Bernie Sanders is visiting Kentucky — last night in Louisville, tonight in Lexington. If you’re standing in line — or if you’re a Kentucky voter — keep an eye on Sellus Wilder, running for Senate as an authentic progressive for a brighter Kentucky.
Yes, there are progressives in Kentucky.
At a recent candidates’ forum, Wilder spoke the truth: coal jobs aren’t going to come roaring back to Kentucky, and statewide politicians vowing to fight an entirely chimerical “war on coal” are just peddling snake oil. Instead, Kentucky needs to invest in a clean energy future, turning strip mines into solar farms. And that’s why he’s earned a Climate Hawks Vote endorsement. Before Wilder became a candidate, he was a fractivist, helping to organize and promote the successful effort to stop “Kentucky’s Keystone XL,” the natural-gas Bluegrass Pipeline.
The rest of his policy platform: expanding Medicare to cover all Americans, breaking up “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions, legalizing and taxing marijuana, expanding the Clean Water Act to include fracking, strengthening union rights, lowering interest rates on student loans, and “modestly raising taxes on the wealthy.”
Wilder is no Alison Grimes, the Democrat who ran as a Republican-lite against Kentucky’s other senator, Mitch McConnell, in 2014. Grimes made it clear that she strongly opposed Obama’s “war on coal,” and wouldn’t even say if she voted for Obama in 2012. Wilder has the political courage to tell Kentucky that Obama’s EPA isn’t to blame for the decline of coal, to call for a just transition for Kentuckians… and to introduce Bernie Sanders at a rally the last time he came to town.
Jim Gray, Mayor of Lexington, is anointed as the frontrunner, but he’s refusing to talk policy beyond an offhand comment that Obama’s Clean Power Plan “has really caused eastern Kentucky to suffer.” Meanwhile, Wilder is exciting the college campuses, winning debates, and just picked up the first statewide endorsement ever from Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, a 10,000-person strong grassroots progressive group. Gray just loaned himself $1,000,000, while Wilder depends on small donors.
Obligatory ask: help #GetWilderKY. Chip in to help Climate Hawks Vote spread the word among Kentucky Democrats. The revolution continues on May 17 when Kentuckians vote.