Timeline: How DNC Manipulated 2016 Presidential Race

You wonder why independent voters and millions of Democrats don't trust the establishment?

-by Michael Brennan

December 16, 2014: President Obama signs into law omnibus spending bill that increases maximum possible individual political contributions from $129,600 annually to $777,600, substantially increasing the amount of money flowing through party committees. (Congressional Research Services)

April 7, 2015: A Clinton campaign memo to the DNC articulates “Pied Piper” strategy to elevate the most extreme Republican candidates: “Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate. We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal: 1) Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election; 2) Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents; 3) Muddy the waters on any potential attack lodged against HRC.” (Salon)

May 26, 2015: An updated confidential Clinton campaign memo to the DNC is circulated, including new language (as disclosed by “Guccifer 2.0” on 6/15/16): “3) Use specific hits to muddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC… Working through the DNC and others, we should use background briefings, prep with reporters for interviews with GOP candidates, off-the-record conversations and oppo pitches to help pitch stories with no fingerprints and utilize reporters to drive a message.”

August 27, 2015: DNC announces “Hillary Victory Fund” joint fundraising agreement with Hillary Clinton’s campaign with a maximum possible individual contribution of $356,100 ($2,700 to Hillary for America, $33,400 to the DNC, and $10,000 to 32 of the state parties).

November 13, 2015: Associated Press releases a widely-cited survey of superdelegates’ public support: 359 for Clinton, 8 for Bernie Sanders, 2 for Martin O’Malley, and 210 uncommitted.

February 21, 2016: New York Times publishes front-page story proclaiming Sanders faces “steep climb” in delegates, despite trailing Clinton by only one pledged delegate following the Nevada caucus. Clinton’s “inevitability” narrative was largely based on the implicit assumption that her institutional support-- including public commitments by superdelegates-- would be too powerful for Sanders’ insurgency to overcome.

March 5, 2016: DNC vice-chair Donna Brazile provides Clinton with a debate question on the Flint water crisis the day prior (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 10/11/16).

March 12, 2016: Brazile shares question with Clinton on the death penalty the day before a CNN town hall (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 10/11/16). (Washington Post)

April 19, 2016: More than 117,000 Brooklyn voters are unable to cast their New York primary vote due to illegal “voter purges” by the New York City Board of Elections. (New York Times)

April 26, 2016: DNC staffer shares messaging preparing for when Sanders ends his campaign (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 7/22/16). (The Intercept)

May 2, 2016: Politico reports bombshell on how the Hillary Victory Fund was being utilized to circumvent campaign contribution limits by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

May 5, 2016: DNC officials conspire “atheist” smear against Sanders: “It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist,” said DNC CFO Brad Marshall (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 7/22/16). (Washington Post)

May 14, 2016: The Nevada Democratic convention unfolds chaotically: Chairwoman Roberta Lange passes a motion to arbitrate unverified voice votes. 56 Sanders delegates were denied voting status for administrative reasons, swinging the at-large and party leaders pool to Clinton. Lange rejected a voice vote to reconsider the delegates’ rejection and abruptly adjourned the convention to the dismay of Sanders’ supporters. Despite no evidence suggesting violence, major outlets uncritically repeat the myth of “pro-Sanders violence and chair throwing.“

May 17, 2016: DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz calls Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver a “damn liar” in DNC internal emails (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 7/22/16).

May 18, 2016: Wasserman-Schultz promotes “pro-Sanders violence at Nevada convention” myth on MSNBC.





May 21, 2016: DNC national press secretary pitches an anti-Sanders story to DNC comms director: “Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 7/22/16). (The Intercept)

June 6, 2016: On eve of the second biggest primary day (California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Montana, and South Dakota), Associated Press publishes major story calling the primary for Clinton: “Clinton has delegates to win Democratic nomination.” This count includes public superdelegate commitments who will not vote until July 25.

June 15, 2016: “Guccifer 2.0” releases documents stolen from the DNC server including opposition research on Donald Trump, Clinton donor information, and the 5/26/15 strategy memo.

June 28, 2016: Donors to Sanders file a class action lawsuit against the DNC and Wasserman Schultz alleging fraud, specifically that they violated Article 5, Section 4 of the Charter of the Democratic Party: “…the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.”

July 22, 2016: Wikileaks releases first batch of DNC emails three days before the Democratic National Convention, demonstrating anti-Sanders bias from senior DNC officials.

July 24, 2016: DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigns on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. (Reuters)

July 26, 2016: Sen. Nina Turner, a prominent Sanders surrogate, is prohibited from joining Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for Sanders’ nominating speech. Following the roll call vote nominating Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate, hundreds of Sanders delegates stage a “No Voice No Unity” walkout protest off the convention floor.





October 11, 2016: Wikileaks releases “The Podesta Emails Part 3,” revealing collusion between Donna Brazile and Clinton.

April 25, 2017: In class action lawsuit alleging DNC fraud, DNC attorney argues the party has the right to ignore primary voters: “The party has the freedom of association to decide how it’s gonna select its representatives to the convention and to the state party. Even to define what constitutes evenhandedness and impartiality really would already drag the court well into a political question and a question of how the party runs its own affairs. The party could have favored a candidate. I’ll put it that way… We could have voluntarily decided that, ‘Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.’” (See Newsweek: Was the Election Rigged Against Bernie Sanders? DNC Lawsuit Demands Repayment for Campaign Donors.)

She's gone; is Perez worse?

August 25, 2017: Judge dismisses DNC lawsuit on lack of standing: “Not one of them alleges that they ever read the DNC’s charter or heard the statements they now claim are false before making their donations. And not one of them alleges that they took action in reliance on the DNC’s charter or the statements identified in the First Amended Complaint. Absent such allegations, these Plaintiffs lack standing.” (Washington Post)

November 2, 2017: Brazile reveals Hillary Victory Fund agreement “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised… [Clinton’s] campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.” (Vox)

They'll trying it again this year

Is The DCCC Salvageable-- Or Does It Have To Be Dismantled And Begun Anew?

The joke's on us

I’d like to take at least a little credit for preventing Debbie Wasserman Schultz from becoming DCCC Chair after Rahm. If you ask her, she’ll tell you that I got her fired as chair of the DCCC recruitment committee. She actually asked a friend of mine in Congress what it would take to get me to stop writing about her. Her pathway to greatness was through the DCCC chair and she was absolutely a Rahmish fave— both being hard core corrupt New Dems beloved by the Wall Street bankster elites. Between she refused to embrace 3 Democrats running in her south Florida neighborhood against 3 GOP incumbents she was palsy-wallsy with— this as chair of the recruitment committee— even Rahm knew the pressure from the net roots wasn’t going away till she did. So she was demoted and told to stay out of sight.

In truth though, it was Pelosi, who hates Wasserman Schultz for her own reasons, not me, who blocked her path towards caucus leadership and kept her away from the DCCC chair. Obama rescued her faltering spirit though by making one of his worst decisions— and he made so, so many: making her chair of the DNC. Let’s not relitigate that right now. Instead, I want to stick with the DCCC. Many people always ask if Cheri Bustos is the worst DCCC chair ever. It’s too early to tell, but she’s definitely going down as one of the 3 or 4 worst. A complete protégée of Emanuel, she’s an ideological monstrosity, spending every working moment plotting how to disadvantage progressive candidates and how to discourage democracy itself. She shouldn’t even be in the Democratic Party, let alone leading one of its arms.

The DCCC has a long and sordid history of incompetence, corruption, failure and general disgustingness that goes right back to 1866 when it was founded. The first chairman set the tone for the impossibly incompetent organization House Democrats depend on today. Chairman #1, James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin, didn't quite know what he was politically. He started as a Democrat, then switched to the Republicans and then switched back to the Democrats. He was also a prominent opponent of the Fifteenth Amendment, the one that gave former slaves U.S. citizenship. He was such a lousy chairman (1868) that they operated without one for a decade after.

During the Roosevelt years the Committee started gaining prominence and clout. Joseph Byrnes (D-TN) was chairman from 1928-1935, during which time he was also House Majority Leader. In 1935 he was elected Speaker and died a year later. After Byrnes became Speaker, Patrick Henry Drewry (D-VA) got the job and died 12 years later, still DCCC chair. If you think 12 years is long, Drewry was followed by Michael Kirwan (D-OH) in 1947, the first northern Democrat to get that job. He was also a liberal and-- no coincidence-- a gigantically successful DCCC chairman. They were back to conservatives after Kirwan died, although his successor, Michael Feighan (D-OH) was defeated in a primary almost as soon as he was named DCCC chairman. He was followed by the legendary Boston liberal Democrat Tip O'Neill (1971-1973). 1972 was the year of Nixon's landslide reelection and the Democrats lost 13 seats in the House (even though 37,071,352 voters picked Democratic House candidates and only 33,119,664 voters picked Republicans. Yes, the GOP has been surviving on gerrymandered districts for a long, long time). O'Neill was Majority Whip while he was DCCC Chair and became House Majority Leader right after the 1972 elections (and then Speaker 4 years later).

The congressman who turned the DCCC into an arm of Wall Street and Big Business was Tony Coelho (D-CA). He ran the committee from 1981 to 1987, after which he was elected House Majority Whip, a position he held until he resigned in a financial corruption scandal with a crooked bankster.

The DCCC gained a great deal of influence in 2004 when campaign finance reform gave party committees immense power over campaign cash. Since then, they have never had a good chairman. Rahm Emanuel set the authoritarian tone but stuck closely to Coelho's posture of scraping and bowing before Wall Street. Emanuel helped elect a lot of corporate whores from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party in 2006, as did Chris Van Hollen in 2008, almost all of whom were defeated in 2010. Democratic voters, having caught on to the bait-and-switch tactics, have been refusing to come out to vote for these conservative incumbents calling themselves Democrats. Many feel that Steve Israel was the culmination of that policy, the worst DCCC chairman since Doolittle. He trained the next disaster, Pelosi sock puppet, Ben Ray Luján, who did a wretched job and is now running for the Senate. And then came Bustos, well on her way to outpacing Luján and even Israel in terms of horribleness.

A congressmember asked me if there’s ever been a good DCCC chair— which is how I came to know about Michael Kirwan. That same member who asked me about the chairmen also told me that the DCCC had been pressuring him (this was in 2016)— or twisting his arm-- to endorse wealthy corporate Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi over progressive state Senator Mike Noland in IL-08. At the time, I warned progressives who were being asked by the DCCC to endorse Krishnamoorthi that they needed to be aware that, despite his willingness to say what anyone wants to hear, he is not, has never been and never will be a progressive. A DINO, Krishnamoorthi was a job outsourcer who was one of the authors of a white paper, The Pros and Cons of Privatization, for Government Finance Review (June 2011) in which it's literally impossible to recognize the voice of a Democrat at all.

  First off, he praised privatization under Ronald Reagan. The paper states:

The present wave of privatizations can also be viewed in the context of the broader liberalization programs ushered in with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and to a lesser degree by Ronald Reagan in the United States... Poorly run private businesses must fix themselves or perish; state-run enterprises face no such constraint... Reagan similarly made privatization a theme of his presidency, describing the 1987 divestment of Conrail, a large freight railroad, for $1,575 billion as "the flagship of privatization and the first of what we hope will be many government functions returned to their rightful place in the private sector."... Today, much empirical evidence supports the claim that private companies are generally more efficient operators than government entities. The reasons for this are various and include management incentives tied to performance, a better capacity to fund capital investments, greater operating leverage, the introduction of proprietary technology, and the de-politicization of pricing and other operational decisions (e.g., raising tolls or cutting money-losing routes).

Yeah, that's the candidate the DCCC was boosting in 2016— and that’s who the Democratic establishment is readying for the next Illinois U.S. Senate seat. Since getting elected, Krishnamoorthi, a New Dem, of course, has lived up to expectations. He represents a safe blue district west of Chicago from Elk Grove Village through Schumburg out to Elgin (PVI is D+8 and Trump only managed to win 36% of the vote there) but still earned a lifetime crucial vote score of “F.” He spends all his time raising money from corporations and business executives, even though he has no worries about reelections. In 2018 he raised $5,242,332, while his GOP opponent raised $54,520. His biggest contributors are from the Health Industrial Complex, from lawyers and lobbyists and from Wall Street. Back to his paper:

Private operators can do things that politicians are unwilling or unable to do, such as raise tolls or parking fees. This can actually work to the public's advantage because the price of a privatization deal reflects these additional revenues that will be recovered by the private operators." That's a perfectly Republican perspective and Raja continued that "The less obvious reality is that in the absence of those revenues-- if a privatization deal is not done-- a government must implicitly choose a different course... If the goal is to finance some level of spending, then whatever revenue does not come from privatization must come from somewhere else. One likely source of 'somewhere else' is higher taxes, which is both politically unpopular and can have adverse economic consequences in the long run... At bottom, [privatization] is just math.

Yeah, math that Grover Norquist— and Chuck Schumer— would just love.

Problem Solvers? Gottheimer und Trumpanzee

Sorry for the tangent. Back to the DCCC— kind of. There was a worse choice than Bustos the Dems could have made: Josh Gottheimer, Blue Dog, New Dem, an abusive boss, an unrepentant reactionary and chair of Mark Penn’s misnamed Problem Solver’s Caucus. There is a case to be made that Gottheimer is the worst Democrat in Congress, a nexus of corruption and reactionary politics. Friday, reporting for The Intercept, Ryan Grim and Aída Chávez, wrote that warned Pelosi and Hoyer that he had collected enough votes to kill a bill mandating better conditions for the kidnapped children in the Trump concentration camps. He didn’t have to twist their arms to hard for them to embrace his proposal and cave, screwing over the toothless Congressional Progress Caucus again.

The House amendment would have taken away money from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and increased protections for children, among other oversight provisions. The Senate passed its version of the $4.6 billion emergency bill on Wednesday 84-8. A vote on the House version of the spending bill was beaten in the Senate 55-37, largely along party lines, with the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders missing the vote. The Senate’s vote meant House Democrats would have had to hold out to pressure the upper chamber to accept its version, while Gottheimer’s move sapped the House’s leverage. “The quote-unquote Problem Solvers Caucus, I think, threw us under the bus and undermined our position to actually be able to negotiate,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ).

“Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus?” asked Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Wouldn’t they want to at least fight against contractors who run deplorable facilities? Kids are the only ones who could lose today.”

Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar joined Pocan in slamming the move, saying that a vote for Mitch McConnell’s border bill “is a vote to keep kids in cages and terrorize immigrant communities.”

When asked what Gottheimer’s objection to the House border bill was, Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal said it came down to “not giving as much ICE money as the Senate did.” She added that a bigger problem stemmed from the Senate Democrats putting them in a “terrible position” in the first place by voting on a bill that “does nothing to hold a rogue agency accountable for its cruelty,” doesn’t have any provisions to “ensure the money actually goes to the children,” or that “these for-profit agencies are held accountable.” She described herself as a “giant no” on the bill.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus also recommended the House vote against the Senate border spending bill, saying the Republicans “cannot force us to accept this bill, which does not provide necessary guardrails” and allows the Trump administration to “continue denying kids basic, humane care and endangering their lives.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Senate didn’t even bother negotiating with the House. “We have time,” she said in a tweet. “We can stay in town. We can at LEAST add some amendments to this Senate bill. But to pass it completely unamended with no House input? That seems a bridge too far.”

The House failure led to widespread recriminations. Jayapal, Pocan, the CPC, and the CHC were blamed for urging House Democrats to pull out of negotiations with the Senate earlier this spring; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took heat for agreeing to a weak bill that left children vulnerable to abuse; Pelosi was slammed for caving; and Gottheimer’s Problem Solvers Caucus was widely derided for its unhelpful intervention. “The capitulation by the Problem Solvers and the Blue Dogs gave us no leverage here,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (R-AZ).

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, and DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos voted in favor of the bill, while other members of leadership, including Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, and Assistant Democratic Leader Ben Ray Luján, who is running for Senate in New Mexico, voted against it.

“We need a bill that delivers funds to end the humanitarian crisis,” Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib said on Twitter. “Not funds to continue caging children & deny asylum seekers the help they need. Not funds to continue the harmful policies. If you see the Senate bill as an option, then you don’t believe in basic human rights.”

So, yeah, he might have been worse than Bustos— by a smidge. Anyway... any interest in fighting back? Despite Bustos' hysterical fits, more activists than ever are running in primaries against her vile pack of Blue Dogs. There should be at least a dozen viable contests this cycle and even more in 2022. The Blue America 2020 Primary A Blue Dog thermometer on the right is where you can contribute to vetted progressives who are challenging Bustos candidates. Expect more candidates by next month but, for now, please consider helping these progressive replace the garbage Bustos is flinging our way.

Long Past Time To Retire Brenda Snipes AND Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Florida is in the news— and at least it isn’t a hurricane. I think the first time we rang an alarm bell about Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s crooked crony, Broward County elections chief Brenda Snipes, we were picking up on a Politico report by Marc Caputo. In the 2016 cycle, she worked to steal the election for DWS, as sure as DWS worked to steal the presidential primary for Hillary. Snipes broke the law by destroying ballots cast in the tight primary election between Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova after Canova sued to get access to the ballots. Canova, according to Caputo "wanted to inspect the optical-scan ballots cast in his Aug. 30 primary race against Wasserman Schultz because he had concerns about the integrity of the elections office. Under longstanding federal law, ballots cast in a congressional race aren’t supposed to be destroyed until 22 months after the election. And under state law, a public record sought in a court case is not supposed to be destroyed without a judge’s order. Snipes’ office, however, destroyed the paper ballots in question in October-- in the middle of Canova’s lawsuit-- but says it’s lawful because the office made high-quality electronic copies. Canova’s legal team found out after the fact last month.”

She wasn’t fired and was never held accountable so… of course, she took that as a green light to just keep fucking up. People are more concerned that she’s made it impossible to ever know who really won the gubernatorial and senate races in Florida than they are about how she stole another race from Tim Canova on behalf of DWS. Below is an email Canova sent his followers in Broward and Miami-Dade yesterday:

Since Election Day, the eyes of the nation have been on Broward County. While all other counties in Florida completed their counting of ballots, Broward continued finding new ballots to be counted, nearly swinging the election results for U.S. Senate and Florida Governor from Republicans to Democrats. Now there’s a state-wide machine recount, and the likelihood of lawsuits and possible hand recounts.

It’s been more than a year since we discovered that Brenda Snipes, the Broward Supervisor of Elections, illegally destroyed all the ballots cast in our 2016 primary against Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The news media refused to cover the story. If not for this double-trainwreck that landed in Broward, with both Governor and Senate races hanging in the balance, the media blackout would have continued. Instead, because of her role in the middle of the contested races for Governor and Senator, the mainstream media is finally asking questions about Snipes.

I warned for months that the failure to remove Snipes and her cronies from office would undermine public trust and result in continuing election irregularities, frauds, and illegal conduct. Since Election Day, I have heard from countless Broward residents from across the political spectrum expressing the same view, that they have lost faith and confidence in Broward election results, from non-partisan city commission and judicial elections to primaries and Congressional elections. Many ran for office as outsiders fighting for clean government, and now are horrified to see the level of corruption in our elections.

Two years ago, I first sought to inspect the ballots cast in our 2016 primary in an effort to verify the vote. Instead, we discovered that Snipes and one of her directors, Dozel Spencer, conspired to obstruct justice and tamper with evidence. This is not a theory, but an actual conspiracy that was established by a mountain of evidence discovered in our public records lawsuit against Snipes. In sworn videotaped depositions, Snipes and Spencer admitted to the ballot destruction. The Florida Circuit Court then granted us summary judgment in a 10-page order finding that Snipes obstructed justice, lied to the court, illegally tampered with evidence, and violated numerous state and federal criminal statutes, some punishable as felonies.

I reached out to Florida Governor Rick Scott months ago, as well as Democratic and Republican party officials, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and every member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. None responded, no one saw fit to investigate, and Republican Rick Scott failed to remove Snipes from office, an abdication of his responsibility as Governor to uphold the rule of law and protect us from official corruption.

The journalist Chris Hedges has said that the corruption today is so bad that they don’t even try to hide it. Barely a week before the recent election, Snipes campaigned openly with Wasserman Schultz. And why not, she had already destroyed ballots with impunity. I warned for months that if her crimes went unpunished, Snipes would have every incentive to engage in future illegal conduct and rig another election against us. The burden should not be on campaigns like ours to prove fraud when someone with Snipes’ record is left in charge of elections.

Snipes and her top staff should have been prosecuted months ago. Allowing someone with her record of lawlessness to continue supervising the recent primary and general election taints all those results by creating “incurable uncertainties” about the election outcomes. That’s why a growing number of Broward residents and former candidates are now arguing that recent election results from the primary and general elections should be invalidated, and that the courts should order new elections with appropriate safeguards— namely, hand-marked paper ballots that are counted by hand in public.

Our campaign has also uncovered other disturbing irregularities in the recent election. One campaign volunteer smelled a rat on Election night, and took video on her smart phone of a line of private vehicles driving up and transferring the blue satchels containing paper ballots to a rented truck. The ballots should have been in the possession of two people at all times. They were not. In addition, the ballots should have been transferred only to a sheriff’s deputy who should have signed a receipt for the ballots. None of this happened, which destroys the “chain-of-custody” of the ballots and casts doubt on any potential paper ballot recount.

Like many other candidates who have lost under highly suspicious circumstances, we are still assessing our options moving forward. One thing is certain, whatever happens to our campaign, we will continue calling for Snipes and her staff to be removed from office and prosecuted for their crimes. The criminal justice system must be used to clean up the swamp in the Broward elections office.

I’m going to guess that U.S. District Judge Mark Walker would tend to agree with Tim. NPR reported that Walker slammed Florida yesterday for repeatedly failing to anticipate election problems, and said the state law on recounts appears to violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided the presidency in 2000. “We have been the laughing stock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this.” Key word there is "chose."

Time To Finally Get Rid Of Wasserman Schultz (But Not With A Pipe Bomb)

The Joe Crowley of South Florida, Debbie Wassermann Schultz, has finally agreed to participate in a debate. She'll face Republican Joe Kaufman and progressive independent Tim Canova tonite at Broward College, conveniently after many FL-23 voters have already cast their ballots. That's Debbie! As low as they go! [NOTE: Now I'm hearing she's making excuses about not showing up tonight] On Tuesday, the Miami Herald published an OpEd by Canova, Here’s why I’m challenging Debbie Wasserman Schultz as an independent. He reminded the readers that just about 3 years ago he took a leave as a tenured law professor at Nova Southeastern University "to run for Congress and challenge an entrenched incumbent, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then the chair of the Democratic National Committee. To me, she was the epitome of why the party was failing: a corporate funded incumbent supporting a trickle-down Wall Street agenda of corporate trade deals, payday lending, private prisons, and endless wars." Blue America had urged Tim to run and endorsed him on the day he declared. This cycle we've endured him again, even though, technically, he isn't running as a Democrat.

My agenda is full employment, a renewable energy New Deal, a national infrastructure bank, ending the drug war and mass incarceration, universal single-payer healthcare, and protecting and conserving the environment. These issues are too pressing, and that’s why I decided to run again, to build on the momentum of the last campaign and continue waking voters on these issues.

But voters often first want to know why I left the Democratic Party and decided to run this time with No Party Affiliation (NPA). My “DemExit” was an unexpected fallout from the aftermath of my 2016 primary. After falling short by a few thousand votes, I started receiving phone calls from election experts across the country questioning the accuracy of the results. Some suspected hacking or software rigging. Our own internal field numbers, based on more than 10,000 door knocks a week, also showed a far different outcome. To try to put the matter to rest, I decided to verify the vote by simply inspecting the paper ballots in some key precincts, as permitted under Florida’s public-records law and at my own expense. If the ballots matched up, the issue would be resolved.


Brenda Snipes, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, stonewalled my ballot request for months. I filed a lawsuit in June 2017, and while the lawsuit was pending, Snipes destroyed all the ballots, violating numerous state and federal criminal statutes. She concealed the ballot destruction from the court for more than two months and admitted to all this in sworn videotaped deposition.


Snipes claimed there was no harm to the public because she says she maintained digital scanned images of the purported ballots. But no one is permitted to inspect the software that creates these digital ballot images. Instead, the software is “proprietary,” the private property of the same software vendors hired by Snipes. Under such circumstances, her illegal destruction of the ballots has undermined public faith and confidence in Broward elections.

In May, the Florida Circuit Court granted me summary judgment, finding that Snipes broke the law. We recently settled for $150,000 in lawyers’ fees and court costs.

I had been a Democrat most of my life, served as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill to a Democratic U.S. senator, volunteered my time and energy to several campaigns and was inspired in my academic work by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in banking and public finance.

But when Democratic Party officials in Florida refused to join my call for an investigation into Broward’s ballot destruction, that was finally enough. I am running as an independent to speak to a much wider part of the electorate. Although Republicans make up only 23 percent of registered voters in my district, independent voters are quickly approaching the number of registered Democrats. If there’s any district in the country where an independent can win, Florida’s Congressional District 23 is it, right here, right now.

Democratic Party politics appear petty when compared to the growing economic and environmental crises we face in Florida. For many people, this feels like year 10 of a Great Depression in jobs, incomes and savings. It’s why so many people voted for Bernie Sanders and so many others for Donald Trump. They know the system is broken, and that incremental change will change nothing.

Although Wasserman Schultz says climate change and sea-level rise are real, she then votes for billions of dollars in federal subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry and big agribusinesses, the industries contributing most to climate change. And she votes for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies for the Big Sugar industry, which along with those factory farms, are most responsible for polluting our waterways with toxic algae, endangering public health, harming tourism and threatening our oceans and aquifers.


I didn’t leave the Democratic Party as much as it left me. It’s much the same with the Republican Party. Both went so establishment and corporate that they abandoned the American people. That’s why although I’m running as an independent, I’m still the real New Deal Democrat in the race, and the candidate most in line with Teddy Roosevelt’s Republican progressive vision of trust-busting to protect workers and consumers, and to conserve our natural environment. Like during the Roosevelts’ era, our generation needs to tame capitalism without destroying it in order to liberate people while providing them with meaningful work in a dynamic economy.


 UPDATE From Tim

Tonight was to be the one and only debate in our independent campaign for Congress against Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a Republican opponent. Unfortunately, the debate has been cancelled.

First, Debbie Wasserman Schultz did not even have the good grace to respond to the invitation made by Broward College on behalf of their students. No response at all.

And here’s an indication of Wasserman Schultz’s absolute hypocrisy: Last night she attended a debate of candidates for Florida governor at Broward College! Apparently, everyone else should be expected to debate opponents and answer to voters, but not Debbie.

The debate was going to proceed without Wasserman Schultz. My Republican opponent, Joe Kaufman, had already accepted Broward College’s invitation. But Kaufman cancelled this morning, even though the replacement moderator was a Republican who has served as press secretary to a number of prominent Florida Republicans, including Florida’s Attorney General.

Broward College felt compelled to cancel the entire event, rather than letting me take the stage alone, as the only candidate in this congressional district willing to debate.

It’s absolutely revolting that candidates for Congress, including a sitting Congresswoman who proclaim their fidelity to democracy, are actually afraid of the voters and have such little respect in particular for younger voters. They believe that college students and other young voters will not turn out to vote. And by not speaking to young voters, they are hoping it has that effect.

My opponents have also rejected a Town Hall invitation from March for Our Lives, a group formed by high school students in the aftermath of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in Parkland, Florida earlier this year. And once again, Debbie Wasserman Schultz did not even respond to the invitation. That’s vintage Debbie. If you have a $5000 check from a political action committee, Debbie will make time for you. If not, her staff won’t even return your calls or debate invitations.

Wasserman Schultz and Kaufman both pretend to care about school safety, the lousy conditions in our public schools, and the concerns of college students. Yet, when push comes to shove, they both avoid invitations from students to appear in public, debate the issues, and answer their questions.

As a professor, I know all too well what a difficult job market this is, even for college graduates, and the burdens they carry in student debt. That’s why I have an agenda for students, one that includes a plan to reduce interest rates on existing student debt and even to forgive much outstanding student debt-- the same way the Federal Reserve helped Wall Street banks and hedge funds following the 2008 financial collapse. I support tuition-free public colleges, and we also have a plan for voluntary national service for high school grads that would provide tuition-free higher education at any school, public or private, after three years of servic-- the same kind of deal my dad’s generation got after World War II with the G.I. Bill of Rights. A national service program would provide opportunities in civilian conservation in national forests and coastal waters, cultural production in the arts and music, and improving all kinds of infrastructure-- just like in President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. I also support Medicare For All, which would greatly help young people, many of whom presently lack any health insurance.

None of my opponents have any real agenda to address the concerns of our youth. No wonder why they run away from public forums and debates at our colleges and with young voters. The corrupt establishment is making such a mess of our world, I fear what the future will be like for our children.

This is what our campaign is fighting against: cowards who do not believe in democracy and who show such disrespect and disdain for young voters, and for people of all ages.

This is what our campaign is fighting for: a New Deal for all Americans!

Sorry, It Isn't Only Slimy Republicans Who Sell Their Votes To Corporate PACs

Bankster by Nancy Ohanian

I admit, I was one of the people complaining that Congressional Progressive Caucus members didn't spend enough time and energy raising money-- which had a lot to do with why Pelosi didn't take them seriously and wound up helping the New Dems take over the caucus. Now DCCC recruitment ignores progressives and stocks the House Democratic caucus up with Blue Dogs and New Dems. I may have pushed them too much. Now some of them are turning into corporate whores.

One top CPC staffer reminded me that CPC members "didn't raise money and didn't pay dues" and that that was why none of them ever got beyond DCCC regional vice chair.

Things have changed according to a story that Ryan Grim did this week for The Intercept that a pissed off member of the CPC sent me.

In April, the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced that it was going to be drawing a line: Its political action committee would no longer accept corporate campaign donations.

“If we are going to end the influence of corporations and special interests in government, we have to start by not relying on their support,” said caucus co-chair Mark Pocan (D-WI). “Only by being fully independent of their financial influence can we prioritize people over corporations.”

The development was largely ignored by the press, but for those who heard about it, the move raised an immediate question: Wait, the Congressional Progressive Caucus was taking corporate money?

Yes, it was. And not only did the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC accept corporate contributions until recently, but also, almost all of its 78 members-- including Pocan-- still take corporate money individually, even as their caucus shuns it. Just four caucus members who will be returning to the House next session have pledged to decline corporate funds: Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA); Ro Khanna (D-CA); Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI); and David Cicilline (D-RI).

That number, however, is about to balloon to as many as 40 or more, as a wave of successful progressive insurgents-- including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jahana Hayes, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar-- are poised to join the House of Representatives.

The new push to go cold turkey on corporate cash is creating tension within the caucus, as progressive members take offense at the implication that their votes might be influenced by big money. “People feel like you’re saying that they are bought and sold-- and some are, but many aren’t,” Jayapal told The Intercept. “It’s not like everybody who takes corporate PAC money is bad or only does what the corporations want... But that’s not what this is about. It’s about re-establishing trust with voters, changing the system, working from multiple angles.”

But while the voting records of Congressional Progressive Caucus members are better on democracy reform issues compared with those outside the caucus, that might be setting the bar too low. Aaron Scherb, the legislative affairs director for the watchdog group Common Cause, told The Intercept that 17 of the 28 members of Congress who earned perfect scores on his organization’s “Democracy Scorecard“ are in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. But there are 78 representatives in the caucus, meaning that nearly 4 in 5 caucus members actually failed to earn a perfect score.

“So,” Jayapal explained, “I try to say to people, ‘Look, this is the system that we’ve had, it just doesn’t need to be the system that we always have. So it’s not bad that you’re doing it, because that is what has been the case.’ [I] try to not make it about shaming and blaming, but about, ‘Okay, we’re trying to fix this.’”

While Jayapal is trying to coax her colleagues with carrots, the ballot box is acting as a stick. In September, Rep. Michael Capuano, a longtime progressive from Massachusetts, was bested in a primary contest by his opponent, Ayanna Pressley, who made Capuano’s acceptance of corporate money a key campaign issue.

An analysis by The Intercept of the 2017-18 campaign cycle reveals that the vast majority of CPC members are similarly vulnerable, taking not just money from union and advocacy group PACs, but significant sums of corporate PAC cash as well. Not coincidentally, given the reliance on big money, hardly any members of the CPC rely on small individual donors.

Grim wrote that "the movement to get money out of politics has fueled a massive, rapid, and poorly understood sea change-- one that’s come to a head in the 2018 cycle. According to End Citizens United, a campaign finance reform political action committee, 208 candidates took the “no corporate PACs” pledge this cycle. Of those candidates, 124 won their primaries, including big names like Beto O’Rourke, the Texas Democrat challenging Ted Cruz’s Senate seat, and Ocasio-Cortez, the insurgent candidate from New York City who ousted Joe Crowley, one of the top Democrats in Congress. (End Citizens United endorsed Crowley in the primary, despite his long record of taking corporate contributions, not expecting him to face a real challenge.)"

First of all, Grim should be aware that End Citizens United doesn't have a long record doing anything, other than tricking grassroots contributors into giving them money for DCCC and DSCC candidates. They are just another DCCC/DSCC cutout group, manned by ex-staffers from both those organizations. They don't do anything except that. And of course they endorsed Crowley. It would be a political earthquake if they ever under any circumstances didn't support an establishment crook like him. Their DNA would explode.

Second, there are plenty of candidates who took the "no PAC money" because they knew they wouldn't get any anyway. We'll see how long they stick to that once they get into Congress. One who did-- and who was a major part of Grim's piece-- has been financed by local developers, even worse than PACs. Many Democrats take monet indirectly from the sleaziest PACs of all as long as it's cleaned and laundered through the worst scumbags in Congress. Rationale: I'm not really taking PAC money if I get it from Steny Hoyer (see no evil... etc) or, worse, if I get money from payday lenders, sugar barons or private prisons through Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Want to see how that workers to destroy the Democratic Party innards. This is from 2008, when Wasserman Schultz flew out of her sewer to destroy Obama's opening to Cuba, first a little background:

When Democrats gained control of Congress, in 2006, hopes were high that Cuba travel and trade restrictions would be eased by a party historically opposed to a so-called hard line on Cuba. But the Democratic-led House turned out to be as tough on Cuba as the Republicans has been when they ran the joint. 66 House Democrats-- including 20 members of the freshman class-- voted against a farm bill amendment offered by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) that would have made it easier for U.S. farmers to sell agricultural goods to Cuba.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, working with the GOP, was instrumental in winning Democratic votes against the Rangel amendment. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) told the Miami Herald that Wasserman Schultz was "a tiger" on the Rangel vote, while Antonio Zamora of the U.S.-Cuba Legal Forum described her as a key party in building Democratic opposition.

"I was about as active as you could be," said Wasserman Schultz, a deputy chief whip for Democrats. Wasserman Schultz’s position on Cuba put her at odds with some Democratic leaders, but she said she had no worries that this might affect her if she seeks a higher leadership position in the future. Hoyer and Clyburn voted against the amendment as well. 52 of the 66 Democrats who voted against Rangel’s amendment had received one or more contributions from the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC since the beginning of the 2007-2008 cycle. It has given $56,000 to 22 Democratic freshmen in 2008, and 17 of those freshmen voted against Rangel’s amendment. The votes of the freshmen was a concern to those who believe the current U.S. policy on Cuba is ineffective.

Wasserman Schultz's PAC had laundered nearly a quarter million dollars from sleazy special interests for Democrats running for re-election and election in the House. Between the US-Cuba Democracy PAC and her own shady Democrats Win Seats PAC this is how much loot Wasserman Schultz was able to direct to Democratic freshmen willing to sell her their votes, even from congressmen representing agricultural districts where this amendment would have had widespread support. The first amount comes from the US-Cuba Democracy PAC and the second came directly from the filthy Wasserman Schultz PAC:

• Jason Altmire (PA-04) $8,000 + $5,000
• Mike Arcuri (NY-24) $4,000 + $2,000
• Bruce Braley (IA-01) $5,000
• Chris Carney (PA-10) $7,000 + $7,500
• Kathy Castor (FL-11) $2,000
• Joe Donnelly (IN-02) $3,000 + $5,000
• Brad Ellsworth (IN-08) $3,000 + $3,000
• Gabby Giffords (AZ-08) $5,000 + $5,000
• Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-20) $8,000 + $4,000
• Phil Hare (IL-17) $9,000 + $1,000
• Ron Klein (FL-22) $10,000 + $4,000
• Tim Mahoney (FL-16) $10,000 + $7,500
• Harry Mitchell (AZ-05) 0 + $4,000
• Patrick Murphy (PA-08) $6,000 + $4,000
• Joe Sestak (PA-07) $1,000 + $2,000
• Heath Shuler (NC-11) $7,000 + $5,000
• Albio Sires (NJ-13) $10,000
•Zach Space (OH-18) $7,000 +$4,000

That's how it's done; all of those members-- two of whom are now crooked Senators instead of crooked Reps-- can pss a lie detector test claiming they never sold their vote for corrupt cash from the sugar industry that wanted to kill the amendment. And they didn't; they took the money from their colleague Debby and had "no idea" who gave it to her. By the way, one of the Senate's worst Wall Street shills, Kirsten Gillibrand, who took corporate PAC money for her entire career (you can see she got $12,000 from Debbie for that vote) and has taken an astronomical $9,658,479 from Wall Street, is now hoping to get on a national ticket and says she is no longer going to take corporate PAC contributions-- "an easier decision," wrote Grim, "since corporate PACs aren’t likely to weigh in on presidential primaries anyway."

[W]hile elected officials-- especially self-identified progressive ones-- recognize the need to publicly back efforts to get money out of politics, incumbents will privately complain among themselves about the growing pressure to turn away long-standing donors, and big donors at that.

“Some of the most progressive members of the CPC will say their corporate contributions have never affected their votes, but they need to take trade association dollars or corporate PAC money because they represent poor districts that they don’t think has a donor base to make up for it,” said one Democratic House strategist.

“I’ve heard this particularly with folks of color,” said Jayapal, “that they have very minimal sources to get money from, and they traditionally haven’t been part of the overall [fundraising] system. But I think the beauty of getting corporate money out of politics is, it actually opens it up to everybody. In many ways, it’s a democratizing factor for traditionally marginalized communities.” Jayapal acknowledges that she thinks “it can take time to transition into that.”

This year’s primary upsets are beginning to change the political calculus, but longtime incumbents haven’t typically felt pressure to reject corporate PAC money. Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., came to Congress as an insurgent herself, beating a nine-term Democratic incumbent in 1992. Now, she says, she would “love to get to the point” where she doesn’t have to accept corporate money, but her energies have been largely focused on Puerto Rico. “Since I didn’t have a primary,” she added, “I am not paying attention to that.”

Without electoral pressure, incumbents like Velázquez have had little incentive to spend the energy to create a small-dollar fundraising base, or even one that can subsist on big money from individuals without corporate PACs. Privately, members of Congress also argue that it is unrealistic to expect all of them to be able to attract the kind of small-dollar support for which Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and O’Rourke are famous.

“The way I would put it is, there’s a consensus that candidates ought to be raising their money from small donors, but it’s also the case that only a subset of candidates really click with small donors,” said Mark Schmitt, a former congressional aide and current political reform director at New America. “There’s only one Beto, and he gets attacked because his money pours in from out of state. There’s just some candidates who that’s never going to happen for, and they could be perfectly good progressive candidates, but not the attractive, charismatic type that might fuel small-dollar backing.”

And even O’Rourke has acknowledged that some degree of his ability to raise money relies on the intense disdain for his opponent, Cruz-- a dynamic that also benefited Randy Bryce in his race against Paul Ryan. When Ryan retired, Bryce’s fundraising dropped significantly.

Some candidates who don’t share the superstar appeal of Sanders or O’Rourke argue that rejecting corporate cash could be tantamount to unilateral disarmament against Republicans in the general. “You would not want corporate PAC money used to destroy you in a general election, so it’s really going to depend on the landscape of each district,” said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) when asked if he would pledge not to take corporate PAC money.

Nasim Thompson, the communications director for Justice Democrats, has little patience for these types of excuses. “Those small-dollar donations are a reflection of grassroots support on the ground. And it’s not easy work, it’s very hard work, but it’s what we should expect of our electeds,” said Thompson. She adds that it’s the candidates who are not doing that hard work that are “compromising the entire system.”

Jayapal put it like this: “You don’t have to be an organizer; you don’t have to go out and make inspiring speeches. You just have to be authentic and show that you really care about the people that you represent and ordinary people, and that you want to take on the system of corruption in politics, and I think anybody can do that,” she said. “It is inspiring just to take the step.”

Although corporate PAC contributions have been the focus of the national political conversation, corporate PAC money, it turns out, amounts to a relative drop in the bucket of the large-dollar donations sloshing around American politics. “I sometimes ask people, ‘Well, how much do you get?’ And often, it’s a fairly small number,” said Jayapal.

In 2016, for example, just 6 percent of the $6.5 billion spent on the presidential election came from corporate PACs-- two-thirds of which went to Republicans. The vast majority of money flowing into elections comes from wealthy individual donors. Even Congressional Progressive Caucus members who have sworn off corporate PAC money, like Khanna and Jared Polis (who is currently running for Colorado governor), rely predominantly on individual donations from the rich. Gabbard, too, has a broad national base of donors, and gets a boost from wealthy American Hindus eager to support the first Hindu in office. Tlaib and Abdul El Sayed, both of whom took the pledge, similarly benefited from high-dollar donations from Muslim communities nationwide.

Corporate PACs are more likely to support incumbents than primary challengers, which is good news for insurgents, who can run on the politically popular message of opposing corporate PAC money while also recognizing that they were unlikely to be beneficiaries of those dollars to begin with.

Still, advocates for campaign finance reform say the level of upfront, personal sacrifice isn’t really the point, because candidates who pledge to take no money from corporate PACs are communicating a greater level of commitment to reform than their opponents. Pledges also make it harder for them to walk back their commitments later on, when, as incumbents, they’re more likely to feel pressure to draw a greater share of their funding from corporate PACs. Pressley, who fundraised from corporate PACs while she was a member of the Boston City Council, pledged in September to continue refusing corporate PAC money into the general election, and also once she’s in Congress.

“There’s no such thing as a pristine or incorruptible human being going into Congress, so part of our role is to continue that accountability for all members, including for Justice Democrats themselves,” said Thompson. “We need to make sure that drift doesn’t happen, and Justice Democrats aren’t immune to those pressures.”

...“If you’ve been in politics for more than five minutes, you get tangled up in the money-- everyone knows that,” [Maryland Rep. John] Sarbanes told The Intercept. “The real question is: What are we going to do about it? If we get back the gavel in November, we will want to move quickly on this reform agenda.”

Blue America Endorses An Inspiring New Candidate-- Meet Matt Haggman (FL-27)

I want to introduce Blue America's newest endorsed candidate, Matt Haggman in Miami-Dade, the 27th district, from which Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is retiring. The only reason this very blue seat has remained in Republican hands for so long is because Debbie Wasserman Schultz has done everything in her once- considerable power to undermine and sabotage any Democrat who has gone up against Ros-Lehtinen, an old crony of hers from when they both served in the Florida state legislature and worked together to gerrymander the state in a way that helped the GOP and, of course, Wasserman Schultz. She's now a largely reviled and powerless character and Ros-Lehtinen realized without Debbie working for her behind the scenes-- Debbie's no longer even allowed behind the scenes-- she'd better retire with grace. The district has a PVI of R+5 and Hillary beat Trump there 58.5% to 38.9%, the biggest, bluest margin in any Republican-held district in the entire country.

This cycle, predictably, a boatload of Democrats jumped into the race. Since then many of them dropped out, leaving it a contest basically between progressive Matt Haggman and two garden variety Democrats, Clinton-era throwback Donna Shalala and moderate state legislator David Richardson. All have raised approximately the same out of money. Shalala and Richardson, though, are both self-funders who each dropped over half a million dollars of their own money into their campaigns. Yep... seat buyers. Clearly the best of the three candidates, I asked Matt to introduce himself to DWT readers with a guest post. If you like what he has to say, please consider contributing to his campaign-- by clicking on the Blue America 2018 congressional thermometer on the right.



Why We Must Change In Big Ways, Not Small
by Matt Haggman

I’ve never run for elected office before. But last year I decided to quit my job and run for Congress.

Before the last presidential election I believed America would never elect a person who said and did the things that Donald Trump said and did. I believed America today would never elect a bully, a liar, someone who preyed upon our worst fears and sought to divide us to win. We might come close to electing such a demagogue as president, but at this stage in our country’s history we would never actually do it. We had come too far to take such a clear and destructive step backward. America today was, I thought, different. I was obviously wrong.

Eight years after the most hopeful moment in our politics in my lifetime, we now were at the very bleakest moment. The better angels of our nature had given way to the most base sensibilities. A presidency built on hope had been followed by one built on our worst fears.

How we respond is, of course, critical. Years from now we will each be asked, what did you do when a president was elected who declared the press the enemy of the state, instituted a Muslim ban, ripped immigrant children away from their parents? Each of us is answering that question in our own way. For me, I’m answering by running.

But I would argue even more is at stake than standing up against a rogue and duplicitous president.

To me, what is required in Congress today is dramatic overhaul. Not incremental tweaks but deep and widespread change. This needs to be more than simply retaking the House but a moment of renewal in our politics in which we chart an entirely new path, and practice our politics in entirely new ways.

Even as Donald Trump’s election was a call to action and even as we must ensure that Trump’s America doesn’t become the new normal, Trump’s election revealed something else. Namely, it revealed that our political system is badly broken.

For years our politics have been stuck. Friends intent on driving social change have long given up on politics as the place to do it. They’ve focused their efforts in community activism, entrepreneurship, arts, education (my brother has worked as an 8th grade public school teacher the past decade), rather than try to make a dent in the messy and ineffective world of politics. Trump’s election served notice that the rupture is complete. Something is deeply wrong with our entire political system. Indeed, the sad truth is that while Trump is a cause of our political dysfunction, he is also a symptom of it.

At the time of Trump’s election I was Miami Program Director at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Before that I was a journalist for almost a decade, most of that time at the Miami Herald.

During my nearly six years at Knight Foundation I launched an effort focused on propelling Miami’s entrepreneurs and civic innovators as a way to expand opportunity and drive community engagement. The effort resulted in thousands of jobs, spawned myriad new leaders and, most important to me, created a new sense of possibility in Miami.

We aimed to lift up the entire community, supporting the launch of dozens of programs ranging from The Idea Center at Miami Dade College, supporting student entrepreneurs at the largest and most diverse college in the U.S., to the creation of the Black Tech Week and Women Innovating Now LAB Miami, supporting black and women founders.

I loved the work, and it’s hardly finished in Miami. But, for me, the presidential election interrupted all of that. Instead, I submitted my resignation, packed up my office at Knight Foundation, and drove home. There, sitting on my couch in my living room, I started calling friends. “I have a crazy idea,” I told them, “I’m running for Congress.”

As I’ve set out on my first campaign-- building a plane while flying it, I’ve often described it-- much has shaped my thinking. From growing up in Cambridge, Mass. in Speaker Tip O’Neill’s district, being a product of public schools, attending college in New Orleans at Tulane University, working as a journalist at the Miami Herald. But what I want to focus on here is the work at Knight Foundation helping propel entrepreneurs, small business owners and community leaders in neighborhoods across Miami.

At its core, that work focused on investing in and empowering people, helping entrepreneurs honestly assess challenges and think in new ways to solve them, while building trust and establishing core values across the community. And, most of all, the work thrived on an ethos of helping people disrupt-- in big, transformative ways-- the normal way of doing things.

To me, all of this is required in our politics today. We need wrenching, system-wide change. And we, as candidates, can’t just aspire to it, but have the courage to live it.

Change must really mean change

It’s for that reason that my campaign is refusing to accept any donations from political action committees, federal lobbyists or special interests that often play an outsized role in Florida politics like the sugar and energy industry. Instead, our mantra is people, not PACs.

My belief is that if we can get people elected who are funded purely by individuals, then it’s one step closer to getting a Congress that is working in the public interest rather than the corporate or special interest.

Consider that polls show that more than 80 percent of Americans-- more than 8 in 10-- want universal background checks for gun sales. Yet, there is zero movement on legislation in Congress to establish universal background checks. To me, there is one explanation: how congressional campaigns are funded.

Once in Congress, I would support legislation banning contributions from PACs and lobbyists. Furthermore, support legislation that increases transparency on political contributions of all kinds and begin the process of passing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

But, to me, the key is not to wait. For too long we have seen well-meaning candidates who say we must have campaign finance reform but become beholden to the very system they pledge to change.

Meanwhile, this needs to be a moment when we not only change the way we fund elections, but have the courage to let new leaders emerge from the bottom ranks of Congress to the very top. Now, more than ever, we need new leaders and fresh voices. But solely electing a host of fresh-faced members to Congress this Fall is not nearly enough.

That’s why when I was asked in May by a Miami Herald reporter, if elected to Congress, would I support House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi to continue leading the party, I responded, “No, it’s time for a new day.”

My response was not meant to detract from the years of great service Leader Pelosi has given to the party. She is a trailblazer who is responsible for some of the biggest successes of the Democratic Party in the past fifteen years.

Experience and institutional knowledge are, of course, important. But if the Democratic party doesn’t see voters’ frustration with both its current leadership and our politics today, we will have missed an historic opportunity to chart a new path at a pivotal moment.

If elected, I would also push for reforms that allow members of Congress to move up the ranks quicker. For instance, establish term limits for committee leadership posts. With this change, members will be able to move into leadership roles faster and groom future speakers.

In sum, the “Blue Wave” must not only result in a Democratic majority in Congress, but new leaders at all levels too. If it doesn’t, my hunch is that this surge could ultimately resemble the last Democratic wave in Congress, which was short-lived and unsustainable.

Throwing out the playbook

Yet, this is just the start of the broad change that is needed. We need to move away from the campaign formula that candidates are told to follow. Namely, focusing on a specific set of Democratic voters, sticking to selected Democratic poll-tested issues, and then spending most of our waking hours raising money.

Back in 2012, when my Knight Foundation colleague Ben Wirz and I first sketched out our plan to help build Miami’s startup and entrepreneurial community, we established principles to guide us.

• Build networks from the bottom up
• Diversity as a core strength
• Entrepreneurs over institutions
• Fund experiments first, then scale
• Don’t reinvent if we can import
• Learn as we go

This was built on a model of constant community engagement. Every other week we held a coffee open to the entire community. Anyone could come (we didn’t extend invitations or decide who could attend) and conversations were purposefully open-ended with nothing off limits for discussion. The result was a regular platform for people to share ideas, aspirations, complaints, fears-- whatever.

Our thinking was that we didn’t have the best ideas, the community did. Furthermore, the best solutions are reached when you listen and have the courage to embrace good ideas no matter where they arise. And that the greatest impact is achieved when the most diverse range of people are included-- after all, innovation is built on a diverse range of people and ideas connecting and colliding.

Thinking back on it now, I see how different it is from how we are told to run for political office. Rather than opening ourselves up to as many people possible, we choose to connect with a select few who regularly vote. Rather than being open to myriad ideas and solutions, we read from poll-tested position papers. Rather than seeing diversity and inclusion as a critical value, it’s viewed as a nice thing.

For our campaign, our approach is to start with the voter and work backwards. We’ve built a campaign fellows program powered by more than 60 people who, along with me, are visiting voters in all 245 precincts across Florida’s District 27. Currently, we have hit 220. We’ve hosted meetups and coffees open to all. We also have tried an online site called UpVote where we ask people to identify what solutions they prefer. This is only a start.

I know that listening, or even changing one’s mind after hearing a better idea, rather than presenting one’s self as having bold ideas and clear convictions isn’t typically rewarded in today’s politics. But we should start to try. Change occurs from the bottom up. Washington has not been able to find the solutions to our most pressing problems, listening more closely and more widely across our neighborhoods may prove better.

Investing in people and thinking different

My approach at Knight in supporting entrepreneurs wasn’t to make direct investment in businesses. Instead, it was to create an ecosystem of resources across the community that people could choose from to better build the ideas and solve the problem most important to them. This included programs that provided mentorship, connection, learning, access to funding, and fostered a greater sense of community.

Examples include Endeavor, a non-profit which provides mentorship and support to help entrepreneurs scale ventures. eMerge Americas, an annual conference in Miami uniting entrepreneurs across the Americas. LaunchCode and Girls Who Code, each making learning to code more accessible and, in the case of Girls Who Code, taking aim at the yawning gender gap in technology. Social Entrepreneurship Bootcamp and programs, which I mentioned earlier, like The Idea Center at Miami Dade College, Black Tech Week, Women Innovating Now LAB, with a particular focus on black, Hispanic and women entrepreneurs.

Our mantra was that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not-- and that must be changed. Creating a network of resources that invest in people across the community from the bottom up was our way to try.

It’s time our politics took the same approach. And, while at it, it’s time to start matching the scale of the challenges we face with the size of the solutions. For too long, we’ve operated under the assumption there are things we cannot do. That needs to end.

Matt and his wife at the Women's March-- the day he decided to run for Congress

I mentioned earlier that years from now we will each be asked what we did in response to a destructive and irresponsible Trump presidency. But an equally important question is, what did you at a time when the opportunity and income gap is wider than it’s been since the great depression; when getting an education resulted in so many going deeply into crippling debt; when we seemed helpless to confront gun violence; when quality, affordable healthcare remains a challenge for way too many families and prescription drugs remain artificially and cruelly high; when the planet continues to warm and sea levels rise; when entrepreneurship and business creation remain at decade lows; when the era of mass incarceration continues unabated; when public transportation remains abysmal for too many here in South Florida who lose hours each day commuting to work or school; and when there is such deep-seated mistrust in our politics.

It's a long list. But that’s why we need a new approach which is both honest about what is required and unafraid to embrace solutions that actually have a shot at solving the problem.

That’s why I am for Medicare for All, importation of prescription drugs and allowing Medicare to negotiate reasonable drug prices, universal pre-K, refocusing on improving public education, free tuition in community colleges and public universities, high-speed internet into every home, revamping our criminal justice system, raising the minimum wage to $15, increasing federal funding for public transportation, piloting a federal jobs guarantee. Taken together, this would begin to address the searing the opportunity gap in our country, while expanding opportunity and stirring job creation.

Not only that, hastening the transition to an economy powered renewable energy. Indeed, my moonshot goal is for South Florida-- a region threatened by sea level rise-- is to be the first metropolitan area to do it. We are a long, long way from there today. But if we can muster the resolve, this is a change that will not only safeguard the environment and make us more resilient, but increase jobs and drive our economy.

Meanwhile, we must get back to celebrating that we are-- and always will be-- a nation of immigrants. My wife’s family came to this country in 1966 from Cuba. They found a country that welcomed them with open arms and gave them a shot. We need to get back to being that America. Comprehensive immigration reform includes a pathway citizenship for the undocumented, fighting for Dreamers and those with Temporary Protect Status, cleaning up a cumbersome visa process, and abolishing ICE.

Lastly, no one will believe Congress is really serious about change until we pass gun safety reform. This includes universal background checks, an assault weapons ban and a ban on high capacity magazines, among other changes.

This is a tall order. But the truth is that we are at a crossroads. We need a new direction in our politics focused on solving problems with an open mind that is grounded in common sense, champions our diversity and engages the entire community. The response must allow for experimentation and cannot be top down. But it also can’t be incremental. To do it, in my view, we will need many new leaders in our politics.

We can’t expect the same approach and the same people to deliver a different result.

In President Obama’s farewell address he warned that we can’t take democracy for granted. It “falls on each of us to be anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy,” he said. What the speech said to me is that, yes, America is a special place-- but it is special because generation after generation have continually stepped up and engaged in making it so even as there are setbacks, sometimes dramatic setbacks, along the way.

Now is that time for us.