Hi everyone. I've been staying off Daily Kos entirely for well over two months, a much-needed break (not because of anything you did, of course!). I'm not going to reappear here regularly for some time. I am breaking my silence for this one diary, addressing the 2017 elections, in particular those in Pennsylvania. While protest and such is necessary and emotionally satisfying, it ultimately accomplishes little if we can't win some damn elections for a change. Because we have seen this movie before. Conservative leader assumes office, immediately embarks on aggressively conservative agenda that triggers huge protests and passionate opposition. That describes Scott Walker as well as Donald Trump. People on the left and in the political establishment underestimated what Walker was capable of, just as with Trump. People may have protested Walker, and still hate him, but the fact remains, Walker has been massively successful at implementing his agenda, he has the Wisconsin judiciary and media in his back pocket, he has won three elections, and the left and the Democratic Party are disorganized, impotent messes that have no shot to oust Walker as governor. This is going national unless we change, and fast. And also, please don't bother with the "if we were just more unapologetically progressive" spiel. Russ Feingold is like that. He's pretty much a clone of Bernie Sanders. He lost. I agree that Democrats should be more unapologetic and less squishy and compromising (join Jeff Merkley's filibuster, wimps!) but that alone is not enough to win an election. There are some people who I think understand what is necessary, Van Jones first and foremost. I highly recommend listening to pretty much anything he has to say.
Warning over. The rest of this is largely an informational diary, aimed at fighting liberals with far more mental strength than I have.
The most prominent 2017 elections will be the open-seat gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which pit progressive Democrats against bipartisan corporate centrists who always accommodate the GOP, like we see Joe Manchin, Mark Warner, etc. doing with Trump. The contrast is particularly stark in New Jersey, where progressive legislator John Wisniewski, who led the charge to expose Chris Christie's corruption and who endorsed Bernie Sanders, is running against a Goldman Sachs executive, Phil Murphy, who represents everything wrong with the Democratic Party. Needless to say, the party establishment, with its bipartisan delusions and captivity to corporate cash and thought, is backing Murphy to the hilt. In Virginia, our old friend Tom Perriello is running against the centrist/establishment choice, Ralph Northam. I am endorsing Wisniewski and Perriello and hope that the progressive community will strongly support both. Tepid establishment politics breathe with soul so dead, they cannot ever get us ahead (I'm ripping off Sir Walter Scott there). But in prose, history demonstrates over and over that authoritarianism cannot be effectively met with centrist establishment politics.
Those elections are not the main point of this diary, however. I'm going to discuss some lower-profile races that are just as important, in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is electing a new justice to the state Supreme Court, and is electing a total of SEVEN new judges to the statewide courts this year. That's tied for the most in the past couple decades, and 25% of the bench. We need a lot of pro-democracy judges on the bench to oppose Trump's unconstitutional and illegal actions and policies. In PA, we can get some this year (and possibly make some history--we can elect only the second racial minority to PA's highest court). But to do this, we will need to fight from behind and get all hands on deck.
To provide the proper context, I've structured the diary as follows: first, an overview of how judicial elections work in PA. After that, a discussion of recent judicial elections, from 2001 to 2015. I finally assess our chances for the elections this year, and introduce the candidates.
More below the fold.