"Time for Progressives to Become Active In the Democratic Party," by Thom Hartmann

Friends,

I couldn’t agree more with Diane Ravitch’s post amplifying Thom Hartmann’s urgent message: progressives must learn from the radical Right’s playbook. The pre-MAGA Tea Party didn’t just protest—they took over the GOP by starting at the grassroots, winning local Precinct Committee seats, and reshaping the party from within.

History shows the Democratic Party can deliver transformative change—FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society—but only if we organize strategically, from the bottom up. It’s our turn to take on this slow and patient work at the grassroots level. 

In the meantime, we need to support our dems who are out of state so that mid-decade redistricting doesn't come to pass. Here is a link where all can contribute their support: https://poweredxpeople.org/ 

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

Time for Progressives to Become Active In the Democratic Party

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 Diane Ravitch's blog

By dianeravitch on August 4, 2025

Thom Hartmann, accomplished author, blogger, and podcaster, urges progressives to learn from the success of the radical Right. The ultra-Right as for many years a fringe group, far from the power center of the Republican Party. Now the extremists control the Republican Party. Hartmann explains how they accomplished this feat and why progressives should do the same.

He writes:

What if, lacking an organized resistance to fascism like we have had in previous eras (the civil rights movement, SDS, BLM, the Wobbly’s) the Democratic Party itself could play the role of producing radical, positive transformation across America?

Sound crazy? It’s actually happened twice.

The first time was in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal literally flipped our politics and the American economy upside down, turning us from a raw, harsh capitalist system to a democratic socialist system with Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, workplace safety rules, massive infrastructure construction, and millions of Americans being employed directly by the government to end poverty.

It happened again in the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, producing Medicare, Medicaid, the civil rights act, the voting rights act, food stamps, low income housing, National Public Radio, a transformation of our educational system for the better, USAID, Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, a major Social Security expansion, The National Endowment for the Arts, and what was essentially free college.

Sunday, I was on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC a conversation about protest movements. I pointed out that back in the 60s, when I was in SDS, there were a number of groups that were quite active, particularly on college campuses, but today most of them have been gutted or banned.

Black Lives Matter has disintegrated, the movement against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has led to universities rolling over and capitulating, and the #MeToo and abortion rights movements are essentially leaderless.

Which leaves the Democratic Party, as I mentioned on Ali’s show. Billionaires and racists turned the Republican Party into a neofascist protest party over the past decade; progressives and those of us who want to preserve democracy in America need to similarly says control of and radicalize the Democratic Party in the tradition of FDR and LBJ.

There is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.

If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.

And it starts in our own backyards.

Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, a decade ago, was in charge of helping the Tea Party’s Successful effort to take over and radicalize the GOP.

The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”

Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:


“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”

So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?


“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”

As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: true and effective political power flows up from the bottom.

It starts with Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power.

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party’s platform.

They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say.

So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party and for primaries.

And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.

That was their pitch: take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked....

Diane Ravitch's blog © 2025.

Can Economic Populism Win Back the Rio Grande Valley? A Vermont U.S. senator and an Austin congressman make the case in McAllen. by Michael Gonzalez June 23, 2025, 2:00 PM, CDT

Thanks to Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar for going to the South Texas Rio Grande Valley as part of Sanders' "Fighting Oligarchy Tour." I had family attend the event and they were very much inspired and the turnout was fantastic in the McAllen Convention Center.

The Texas Democratic Party really needs to build on this momentum and have a good ground game, meaning getting people registered to vote, engaging voters and prospective voters in elections, and getting them out to the polls. And not for the party but for democracy.

-Angela Valenzuela

Can Economic Populism Win Back the Rio Grande Valley? 

A Vermont U.S. senator and an Austin congressman make the case in McAllen.  

by Michael Gonzalez  June 23, 2025, Texas Observer

As a rainstorm rolled in last Friday evening, hundreds of people eagerly filed through metal detectors at an 1,800-seat performing arts center in McAllen—the urban hub of Hidalgo County in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley—ahead of Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ 13th stop on his nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

Normally a stage for orchestra concerts and comedy shows, the venue, located about five miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, filled up now for a different reason: People from every age group, worried about the country’s future under Donald Trump’s control, crowded in to hear Sanders and Austin Democratic Congressman Greg Casar rally up the working class.

“McAllen, Texas, can be the birthplace of a new Democratic Party that puts working people first, kicks out the corrupt politicians regardless of party, and saves our country for everyday people,” Casar said, as he spoke ahead of introducing Sanders. 

The Valley, the four-county region of around 1.4 million mostly Latino residents at Texas’ southern tip, is no stranger to the controversial influence of billionaires like Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX has taken over what used to be Boca Chica Village and turned it into Texas’ newest city, Starbase, now mainly inhabited by SpaceX employees. Destroyed rocket parts litter Texan and Mexican beaches, and a recent SpaceX test ship exploded late at night startling nearby Brownsville residents and littering debris.

“Elon Musk does not own the Valley,” Casar—a second-term U.S. House member representing a district stretching from the capital city to San Antonio who was recently minted chair of the body’s progressive caucus—declared to the crowd.

Attendees at the McAllen event (Michael Gonzalez)

Sanders’ nationwide tour to mobilize individuals especially in conservative regions comes amid increased uncertainty about further impacts of Trump’s policies on the working class. During a time of restructuring in the Democratic Party, following last year’s presidential election defeat, Sanders pushed a populist message urging unity and action against oligarchic control and highlighted the profound impact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have had in communities like the Valley.

“Right now in McAllen and other parts of this country we’re seeing what authoritarianism is about in its ugliest way,” the senator said. We’re seeing people being stopped on the street being picked up at their workplace, thrown into vans and taken God knows where without due process.”

Sanders continued: “What Trump is doing is not just waging an attack against the working class of this country. He is moving America very rapidly and dangerously into an authoritarian form of society.”

Since 2016, support for Donald Trump has increased steadily throughout previously deep-blue far South Texas. In that year’s presidential election, Hillary Clinton won all Rio Grande Valley counties in a landslide. In Hidalgo County, Clinton prevailed over Trump by 40 points. But, in 2020, Biden carried the county by only 17, and in 2024 Trump won it by three—part of a stunning sweep of all four Valley counties.

Jon Taylor, chair of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s political science and geography department, believes that despite Trump’s electoral performance in last year’s election, the Democratic Party still has ample opportunity to seize the narrative and use populism to appeal to voters’ frustrations and anger. 

“Trump had this appeal to South Texas voters apparently because he’s strong, or he’s forceful,” Taylor told the Texas Observer. “I think Bernie might be really good at being able to just drive home that point about: What has it meant to you by voting for this guy? [Trump] cares about billionaires; he cares about megacorporations. He cares about giving all of them tax cuts and benefits.”

Despite increased support for Republicans in the region for almost ten years, Sanders was extremely popular during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, in which he won every populous border county in Texas.

Hidalgo County Democratic Party Chair Richard Gonzales describes himself as a moderate Democrat and personally views the region’s makeup as conservative and family-based. The area’s long-time Democratic elected officials at all levels tend to be conservatives on issues ranging from fossil fuels to guns to abortion. No local elected officials spoke at the Sanders rally.

But Gonzales sees the appeal of progressive policies, saying he thinks they may be part of the recipe for turning his county blue again. “When we look at what Senator Sanders stands for, I think it’s starting to become more okay to kind of buy into that idea, because we’re seeing what the opposite can do to us down here,” he told the Observer. 

Life in the Valley is largely a quiet existence, but near-daily ICE raids on local communities and workplaces have changed that. These raids have targeted businesses and construction sites from Brownsville to South Padre Island to McAllen. Notably, a bakery in Los Fresnos was targeted by ICE and HSI agents around mid-February, leading to multiple arrests including the owners. Pulgas once packed with people buying and selling goods including produce, antiques, and second-hand items are now oftentimes empty due to the fear of arrests by ICE agents. The Republican mayor of McAllen, Javier Villalobos, recently posted on Facebook that immigration enforcement is “negatively impacting all sectors of our economy” and called for the Trump administration to relax enforcement on all industries in need of labor.

Some locals at the Friday rally, like Michael Dutcher, expressed deep concern that their way of life is being threatened under Trump’s second administration. “Being a part of something to counter that is important to me,” Dutcher said. He had only heard of Sanders’ event hours before the start time and immediately made plans to attend.

Congressman Greg Casar (right) with Senator Bernie Sanders (Michael Gonzalez)

Sergio Salinas, a business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1015 in McAllen, showed up to the rally with several union members who sat on the stage behind the lectern. He referenced how Donald Trump threw around the word “union” on the campaign trail during last year’s election, yet he doesn’t believe that Republicans truly have the backs of unions. “The Republicans say that the unions are good, but where are they at?” Salinas said.

Standing beside vendors selling Bernie merch, attendee Danny Diaz, a local Democratic precinct chair and longtime political organizer, said he hopes that change in the Valley’s political scene is soon to come. 

“I don’t think Latinos in South Texas are married to the Republican Party,” he said. “I think people respond well to Bernie Sanders down here. … I am willing to bet that if we really absorb the energy like the energy that we saw tonight, that we could bounce back and sweep these counties back to the Dem side.”

Michael Gonzalez is a freelance photographer and reporter based in the Rio Grande Valley.

Tags:

 

• Bernie Sanders
 
• Greg Casar
 
• Rio Grande Valley

BEST NEWS ALL WEEK. Air Force veteran Gina Ortiz Jones wins runoff race for San Antonio Mayor

Friends:

Oh my goodness! This is BIG! Congratulations to Gina Ortiz Jones, who won the race for Mayor in San Antonio. Great write-up in today's Texas Tribune. So glad to see Rosie Castro, former Mayor and Rosie's son Julian Castro and the Democratic party weighing in, beating back conservative PAC dollars. San Antonio remains a progressive, compassionate city!

Best news all week. Enjoy the story!

-Angela 

Air Force veteran Gina Ortiz Jones wins runoff race for San Antonio mayor

Jones, who served in the Biden administration, defeated Rolando Pablos, a former Texas secretary of state, in a high-profile, bitterly partisan contest.
By Andrea Drusch, San Antonio Report
June 8, 202511 hours ago



San Antonio’s next mayor will be Gina Ortiz Jones, a 44-year-old West Side native who rose from John Jay High School to the top ranks of the U.S. military on an ROTC scholarship.

Jones defeated Rolando Pablos, a close ally of Texas GOP leaders, with 54% of the vote on Saturday night in a high-profile, bitterly partisan runoff.

Thanks to new, longer terms that voters approved in November, this year’s mayor and City Council winners will be the first to serve four-year terms before they must seek reelection.

The closely watched runoff came after Jones took a commanding 10-percentage-point lead in last month’s 27-candidate mayoral election, but weathered nearly $1 million in attacks from Pablos and his Republican allies.

At the Dakota East Side Ice House, a beaming Jones said she was proud of a campaign that treated people with dignity and respect.

She also said she was excited that San Antonio politics could deliver some positivity in an otherwise tumultuous news cycle.

“With everything happening around us at the federal level and at the state level, some of the most un-American things we have seen in a very, very long time, it’s very heartening to see where we are right now,” she said shortly after the early results came in.

When it became clear the results would hold, Jones returned to remark that “deep in the heart of Texas,” San Antonio voters had reminded the world that it’s a city built on “compassion.”

Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” blared over the speakers to the roughly 250 supporters celebrating with drinks on a hot evening.

At Pablos’ watch party, he said Jones’ overwhelming victory surprised him. The conservative Northside votes he was counting on to carry him didn’t wind up materializing.

“The fact is that San Antonio continues to be a blue city,” Pablos told reporters at the Drury Inn & Suites’ Old Spanish Ballroom near La Cantera. “This [race] became highly partisan, and today it showed.”
An unusual race

After an overwhelmingly long ticket discouraged much voter interest in the first round, San Antonio’s mayoral race suddenly took on new significance when it came down to a runoff between Jones, a two-time Democratic congressional candidate, and Pablos, a close ally of Texas’ GOP leaders.

The two City Hall outsiders boxed out a host of candidates with more local government experience, including four sitting council members, and sent local politicos scrambling into their partisan camps for an otherwise nonpartisan race.

It also drew major interest from state and national political interests, with Republican and Democratic PACs each targeting a position that could be a springboard for a future politician from either party.

Between the candidates and their supporting outside groups, the runoff had already drawn roughly $1.7 million in spending as of May 28 — the last date covered by campaign finance reports before the election.

Both 2025 mayoral runoff campaigns and their supporting outside groups spent big on mailers, text messages and TV ads.

At a recent Jones rally on the West Side, new Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said Republicans’ willingness to sink unheard-of money into symbolic victories was enough to spur the Democratic state party to spend money on Jones’ behalf near the end of the runoff — in a city where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans.

“These races are supposed to be nonpartisan, they are the ones making them not nonpartisan,” Scudder said of Texas Republicans. “They are the ones that are coming in and flooding money into these races … and we have to stand on the front lines of that.”
Third time’s a charm

For Jones, who most recently served as Air Force Under Secretary in the Biden administration, this is the third high-profile race Democratic interests have expected her to win.

She came close in 2018 in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, losing by roughly 1,000 votes to Republican Will Hurd, then lost by a larger margin in the same district two years later to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio.

Both were multimillion-dollar, top-tier races in the battle for the U.S. House, and the losses stung so much that Jones chose to watch last month’s election results in private — even though she’d led every public poll leading up to it.

At her watch party on Saturday night, Jones was joined by the iconic local activist Rosie Castro and former Mayor Julián Castro, as well as representatives from an array of outside groups that helped her in the race: Texas Organizing Project, Vote Vets, and labor unions, to name a few.

Underscoring the growing progressive influence at City Hall, Councilmembers Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), Phyllis Viagran (D3), Edward Mungia (D4) and Teri Castillo (D5) also attended.

Another new progressive, 24-year-old Ric Galvan, was celebrating a narrow victory for District 6 on the city’s West Side.

The Democratic National Committee, Texas Democratic Party and Democratic Mayors Association all put out statements congratulating Jones.

“With her win in a heavily-Latino city, Mayor-elect Jones will continue the legacy of Mayor Nirenberg and move San Antonio forward,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “From school boards to city councils to mayoral offices across the state, Texas voters are making their voice heard loud and clear: They want strong Democratic leaders who will fight for them.”
Bucking rightward shifts

Going into the night, conservatives controlled just one seat on San Antonio’s City Council, while Republican elected officials on the whole have been nearing extinction in Bexar County.

Nevertheless, Republicans saw a big opportunity in the nonpartisan city election.

Mayors of Texas’ major urban centers have steadily become less progressive as longtime incumbents termed out, and in the November election, President Donald Trump flipped two historically blue counties in South Texas — fueling greater intrigue about Hispanic voters becoming more Republican.

Pablos and his allies sought to cast Jones as a progressive zealot, with a PAC supporting him dubbing her the “AOC of Texas” in recent days and the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association threatening that she would defund the police (something Jones has said she doesn’t plan to do).






San Antonio mayoral candidate Rolando Pablos concedes to Gina Ortiz Jones



Pablos purposefully dropped the “Ortiz” from her name nearly every time he was in front of a microphone, and ran ads accusing Jones, who is Filipina, of pretending to be Hispanic.

It was an unexpected approach from a well-known business attorney with good relationships on both sides of the aisle, and deviation from the “unity candidate” he set out to be more than a year ago when describing plans for his first political venture in San Antonio.

Pablos said Saturday that he was proud of the race he ran, even when it got ugly. The crowd at his watch party even booed Jones when her face came on the TV screen after early results were announced.

“I think that my team did a great job. I think we ran an excellent campaign,” said Pablos, who vowed to continue looking for ways to serve the community. “What we did is we just laid everything out for everybody to look at and consider.”
A vision built from personal experience

Jones, whose family grew up leaning on housing vouchers and other forms of government support, crafted a campaign around protecting San Antonio’s most vulnerable residents — particularly in times of political uncertainty at the state and federal levels.

She was one of the most vocal critics of the city’s plans for a roughly $4 billion downtown development project and NBA arena for the San Antonio Spurs known as Project Marvel early in the race, saying she instead wanted to focus city resources on expanded Pre-K programs, workforce development and affordable housing.

It was a major contrast to Pablos, a former San Antonio Hispanic Chamber chair, who vowed to focus on bringing major corporations to San Antonio, and led even some left-leaning members of the business community to view her with uncertainty.

A surprising number of progressive elected officials either stayed out of the runoff entirely or publicly backed Pablos.

Jones seemed undeterred by that dynamic, saying often on the campaign trail that her own approach was rooted in personal experience with leaders who only listen to the privileged few.

She joined the military under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell more than two decades ago at Boston University, and will now be the city’s first mayor from the LGBTQ community.

“That experience [of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] showed me the importance of when you are in leadership, always having the humility to ask, ‘Who am I not hearing from? And why am I not hearing from them?” Jones said at a recent San Antonio Report debate.

Jones pointed to San Antonio’s ongoing struggle with poverty — despite major investments over many years to try to change that reputation.

“We’ve had, I think, too many leaders listening to too small a part of our community.”

"Fannie Lou Hamer and Ketanji Brown Jackson: The Democratization of Party Politics in the U.S.," by Dr. Blandina "Bambi" Cardenas

Reflecting on Ketanji Brown Jackson's testimony before Congress in the wake of her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Dr. Blandina "Bambi" Cardenas' speaks to the long arm of history involving singular acts of courage by extraordinary individuals like Ketanji Brown Jackson and the legendary Fannie Lou Hamer, resulting in defining moments with lasting impacts—even if not immediately manifest.

Accordingly, everyone should take time to listen to Fannie Lou Hamer's riveting speech before the Credentials Committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

Thanks to Dr. Cardenas for sharing her essay and for connecting these stories to her own, as well as to real progress with respect to Mexican American women's representation in party politics. 

It's provocative and inspiring to think of how single acts of courage can inaugurate a sea of much-needed change. This is as true today as it was then. Moreover, society as a whole benefits from this widening of the circle of citizenship and democracy. 

Savor and enjoy!

-Angela Valenzuela

"Fannie Lou Hamer and Ketanji Brown Jackson: The Democratization of Party Politics in the U.S.

by 

Dr. Blandina "Bambi" Cardenas

As I watched the awesome display of intelligence, strength and dignity in the person of Judge Jackson before the Senate Judiciary Committee, my thoughts went to Fannie Lou Hamer, a woman who changed my life and the lives of women of every color in the United States. The arc of history that curves from Fannie Lou Hamer to Ketanji Brown Jackson is not one that is likely to be covered in American History classes, it may not even be understood in Women's History classes.

It is often that way that a seemingly small act of courage by a seemingly powerless person sends an energy through a community, a state or a country that fundamentally creates the conditions that allow whole populations to thrive in ways they were never able to thrive before.

In 1964 Fannie Lou Hamer led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the Democratic National Convention seeking to be seated because the Democratic Party in Mississippi would not allow and even criminalized efforts by black people to vote. A victim of non-consensual sterilization, Fannie had a story to tell and the party and the nation were moved. Four years later the Democratic National Convention was rocked by the anti-war protests, and more deeply by the issue of inclusion and representation.

The accumulated frustration with the make up and the representation in the largely all white male party that had nominated John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson led to the establishment of the McGovern-Frasier Commission. It is also noteworthy that the DNC chairman at the time was Senator Fred Harris, who just happened to be married to LaDonna Harris, a leader for women and her Native American community. The McGovern Frasier Commission rewrote the rules for recognition of delegates, but also established the requirement that every committee at every level of the Democratic Party should include representation of women and underrepresented groups proportional to their participation in the previous presidential election.

This democratized the structure of the party and opened the doors to women and underrepresented groups for all time going forward. In Texas, Mexicano politicos suddenly had to take their wives to the conventions and behave. Moreover their wives got to sit on committees and learn the rules. Alicia Chacon of El Paso, Judith Zaffirini and then I served as Vice Chair of the Texas Party. The DNC was 50 percent women. Fannie Lou Hamer had walked into the lions den and demanded not only the right to vote in the polling places but the right to be at the table where decisions were made. The concept of equal representation was rooted.

The Republican Party did not adopt similar rules, but it could not continue to exclude anybody but white men. It too had to be concerned with representation. Before very long, my good friend Mary Louise Smith, a woman rights activist became chairperson of the Republican National Committee and gaveled the 1974 Convention into session. Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1981. George Bush, Sr. was highly intentional and direct in appointing women and people of color to his administration. The world had changed. Never again would a national political convention be all male and exclusionary on the basis of race.

Even when doors open, it still takes extraordinary intelligence, discipline, application, backbone, and patience for those members of formerly excluded groups to persevere and succeed. No group does that. It is an individual journey and it is an individual accomplishment. If it occurs in the public eye, it is exponentially challenging. You do have to put up with a lot of jerks. If you are a woman, and particularly a woman of color, those jerks think they can either ignore you or beat you into submission. You learn to put them in their place and to keep yours. Mostly you learn to let them blow until they thoroughly embarrass themselves and then move on to what is important.

Every wave of change begins with someone with the courage to disrupt. The status quo is powerful and resistant to attack. But disruption must be followed by strategic construction of new processes that bring the greatest good to the many and not just the few. And ultimately it requires leaders with the courage of Fannie Lou Hamer, who with impeccable preparation and disciplined application, understand that it's not about getting in the door and to the table, it is about bringing to that table your authentic understandings of what it took to put you in that place to begin with.