Last Tuesday saw a slate of primary elections in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, critical national battleground states, as well as in Oregon, Idaho, and Kentucky.
For progressives, it was a good day. They saw key victories in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and more. But Tuesday also highlighted some troubling trends on the horizon — including the continued electoral capture of the Republican party by MAGA and the extent to which the pro-Israel government lobby will go to defeat progressives.
Here are some of the key headlines.
Progressives John Fetterman and Summer Lee win in Pennsylvania
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman won his Democratic Senate primary, doing so from a hospital room while he recovered from a stroke brought on by atrial fibrillation. He had a pacemaker placed earlier in the day.
More importantly, Fetterman trounced Rep. Conor Lamb, the archetypal centrist who was endorsed by Sen. Joe Manchin. Fetterman, who campaigns in Carhartt hoodies and gym shorts, supports Medicare for All, a woman’s right to choose, and union rights (though I disagree on some of his environmental positions — he opposes fracking bans). His victory represents an important adjustment on the arguments that centrists have been making about how to win over blue-collar voters around the country. Rather than strictly coding policy positions as “too left,” voters are responding to whom politicians implicitly say they represent in the ways they present themselves. In short, vibes matter. And John Fetterman is a man of few pretenses.
Fetterman offers an important counterpoint to the likes of James Carville and other centrist talking heads who argue that the voters’ rejection of democratic politicians at the polls is about their progressive policy positions. Rather, it’s a reminder that voters elect politicians to do something. And the Conor Lamb-Joe Manchin wing of the party have, all too often, put their corporate donors’ interests ahead of achieving the policy goals they ostensibly support, whether it’s climate action, paid family leave, universal childcare, or student debt relief.
Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, Summer Lee — a 34-year-old Justice Democrats-backed progressive organizer who was the first Black woman to represent Southwestern Pennsylvania in the state legislature — eeked out a win in the primary for U.S. House despite massive outside spending by pro-Israel super PACS to smear her. More on that later.
Madison Cawthorn lost
MAGA party boy Madison Cawthorn lost his seat in Congress after an all-out assault from his own party. His crime? It wasn’t supporting the insurrection against our democracy or his colleagues in Congress. Nor was it his continued denial of the results of the 2020 presidential election. In the modern GOP, those are matters of dogma. Rather, it was his choice to accuse his Republican colleagues of inviting him to cocaine-fueled orgies. From the moment he made that claim, the Republican opposition research machine manufactured scandal after scandal that dogged him throughout his campaign.
Cawthorn was one of the worst MAGA-lomaniacs in Congress. It’s a good thing for our democracy that he lost his seat. But the way he lost it is an indictment on the modern GOP.
Pro-Israel super PACs spent millions to smear progressives
The Democratic Majority for Israel, which spent millions of dollars to tank an off-cycle special election campaign by prominent Bernie Sanders surrogate and former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, flexed again in races around the country. They spent $2.3 million in an effort to defeat Summer Lee in Pennsylvania, as well as $2 million targeting Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam’s campaign for congress in North Carolina. They weren’t alone. Another pro-Israel super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent millions more.
Rather than specifically target these young progressive women of color on their stances on Palestinian rights, they either ran ads supporting opponents or smeared them as being not sufficiently democratic.
In Lee’s race, these Super PACs accounted for 75% of the spending supporting her opponent, former Republican Senate staffer Steve Irwin. The ad campaign was so effective, it brought him from 29 points down to within a few hundred votes of victory on election day.
What’s emerging is that pro-Israel group see progressive candidates as a mortal threat to the longheld bipartisan consensus on Israel. And they are spending millions of dollars to try to defeat them.
Pro-Pharma Democrat Kurt Schrader is on the ropes
While the race is still too close to call, Rep. Kurt Schrader, the Democratic congressman who led the effort to destroy the Democrats' prescription drug reform, could be on his way out. That’s despite receiving gobs of pharmaceutical donations and a $300,000 ad blitz from a dark money pharma lobby group ahead of election day.
It’s a reminder that you probably shouldn’t try to keep your constituents’ prescription drug costs high in exchange for an industry’s campaign dollars — or at least you shouldn’t be so brazen about it (considering how many politicians on both sides of the aisle take this kind of funding every single cycle).
MAGA’s gaining steam among GOP voters
Perhaps the most depressing storyline of the entire midterm is the role that the twice impeached insurrectionist former president continues to play in his party’s future. Perhaps the most surprising outcome of all was the Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial primary victory of Doug Mastriano, Donald Trump’s endorsee who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Mastriano has compared Democrats to Nazis for opposing abortion rights.
In the GOP Senate primary, the race remains too close to call and will go on to a recount. Though Dr. Mehmet Oz — Trump’s endorsed candidate — is up by a slim margin over the more traditional (though plenty MAGA) former hedge fund manager David McCormick, Oz wasn’t helped by the late surge of ultra-MAGA commentator Kathy Barnette, who claimed that “MAGA does not belong to President Trump.”
The notion that Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate may lose only because he split votes with a candidate that is even more extreme than Trump does not bode well for a GOP that aims to be a legitimate governing partner in the future.
Notably, Pennsylvania Democrats are pressing their tactical advantage. Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro’s team ran ads that, while promoting Shapiro, took pains to specifically tie Mastriano to Trump, bargaining that the more MAGA their opponent would be in November’s general election, the easier it would be to beat them. Let’s hope that gamble pays off.
Originally published May 19 in The Incision. Get more at abdulelsayed.substack.com.
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