After the long Thanksgiving weekend, one might have thought that liberals would start to recover a bit from the election. Instead, at the national level we saw Hillary Clinton join with the Green Party to demand a recount in Wisconsin (and maybe Michigan and Pennsylvania). And in our Washington, as we highlighted last week, far-Left Democrats are seeking the ouster of their state party “leader”.
However, where the national effort seems to be primarily a fundraising one – as CNN reported, “Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s Thanksgiving fundraising blitz passed $5 million. The money is well beyond the $2 million mark the Green Party initially set, and Wisconsin party officials said that any additional money not used for the recount would be used to train Green Party candidates for local office” – in our state the goal appears to be moving the Democrats even further Left.
So, in our continuing series on lessons learned from the election, Shift takes a deeper look at the ideological fight taking place among the Democrats searching for inspiration now that Fidel Castro is dead.
As Seattle blog Publicola reported today, failed Secretary of State candidate Tina Podlodowski is considering a campaign for state party chair. The big-spending (closing in on $1 million) loser to incumbent Republicans Kim Wyman has plenty of complaints, saying it’s“clear we need a 39 county/49 legislative district strategy for Washington State, as well as full time organizing, better data, and a revamp of communications for both our party volunteers and the general voter. I’ve spent the last year traveling all 39 counties, and have a rather large ‘to do’ list based on conversations across the state.”
Now, we could nitpick, and actually challenge whether the Seattle-centric Podlodowski visited all the state’s counties, let alone actually talked to any voter outside of the urban centers where Democrats get their votes. If she had actually done so, perhaps she could have done better than winning three counties – the liberal bastions of King, San Juan and Jefferson.
Or maybe Eastern Washington voters heard her liberal message loud and clear, since she managed to get above 38% in just one (Whitman, proud home of Washington State University) of the 21 counties East of the Cascades.
But Podlodowski is not dissuaded by her own dismal performance. Instead, she says, “It’s clears that Dems need to be able to clearly communicate our values and priorities, fight for our values and priorities and be seen fighting for our values and priorities to inspire and educate. Leadership needs to really be willing to listen, respect, and reconcile disparate points of view. [The] next chair needs to build a lasting ‘bench’ and organization that is welcoming, nimble, and open.”
Now, it’s hard to say exactly what Tina means by “welcoming and open”, since she is known for being pretty close-minded herself as Shift has reported previously. But in a Seattle Times story on the “soul searching” Democrats are doing, fellow uber-lefty State Representative Noel Frame adopts Bernie Sanders language about what needs to happen to the state Dems, saying the “the party needs to refocus on ‘voters more than donors’” and “ ‘large areas of the state have been consistently ignored.’
The state party chair election isn’t scheduled to take place until January, so the liberals have plenty of time for more bloodletting. Conservatives can only hope they do so in public, so voters can see just how far to the Left the Democrats can go.
