Trans journalist Erin Reed has published a list of Democratic midterm candidates with anti-trans records, and the question she is forcing is one the party would rather not answer: if trans voters keep rewarding Democrats who harm them, what signal does that send? The calculation is real, the stakes are high, and there is no clean answer.
Yeah. We know how the Senate works. The problem is that the party is choosing strategies to win elections and those strategies include things like supporting genocide, scapegoating vulnerable people, condemning communism, expanding the military and the police, honoring ICE agents, destroying RCV campaigns, and punching left. For every win they get with these strategies, they will use the victories to claim that this is the way the party must go. For every loss using these strategies, they will attack the voters and say it’s the voters’ fault for not voting properly. They will then pay social media influencers to claim that the party never actually cared about people who didn’t vote for them, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent over the last several decades on “get out the vote campaigns”.
What expect is that if Paxton is willing to sacrifice his principles on the campaign trail, then he’s likely to sacrifice his principles once in the Senate and will vote with his Republican colleagues, because that’s the evidence he’s providing us. We don’t want another Manchin.