The “Establishment” Versus “Progressive” Debate Doesn’t Matter Democrats Can’t Win in November

7 min readDamn, Milwaukee. I’m getting too old for this.I finally gave up at about 3 a.m. There was not an eyelash's difference in the Democratic gubernatorial race between David Crowley and Francesca Hong. As the racetrack touts used to say, you couldn't shine a flashlight between them. I knew bedtime was imminent when Ali Velshi went into reruns and I didn't notice for about 30 minutes. Crowley managed to scoop the nomination when the people in the ’Wauk finally got their seams straight. God, I love that place.There were a lot of other national sidelights to Tuesday night's action. For example, John Roberts' Day of Jubilee was celebrated in Alabama. After the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the Supreme Court delivered the coup de grace to the Voting Rights Act back in April, Alabama rushed to redraw its congressional map to eliminate a black majority district down around Mobile. This decision had to be part of the reason why participation in the primaries fell off a cliff. From AL.com:Tuesday’s election was both a special election and a winner-take-all primary, the result of U.S. Supreme Court rulings involving congressional redistricting and the Voting Rights Act. The low turnout prompted political parties, candidates and election observers to spend the final days before the election urging voters to participate and educating them about the unusual format in which the candidate receiving the most votes would win outright. Those efforts intensified Monday through social media posts and traditional media outreach. Alabama Republican Party Chairman Scott Stadthagen, in a video posted Tuesday morning, urged Republicans to “prove them wrong” and support the candidate of their choice.Brown said the perception that many races lacked meaningful competition likely contributed to voter disinterest. He questioned whether there was any “genuine competition” in the Democratic primary in the 6th Congressional District, which Cook Political Report rates as a Republican-leaning district with a GOP advantage of 17 percentage points. The 6th District contest was the state’s only Democratic congressional primary and featured four candidates.Meanwhile, in South Carolina, we will have a runoff for Lindsey Graham's vacant Senate seat between Graham's sister, Darline, and true GOP nutball Ralph Norman. He's the guy who, in the wake of the 2020 election, urged White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to declare something called "Marshall Law" to force the continuation of Trump I. Later, he fronted for a notorious passel of Covid-19 quacks. He then organized a clumsy effort to distance himself from the Crazy, but it recognized him as one of its own and ran him down.But the real action, as it has been for a week now, was up around the Great Lakes. In Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar was held to just below 90 percent in her gubernatorial primary, so clearly, the DFL is in disarray. Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan will be running for Klobuchar's old Senate seat against former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya, who will run on the twin platforms of: a) Minnesota Somalis-are-Stealing-Our-Dates platform, and b) Donald Trump for Emperor. Flanagan's win is already being teed up as a victory for the Democrats' progressive wing in the pre-fab narrative that the elite political media so dearly loves. More on that Potemkin bullshit in a moment.(Alas, Klobuchar will not be facing Mike Lindell, who lost to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth. The next part will shock you, I'm sure, but Lindell immediately has alleged that there were irregularities in the count, which he lost by 11 points. Can someone tell me the day on which Lindell just throws a couple hundred thousand dollars out the window? I'm on the next plane, baby.)In the Democratic Senate primary, Flanagan beat Rep. Angie Craig at least in part over Craig’s vote for the so-called “Laken Riley” Act, in which the Republicans used the tragic murder of a woman to pass even broader criteria under which the undocumented could be deported. Craig also was the beneficiary of a flood of PAC money, which seemed to matter not much at all. To her credit, Craig delivered one of the most gracious concession speeches I’ve ever heard.Now, about Wisconsin ...First of all, get to know a woman named Rebecca Cooke. She won the Democratic primary to run in the state's Third Congressional District, located, as we honorary Sconnies put it, "up dere around Eau Claire." Currently, the district is represented by the inexcusable Derrick Van Orden, who specializes in terrorizing exhausted House pages for resting unpatriotically in the Capitol rotunda. From the Wisconsin Examiner:Pages work for the Senate carrying and delivering legislative materials and assisting lawmakers during floor debates. The pages who Van Orden yelled at were taking the photos during their last week on the job. Punchbowl News reporter Jake Sherman reported that while the pages were on the floor, Van Orden, using several expletives, called them lazy and told them to get off the floor. “Wake the f— up you little s—-. ... What the f— are you all doing? Get the f— out of here. You are defiling the space you [pieces of s—],” Van Orden said, according to an account of the incident provided to The Hill by a page. "Who the f— are you?” Van Orden asked, to which one person said they were Senate pages. “I don’t give a f— who you are, get out. You jackasses, get out,” he added. Van Orden said in a statement that he thought the pages were being disrespectful by lying on the floor because the Capitol rotunda was used as a field hospital during the Civil War.Yeah, that guy.Two years ago, Van Orden beat Cooke so narrowly that a rematch was almost inevitable, especially since Van Orden hasn't done much to improve his performance beyond being an even noisier nuisance. By the way, the Third district is located in a part of the state known as the "Driftless Area," because of certain geological peculiarities involving glaciers and such. Admittedly, Van Orden seems made to order to represent something called the Driftless Area, and the shebeen has a strict rule against soliciting political contributions for candidates, but, really, folks, I'm tired of paying for this guy's bar tabs.And now, the Big Kahuna Burger.Back before the Covid-19 lockdown, when I was in Wisconsin covering something else, I sat and talked with David Crowley, who had just been elected Milwaukee County Executive. Now, in Massachusetts, county government is a place on which somebody's Uncle Knocko works for 150 years so that his 3,000 nephews have job security. But, in Wisconsin, county government is a big deal. (Previously, Scott Walker went from Milwaukee County Executive to a job in Madison being the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin.) Crowley impressed me as an amiable soul with a good grasp on how to use the powers of his new office for the public good. But I completely lost track of him after that. Now, by the thinnest of margins, he's the Democratic candidate for governor. Wisconsin is full of surprises.On Wednesday morning, we found ourselves awash in narrative crapola about a resurgent Democratic "establishment" defeating the "progressive" insurgency that so scared them a week earlier in Michigan. Gene McCarthy's description of the political press as birds on a wire—one flies off and they all follow—never has been more true than it has been this month. Crowley's an "establishment" candidate because Tony Evers, a serious liberal, endorsed him? Please. I'm a little more troubled by the reports of a flood of dark money boosting Crowley in the stretch drive against Francesca Hong, but that's because I hate the very idea of the cascade of campaign money, dark and light, that Citizens United unleashed. Hong ran a strong campaign and came very close to winning it. That's not disarray. That's a political variety pack, which makes it a strength, not a weakness.And I mean, good lord, the Republican candidate is Rep. Tom Tiffany, an extremist election-denying MAGA hack who won't leave that particular poor, exhausted chicken alone. From The Cap Times:Yet Tiffany actively supported Trump’s drive to overturn results in Wisconsin and nationally. This, despite the fact that Tiffany enjoyed his own reelection win in the very election he now contests. As Wisconsin Public Radio noted: Tiffany “signed onto a lawsuit filed by the Republican attorney general of Texas with the U.S. Supreme Court that would have thrown out Wisconsin’s presidential votes and instead had the election decided by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Texas lawsuit Friday evening.”Let the facts sink in: Tom Tiffany wanted to throw out Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential votes in a move that would have disenfranchised 3,298,041 Democrats, Republicans and independents who cast ballots in the 2020 election.Worst of all, Tiffany has remained an election-result denier. Just this May, when Tiffany was an active candidate for governor, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that when asked, “Tiffany would not answer whether Joe Biden won the (2020) election.”Gee, I wonder what David Crowley's first question to Tiffany will be if and when they debate.Lord, I'm going to need oxygen soon.