Category Archives: Elections & Voting

We’re all now party to the most critical election protection debate in U.S. history, one that has entered the coronavirus stimulus package to the tune of $400 million, which may be just a fraction of what’s really needed. Continue reading →

Tuesday results in six states for Dems largely replicated Biden’s pre-scripted week ago Super Tuesday triumph over Sanders. Continue reading →

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.” Continue reading →

Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements. For a man who relished the adulation and bombast of campaigning, it should have surprised no one that he charged out of the starting gate so quickly for 2020 as well. After all, he’d already spent much of the December before his inauguration on a ”thank you” tour of the swing states that had unexpectedly supported him on Election Day—Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—and visited Florida for a rally only a couple of weeks after he took the oath of office. In much the same way that Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once embraced “permanent revolution,” Donald Trump embarked on a “permanent campaign.” Continue reading →

The myth of moderate Joe belies his hardline agenda throughout a near-half century of public life as US senator and vice president. Continue reading →

Hillary Clinton, of course, received the Democratic Party nomination in 2016 and was widely expected to beat Trump but she lost to him (though she won California by 4,269,978 in the popular vote, and so beat Trump by 2,864,974 in the nationwide popular vote, while she lost all other states by 1,405,002 votes, and so she would have been California’s president if she had won, but the rest of the nation wouldn’t have been happy). Continue reading →

Tabulating March 2 election results took time to include absentee ballots. Continue reading →

In a free, fair and open process, Bernie Sanders would be odds on favorite to become Dem standard bearer against Trump in November. According to polls, he’d likely defeat DJT and become the 46th US president. Continue reading →

It isn’t un-American for voters to do some homework before voting. Here’s a “concise guide” for the voter with limited time who might want more information. Continue reading →

The night before Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren spoke to several thousand people in a quadrangle at East Los Angeles College. Much of her talk recounted the heroic actions of oppressed Latina workers who led the Justice for Janitors organization. Standing in the crowd, I was impressed with Warren’s eloquence as she praised solidarity and labor unions as essential for improving the lives of working people. Continue reading →

As the Democratic Party’s “moderate” (or shall we say “establishment”) wing coalesces around Joe Biden to stop Bernie, the primary contest is starting to look a lot like 2016, when the same wing rallied around Hillary Clinton. Continue reading →

How is it possible for a Dem presidential aspirant ahead in most Super Tuesday states (according to polls), including California and Texas, to lose overall to a challenger? Continue reading →

As the Democratic Party’s “moderate” (or shall we say “establishment”) wing coalesces around Joe Biden to stop Bernie, the primary contest is starting to look a lot like 2016, when the same wing rallied around Hillary Clinton. Continue reading →

It became clear during the 2016 presidential election process that Bernie Sanders was successful in getting the attention of tens of thousands of potential voters thus challenging the candidacy of the darling of the party, Hillary Clinton. The Democratic National Committee felt so threatened by Sander’s success that they conspired with the Clinton election staff to withhold support to and undermine Sander’s candidacy. Continue reading →

The day after Bernie Sanders’s big win in Nevada, Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, expressed the fear gripping the Democratic establishment: “I don’t believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump.” Continue reading →

The red-baiting of Sen. Bernie Sanders has been stepped up as we near the date of the important South Carolina primary election this coming weekend. “Liberal” pundits have accused him of everything from supporting “Marxist dictators” like Fidel Castro to singing the praises of chandeliers installed in the Moscow subways by the communist dictators of old. “You don’t ever talk about the wonderful chandeliers in the Moscow subways when you have Stalin killing 30 million of his own people,” Joe Scarborough declared on Morning Joe today. “With his praise of dictators, who does Bernie remind you of?” Joe’s wife, Mika Brzezinski, then asked. Continue reading →

The chaos in Iowa’s Democratic primary is nothing new. Continue reading →

While journalists pick through the ashes of the Iowa caucuses meltdown, thousands of progressive activists are moving forward to make election history in New Hampshire. In sharp contrast to the prattle of mainstream punditry, the movements behind Bernie Sanders are propelled by people who engage with politics as a collective struggle because the future of humanity and the planet is at stake. As a result, the Granite State’s primary election on Feb. 11 could be a political earthquake. Continue reading →

Amid all the finger-pointing and anger that followed the nightmarish Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses Monday night, many journalists and progressive observers honed in on the smartphone app the state Democratic Party used—with disastrous consequences—to record and report the results of the highly anticipated contest. Continue reading →

It is remarkable how the Democratic presidential candidates allow themselves to be pigeon-holed by the media as “moderate,” “centrist,” “extreme,” “left-wing,” and other abstract fact-deprived nomenclature. Continue reading →

Dr. Robert Epstein, a Hillary Clinton supporter who happens also to be an honest expert, told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) last Tuesday that Google and social media can manipulate votes by using tools that they have at their disposal exclusively. In the absence of regulation, no one can counteract Google and social media or even know that they have reversed an election outcome. Continue reading →

With just days until the Iowa Caucus, Bernie Sanders is the clear front runner in what is still a crowded primary field. Sanders has gained a lead in the polls in key states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, and California. He also leads all candidates in the number of volunteers and small donor contributions, and it’s not even close. The Democratic Party establishment is in a panic about Sanders’ recent success. Sanders has faced an intensified attack from his opponents, yet his popularity continues to rise. Continue reading →

Chicago’s Bobby Rush and San Francisco’s London Breed have sold themselves to super-plutocrat Michael Bloomberg, the worst stop-and-frisker in history. Continue reading →

Hey, Sanders, hey, Warren, hey, Biden and the rest of you. Listen, I know from party divisiveness. As a very (very!) young man, I worked on the campaign staff of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. There now will be a slight pause as you imitate explosions and other sound effects from your favorite disaster movies. Continue reading →

To corporate media, Bernie Sanders is incorrigible. He won’t stop defying the standard assumptions about what’s possible in national politics. His 2020 campaign—with feet on the ground and eyes on visionary horizons—is a danger to corporate capitalism’s “natural” order that enables wealth to dominate the political process. Continue reading →

While Biden and his surrogates like John Kerry continue to falsely claim that the former vice president and U.S. senator was not for the Iraq invasion, the Bernie Sanders campaign has rightly highlighted more documentation—such as this video—of Biden’s support for the Iraq invasion both before and after it happened. Continue reading →

Corporate Democrats got a jolt at the end of last week when the highly regarded Iowa Poll showed Bernie Sanders surging into first place among Iowans likely to vote in the state’s Feb. 3 caucuses. The other big change was a steep drop for the previous Iowa frontrunner, Pete Buttigieg, who—along with Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden—came in a few percent behind Sanders. The latest poll was bad news for corporate interests, but their prospects brightened a bit over the weekend when Politico reported: “The nonaggression pact between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is seriously fraying.” Continue reading →

In a recent New Yorker profile of Pete Buttigieg, one sentence stands out: “Watch Buttigieg long enough and you notice that he uses abstraction as an escape hatch.” Evasive platitudes are also routine for Joe Biden, the other major Democratic presidential candidate running in what mainstream journalists call “the center lane.” Continue reading →