North Carolina Is A Canary in the Electoral Mine

SHORT TAKES: Filibuster Killing More Working Class Dreams; The Voice of A Minimum Wage Worker; Cleaning House in Nevada

LONG TAKE:

I don’t want to spend too much time in the abstract on electoral politics but I will raise elections when there is a very clear point to be made about policy. So…in the wreckage of the abhorrent vote to block a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15-an-hour by banning it from being included in the relief bill (for truly arcane, bad reasoning), consider this as an element: if Chuck Schumer had not meddled in the North Carolina Senate primary in 2020, promoting, and directing huge gobs of cash to, the corporate shill and dumb-as-a-brick Cal Cunningham who, then, crashed and burned in the general election (partly because, it turned out, he couldn’t keep it in his pants for at least, say, until after the election), letting Trump acolyte Thom Tillis win re-election—then, there would have been a very good chance that the progressive candidate, Erica Smith, would have won the Democratic primary and, then, the general election.

That would have given the party 51 seats outright (in …