3/9 Weekend Review: The Super Tuesday Primaries

Between college midterms, Reclaim RI meetings, family commitments, and many other things, it took me just a little longer to get to my regular biweekly blog posts.

So buckle up. We have a lot to cover today:

Donald Trump with fellow strongman Viktor Orban, who he also just met with this past Friday; via bgnesnews.com.

• A question: how long is Speaker Mike Johnson going to wait until we deliver aid to Ukraine? When Russia takes over Ukraine? When Russia starts invading NATO countries? Or when Russia comes to our doorstep? Ukraine’s survival must be of the highest priority, yet Johnson does not seem to care.
• Check out the remarkable — and unprecedented — State of the Union address delivered by President Joe Biden to a joint session of Congress this past Thursday. To see the agenda he laid out, watch the full clip here. Don’t take my word for it. Hear the entire speech and look around for all of the press coverage so far. Guess Fox News can’t say Biden is sleepy anymore. You can also check out the commentary from Salzillo’s Two Cents.
• Here is also the response to Biden’s SOTU address from wannabe Hollywood actress Katie Britt, who went between dramatically fighting back tears and smiling at just about the weirdest times. I think her dramatic whispering was the most convincing. More bad melodrama than substance. Let’s see tonight if SNL can make itself relevant again.
• On Super Tuesday President Biden and Donald Trump won their respective presidential primary contests (Biden only lost American Samoa, while Trump narrowly lost Vermont). In almost every contest though, Biden has more party support than Trump has, which makes Nikki Haley voters the potential deciders of this very contentious election cycle. And boy the stakes are very high. Choose wisely, Haley supporters.
• It is all but certain now we will have a 2024 rematch in November. Now it is about picking one choice for president. And let’s be clear: the secretive Republican-funded No Labels enterprise has no chance of doing anything except helping Trump. And don’t get me started on RFK Jr., the anti-vaxxer, anti-Semite, and conspiracy obsessed close friend of convicted sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein (who was also in Trump’s circle of friends).
• The party choices are clear as day as it is summarized here, whether it is on the Holocaust, the history of slavery, “honorary” KKK members, measles vaccines, the “evil” AARP, or other fringe positions Trump’s party has now embraced fully. Check out these two clips-and yes, they are not deepfakes or satire clips.
• There are down ballot races we are covering as well. First, in North Carolina, the Democratic Attorney General (who also might become the first Jewish Governor of the state) is facing the state’s GOP crackpot and vicious Anti-Semite Lt. Governor Mark Robinson. This article has just a small sampling of controversies (so much it didn’t even get to mention Robinson’s other massive conspiracy that “American Idol” and “Chopped” are signs of a pending New World Order a.k.a. NWO). But to Donald Trump, he is “Martin Luther King Jr. on steroids.” For someone who called the Civil Rights Movement “Communistic,” and admires the times women weren’t allowed to vote, this is a rather comical irony. But he could also be their next governor depending on the November election. All this sadly makes Kari Lake look quite tame by MAGA standards.
• Meanwhile, in the California Senate race, Adam Schiff and Steve Garvey will advance to the November general election. There was no question Schiff was going to make it. Garvey is more surprising. For the most part, he did not campaign much across the state, and he did not air any TV ads. In fact, Schiff’s campaign did more to put Steve Garvey on the airwaves than Garvey himself, who ran a very lackluster campaign and was regarded as the weakest of the candidates in the jungle primaries (Democrats Katie Porter & Barbara Lee were the other choices on the ballot for that race). Schiff should win handily. Garvey has a number of personal family issues already on the record, as well as a long record of supporting fringe Tea Party candidates.
• The structure of this California jungle primary has garnered considerable controversy. The cryptocurrency industry and the pro-Netanyahu lobby spent tens of millions of dollars to tear down Congresswoman Porter on personal attack ads rated “misleading” and “mostly false” by both PolitiFact and the Sacramento Bee. Turnout in the California jungle primaries for the Senate seat, hot-button House contests, and state legislature offices, reached an all-time low. Might be time to consider ditching the jungle primary and ranked-choice voting as we know it today. They are very ineffective in practice, and they often act as more complicated ways of getting to the same results of a regular primary (as we saw in the Schiff-Garvey race). Campaign finance reform and partisan gerrymandering are much bigger issues in our election system.
• Speaking of dark money influence, it very well decided a key House race in Texas. After the winner Julie Johnson launched an issues page for blockchain and cryptocurrency policy in February, the industry spent at least a million dollars for her in less than one month. All the more reason progressives need to push for a ban on dark money from Democratic primary contests at the Chicago Democratic National Convention later this summer.
• Not to forget a moderate Republican in Texas, Rep. Tony Gonzales, will now face a runoff after being previously censured by the Texas Republican Party over his position on guns after the Uvalde Massacre. This could be a real sleeper contest to watch in November-and especially if Gonzales loses his runoff. Arkansas Republican Congressman Steve Womack, who is high up in leadership on Capitol Hill, also faced a mightily strong challenge from GOP conservatives, though he ultimately prevailed in the end.
• An Alabama food fight ends with one incumbent winning and another going home. Another House runoff there will be flooded with even more crypto cash.
• I should not neglect to mention the incumbent GOP NC Superintendent of Public Instruction lost her bid for renomination to a parent who attended the US Capitol on January 6, and called public school teaching “indoctrination.”
• To see more of how wrong Washington DC is today, check out this groundbreaking investigative report. If you like this report on antitrust budget cutting, follow the great work of David Sirota and The Lever. Likewise with the Brennan Center and Democracy Docket for takes on elections in America today.
• Good riddance to Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who have no accomplishments of their own to tout, except the list of Biden policy priorities they killed (including the signature Build Back Better Act). Preserving McConnell’s filibuster really did foster compromise, didn’t it Kyrsten and Joe? Maybe now we can hopefully have a true Democratic Congress to deliver a momentous Biden second term.
• More evidence on how Gina Raimondo’s 2011 Pension Reform has impacted the state. Employee attrition has greatly worsened since 2011, according to a newly-released study from the National Institute on Retirement Security. For people outside my state, this is how Rhode Island treats its workers. No wonder she left Rhode Island high and dry. No wonder she jumped ship in the midst of her pandemic failures, botched vaccine rollout, disastrous stake takeover of Providence’s public schools, and her inability to fix the dilapidated infrastructure she promised to fix in large part with costly truck tolls (which have since been ruled unconstitutional).

Lastly, feel free to look through the entire archive of previous 2023 and 2024 blogs concerning “The Gina Raimondo Files,”Rural America strategy, partisan/racial gerrymandering, a bold 2nd term agenda, media advice, the importance of civic engagement, the tales of wannabe election hero Ken Block, the Clinton legacy, the stakes of the 2024 elections overall, and much, much more on my Substack, Medium, and LinkedIn pages.