Help Shock The DCCC-- Help Replace Crooked Ken Calvert With Liam O'Mara In Riverside County

 

In 2016, Trump won 7 of California's 53 congressional districts and all have relatively strong red PVIs. Only one of those districts is in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, CA-42 in western Riverside County. The district goes from Eastvale and Norco just west of Riverside down through Corona, the Temescal Valley and Lake Elsinore to Menifee and Murrieta. The PVI is R+9 and Trump took the district 53.4% to 41.4%. Whites are a plurality there-- 42.9%-- with a large Latino population (38.5%) and electorally significant Asian (9%) and black communities (5.2%). It was the only congressional district in southern California to vote against Gavin Newsom for governor in 2018 but the district has been slowly, slowly, slowly turning from red to purple.

The current congressman is an amoral, corrupt, out-of-touch hack, Ken Calvert. When Fox News was looking for an example of congressional corruption for a TV special, they came up with three of the worst in DC, one being Calvert. Watch while Chris Wallace explains why:





Calvert has served the corrupt corporate agenda of big-moneyed donors and lobbyists. Since 1993, he has used his power and influence against Inland Empire working class and marginalized communities. His largest donors are part of the military-industrial complex, and he has pushed ever greater corporate welfare for bomb-makers, while voting for every use of force and sending American youth to die for oil and foreign infrastructure contracts. Along the way he has championed the expanding police state, and resisted every opportunity to make life better for the residents of his district.

This cycle, the California Democratic Party endorsed history of ideas professor Liam O'Mara, an outspoken, working class progressive. But the DCCC showed no interest in the district or in O'Mara, who they would consider "too progressive" and far too independent-minded. He is campaigning on issues the DCCC and Democratic Party establishment oppose: Medicare-for-All, a Green New Deal, UBI (universal basic income), and systemic government reform. When I first met him last year he told me that the very same ideas that have helped members of Squad beat entrenched establishment Democrats in blue strongholds can work to defeat entrenched establishment Republicans in red strongholds. His point was that by sticking to progressive policies which address the economic interests of American workers-- and framing those policies in ways that make sense to them-- progressives can go back to winning elections all across the heartland, and finally have the numbers in Congress to address the major challenges our time is crying out for. He told me that the American Dream is "being murdered by conservative and neoliberal economic policies which strip wealth from ordinary Americans and siphon it into the accounts of an oligarchic elite. As a historian, I pay close attention to the lessons of the past and the way they help to explain the present. Nothing about the Trumpist phenomenon has been a surprise; indeed, I have long argued that this turn towards neofascist populism was inevitable in the Republican party post-Reagan.

We live today in a world created by Reaganite policies-- a world very like that of the Robber Baron era, when most of the country’s wealth was held in a tiny number of hands, and people today are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. Nearly a trillion dollars was lost by the bottom 50% of the country in the last few decades. Meanwhile, the top few per cent have seen record-breaking levels of profit.

The media is lying when it talks about economic growth, because-- let’s face it-- the stock market and job-creation numbers do not paint a full-enough picture of what is happening. Despite higher levels of workforce participation and more education, Millennials earn less than Boomers did at the same age, and have a far higher cost of living. The reasons for this are not complex-- wages have remained flat for nearly fifty years. As productivity levels have soared, poor tax policy has allowed those gains to translate into wealth for a few, and rising debt for the many.

It is this disparity in wealth which has made the Trump era possible. When the liberal orthodoxies only increase inequality and fears for the future, and no left-populist or socialist alternative is available, workers will drift into the arms of demagogues who offer simple solutions to their ills. It’s the immigrants! It’s China! It’s the fake news media! When people are hurting, and someone offers them an enemy, it is all-too-tempting to listen.

Trump’s rise was made possible, not by latent racism or by conservatism, but by the failure to articulate a rational alternative. An alliance with financial elites may have translated into some short-term successes in the 1990s, but even these were illusory-- Bill Clinton won the presidency both times with less than half of the vote because an independent populist sapped votes from the two major parties. There was a lesson to be learned from Ross Perot’s “great sucking sound,” and unfortunately it was some in the Republican party who listened.

Income inequality lies at the core of the collapsing American Dream. What we need to be talking about is equality of opportunity-- giving people the resources they need to pick themselves up and make whatever they want of their lives. This is what made America great! There is a real irony in watching a reactionary Republican party herald a past “golden age” of prosperity which was created by the very policies they most despise! Post-war America built a strong welfare state on the back of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Republican and Democratic presidents alike, from Truman and Eisenhower, through Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, all accepted its basic outlines. Massive federal spending was supported by progressive taxation and steady growth. That growth itself was a result of tax policy, as it incentivized investment in the real economy and good pay for workers. Fordist logic-- the principle whereby workers are paid enough to be able to afford your products-- was the order of the day, and factory workers could afford a suburban dream-home just as easily as dentists and lawyers.

If we are going to fight back against the destructive influence of the Chicago School’s neoliberal economic ideals, we have to get back to talking about those bold liberal visions that created the middle class in America. And that means taking a class-conscious approach, reaching out to working class voters regardless of education levels, and telling them our ideas will make them richer-- because they will!

Failure to heed this strategy has been disastrous for Democrats and for the country. Letting our emphasis on the workers slip has allowed a Republican party whose ideas are harming workers to claim their loyalty. We must get back to fighting for those same hearts and minds, and we can do that by talking about basic economics again, and showing the voters that we have a path forward that will help all Americans.

This morning, with the election just days away, he is busy putting his get out the vote program into action with no help at all from the DCCC. He told me that "When this race began I knew that the 42nd and Calvert got ignored across the country, and that we're usually written off as safely red. So, my team and I came at this with a different strategy that better suited the demography and the unique issues in the area, and the proof of that is in the pudding. We have had countless Republicans and conservative independents reach out to say they are voting for me, despite knowing I am a solid progressive, because I frame issues in ways that make more sense. That effort is starting to get noticed, too. Even the conservative predictive models used by FiveThirtyEight show a solid chance of flipping this seat, potentially one of the very best chances for any progressive in a red/purple district, and about seven times the chance of any Democrat here in the last dozen years. And turn-out is already historically high. Every single day of early returns there have been more Democratic ballots than Republican, and if this continues we are on track for a historic upset."

Currently, Liam's campaign has three different ads in Spanish running on Univision stations, and an English radio ad on major Inland Empire radio station KOLA. They're being heard four and five times a day and the campaign needs to keep them on the air through Tuesday. Despite the cluelessness of Cheri Bustos and the DCCC, CA-42 is a flippable district, but Liam needs to keep those phone banks running and those ads on the radio! Blue America is making one last appeal for you to flip one of the last Republican districts in California. Please click on the thermometer on the right, which takes you to a unique ActBlue page for progressives running in districts that Trump won in 2016. These are the seats we are concentrating on for our final 2020 push. The DCCC is ignoring them but they are among the most important gains progressives can make this cycle. Please consider giving what you can to help Liam flip this seat.