Blue America's Last Endorsement Of 2019-- Meet Liam O'Mara, Of Riverside County, California

We hope everyone's going to have a great holiday season and a wonderful kickoff to 2020. This is going to be our last candidate endorsement of the year, although we are in the middle of the vetting process for nearly a dozen more candidates for 2020. We also want to announce the winner of our Nirvana/Pramila contest, which ended last night: Venetia R. of Seattle. In all, over 400 of you contributed around $8,000. Thanks very much. Pramila deserves that kind of continuing support; she's never let us down and she always goes the extra mile for working families.

I hope you can dig deep and find it in your heart to contribute to one last campaign one last time for 2019-- this time to progressive Riverside County, CA history professor Liam O'Mara. Liam, who has been endorsed by the California Democratic Party, is running for one of the last Southern California GOP held congressional seats, this one by Ken Calvert, a corrupt and extreme ideologue who was even denounced by Fox News for his crooked ways! He likes to say "I am running as a progressive populist in a red district in California... Much attention has gone to insurgent runs against Democrats by 'The Squad,' but the same ideas can work in Republican strongholds if the messaging is clear. By sticking to progressive policies which address the economic interests of American workers-- and framing those policies in ways that make sense to them-- we can go back to winning elections all across the heartland, and finally have the numbers in Congress to address the major challenges of our time."

Blue America endorsed Liam-- heartily-- primarily because of his spirit and his platform. He's a brilliant guy who would make an incredible member of Congress These are his half dozen top priorities. what he calls "the major challenges of our time."

• Income and wealth inequality-- which he hopes to address by taking action against stagnant wages and for progressive tax policy
• Campaign finance reform, public financing of elections. He has been speaking out about banning dark money in politics for years.
• Green New Deal with a regional emphasis on infrastructure investment.
• Single-payer Medicare-for-All health care
• Tuition-free trade schools and state colleges along with student loan debt forgiveness
• Strengthening unions and addressing the rising tide of automation and job loss

Sound familiar? It should. Liam has officially endorsed Bernie for president. When I asked him why, he said that Bernie "best expresses two things I look for in a candidate-- principle and policy. The Senator's judgement has been proven right time and again, and he has stuck to his positions in spite of their unpopularity, in so doing helping to make them popular. And his platform has the widest range of initiatives for tackling the systemic factors which made Trump viable. His proposals deal with our historically absurd levels of wealth and income inequality, address climate change, offer Medicare for all, root out corruption in Washington by addressing the dirty campaign finance system, deal with the long-festering immigration and criminal justice messes, and strengthen the unions and their bargaining position. If we want to defeat not only Trump but the kind of politics he has brought to America, we need to address the underlying socioeconomic causes. As a historian, I can tell you that Bernie Sanders is trying to do just that."

Please consider contributing to what you can to Liam's campaign by clicking on the Blue America 2020 congressional thermometer above. And take a look as the video he made to launch his campaign: