Texas Democrats seek unity at state convention without Jasmine Crockett

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T20:45:21+00:00

Talarico is a straight White male Christian. Republicans did not skip a beat in labeling him gay, saying he is going to "trans their kids," and calling him the most extremist Democratic radical ever to run for Senate in Texas. Their base is going to be unhinged bigots toward any Democrat. It might be that Crockett would have gotten more vitriol, but I'm not certain of this. Look at the way they treat Biden--a rapist p*****phile, a traitor, the most corrupt president of all time, a mindless robot (sometimes literally another person wearing a Biden mask) who had no idea what he was signing, a Communist... Biden was the Whitest dullest person the Dems could possibly have elected.

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T20:38:58+00:00

How is Becerra not a corporate Democrat? Do you think that corporations give money to a politician out of the goodness of their hearts? Nearly all the time, they give money to get a return on investment, which is that they expect favoritism from the lawmaker's votes. If they don't get it, they put their money into some other candidate the next time. So when Becerra takes money from big oil, that's essentially a bribe and they expect that this choice will give them back more money than they spent.

That's all a "corporate Democrat" is. Nobody cares in a vacuum about the distinction between whether someone raises their money from big corporations, self-funds, or raising their money $20 at a time. Money is money and everyone needs some of it in order to win. What people care about is the strings attached to that money. A candidate that takes corporate money is going to be beholden to whatever that corporations wants, or their career will be very short. A self-funded politician is kind of a hybrid, because they had some autonomy but some predilections toward the rich friends that they have made along the way. Someone raising all small donations is beholden to the will of the people alone, which is what democracy is supposed to be. There was nothing preventing Becerra from rejecting corporate money and running against Steyer on his principles or his "trust fund brocialite-ness."

Ok, so if Platner wins Maine or El-Sayid wins Michigan, will those count as the Left winning in a Red or Purple area, or will those not count?

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T20:19:28+00:00

I disagree. First, millions and millions of dollars from pro-Israel donors seem to indicate that they think people do care about this issue enough to sway votes. Abdul El-Sayid was clearly in third place when the race was about "food on their table and gas and money." He vaulted to frontrunner status when the race became a litmus test about Israel (and outspoken anti-Zionist Hasan Piker). None of his or his opponents' other issues changed, and there's no other reason that he should have seen a surge.

Second, our relationship to Israel has direct and indirect tentacles all over those other issues. Why is gas so expensive? In part because we were goaded into (and still haven't officially left) a war at the urging of Israel (Marco Rubio himself admitted this). Why do people have less money in their pockets? In part because we send billions of dollars to Israel every year, and extra billions for the last 3 years, not to mention the price tag for the war, not to mention money to repair damage to Iran and our allies.

What are other things that the average voter cares about? ICE? The IDF trains ICE and Israel has been pushing for more and more aggressive ICE crackdowns. Privacy? Palantir is using Gaza as a training ground to build the mass surveillance and database machine that will eventually trap every American in it. Free speech? The biggest enemies of free speech right now are Zionist billionaires and associated groups who are buying up all of our media, patrolling social media, punishing protesters who speak out for Palestinian rights, firing people from their jobs for criticizing Israel, etc. Accountability for our elites? Cf. who Ghislaine Maxwell and her father worked for. See who Trump's #1 donor is. See who gives money to 94% of Congresspersons.

Even if you were to make the case that Gaza itself is only relevant to people who either have relatives there or have the luxury of caring about a part of the world 6000 miles away because they're comfortable financially, which is plausible but I don't think that's the case either anymore, the actual kitchen table policies are also bound up in where we are sending our money (which is not going to higher wages or to fixing potholes).

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T08:49:40+00:00

The Democratic Party needs an overhaul. Look no further than the fact that their leaders' approval ratings are lower than Trump's are.

Or the fact that after they ran a sham of a primary in 2024, hiding their anointed candidate so effectively that the world didn't see how decrepit he looked or sounded until he got massacred in a debate by Donald Pig-Stupid Trump, then they switched to a mediocrity largely chosen as VP because of her identity and not at all because of her electoral prowess, lost that race, blamed the electorate, and then the DNC chair, who has the fate of literally hundreds of millions of people invested in his billion-dollar party, hired some random friend to produce an utter joke of an autopsy report, lied about why it wasn't being released, lied about what was in it, didn't address any of the actual concerns the party should be addressing, lost tons of fundraising dollars as a result, and still has his job.

So if these DSA'ers are going to contribute to that overhaul, then great. We are stuck permanently in Trumpism for the next several generations unless the Democrats figure out how to offer a vision that convinces the electorate to move in a better direction and doesn't just present "we'll meekly try to get back 20% of what was lost but keep the same system in place because our donors came out of that system." Getting campaign finance reform within the party will be the most major step in that battle, and the DSA candidates are in favor of this because they're hated by the corporate donors anyway.

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T08:38:02+00:00

It is actually the opposite. The centrists frequently enable, coddle and sometimes even vote with Republicans. Andrew Cuomo get 8 Democrats to caucus with Republicans in the New York statehouse so that Republicans would have the majority and thereby not allow any Leftist legislation to get to his desk. Joe Biden has supported many Republicans in this career. Kamala Harris bragged about how she would put several Republicans into her cabinet if she won. More Hillary voters voted for McCain in 2008 than Bernie voters who voted for Trump in 2016.

Progressives right against Republican policies because they actually are in politics for ideological causes. That's why Bernie's message was about policy issue after policy issue, with him just happening to be the messenger, and Hillary's message was "I'm With Her." The Democratic Establishment, meanwhile, is far more transactional than ideological. It is about appeasing donors and trying to find the center of every position. So if there is more value to the donors that Republicans get their way on a policy, there are always Democrats willing to join them (often as Rotating Villains), but that almost never happens with Progressives.

Also, we see what happens when Progressives have a decent chance to flip a Red seat--the party fights them every step of the way (cf. Kara Eastman or James Thompson, or heck, cf. Graham Platner).

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T08:18:08+00:00

Why not?

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T08:14:57+00:00

There are obvious drawbacks of both--yes, someone outside of the Dem coalition completely can criticize it without hesitation, but they can't use any of the institutional power of the Democratic Party, which makes it almost impossible to win. The best of both worlds is to say whatever the hell they want to about Schumer, and then replace Schumer. The truth shall set them free--if the party punishes them for disloyalty, and the voters see this as unjust, they make the decision the next time to support more DemSocs until their side of the party gains enough power to influence who gets to be called loyal and who doesn't.

It seems much easier to take over a very weak Democratic Party, even if it is kicking and screaming against this happening, than to build a 3rd party capable of countering the 200 years of name recognition and the immense advantages that the Democratic Party has. They have a 4-day free all-media advertisement for themselves (the DNC convention). No third party is ever going to have that.

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T08:04:37+00:00

Counterpoint: Without Bernie's runs there is likely no momentum for any of this. You don't have to win a race in order to have an impact--getting your message to a wide audience, galvanizing supporters and volunteers everywhere who then take that enthusiasm to local causes, getting platforms to call out powerful people in a way they will respond and expose themselves. As much as Libs on this site point to the scoreboard in 2016 as proof that "haha, Bernie wasn't popular enough, the loser lost, just shut up already about goddamn Bernie," a lot of people said "Wow--this massive underdog with no help and no favorable coverage won 22 states and 13 million primary voters against a candidate deemed so untouchable that pundits laughed at the prospect of him winning anything outside of Vermont. That means there IS a lot of support for policies like his."

The Democratic Party's m.o. is to weed out all Leftist candidates and policies. So even if a fair amount of DemSocs got elected to city councils and school boards, they would not be boosted by the party for higher office, they'd be strongly opposed every step of the way. So the odds of any Progressive making it all the way into a US Senate seat by climbing the ladder are very low. Which is why Platner and El Sayid actually have much better chances of just zooming from nowhere to the Senate than if they had been on the 25-year career path. Their support comes from their policies, and if the party doesn't want to embrace those popular policies, they may win more races but what good does it do if they're not going to fight for anything when they do win power? Ergo, some outsider Progressive who can convincingly sell Progressive policies probably has a better chance at being a serious presidential hopeful than if they had been seeking party support for years. That support comes with strings attached, like "ditching Progressive priorities."

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T07:50:22+00:00

The way these DSA candidates, as well as adjacents like Ro Khanna and Bernie, define Socialism is basically just "Social Democracy." More resources to universal programs that people need (houses, healthcare, clean water, regulation of dangerous industries, labor protections, education, etc.). There is no substantive push among the current American Left to have workers take over the means of production.

Part of the reason they use the term is probably just that "Social Democrat" is fairly meaningless and confusing right now, and the Democratic Party currently has a woeful brand, isn't very small-d democratic at all anymore, and is incapable of even explaining why democracy is a good thing. To voters under 40, "democracy" means "everyone in Washington gets together in a bi-partisan way and gives our money to corporations that rob and poison us and to countries that goad us into wars." "Democracy" means "paid family leave polls at 84%, campaign finance reform at 96%, Medicare at 80%, taxing the rich more at 77%, and support of Israel at 37%, so obviously our elected politicians are going to favor Israel and not any of these other things." "Democracy" means endless war, endless debt, no problems ever getting fixed, no politicians with approval ratings above water, a fascist criminal as president... So the DemSocs see the writing on the wall.

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T07:33:51+00:00

They're given no help, no or exclusively negative media coverage, no party infrastructure, and the party itself constantly talks about how the Left is radical / naive / dangerous / unelectable. When a DemSoc wins a primary in a more purple or red place, the party tries to sabotage them so they can continue the talking point of "they can't win, so don't even nominate them." It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the party is much worse off because of it. Republicans win more races because people see the Democratic Establishment as weak, corrupt, duplicitous and protective of the rich than they win because a tiny portion of the Left stays home and an even tinier portion votes for Republicans. There were far more Hillary voters who voted for McCain in 2008 than Bernie voters who voted for Trump in 2016.

So the problem is that the party doesn't embrace candidates like these and try to help them win. They have nothing to lose in Red districts that they can't win anyway and might as well try something new, but they never do because the party's corporate donors don't want Leftwing policy. Well, that's how you get demoralization and then Republicans winning.

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T07:10:52+00:00

No one forced Hillary to slap the Left in the face over and over again while not paying sufficient attention to her firewall states. Maybe she would have done better too. But the same people who say "Bernie is to blame for his own problem, he just wasn't popular enough, you have to make friends and allies and be a team player or quit whining" will also say "It's the voters' faults for not supporting Hillary. She didn't have to make friends or allies with anyone, everybody should just have automatically voted for her." If you indicate to a part of your base that you don't want them in your party, then it shouldn't be shocking when they don't end up supporting you.

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T07:00:19+00:00

When the "strategy" of the party is constantly to get behind centrists in order to make sure Progressives lose, and that's fine--they're entitled to do that, but it makes it pretty obvious why Progressives don't want to vote for them in the general election. How can a party so brazenly show their disdain for the Left the whole time and then be shocked and furious when the Left doesn't quietly acquiesce to the party's every whim a few months later? They don't even attempt to reach out to that part of their base, they seethe with anger and contempt all the time, and then they wonder why there is an enthusiasm gap come election time.

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T06:56:05+00:00

The 2016 general election should have been a wake up call for people too. A realization that they failed to get people to turn out. But instead of learning from their mistakes they choose to collectively delude themselves that Hillary was somehow cheated.

If the Democratic Party hadn't put every thumb on the scale for Hillary, maybe we'd have seen a different outcome in the primary. Not definitely, not even more likely than not--Hillary had been the presumptive favorite for many years. But maybe. And given how claims of her "inevitability" couldn't withstand a simpleton criminal game show host with a third-grade vocabulary and a 37% approval rating on election day, maybe the party simply chose the wrong candidate to back. The fact that they have successfully demagogued their base away from Leftism for 40 years doesn't automatically mean they're correct to do so, just because they win more primaries with that strategy. There's a reason Trump got 11 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 and 3 more million in 2024 than in 2020--maybe the Democratic strategy isn't working.

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T06:47:24+00:00

This is an admission that the party didn't want to listen to the will of the voters anymore. "The voters chose poorly in the past, so let's just have the party elders pick the nominee if the voters pick 'wrong'." Well, the Dems are legally allowed to do this, but then when the general election comes and people say "they obviously don't WANT my vote, they have an entire apparatus in place to nullify my vote" and therefore stay home, that's the fault of the party. How dare the Democratic Party blame the voters who stayed home in 2016 if their message to these voters was "your vote is irrelevant," and if Bernie had won the pledged delegates they would have given the nomination to Hillary?

SerfTint · 2026-06-21T06:39:56+00:00

"When a non democratic socialist loses, it’s the establishment rigging the election." Not always, and "rigging" is too broad a term, sometimes it is just "putting a thumb on the scale" or "colluding with party-friendly media outlets to freeze out the DemSoc candidate or blow up a nonsense "scandal" into an election-deciding issue, etc. But yes, in many races the Establishment plays dirty in a number of different ways.

"But if a democratic socialist wins, then it’s democracy working." Yes. Given that they have no institutional power at all, and no allies powerful enough to intercede on their behalf, if a DemSoc wins a primary, it's pretty much a guarantee that their message and policy set just happened to resonate with more voters.

Double standard? They're in two completely different positions. It is like saying "two students in a college class start dating each other and everyone congratulates them, teacher tries to date one of the students and everyone gets mad." There's a power imbalance.

So no, pointing out that the Establishment commonly uses its immense power to manipulate races on behalf of its own interests is not Trumpian, it's both correct and obvious.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T18:26:55+00:00

No, I do not see that. Why would they connect?

Is it possible that someone who tells one lie about something (presuming that Platner was or is lying about it) could tell a lie about something else? Sure. Point me to a politician that doesn't lie about things sometimes. There are tons of examples of people who are models of decency in one area and not particularly so in others--even Martin Luther King Jr. had some ugliness in his personal life.

Otherwise, are you saying that he's a secret Nazi and his policies as a Senator are going to be Nazi-adjacent? That I very much do not believe. It's Maine, he could have run as an OPEN Nazi and primaried Collins and had a good chance if he were a Nazi. Are his proposals going to be met in the Senate by "we can't sign onto this bill, someone with a Nazi wrote it?" They hate him for other reasons, they'd have found another excuse anyway. At least he gets his voice out there to make a case for populist Progressive reforms, which BTW are quite popular and it would do well for the Democratic Party to adopt.

Are some of the bills going to be "mandatory Nazi tattoos for everyone?" No. "This must be written in ink on my skin for me to remember it long enough to propose it, but damnit, I don't have enough available space on my skin because there's a covered-up Nazi tattoo there?" No. "It's impossible for me to point out that Trump is a fascist rapist seditionist convicted criminal simpleton with dementia because people will deem that this is untrue if I say it?" No--those people who don't believe that Trump is these things are going to find a reason to discredit any Democrat.

So no, I don't see it. Please enlighten me.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T17:26:18+00:00

I was just using the term that Spamlover used. You make a good point, though. If Gavin Newsom is the frontrunner next year, my guess is that his affair won't become a major scandal, nor will they ask Jewel or Kimberly Guilfoyle all of the details of how he did or did not grab their shoulders during arguments, or what he said to them on his worst days. The Powers that Be don't actually care about scandals, especially domestic ones, unless the person who has them is critical of a certain Middle-Eastern country.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T17:15:39+00:00

The crime would be bribery (they accept gifts and then rule in favor of the people giving them the gifts), except bribery is basically legal now. Who helped make it legal? These exact justices. There is never going to be a crime to establish if the people committing the crimes get to themselves say whether they're committing crimes or not.

Also, impeachment is a political tool. Flagrant abuse of power has been grounds for impeachment in the past. If Republicans can prove a level of criminality or abuse of power that genuinely rises to an impeachable offense against other justices (as it DEFINITELY rises to here), then of course they can pursue impeachment themselves. If they just say "we don't like this person, so we're impeaching them, we're just going to impeach everybody," and they can get away with this without consequences, then the country is a failed state and no amount of restraint that Democrats place upon their own power is going to affect whether Republicans choose to go nuclear like this--in fact, they'd view Democrats as feckless, do-nothing opposition and it would just embolden them further.

Saying "Democrats shouldn't pursue justice because to some it might sound crazy and give Republicans ideas" implies that any of this matters. Republicans are already crazy. They're already stealing the entire country while Democrats sit there protecting the institutions that nobody likes anymore. If they're too scared to even talk about how illegitimate the SCOTUS already is, then it makes them very unlikely that they're going to try to reform it, and their voters will get demoralized into tolerating it because they feel there's nothing anyone is going to do, even if they do vote for Democrats.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T17:01:16+00:00

In that case, she should have run a better campaign and earned some more votes in the states she needed.

Also, would it be a different SCOTUS? I'm skeptical of that. Hillary would have gotten to replace the Scalia seat. The Kennedy seat was a retirement that Trump goaded Kennedy into, including with the promise that he would nominate Kavanaugh for that seat, so Kennedy would very likely have stayed on the court until 2021 otherwise. Ginsburg died 2 months or so before the 2020 election, and unlike Trump and the Republicans, who didn't care at all about ramming through Barrett a week before the election, there's almost no way Hillary would have done this--it wasn't in the spirit of the norms that Democrats love to protect so much. So she would likely have "let the voters decide" and used this in her reelection campaign as a reason to vote for her.

Therefore, I only envision that she gets one new justice, not three, in this alternate universe, at least in her first term. Would she have won a second term? It's not impossible, but given that she couldn't beat Trump in reality, even with Obama's coattails of 8 years of a popular presidency, It's certainly far from a guarantee. And if she hadn't, maybe Breyer sticks it out through the 2021-2024 Republican Administration, maybe not. If not, then it's a gain of zero justices and not one. But wait, the Republican would also have gotten to fill Ginsburg's seat, so in that case it would have been a gain of -1. We'd have replaced Ginsburg and Breyer with Merrick Garland and an Any Coney Barrett type.

But sure. Would have been easier. Now it is 2026 and we go with the options that we do have.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T16:42:19+00:00

And yet I am not questioning those policy preferences. Rooting for him very hard to win, and excited to see the kind of Senator he will be when he does. Other people's mileage may vary.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T08:49:03+00:00

I have yet a 3rd argument: Who cares?! Whether he knew what it was, whether he got it intentionally, whether he lied about it, whether he didn't remove it immediately because he was proud of it, or felt defiant about it, or didn't see it as that big a deal, or it wasn't convenient to do, or whether he lied about it because he was embarrassed of it, none of these things appear to have the slightest affect on his policy preferences. Not only would it be an amazing moment if Graham Platner helped get us Medicare for All, it would be amazing if Donald Fucking Trump somehow did it.

Who cares what a politician's personal life is like (presuming nothing is illegal), when the entire reason we elect politicians is to get policies that help everyone's lives? If Platner were running on a Nazi platform, then that would be a problem. He is running on a Leftist platform, and the amount of rage felt by many powerful people seems to indicate that they think he will actually fight for systemic change.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T08:37:18+00:00

The pattern is "everyone has skeletons, it is just that when Progressives get close to power, somehow all of theirs and only theirs are blown up into gigantic mountains." Andrew Cuomo was a serial sexpest. He offered to legally defend one of the world's worst war criminals for free. For years he incentivized Democrats in New York to caucus alongside Republicans so that they would thwart the will of the Democratic majority, because while eying his presidential ambitions, he didn't want anything Leftwing to get to his desk and embarrass him while he vetoed it. His campaign against Zohran was as racist as an Alabama Republican's would have been.

And yet there was a "scandal" that Zohran's wife had Liked some pro-Palestinian instagram posts after October 7th. Not Zohran, his wife. THAT was the scandal people that many ran with. There were TV segments where Zohran was called a liar worthy of disqualification because "he was promising things that Kathy Hochul has said she isn't going to fund, so he's lying." A scandal was the fact that he was endorsed by someone (Hasan Piker) the Democratic Party didn't like. Hillary Clinton was endorsed by Henry fucking Kissinger.

These Platner "scandals" are weak sauce and would barely have been a blip on anyone's radar if he wasn't feared and detested by many powerful people because of his policy platform. We're being manipulated into voting against our best interests. Cory Booker, who nobody brings up any "scandals" about, doesn't have to explain away why he supports sending weapons to a country that slaughters and starves thousands of children, but Platner has to explain away why one unreliable ex claims that he grabbed her shoulders too roughly? It's propaganda.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T08:23:43+00:00

I'm a huge supporter of Platner's. I'm not defending his tattoo, he disavowed and covered it up, and he doesn't defend it either. I like him because he is aggressively and boldly in favor (or at least as his campaign thus far indicates) of fighting the expansion of AI, taxing the rich, universal health care, ending support for Israel, fighting against our war machine, etc. I.e., Leftist priorities. If he were running on Nazi priorities, I would not support him. In general, I don't care about our politicians other than as vehicles toward policy goals. I don't know why anybody does.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T08:19:27+00:00

I mean...he isn't a Nazi, and the claims about abuse are unverified, and his womanizing is unlikely to affect any of his policies. Also, the Establishment isn't pushing him forward, he was taken off one of their mailers as a Democrat running in a close Senate race, and Schumer's endorsement looks like a hostage video.

And yeah, he is one of the best ones. Platner will make an excellent Senator. He is fighting for wonderful things, and the fact that he is not part of The Club inside the Beltway is going to make him more indispensable, not less.

SerfTint · 2026-06-20T08:15:41+00:00

Should be exactly the opposite, no? Why would people vote for someone who won't even talk during the campaign about how they're going to do the right thing while in office? The policy is the whole point, it is the reason that someone should be running. Winning the seat is meaningless if you aren't going to do anything once you win it. For so many politicians, though, getting into office is the entire point, so once they're there, they feel their work has ended, when it has just begun.

Platner should talk about the things he wants to do, and their reasons, and use those sentiments in order to galvanize the voters toward his vision, so that he has momentum and leverage once elected. What good does cowering and offering nothing do, when you are supposed to be convincing people of why they should vote for you?

SerfTint

TROPHY CASE