There's No Legitimate Reason To Assume Shenna Bellows Can't Defeat Susan Collins In Maine

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee seems content to waste their resources on reactionary Blue Dog Travis Childers' hopeless attempt to win a Senate seat in deep red Mississippi (where Obama lost with 44%) while ignoring the best Democrat running for Senate in years, Maine's Shenna Bellows-- and in a state Obama won with 56%. This week, Brad Dayspring, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Bellows is "way too far outside the mainstream" for Maine and that "if the Daily Kos declares statehood, Shenna Bellows would fit in well." Bellows, of course, is proud of the support she's gotten from Daily Kos and other online activists. And she asked which of the policies she's running on are outside of Maine's (not DC's) mainstream. Shenna:

• Most Mainers I know support raising the minimum wage to $10.10;

• Most Mainers care about climate change;

• Most Mainers believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

These are issues where my opponent, Republican Susan Collins, and I honestly disagree… My opponent has sided with Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz over Maine voters on the minimum wage, the Keystone XL Pipeline and just yesterday, she voted against restoring veterans’ benefits."

One of Blue America's most consistent contributors asked us to express to all our other members some of his own thoughts on why now is the time to contribute to the Bellows campaign. First off, he points out that this is crunch time. The next few weeks is when Bellows’ campaign can benefit most from increasing contributor headcount and dollars, in order to earn more attention from national media and support from national political organizations and contributors. Her campaign is on the verge of this kind of “lift off”-- or “critical mass”-- after its surprisingly fast start-up in fundraising, organization-building, endorsements and visibility-- culminating last week in national publicity from ABC.

The message of Bellows’ success would be all the louder because Susan Collins has been a very popular incumbent in prior elections and recent polls. But this popularity depends largely on Collins diverting attention from her positions on privacy, law enforcement drones, marriage equality and other issues, which on which she is not evolving fast enough to keep up with public opinion among Maine’s voters, who gave Obama two emphatic wins. Small-town native daughter Bellows is well-equipped to win over even more of these voters.

And, for many of us, the most important issue-- on a par with Climate Change-- is the increasing scope of the surveillance state. Its becoming a plausible campaign issue. We believe that a successful campaign by the ACLU-veteran “civil libertarian” Bellows can send the loudest possible message to every politician and government official in Washington, DC that the ongoing Snowden disclosures are a serious concern to voters of every stripe, including swing-voting independents and potentially Democratic-voting libertarians. Bellows’ opponent Collins, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has done virtually nothing to advance surveillance supervision or transparency, and has uncritically amplified quickly-discredited assurances about the efficacy and limited scope of surveillance. Maine’s voters include many independent thinkers who will not be impressed by Collins statements that: "the program, in which the NSA collected information on the phone calls and emails of millions of Americans 'has defeated and thwarted dozens and dozens of terror plots both here and overseas ... We should not assume a trade-off between liberty and security…'"

Let the DSCC waste their time and resources on anti-Choice, anti-equality, antigay, anti-environment, pro-NRA goons like Travis Childers. Let's see what we can to elect a real progressive fighter. Shenna Bellows is going to be just as astounding and essential a U.S. Senator as Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Let's help make it happen.