Meanwhile, in Denver a 26 year old democratic socialist candidate Milat Kiros drubbed 30 yr. incumbent Congresswoman Diana DeGette in a preliminary intraparty assembly vote by a 63 to 32 percent margin. Kiros is right out of central casting, an attractive firebrand, a Phd student, and daughter of Somali immigrants. The vote was a preference vote prior to the formal assembly vote in June but it clearly shows that the machine Democrat is in trouble. She is backed by Justice Democrats who also backed AOC and Ilhan Omar. Mind you, it's a preference vote but it does reflect a trend in Colorado.
Yes, these people were true whackadoodles. But then this kind of national news doesn't help:
"Democrats vote against deporting migrants who harm animals." Face it, the illegal immigration issue is 80/20 GOP and until or unless Democrats get fully, and I mean 100%, on board, the long-term prognosis is terrible. This issue has already been won. It's like it's the 1970s and Democrats are trying to hold onto the Dixiecrat segregation movement.
If one forms strategies for national political parties by reading things in the genre of "the Liberal Patriot" one devolves to tactics, to methods of disguising what leadership (who read stuff like tLP) actually want to emplace. What's that? 5% or 10% of each [party? maybe?
They're actually the marketing department. The folks unconcerned with how the product WORKS, just who buys it this week.
The rest of the Country would probably prefer to have folk nominated and elected for the purpose of working together to develop solutions to issues generally described as problems... instead of constantly going jihad. Republicans are not that jihadi but they ARE learning so there's a time factor involved since one jihad will certainly generate a similar response.
Unfortunately we have evolved a system that rewards jihad with more snark, more political consultants for whom political jihad is a meal ticket. I don't see this getting fixed unless and until the folk who run the democrat party are so thoroughly discredited that the money dries up and all the media coaching staff have to find honest work.
The Democratic Center? James Talarico is unquestionably one of the most Progressive candidates in the entire history of the Democratic Party. It remains unclear whether he was a vetting mistake, or if he is an 2028 WH electoral experiment.
If Dems can run a candidate to the Left of AOC in 2026 Texas and win, Newsom will undoubtedly be the Dem 2028 Presidential nominee. Should Talarico prevail, Dems will not only refuse to moderate, they will become more Progressively brazen, if that is possible.
The US just endured 4 terror attacks on US soil in 2 weeks by naturalized citizens or their offspring. Only extraordinary training and luck stopped what could have easily been mass casualties.
Had a Synagogue Security Guard been less well trained, dozens of young kids might have perished in Michigan. Had the NYC bombers paid attention in Chemistry class, countless New Yorkers could have, literally, been blown to pieces on a midday sidewalk. Had the Austin bomber targeted a bar where police were not 1 minute away, the carnage might have approached triple digits.
Yet, Dems remain unfazed. They inexplicably continue to refuse to pay Homeland Security employees, even as ICE is fully funded until 2029.
Outside of DC, the picture is no less Progressive. Talarico is a moderate cartoon. Beshear just refused free federal dollars for school choice. Less than 1/2 of KY public school students can perform at grade level, yet "moderate" Andy insists Ky Educational Apartheid, remain in perpetuity. Ditto for Penn's Shapiro. Emanuel helped crash the US healthcare system, now Americans should give Rahm a 2nd bite at the apple?
In truth, Shapiro and Emanuel are non factors. The notion the current Dem Party would ever nominate a Pres candidate of Jewish descent is a practical impossibility. Even if many Dems refuse to admit the near omnipresent antisemitism that now plagues the Party.
It is easy to understand why sane Dems would like to assume peak Progressivism has come and gone. Still, Dems are pushing all their chips into the middle of the table, like gambling addicts in Vegas on Final Four weekend. Like all junkies, Dems fail to recognize the potential downsides of their Progressive addiction.
If 4 dozen child sized body bags had been required in Michigan, the Dem jihad against US Immigration law would have melted like ice in the Tehran sun. So too, would have any realistic chance of a Dem 2028 WH win.
I do not follow politics as closely as Ronda, so here’s Claude explaining the four terror attacks she referenced. Wild that we now live in a world where Islamic terror attacks on US soil don’t fit the correct narrative so they’re buried by the media.
This comment refers to a cluster of four terror attacks that occurred in the US over roughly two weeks in early March 2026, all appearing to be linked to the ongoing US-Iran war. Here’s a breakdown of each incident:
1. Austin, Texas (late February/early March)
A shooter killed three people and injured more than a dozen others in Austin’s bustling entertainment district. Underneath a hoodie, the shooter was wearing a T-shirt featuring an Iranian flag design. Authorities investigated whether the shooter was inspired in part by US and Israeli strikes on Iran.  The suspect was Ndiaga Diagne, a 53-year-old native of Senegal and a naturalized US citizen since 2013, who was shot and killed by police. 
2. New York City (around March 8)
Two terror suspects were accused of tossing makeshift bombs at a protest outside the NYC mayor’s home, in what authorities described as an ISIS-inspired attack. 
3. Old Dominion University, Virginia (March 13)
An ISIS-linked gunman launched a deadly attack at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The shooter, Mohamed Jalloh, was a naturalized US citizen from Sierra Leone, convicted in 2017 of providing support to ISIS and released from prison in December 2024.  He killed one person and injured two others, including US Army personnel, before ROTC students in the class subdued and killed him. 
4. Temple Israel Synagogue, West Bloomfield, Michigan (March 13)
A Lebanon-born US citizen rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into Temple Israel, setting part of it ablaze while dozens of children were inside.  Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said the security guards’ actions kept everyone inside safe, including 140 students at a childcare center attached to the synagogue.  The attacker, Ayman Ghazali, had connections in federal databases to Hezbollah members in Lebanon. 
So the comment is essentially arguing that only luck and good training prevented mass casualties across all four incidents — the synagogue guards stopped what could have been a massacre of children, the NYC bombers’ devices apparently failed to work properly, and Austin police happened to be nearby. The broader context is a heightened domestic terror threat following the US military engagement against Iran.
I think you may have that backwards. Asking how to persuade people who share your perspective to become primary voters. Is more likely to yield better results.
I wouldn't mind a extremist candidate, depending on what they are extreme about. The centrist Democratic positions have veered so far to the left that not much is gained by a centrist Dem except the ability to say nothing and the support of billionaires. As if our billionaires are somehow more pure.
Most people aren't very invested in the same issues that political hobbyists are. Why does no one mention illegal immigration or tariffs? Kryptonite?
There's a sizeable portion of people who can vote either way. Left or right most people want to make enough of an income to pay the bills, to live in a safe place, and have some sort of hope that those who come after will have a better life. For a sizeable majority it aint been happening, and until it does there will be wild swings of the elections as people seek a party or candidate that can make things work again.
Reading this alongside Ruy Teixeira’s piece from yesterday, it feels like the two articles are actually describing different parts of the same problem. Teixeira is pointing out that Democrats no longer have growth functioning as the organizing principle. Olson is showing what that looks like in practice when you get into candidate selection and primaries.
If growth were really the organizing principle, you would expect candidates to be competing on who has the clearest path to raising living standards, building capacity, and making the country more productive. Instead, what you see is candidates trying to navigate the party’s internal dynamics without triggering the most sensitive issues.
What that leads to is a kind of unspoken understanding during primaries about where the boundaries are. Candidates tend to steer around those pressure points rather than engage them directly. The result is that campaigns focus on areas of agreement or safer contrasts, instead of forcing real tradeoffs.
And what’s striking is that even the candidates positioned as “centrists” aren’t really filling that gap. They may moderate tone or emphasis, but they’re not consistently articulating a clear growth agenda or showing a willingness to make the kinds of tradeoffs that would be required to support it. Energy is probably the clearest example of this on the growth side, because it directly underpins productivity and future capacity, but it’s not the only area where those tradeoffs show up. So you end up with a system where candidates are selected based on their ability to navigate internal pressures, not on their ability to organize a governing approach around growth.
That’s why these two pieces fit together so well. One diagnoses the loss of growth as the central organizing principle. The other shows how, once that happens, the politics naturally shifts toward managing internal dynamics rather than building a forward-looking economic model. And that, more than messaging, is why it feels like the party isn’t moving the country forward at the pace it should be able to.
Actually our growth rate is fine, we are outpacing all other developed nations. Europe, Japan, Canada. We grow just fine...... But we die younger, our kids can't buy a house, and our lives are insecure. Growth is disconnected from income or well being for the bottom 80%.
I think we may be using the word “growth” a little differently. If the question is whether the U.S. has grown faster than other developed countries in recent years, that’s fair, we have. But that’s not really what I’m getting at. What I’m talking about is whether growth is functioning as the organizing principle of how we make decisions as a country. In other words, are we building toward the next level of capability and broadly shared prosperity, or are we managing around the edges of what we already have?
To me, real growth isn’t just GDP compared to Europe or Japan. It’s whether we’re setting ourselves up for the kind of step change you saw in earlier periods, where productivity, energy, technology, and skills all came together and lifted living standards in a visible way for most people.
And I think your second point actually reinforces that. If growth were really working the way it should, you wouldn’t see such a disconnect between overall output and things like life expectancy, housing affordability, and economic security for a large share of the population.
So I don’t disagree that we’re growing. I just don’t think we’re growing in a way that reflects our full potential or translates into broad, durable gains. And that, to me, is the bigger issue.
It's a choice we made. It's not just happenstance. Our goal for fifty years has been quarterly profits. I don't know how we change that, how we successfully tie quarterly profits to worker income. Our legislators will vote contrary to our best interests time and again if it is in the interests of everyone they socialize with, their families, their patrons.
If you want Democrats to change the median voter’s preferences, then they should attack AIPAC and run on having a distinct foreign policy from Netanyahu’s. War with Iran is definitely unpopular with independents. Polling on Israeli is more inconsistent, but the trend is down.
This poll came out from before the Iran war started. Israel’s popularity is likely to get worse before it gets better. Netanyahu politically benefits from conflict and war so he has no incentive to stop.
I notice you didn't mention the new Illinois senator, Juliana Stratton, the senator that Pritzker bought and paid for. Her main campaign slogan was "F*** Trump." American will have to live with her for 40 years - move over Mazie Hirono.
I looked at her campaign website. It is farther left than the International Date Line. She proposes the usual left wing ideas like Medicare For All. Add to that her proposal for a federal minimum wage of $25/hour. If that bankrupts labor intensive businesses, give them federal grants. Tax, borrow, and spend. Sort of like the government of Illinois.
$25 would probably end up being less than that. They usually make things gradual such that by the time people see it in a paycheck it's worth a lot less. $30 with a Cola indexed to inflation and a federal jobs guarantee maybe would be better.
The official Democratic Party platform of 2020 promised to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. They left it at $7.25 regardless of the inflation their deficit spending caused. If they promise to raise it to $25/hour, as Stratton proposes, that will merely be a bigger broken promise.
Meanwhile, in Denver a 26 year old democratic socialist candidate Milat Kiros drubbed 30 yr. incumbent Congresswoman Diana DeGette in a preliminary intraparty assembly vote by a 63 to 32 percent margin. Kiros is right out of central casting, an attractive firebrand, a Phd student, and daughter of Somali immigrants. The vote was a preference vote prior to the formal assembly vote in June but it clearly shows that the machine Democrat is in trouble. She is backed by Justice Democrats who also backed AOC and Ilhan Omar. Mind you, it's a preference vote but it does reflect a trend in Colorado.
Yes, these people were true whackadoodles. But then this kind of national news doesn't help:
"Democrats vote against deporting migrants who harm animals." Face it, the illegal immigration issue is 80/20 GOP and until or unless Democrats get fully, and I mean 100%, on board, the long-term prognosis is terrible. This issue has already been won. It's like it's the 1970s and Democrats are trying to hold onto the Dixiecrat segregation movement.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/03/19/democrats-vote-against-deporting-migrants-harm-animals/
If one forms strategies for national political parties by reading things in the genre of "the Liberal Patriot" one devolves to tactics, to methods of disguising what leadership (who read stuff like tLP) actually want to emplace. What's that? 5% or 10% of each [party? maybe?
They're actually the marketing department. The folks unconcerned with how the product WORKS, just who buys it this week.
The rest of the Country would probably prefer to have folk nominated and elected for the purpose of working together to develop solutions to issues generally described as problems... instead of constantly going jihad. Republicans are not that jihadi but they ARE learning so there's a time factor involved since one jihad will certainly generate a similar response.
Unfortunately we have evolved a system that rewards jihad with more snark, more political consultants for whom political jihad is a meal ticket. I don't see this getting fixed unless and until the folk who run the democrat party are so thoroughly discredited that the money dries up and all the media coaching staff have to find honest work.
The Democratic Center? James Talarico is unquestionably one of the most Progressive candidates in the entire history of the Democratic Party. It remains unclear whether he was a vetting mistake, or if he is an 2028 WH electoral experiment.
If Dems can run a candidate to the Left of AOC in 2026 Texas and win, Newsom will undoubtedly be the Dem 2028 Presidential nominee. Should Talarico prevail, Dems will not only refuse to moderate, they will become more Progressively brazen, if that is possible.
The US just endured 4 terror attacks on US soil in 2 weeks by naturalized citizens or their offspring. Only extraordinary training and luck stopped what could have easily been mass casualties.
Had a Synagogue Security Guard been less well trained, dozens of young kids might have perished in Michigan. Had the NYC bombers paid attention in Chemistry class, countless New Yorkers could have, literally, been blown to pieces on a midday sidewalk. Had the Austin bomber targeted a bar where police were not 1 minute away, the carnage might have approached triple digits.
Yet, Dems remain unfazed. They inexplicably continue to refuse to pay Homeland Security employees, even as ICE is fully funded until 2029.
Outside of DC, the picture is no less Progressive. Talarico is a moderate cartoon. Beshear just refused free federal dollars for school choice. Less than 1/2 of KY public school students can perform at grade level, yet "moderate" Andy insists Ky Educational Apartheid, remain in perpetuity. Ditto for Penn's Shapiro. Emanuel helped crash the US healthcare system, now Americans should give Rahm a 2nd bite at the apple?
In truth, Shapiro and Emanuel are non factors. The notion the current Dem Party would ever nominate a Pres candidate of Jewish descent is a practical impossibility. Even if many Dems refuse to admit the near omnipresent antisemitism that now plagues the Party.
It is easy to understand why sane Dems would like to assume peak Progressivism has come and gone. Still, Dems are pushing all their chips into the middle of the table, like gambling addicts in Vegas on Final Four weekend. Like all junkies, Dems fail to recognize the potential downsides of their Progressive addiction.
If 4 dozen child sized body bags had been required in Michigan, the Dem jihad against US Immigration law would have melted like ice in the Tehran sun. So too, would have any realistic chance of a Dem 2028 WH win.
I do not follow politics as closely as Ronda, so here’s Claude explaining the four terror attacks she referenced. Wild that we now live in a world where Islamic terror attacks on US soil don’t fit the correct narrative so they’re buried by the media.
This comment refers to a cluster of four terror attacks that occurred in the US over roughly two weeks in early March 2026, all appearing to be linked to the ongoing US-Iran war. Here’s a breakdown of each incident:
1. Austin, Texas (late February/early March)
A shooter killed three people and injured more than a dozen others in Austin’s bustling entertainment district. Underneath a hoodie, the shooter was wearing a T-shirt featuring an Iranian flag design. Authorities investigated whether the shooter was inspired in part by US and Israeli strikes on Iran.  The suspect was Ndiaga Diagne, a 53-year-old native of Senegal and a naturalized US citizen since 2013, who was shot and killed by police. 
2. New York City (around March 8)
Two terror suspects were accused of tossing makeshift bombs at a protest outside the NYC mayor’s home, in what authorities described as an ISIS-inspired attack. 
3. Old Dominion University, Virginia (March 13)
An ISIS-linked gunman launched a deadly attack at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The shooter, Mohamed Jalloh, was a naturalized US citizen from Sierra Leone, convicted in 2017 of providing support to ISIS and released from prison in December 2024.  He killed one person and injured two others, including US Army personnel, before ROTC students in the class subdued and killed him. 
4. Temple Israel Synagogue, West Bloomfield, Michigan (March 13)
A Lebanon-born US citizen rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into Temple Israel, setting part of it ablaze while dozens of children were inside.  Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said the security guards’ actions kept everyone inside safe, including 140 students at a childcare center attached to the synagogue.  The attacker, Ayman Ghazali, had connections in federal databases to Hezbollah members in Lebanon. 
So the comment is essentially arguing that only luck and good training prevented mass casualties across all four incidents — the synagogue guards stopped what could have been a massacre of children, the NYC bombers’ devices apparently failed to work properly, and Austin police happened to be nearby. The broader context is a heightened domestic terror threat following the US military engagement against Iran.
From my centrist perspective, the question is how to persuade primary voters to share my perspective. I wish I knew.
I think you may have that backwards. Asking how to persuade people who share your perspective to become primary voters. Is more likely to yield better results.
And yes I wish we both knew.
The problem for centrist Democrats is that voters want fighters and there is a perception that centrists don’t fight.
The Republicans were here during the Tea Party era. Democrats are simply 15 years behind them.
I wouldn't mind a extremist candidate, depending on what they are extreme about. The centrist Democratic positions have veered so far to the left that not much is gained by a centrist Dem except the ability to say nothing and the support of billionaires. As if our billionaires are somehow more pure.
Most people aren't very invested in the same issues that political hobbyists are. Why does no one mention illegal immigration or tariffs? Kryptonite?
There's a sizeable portion of people who can vote either way. Left or right most people want to make enough of an income to pay the bills, to live in a safe place, and have some sort of hope that those who come after will have a better life. For a sizeable majority it aint been happening, and until it does there will be wild swings of the elections as people seek a party or candidate that can make things work again.
Reading this alongside Ruy Teixeira’s piece from yesterday, it feels like the two articles are actually describing different parts of the same problem. Teixeira is pointing out that Democrats no longer have growth functioning as the organizing principle. Olson is showing what that looks like in practice when you get into candidate selection and primaries.
If growth were really the organizing principle, you would expect candidates to be competing on who has the clearest path to raising living standards, building capacity, and making the country more productive. Instead, what you see is candidates trying to navigate the party’s internal dynamics without triggering the most sensitive issues.
What that leads to is a kind of unspoken understanding during primaries about where the boundaries are. Candidates tend to steer around those pressure points rather than engage them directly. The result is that campaigns focus on areas of agreement or safer contrasts, instead of forcing real tradeoffs.
And what’s striking is that even the candidates positioned as “centrists” aren’t really filling that gap. They may moderate tone or emphasis, but they’re not consistently articulating a clear growth agenda or showing a willingness to make the kinds of tradeoffs that would be required to support it. Energy is probably the clearest example of this on the growth side, because it directly underpins productivity and future capacity, but it’s not the only area where those tradeoffs show up. So you end up with a system where candidates are selected based on their ability to navigate internal pressures, not on their ability to organize a governing approach around growth.
That’s why these two pieces fit together so well. One diagnoses the loss of growth as the central organizing principle. The other shows how, once that happens, the politics naturally shifts toward managing internal dynamics rather than building a forward-looking economic model. And that, more than messaging, is why it feels like the party isn’t moving the country forward at the pace it should be able to.
Actually our growth rate is fine, we are outpacing all other developed nations. Europe, Japan, Canada. We grow just fine...... But we die younger, our kids can't buy a house, and our lives are insecure. Growth is disconnected from income or well being for the bottom 80%.
I think we may be using the word “growth” a little differently. If the question is whether the U.S. has grown faster than other developed countries in recent years, that’s fair, we have. But that’s not really what I’m getting at. What I’m talking about is whether growth is functioning as the organizing principle of how we make decisions as a country. In other words, are we building toward the next level of capability and broadly shared prosperity, or are we managing around the edges of what we already have?
To me, real growth isn’t just GDP compared to Europe or Japan. It’s whether we’re setting ourselves up for the kind of step change you saw in earlier periods, where productivity, energy, technology, and skills all came together and lifted living standards in a visible way for most people.
And I think your second point actually reinforces that. If growth were really working the way it should, you wouldn’t see such a disconnect between overall output and things like life expectancy, housing affordability, and economic security for a large share of the population.
So I don’t disagree that we’re growing. I just don’t think we’re growing in a way that reflects our full potential or translates into broad, durable gains. And that, to me, is the bigger issue.
It's a choice we made. It's not just happenstance. Our goal for fifty years has been quarterly profits. I don't know how we change that, how we successfully tie quarterly profits to worker income. Our legislators will vote contrary to our best interests time and again if it is in the interests of everyone they socialize with, their families, their patrons.
Yes and it has us stuck at a point way way under our potential
If you want Democrats to change the median voter’s preferences, then they should attack AIPAC and run on having a distinct foreign policy from Netanyahu’s. War with Iran is definitely unpopular with independents. Polling on Israeli is more inconsistent, but the trend is down.
This poll came out from before the Iran war started. Israel’s popularity is likely to get worse before it gets better. Netanyahu politically benefits from conflict and war so he has no incentive to stop.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead-americans-middle-east-sympathies.aspx
I notice you didn't mention the new Illinois senator, Juliana Stratton, the senator that Pritzker bought and paid for. Her main campaign slogan was "F*** Trump." American will have to live with her for 40 years - move over Mazie Hirono.
I looked at her campaign website. It is farther left than the International Date Line. She proposes the usual left wing ideas like Medicare For All. Add to that her proposal for a federal minimum wage of $25/hour. If that bankrupts labor intensive businesses, give them federal grants. Tax, borrow, and spend. Sort of like the government of Illinois.
$25 would probably end up being less than that. They usually make things gradual such that by the time people see it in a paycheck it's worth a lot less. $30 with a Cola indexed to inflation and a federal jobs guarantee maybe would be better.
You mean guaranteed lifetime employment? Regardless if you're needed? Regardless if you're lazy and just phoning it in/phoning in sick 1 day out of 5?
The official Democratic Party platform of 2020 promised to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. They left it at $7.25 regardless of the inflation their deficit spending caused. If they promise to raise it to $25/hour, as Stratton proposes, that will merely be a bigger broken promise.
Maybe Fetterman will consider running as an independent, especially if Republicans end up nominating far right candidate.