A plurality of voters disagreed

It’s a bit after the fact and maybe I’m not acquainted with the facts and landscape of Kansas politics. That said, I don’t understand the logic of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actively supporting and campaigning for labor lawyer Brent Welder in the congressional primary there. Welder, if you don’t know, was running against Sharice Davids, who is Native American, lesbian women. If elected, she would be the first Native American, lesbian woman ever to sit in the Congress.

If the argument of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is that Welder had a more progressive program than Davids, my reply is perhaps, but if so, not by much.

What is more, does it make any sense to make a candidate’s positions on one issue or another singularly determinative of who to support? Shouldn’t other considerations also matter such as unity and equality, not to mention the experience, background, and electability of the candidate?

And what about the unremitting racism and misogyny of Trump and his right wing cohorts? Shouldn’t that enter our (as well as Sanders and Octavio-Cortez) calculus at this moment in deciding who to support? And, of course, how can the past and present history of genocide and exclusion of the Native American people not be a primary consideration in the deciding who to campaign for? If Davids were on the wrong side of today’s existential battles, it would be one thing. But she isn’t. She’s a progressive Native American lesbian woman. Fortunately, a plurality of Democratic voters in the primary recognized this and were ready to break new ground.