Every Democrat Who Backed Medicare for All Won Reelection in 2020
commondreams.org
'Every. Single. One.': Ocasio-Cortez Notes Every Democrat Who Backed Medicare for All Won Reelection in 2020
Common Dreams
4-5 minutes
Published on
Saturday, November 07, 2020
https://www.commondreams.org/sites/d...?itok=QZ8wN7mr
Highlighting an interesting—and to many, instructive—electoral trend that others have spotted in the days since 2020 voting ended earlier this week, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday—just as jubilation spread nationwide among Democrats and progressives upon news that Joe Biden will be the next U.S. President—pointed out that every single congressional member this year who ran for reelection while supporting Medicare for All won (or was on their way to winning) their respective race.
Quote:
Every single swing-seat House Democrat who endorsed #MedicareForAll won re-election or is on track to win re-election.
Every. Single. One.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 7, 2020
The tweet emerged as many across the corporate media landscape, including pundits and former high-level Democratic officials like Rahm Emanuel, unabashedly pushed a narrative that progressives calling for policies like a single-payer universal healthcare system or the Green New Deal are somehow a hindrance to electoral success. Ocasio-Cortez was not standing for it:
Quote:
Anyone saying this after immigrant organizers delivered AZ, Black grassroots flipped Georgia, MI going blue w reality-bending 94% Detroit margin + @RashidaTlaib running up the margins in her district & Trump publicly challenging @IlhanMN in MN and losing isn’t a serious person.
https://t.co/2FtJzqGki8
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 7, 2020
As Common Dreams reported Friday, while corporate-friendly Democrats have continued to go to bat for the for-profit healthcare system that lavishes billions of dollars each year on insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, and pharmaceutical giants, a new poll this week—put out by Fox News no less—shows that 72% of all U.S. voters would prefer a "government-run healthcare plan." And the poll is far from an outlier, with numerous surveys in recent years showing this trend.
"Polls consistently show a majority of the U.S. electorate [is] considerably to the left of both party leaderships... on issue after issue—the environment, electoral reform, [and] Medicare for All," said Jacobin's Luke Savage in response that poll.
Despite what "corporate front groups and lazy pundits always say," tweeted journalist Andrew Perez, "people absolutely do not like their private health insurance."
When it comes to the 2020 election—even though Biden himself ran against Medicare for All—the following illustration, which includes Democratic incumbents and challengers, made the connection very clear when it came to races in the U.S. House of Representatives this cycle:
Quote:
Support progressive policies like Medicare for All and win elections.
Campaign against progressive policies like Medicare for All and lose elections. pic.twitter.com/DZ7mUeE6Po
— Ryan Knight (@ProudSocialist) November 7, 2020
As astute political observers have been pointing out for years, the United States electorate remains very supportive of universal programs and other progressive policy ideas that their elected representatives—both Democrats and Republicans—have refused to embrace.
With an increasing focus on the need for radical and far-reaching changes to the world's economic and energy systems in order to address the existential crisis of the climate emergency, voters across the political spectrum have showed—in poll after poll after poll—their support for such action to be taken.
And as Ocasio-Cortez added to her tweet about Medicare for All on Saturday: "We're running numbers on [the Green New Deal]" next.
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Working people delivered Biden his victory. Now he needs to deliver for them.
washingtonpost.com
Opinion | Working people delivered Biden his victory. Now he needs to deliver for them.
Opinion by Nina Turner
Nina Turner is a former Ohio state senator and a co-chair for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign.
As the dust settles, pundits, political operatives and party insiders are already swarming to tell the story of what really happened in 2020. They’ll zero in on the smallest margins, the most unlikely Trump-to-Biden swing voters, the affluent white suburbanites. But that’s not the story of this election.
The exit polls are still being finalized, but as of now they show that working people — Black, Brown and White families making under $100,000, along with the vast majority of young people — delivered Biden his victory. Not only did they vote for him in overwhelming numbers, they also knocked on doors, made calls and carried out the hard work of democracy during a pandemic. These voters are the heart and the future of a massive progressive movement inside and outside of the Democratic Party, and it is to them that Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris must answer.
Trump has been a disaster for poor and working people, so they used voting as a tool to fight back. Hammered by a government by, of and for the one percent, brutalized by covid-19 inaction and economic disaster, pummeled with racist rhetoric and white supremacist violence, the people have delivered a rebuke to President Trump. But the result was also a warning for Biden: In the midst of overlapping national crises, his administration has a critical window to deliver for the working people and young people who got him elected. If he fails to meet the moment — if he seeks instead to return us to a “normalcy” marked by corporate handouts and extreme inequality — then the next Trump might be far more dangerous than the one we just defeated. We can see hints of this already in the way voters of color — perennially taken for granted by the Democratic Party — shifted marginally toward Trump in 2020. Though they still carried Biden to victory by a 46-point margin, the lesson is clear: The Democratic Party ignores its base at its own peril.
After all, it was working people’s organizations that had millions of conversations with voters this year. It was not the political operatives at the Lincoln Project or the Third Way who knocked the doors, who spoke to the voters, who heard their concerns. It was laid-off union members in South Phoenix; African American community organizers in Kenosha, Wis.; Latinx zoomers in Reading, Pa. None of us intend to let the far-right of the Democratic coalition claim a mandate for status-quo politics.
This goes for Wall St. Democrats as well as Never-Trump Republicans. The latter in particular spent decades using dog-whistle racist appeals and inflaming culture-war fights to throw red meat to their base. We’re glad they finally had their “come-to-Jesus” moment, but that doesn’t mean we are going to invite them to take the pulpit. The people who should lead our country forward are the people who have been building the country all along: the multiracial working class who have helped carry this country through a pandemic and now demand real reform.
Young people in particular showed up this year in historic numbers, increasing their turnout by eight percentage points. This generation is the most racially diverse generation in the history of our country and the most progressive. That’s no surprise: Their future hangs in the balance — economically, politically and environmentally. They turned out this year in force more to defeat the unique threat of Trump than out of love for Biden or the Democratic Party. Biden and Democrats in Congress now have an opportunity to win a generation’s long-term loyalty, but only if they deliver the big changes young Americans demand.
That means passing a Green New Deal to lift our economy out of recession, create millions of jobs and address the climate crisis head-on. It means passing Medicare-for-all to prevent thousands of Americans from dying (or going bankrupt) due to covid-19 and other illnesses. It means making the wealthy pay their share of taxes and reversing the massive tax giveaway that was Trump’s crowning legislative achievement. And it means electoral reform to ensure our government actually reflects the will of the majority.
These and other policies represent not only what Biden should do, but also what he must do. Politically, a return to “normalcy” is simply a circuitous route back to Trumpism. So-called normalcy has never worked if you are poor or among the barely middle class and it will not work now. Being better than Trump is a low bar. This moment demands — and the citizens of this nation deserve — leadership with a vision to provide for the people. Anything less is unacceptable. The Democratic Party’s future and the future of America depend on it.
A battle for the soul of the Democratic Party
newsweek.com
Marianne Williamson: A battle for the soul of the Democratic Party | Opinion
Marianne Williamson
A TV commercial frequently on the air now shows a couple backing their car out of a driveway, their children in the backseat. As they approach the end of the driveway, we see a large truck driving past; a signal in the car causes the driver to apply his brakes in time to avoid it. The man and wife then look at each other with shock and profound relief that they were saved from crashing into the truck and possibly killing their kids.
That's pretty much what just happened in America.
But that's also where the analogy ends. For in the case of American politics, the truck didn't just happen to be there like some random fluke. Rather it—or he, however we wish to describe the threat—was a manifestation of societal dysfunction that's almost inevitable when so many people are left in chronically desperate economic and social situations. Donald Trump did not create those situations; those situations created Donald Trump. And if the Biden administration reflexively falls back into the institutionalized patterns of soft injustice that produced the dysfunction to begin with, rather than springing forward into fundamental disruptions of those patterns, then the next truck could be even bigger. There's also a distinct possibility that, next time, no signal could save the car from crashing into that truck.
Joe Biden's win is not a healing; it's a reprieve. Now, not later, is the time to make that very clear both to ourselves and to him. The Democratic Party has no basis for self-congratulations at this point. When your opponent is a neo-fascist who has more in common with Mussolini than with Lincoln and has supervised the death of almost a quarter-million Americans, yet all you can do is beat him by a razor-thin margin, that is not a sign that things are going well. It's a sign that some merciful force to be greatly praised came through at the last minute and saved you.
Biden will be surrounded now by a same old same old crowd of Clinton and Obama operatives gleefully dancing in the hallways at being back in the building. They'll also be joined by a new gang of establishment Democrats chomping at the bit as they await their day in the neo-liberal sun.
But Joe, this is a time to be very, very careful. I know they'll tell you to toe the corporatist line and make John Kasich happy. I know they'll tell you not to worry, that we can blame Mitch McConnell for the fact that it's simply not possible to bring Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren into the administration. I know you'll be tempted to sideline progressives going forward in the same way you sidelined us during the campaign. Some of the people surrounding you will even argue you won without the help of progressives anyway. But please hear me, Joe. No, you did not.
If you simply ignore all calls for immediate direct cash relief and universal basic income going forward, as well as universal health care, serious reduction of corporate subsidies, readjustment of the tax code to demand that corporations and the very rich pay their fair share, a wealth tax, serious and immediate efforts to transition off fossil fuels, a ban on dangerous pesticides and chemical additives, real systemic change to address racial disparity in criminal sentencing, changes in police training and practices, cancellation of college loan debts, reparations for slavery and a foreign policy more in line with the moral responsibilities of a great nation—if you simply ignore those issues like they're so far out there that the only way to deal with them is to pretend they don't exist, thus enabling right-wing forces who would describe any policy that actually helps people like it's a road to a hammer and sickle—then the left will not be silent this time. Times have changed, and the progressive movement has proved itself. It has proved itself key, in fact, to your winning the White House. The neo-liberal establishment has proved itself key to getting Democrats thrown out of it to begin with.
There needs to be a strong opposition to corporatist moderates within the Democratic party, smug blowhards which they too often are, who'd now brush over the fact that in the final analysis the party has failed miserably. The election of 2020 has been a repudiation of both parties. The election of Biden has been more than anything else the rejection of a madman, and the abysmal showing of Democrats in the House and Senate races should bring with it the sober sounding of an alarm, not the self-satisfied clinking of champagne flutes.
Yes, we dodged a disaster. But more potential disasters are coming around the corner. Many mini-Trumps are lining up even now for 2022 and 2024. This is not a time to relax or go back to the conditions that paved the way for them to begin with. We need to give people more than a reality devoid of Trump. We need to give them a genuine alternative not only to his mendacity, but to the chronic despair that, under Democrats, as well as Republicans, became a feature of their daily lives.
Thankfully, we won a battle for the soul of our nation. But there are more ahead. Now a battle will rage for the soul of the Democratic Party. And well it should. It's been needing to happen for a very long time.
Marianne Williamson is a Newsweek columnist, best-selling author, political activist and spiritual thought leader. She is founder of Project Angel Food and co-founder of the Peace Alliance, and was the first candidate in the 2020 presidential primary to make reparations a pillar of her campaign. She is the author of 13 books, among them Healing the Soul of America and A Politics of Love.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Corporate Democrats are attacking so-called far-left policies
usatoday.com
Bernie Sanders: Corporate Democrats are attacking so-called far-left policies
11/11/20
I am very proud of the hard work that the progressive community put into electing Joe Biden as our next president.
And let’s be clear: This election was not just a normal election between two candidates. It was much more important than that. It was an election about retaining our democracy, preserving the rule of law, believing in science and ending pathological lying in the White House. And with a record-breaking turnout, the American people voted to reject President Donald Trump’s racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious bigotry and authoritarianism. That is very good news.
Even so, truth be told, the election results in the House and Senate were disappointing. Despite Joe Biden winning the popular vote by more than 5 million votes, the Democrats lost seats in the House and, so far, have only picked up one seat in the Senate.
Now, with the blame game erupting, corporate Democrats are attacking so-called far-left policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal for election defeats in the House and the Senate. They are dead wrong.
Here are the facts:
►112 co-sponsors of Medicare for All were on the ballot in November. All 112 of them won their races.
►98 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal were on the ballot in November. Only one of them have lost an election.
It turns out that supporting universal health care during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change is not just good public policy. It also is good politics. According to an exit poll from Fox News, no bastion of socialism, 72% of voters favored the change “to a government-run health care plan” and 70% of voters supported “increasing government spending on green and renewable energy.”
The lesson is not to abandon popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, living wage jobs, criminal justice reform and universal child care, but to enact an agenda that speaks to the economic desperation being felt by the working class — Black, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American. People are hurting, and they are crying out for help. We must respond.
All over America, voters approved progressive policies to improve the lives of millions of people:
►Florida voters passed an initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
►Colorado voted to provide 12 weeks of paid family leave.
►Arizona voted to increase taxes on those making over $250,000 to increase funding for public education.
►Voters in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota voted to move away from the “war on drugs” and approved legalizing marijuana.
The American people are sick and tired of seeing billionaires and Wall Street become much richer, while veterans sleep out on the streets, our infrastructure crumbles and young people leave school deeply in debt.
They want a government that works for all, not just the few. That’s the right thing to do, that’s the moral thing to do and, for the Democratic Party, that is the way to win elections.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020.
This fucking piece of shit needs to be buried alive in a caved in abandoned coal mine
