The Establishment Still Has Its Claws on the Democratic Party

At least we can all be happy that No Labels has a zero percent success rate so far.538/ABC News

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Is there a red tide taking over the Democratic Party? 538 did the tedious work of actually finding out. The key statistic is not how many centrists have won their primaries or how many firebrand progressives have won theirs. The key statistic is: what happens when one of them runs against the other?

The organization with the best endorsement record in Democratic primaries remains the Democratic Party itself….In races where a party-endorsed candidate ran against a progressive-group-endorsed candidate (excluding any races where a candidate was endorsed by both sides), the party-endorsed candidate won 89 percent of the time.

I’d be curious about how this compares to past election cycles. I’d also be cautious about making too much of this. Almost by definition, party-endorsed candidates tend to have more money and more experience, while progressive challengers are new to the game and have fewer supporters. You’d hardly expect them to do as well as mainstream candidates.

That said, 538 also reports that quite a few #Resistance-endorsed candidates have won their primaries, though in some cases they’re just the same candidates endorsed by the establishment. (Or sometimes they’ve “won” hopeless races where the establishment didn’t even put up a primary candidate.) So the ultimate test for the #Resistance—the general election—is still very much up for grabs.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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