Obviously, for president but then the States Attorney race Marie Newman’s second challenge to anti-abortion and otherwise right-wing Democratic Congressman Dan Lipinski (IL-3 rd) Rachel Ventura challenging centrist incumbent Bill Foster (IL-11 th) the judicial contests and the clerk of the circuit court (obscure, but very important - see explanation below). The most important races are seriously contested. Sample ballots, your voting location, and information about candidates are at Ballotpedia, and there’s a quicker route to basic Chicago info here, with the full candidate list for Chicago here and Cook County here. You can find your candidates and sample ballots with simple web searches for Chicago/Cook County/ or Illinois Primary. In Chicago, you can register to vote in person on election day March 17 at your polling place. Same-day registration to vote in Illinois. Though we are past the deadline for regular registration, you can register to vote in person during the “grace period” at the office of your election authority from February 19 – March 17. No need to talk much about Bernie Sanders - this is his brand, what he means by his slogans “we need a political revolution” and “not me, us.” How to cast your ballot So I’m going to draw attention to candidates who are supported by progressive and left activists and organizations, some of whom have shown they understand the importance of building a movement. What matters is not just electing people with good policies, but voting to build the progressive movements, identifying the candidates who understand that the transformative social change we need comes not mainly from the right people in government, but also from the disruptive power of broadly-based people’s movements holding officials to account and pushing them to act for the common good. But also look at candidates’ connections to progressive activists and organizations. So how do you identify progressives? Go beyond, beneath and between: Don’t just look at the positions and rhetoric, look at their past words and behavior. Perhaps the binaries of progressive – corporate neoliberal, or progressive-Chicago machine oversimplify, at least in some of the contests.* If we can now say the victorious Lightfoot supporters were overly optimistic, we will never know if the defeated Preckwinkle would have unpleasantly surprised her supporters. There were reasons to support either, reasons to distrust either, but the arguments were sometimes (often?) bitter and divisive. Each had very similar and very progressive, left platforms each was supported by different networks of people who identified as progressive. For example, the progressive community in Chicago was divided in the 2019 mayoral election, with some supporting Lori Lightfoot and others supporting County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Who are the progressives, and what is progressive? You can argue about who fits the description, since “progressive” is not just a description, it is a politically charged and ambiguous term, and a political marketing label. A slogan for the times: Unity … with differences. If people you talk have decided on Biden, that doesn’t mean they are not progressives (if you think so, you write off the people you need in your movement for change, and we need to respect the totally progressive fear of a Trump victory). Support for Sanders remains a criterion for identifying progressive candidates down ballot 3. For Sanders supporters, it still makes sense to work for his campaign and for Sanders to stay in the race, because the objective is not just to contest the presidency, but to continue to move the party to the left and build a social movement inside and outside the party 2. Carolina, and there is a lot to think about and discuss. As I write this, Sanders lost heavily in Michigan and other March 10 primaries, after losses in Super Tuesday and S. Sanders or Biden? Not much I can say here since readers by now know all they need to know about them. But her reform administration faces a heavily funded challenge from a billionaire family and from right-wing law-and-order forces. Unusually, in at least one race, the primary transcends the war between establishment and progressive Democrats, since the most important party officials have joined progressives to support incumbent States Attorney Kim Foxx. Locally, it is also about the future of criminal justice reform, the flashpoint issue in Chicago. But this primary is not just, as usual, about the future of the Democratic Party and the competition (war?) between the party establishment and the progressives. People might be tempted to vote for Sanders or Biden and pass over the down-ballot races. Photo by Nate Burgos Chicago Women’s March 1.21.18 (CC BY-ND 2.0) Flickr The election flashpoint: Criminal justice reform
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