X-posted from the great blue satan

Ok, so adam schiff giving money to Republicans is toxic and fuck him fuck him fuck him. (EDIT: I misunderstood a source here. he sent out mailers that identified who the MAGA candidate was so that he could contrast himself. This had the effect of helping to consolidate the Republican vote. Obnoxious, but not the same as funding Republicans. Penance served </edit>)

But that said, Lee and Porter did not total to enough votes to hit second place between them.

There are not enough progressive voters out there. The movement needs to grow, support needs to grow. You don’t win things in politics by being given them, you win them by taking them. If the progressive wing does not have the power to just take things, then of course dem leadership wont care what they think. And if they can’t do this in california, they cant do it.

This is also why the debate between “local organizing” and “voting” is a red herring. The local organizing creates a movement that can deliver votes. Once those votes are large enough in number that they make the leadership scared, or better yet, are enough to just take leadership, is when you win. Like, thats how labor got all the shit it wanted the first go around.

Organize harder, come back, beat the assholes. Ill use my vote to mitigate the worst outcomes in the meantime, but any november decision i make is a small, small part of my political activity. And we’d all be better off holding each others hands and facing the hard shit together than we will screaming about that.

Trans rights
Bodily autonomy
Human rights
End genocide in palestine and everywhere
Dismantle the military industrial complex
Close the jails
Abolish the police

And, as an addendum:

I’ll also add, tone-wise, that while it looks like I’m kind of speaking to progressives more than moderates here, that’s because I believe the audience that is willing to read a multiparagraph ramble from me is far more progressive than moderate.

A takeaway from this should definitely be:

this is why its toxic to say ‘the way to fix this is by voting in November’, with an implied ‘shut up about this now’ embedded in there. Voting is one part of a wide array of political activity, and the organizing you do before the election, and, in the form of speaking up and political pressure, between elections, will do as much as the vote itself.