It Will Take Organizing To Expand Our Political Imagination

Source: In These Times

To overcome the insistent messaging of the corporate media and Democratic establishment, we need grassroots people power.

Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign with impossible promises, from erecting a massive, Mexican-funded border wall to revitalizing dying industries. Instead of being dismissed as a huckster, he raised Republican voters’ expectations of the possible and normalized the party’s shift to its extreme. Trump’s victory seemed to turn on its head the conventional wisdom that only centrists win general elections.

Centrist Democrats are nonetheless clinging to that conventional wisdom, undermining popular progressive candidates and policies on the grounds that one of their own is the most likely to unseat Donald Trump. As one of Joe Biden’s supporters and fundraisers, South Carolina state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, told Vanity Fair, “This [election] isn’t a battle of ideologies or identity or Medicare for All or a Green New Whatever. It’s all about who can stop this juvenile narcissist from getting a second term.”

To an extent, the Democratic establishment has polling on its side. Biden consistently leads in primary polling, and a Quinnipiac poll from May shows 61% of registered Pennsylvania Democrats think Biden is the most likely to beat Trump. Bernie Sanders is a distant second at 6%; Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are tied at 3%.

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