Politics
Progressives say they’re done re-litigating old posts. Are their opponents?
Progressive Democratic candidates have one thing to say to their establishment amid a wave of primary victories poised to dramatically alter the ideological makeup of their party: Enough with the old posts.
Attacks that dredge up calls to defund the police, full-throated embraces of identity politics and more, born from the leftward lurch Democrats took during President Donald Trump’s first term, won’t be what voters are thinking about come November, they say.
Rather, candidates say a populist economic message that addresses affordability concerns will buoy them to victory.
“You can talk about my tweets if you want to, but you can’t afford your health care, you can’t afford your groceries, you can’t afford your housing,” Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed said in an interview. “And it’s because of Donald Trump’s absurd policies.”
The defensive tactic popular among progressive candidates represents a new path being forged by Democrats still haunted by a disastrous presidential election, which some blame on the party’s unwillingness to distance itself from progressive positions on trans rights, policing and other issues that alienated moderate voters.
They’ve largely leaned into their outspokenness, past and present, in the hopes that voters will appreciate their authenticity. But their moderate opponents are less convinced, fearing potential losses if primary voters give Republicans a candidate with obvious weaknesses.
The border between which past comments must be acknowledged — or fully apologized for — and which can be cleanly pivoted away from remains fuzzy. Broadly, however, progressive candidates are dismissing attacks on their past.
“I’ve been to 400-plus public events, and nobody’s ever asked me about my tweets,” El-Sayed said.
However, Roxie Richner, spokesperson for the campaign, said El-Sayed deleted all posts older than July of 2023 “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context” and that the deletion did not target any specific topic.
Which former comments must be atoned for differs by primary. Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, for one, has walked back some of his most outspoken comments calling God nonbinary and lamenting the privilege his whiteness affords him, admitting in interviews that those comments were “cringey.”
But in a Democratic stronghold in New York City, Darializa Avila Chevalier was able to pivot around attacks on her calls to abolish prisons on the way to ousting longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.).
She did, however, express regret for some old posts, including ones in which she wrote “fuck Kamala Harris” and called Joe Biden a “rapist.”
Bill Neidhardt, a Democratic strategist at the progressive consulting firm Middle Seat, said that while it’s not like “there’s never room to apologize,” a candidate refusing to entertain attacks on their progressive past can work remarkably well among voters itching for an outsider candidate.
“Whenever I see an incumbent focusing on tweets and not about the economy, I feel like my campaign is in the place where I want it to be,” said Neidhardt, whose firm has worked for progressives including Avila Chevalier, El-Sayed and Melat Kiros — a democratic socialist who recently toppled 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado.
El-Sayed, for one, has repeatedly emphasized that he isn’t interested in litigating the past — which opponents have sought to do over his since-deleted 2020 posts lamenting that police departments are overfunded relative to other social services and referring to them as “standing armies.”
He told Blue Light News that “the idea that you stand by everything you ever said, out of context, is an insane thing to assume about anybody.”
But El-Sayed’s shifting recollection of the past has put him in bind. After telling the Detroit News that he “actually never, never called for defunding,” CNN reported that he said “we do need to defund the police” in a June 2020 interview with Detroit Public Radio. In that interview, the former health official said that he considered defunding to mean reducing funding for prisons and police while investing more in “the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty.”
El-Sayed has characterized such reporting as superfluous to the actual issues present in the campaign.
In an interview with BLN, El-Sayed was skeptical of the newsworthiness of the coverage: “I think this debate about 2020 and the ways that tweets are going to play are really nice on BLN if you want to get clicks.” And after BLN reported that he did in fact say “defund the police,” a campaign spokesperson told the outlet that El-Sayed’s “perspective has become more nuanced” since 2020.
When opponents and media dig up past comments, Neidhardt says he tells his candidates to keep their eyes on the ball, “and the ball is pocketbook politics, it’s not whoever is looking most proper for the Washington set.”
“They care about whether someone’s gonna fight for them,” Neidhardt said of voters.
That’s a philosophy mirrored in another progressive upstart in Wisconsin: gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong — a democratic socialist state representative that has faced similar critiques over a slew of social media posts calling to abolish the police. She is leading in most recent primary polls.
Alison Geyer, a spokesperson for Hong’s campaign, characterized the attention her posts have received as distractions from her otherwise popular slate of policies while acknowledging the blowback certain slogans can inspire without additional context.
Geyer said Hong “does not regret speaking out” amid a nationwide reckoning over police violence and racial injustice but acknowledged how slogans are “imperfect tools” that can’t always capture the full nuance of policy positions.
Still, problematic social media posts have bogged down some candidates — particularly when they go beyond far-left policy proposals to more personal controversies. Since-deleted posts authored by Maine Democrat Graham Platner, in which he said victims of sexual assault should “take some responsibility” and that many white rural Americans “actually are” racist and unintelligent, provide a picture of which past comments can severely hurt a political campaign.
Repeated scandals about Platner’s posts, in addition to the Nazi-aligned Totenkopf emblem tattooed to his chest — which he denied knowing the symbolism of — and reports of concerning behavior with former partners, now appear to some Democrats as a warning sign the party should have heeded before Maine’s June primary. Platner ended his campaign this week following Blue Light News’s reporting that an ex-girlfriend said he sexually assaulted her.
Platner has called that allegation false.
Still, progressives’ primary opponents — let alone the Republicans they hope to face in November — believe their outwardly nonchalant attitudes toward their past posts will haunt them. Spokespeople for three of Hong’s opponents in Wisconsin panned her posts, with opponent Joel Brennan saying “I don’t think there are three words that have done more damage to Democrats in the last decade than ‘defund the police.’”
“If we spend this fall defending those words, I’m afraid we lose,” continued the statement from Brennan, who trails Hong and other frontrunners in the polls.
Michigan Republicans, meanwhile, are salivating at the opportunity to run against El-Sayed. Presumptive Republican Senate nominee and former Rep. Mike Rogers said in a statement that “hide and deflect all he wants, Michiganders see Abdul and the Democrats for how out-of-touch they really are.”
And Arik Wolk, spokesperson for primary opponent Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), said that Republicans know El-Sayed “has real liabilities as a candidate” and accused Republicans of “spending money to ‘boost’ his campaign.”
El-Sayed has gotten a taste of what Republican opposition may look like if he wins the primary. In late June, the National Republican Senatorial Committee unveiled a new attack ad calling El-Sayed “too radical for Michigan.” El-Sayed has coyly responded to such charges that, in his telling, explain exactly why people should vote for him.
But taking that line of defense when it comes to attacks surrounding a candidate’s supposed extremeness can potentially backfire, said Kate deGruyter, the spokesperson for the center-left Third Way.
“Republicans are going to try to weaponize any evidence they have to paint a Democrat as a radical, and it sure helps them out when our candidates are confidently saying those things out loud on camera,” deGruyter said.
Politics
It might take ‘a lightning bolt from God’ to get these Senate Democratic hopefuls to bow for independents
Democrats vying for a pair of deep-red Senate seats are facing increasingly desperate calls from within their party to step aside for more promising independent candidates.
But they say they won’t drop out — unless there’s divine intervention.
Democrats Alani Bankhead of Montana and Julian Beaudion of South Dakota both told Blue Light News they have no plans to exit the race, despite pressure from national — and even some state — Democrats to step aside. Numerouspolls, coupled with strongerfundraising and campaign operations, show independents Seth Bodnar and Brian Bengs have a stronger — if still muddied — path to victory in November.
If the Democrats stay on the ballot, it will be almost impossible to claw these seats away from Republicans in Mountain West states that President Donald Trump dominated in 2024.
“I’m a person of faith. If a lightning bolt from God struck me and was like, ‘Alani, get out of the race,’ sure,” Bankhead told Blue Light News when asked if anything would change her mind. Otherwise, she said there’s “absolutely nothing.”
Beaudion has a similar resolve: “To be clear, we are not considering dropping out of the race,” he told Blue Light News.
By digging in, the Democrats could imperil their party’s hopes of regaining Senate control in an already uphill cycle. There’s broad agreement across the many factions of the Democratic Party that a crowded race relinquishes any hope of victory. Bengs has argued that Beaudion remaining on the ballot jeopardizes his chance of winning this fall against GOP Sen. Mike Rounds. Bodnar has maintained he has a viable path either way, and he could be helped out if the Libertarian candidate in the race pulls votes from Republican Kurt Alme.
The deadline to withdraw in South Dakota is Tuesday, and Montana’s is shortly after, on Aug. 10. Democrats across the ideological spectrum in Washington and their home states are calling on Bankhead and Beaudion to step down to help their party bank-shot a Senate majority, with the idea that a victorious independent candidate could caucus with a future Democratic majority — or at least not party up with Republicans.
“The math is inescapable. If it’s impossible for a Democrat to win, it is vital that the Democrats step aside and give the independent at least a shot of beating the Republican,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “Beating the MAGA Republicans is priorities one, two and three. Who we beat them with is pretty far down the list.”
Democrats have already had some luck setting up one-on-one independent vs. Republican matchups in other Trump-won states. The Democratic candidate in Nebraska withdrew to pave the way for independent Dan Osborn — though an ongoing court case from a Democratic anti-abortion pastor could complicate things. And Idaho’s Democratic nominee recently dropped out in favor of independent Todd Achilles.
“Knowing that your campaign is not gonna break through, and just being able to recognize that is probably the hardest thing of all,” Achilles said of Democrat David Roth’s decision to step down. “I do appreciate what David did in Idaho.”
Bankhead and Beaudion insist they can win, even despite the headwinds. Bankhead expects to ride the anti-incumbency and pro-outsider wave into office, and Beaudion credits his relationships with voters throughout the state.
“Nobody ever knows what’s actually going to happen in an election,” Bankhead said. “The people decide on November 3.”
But Idaho and Nebraska Democrats reached a conclusion that Bankhead and Beaudion did not: The party’s brand is so tarnished in their states that the “D” label on the ballot line provides no viable path to victory.
“I am a professional partisan Democrat, and I have every incentive to be on the Democrat’s side here,” said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge 21st Century, an opposition-research firm. “But ultimately, the priority is to take the Senate majority away from Republicans. In some states, that path is very difficult to impossible for a Democrat. In those cases, it is both strategically and morally correct to take the path that is most likely to achieve the goal we’re going for.”
Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), did not go as far as to call for Bankhead and Beaudion to step aside. But he agreed that there’s real opportunity for independents who aren’t stuck with the Democratic brand’s baggage.
“Being someone who’s not associated with the two-party system right now helps you greatly in many parts of this country, particularly those that have much more rural and conservative tendencies,” said Shakir. “There’s frustration and anger with Trump, and there’s not as much of a love and appreciation for the Democratic Party.”
Shakir also said that competitive races in these red areas — even if the independents can’t pull off a win — could force Republicans to pull much-needed resources out of battleground races in order to defend their turf.
But he also offered a warning to his party: Talking too much about the independents’ strong fundraising and establishment backing risks tying them to the “donor class” and turning them “into a worse version of what people assumed of a Democrat.”
“You gotta give them the space to be both independent in mind and in spirit,” he said. “The argument for them is truly that they are building a movement in the state that people are hungry for, and that in the support of those people, they’re finding resonance. And that would be the argument for a Democrat to step aside.”
Republicans, meanwhile, are working to paint the independents and Democrats as one and the same. They’re also trying to elevate the Democrats in an attempt to stop the independents from gaining more traction: Trump on social media attacked Bankhead in July, ignoring Bodnar entirely.
“Democrat-backed independents all support the same socialist policies and middle-class tax hikes that made Democrats toxic across the country,” Joanna Rodriguez, the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement. “Republicans will defeat them in November.”
The inside calls for Beaudion and Bankhead to step aside aren’t just coming from Washington. Many local Democrats in Montana and South Dakota have said publicly they should not continue their campaigns. Nancy Keenan, the former executive director of the Montana Democratic Party who has endorsed Bodnar, wrote in a June op-ed that “there is not a viable path for a Democratic victory in this race.”
Bennett, the Third Way co-founder, went further, saying if Democrats fail to flip the Senate in November, the blame would lie at the hands of Bankhead and Beaudion.
“If we fumble away a majority because these no hope candidates are too vain to get out of the race, that’ll be a political calamity,” he said. “These people need to understand that they will become pariahs.”
Bankhead doesn’t see it that way.
“I’m not swayed by it because I’m not here for power and money,” she said. “It’s still the old, rich D.C. powerful political circles that are trying to keep more progressive candidates out of the fight so they can maintain the status quo.”
FCC chair Brendan Carr on Trump, free speech and his threats against broadcasters
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Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and his team are discussing dropping out of the crowded Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The conversations come as Democratic officials in the state brace for damaging media reports about Barnes expected to hit in the coming hours. Barnes and his team have been on calls Thursday to discuss how to proceed, according to the people, granted anonymity to share private details.
The primary had become increasingly messy as more moderate leaning Democrats like Barnes have tried to stave off Democratic socialist Francesca Hong’s rise, worried her victory could boost presumed Republican nominee Tom Tiffany. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ endorsement of David Crowley — who reentered the race in the final stretch — further complicated the moderate coalition.
A spokesperson for Barnes’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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