processed foods ... which results in rates of diabetes and obesity that double the national average ... which fuels the country’s highest per-capita spending on health care.
This is some messed-up logic. Seriously messed up. Let's do a thought experiment and take food stamps away from poor people who are currently using them to buy cheap, processed foods. Is there a scenario in which those people buy more expensive, healthier food, having lost the benefits that are currently providing much of their food budgets?
The reason people are relying on cheap, processed foods is not that people's food budgets are coming from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—heaven knows it's not like it's a program requirement that benefits be spent on junk food—it's that they are poor. Maybe they live in food deserts. Maybe they don't have the kitchen facilities to keep or cook fresh foods—one woman portrayed in the story doesn't have a fridge. But whatever you can say about the diets of food stamp recipients, poverty, not food stamps, is the starting point.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: We’re not done with Moore just yet, while the Gop wants your eyes on Franken, instead. Lots to learn from both, some parts of it more discouraging and gross than others. Then, a quick roundup of weekend chatter news, and Zinke is the new Schock.
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