Democrats behaving stupidly.

[yardwork]

I'll try to keep this short and to the point, without sacrificing important background and details. (Sorry - it's long.)

TL;DR. The current Democratic primary for the 4th congressional district in North Carolina is the kind of shitshow that reflects badly on everybody and hands victory to Republicans.

Because of extreme gerrymandering by the Republican-controlled state legislature, the NC 4th congressional district is bright, deep blue. We will send a Democrat to Congress.

It's a majority minority district, with a history of Black political and economic strength and success. People move here from all over the world, many affiliated with our research universities and biomedical research industry. It's a vibrant, diverse, fun place to live. I've lived here for decades and I love it.

Politics here are always scrappy, but this spring we're dealing with a level of negativity brought by outside forces that is really ticking me off. And it didn't have to be this way.

Our incumbent representative is Valerie Foushee, a Black woman with deep roots in this community. Her mother was a housekeeper for the town of Chapel Hill. Valerie was elected to our state legislature in 2012 and elected to Congress in 2022. She's running for reelection and our Democratic primary is next week.

I have a lot of admiration for Valerie Foushee. Like many people in this community I am personally acquainted with her and I know her to be a kind and ethical person. I don't agree with all her positions. She's more moderate than I am and I would like her to speak out more, as I've shared with her polite and responsive local staff. Valerie holds regular town halls.

Nida Allam is running against Valerie in the primary. Nida has served on the Durham County Commission since 2020. She's 32 years old. Born in Canada, she moved to this area as a child when her dad took a job with IBM. She is a devout Muslim. Her background is fairly typical of people her age in this district. Many of us came from elsewhere and made this our home.

I have a lot of respect for Nida Allam. I've appreciated her outspoken support for abortion rights and other human rights. She's always had my vote for county commissioner.

If this state weren't so gerrymandered there would be room for both Valerie Foushee and Nida Allam to represent districts in this blue region. But we only get one so we have to choose.

I was leaning toward voting for Nida Allam until I saw her ads attacking Valerie Foushee. Really negative, unnecessarily attacking, Bernie Sanders all over them (again, this is a Congressional race in a safe blue district in NC; we don't need a senator from Vermont putting himself front and center). Nida's ads are in the infamous tradition of Jesse Helms - just nasty. They look like Trump ads.

Valerie responded with a negative ad of her own. And Nida sued her! Used a high priced DC law firm. Kind of hypocritical.

So now we have this spectacle of a young progressive Muslim woman pitted against an older moderate Black woman, with accusations flying, racist dog whistles (I'm sorry but running ads saying that a Black woman is "owned" by corporations and foreign influences is not ok. Especially in the south.)

Valerie Foushee has my vote again even though I don't agree with all her positions. I'm not going to support the kind of behavior Nida's campaign is demonstrating. The Black community here is furious with Allam for very understandable reasons. It's caused a schism among Democrats.

The icing on the cake is I received an email appeal from Bernie Sanders today accusing Valerie Foushee of dreadful things and comparing Nida Allam to Zohran Mamdani. You know, one reason Mamdani won in NYC is he ran a clean, positive campaign. He's upbeat. He didn't insinuate nasty things and sue his opponents. He focused on a message of what he would do. I so wish that Nida Allam had done the same.

Do better, progressive Democrats. I want to support you but I'm not going to support racist dog whistles and tearing down Black politicians who have paid their dues.

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[dweller]

2. Nailed it

Im in 4 also .
Foushee is my choice

I✌🏻

[Cha]

3. Mahalo for this, yardwork... I'm so

sorry and Mad this is happening.

Good Luck to Valerie Foushee

[CousinIT]

4. Wow. That's some shit.

[yardwork]

6. And so unnecessary.

I think Allam had a good chance at winning this primary if she'd run a clean, positive campaign. Voters are in the mood for change.

Instead, so much damage has been caused, and it's so counterproductive to the goal of winning the seat for Allam, I wonder if it was deliberate sabotage.

[MustLoveBeagles]

5. Kick

Sorry this is happening. It didn't need to be this way.

[yardwork]

7. It really did not!

I posted this because this has to stop.

We have a strong progressive Muslim woman who's allowing an older white man to speak for her. Jaw dropping sexism.

Then the campaign ads are full of racist and anti-Semitic dog whistles that a child could've told the campaign not to say.

And the last straw was the decision to use a high powered law firm to shut up the older Black woman. People here are furious.

[MustLoveBeagles]

8. The mayor of NY ran a positive campaign on the issues

And he won! The 2 campaigns shouldn't even be compared. I predict this will backfire on the challenger and hurt any future campaigns she might run.

[rampartd]

9. similar situation in texas senate.

i really do not want crockett or talrico to go negative and help abott or cornyn beat the winner

[MadameButterfly]

17. It sounds like anonymous dark money is going

negative. Hard to know who they are and who they are really trying to help. Maybe they are Republicans trying to sow division. Dems need to not take the bait. And come together in the general whatever happens.

[struggle4progress]

10. Damn right

[WarGamer]

11. thx for breaking up into small paragraphs...

So much easier to read than a wall of text.

[yardwork]

12. I try.

[QueerDuck]

14. Praise! Truth!

[Susan Calvin]

13. Damn.

I guess I'll have to stop just automatically sending a few bucks when Bernie asks. You are right, this is Democrats behaving very stupidly.

[BaronChocula]

15. Disappointing this is going on

But love your take.

I wonder if there was any previous bad blood between the two candidates.

[yardwork]

18. There's bad blood from the 2024 campaign.

I don't know if it's personal.

[RetiredParatrooper]

16. Circular firing squad

The Dems in my state (NC) are disappointing at times.

[yardwork]

19. This time I blame outsiders.

[QueerDuck]

23. "We know BETTER THAN YOU when it comes to how to 'do-politics' in your own back yard!"

Or "here's the way WE do things it in OUR neck of the woods, so you should do it that way too" ... overall, it's rather insulting and in the end, it's a great way to create divisions and distrust. It has the potential to generally fuck things up and hand a victory to the GOP. I hope that doesn't happen.

[yardwork]

28. The more I think about it the angrier I get.

I am white, but I listen to Black women who've been saying that they are fed up with Democratic operatives who ignore the sacrifices and hard work Black organizers - especially Black women - have made for the Democratic Party.

This frustration on the part of Black Democrats boiled over after so many white voters who call themselves progressives failed to support the Democratic candidate for president in 2024.

Black voters have supported white Democratic politicians for decades - usually knowing that not much was going to change for the Black communities. They didn't sit on their hands and whine that so and so isn't pure enough. They worked like hell to get the white moderate Democrats elected instead of the racist right wing Republicans. Because those are usually the only two choices.

I imagine that progressive campaign advisors figured that this safe blue district could be captured by a progressive young candidate. And that part is true. A month ago I figured that Nida Allam might win this primary.

But politicians don't win for long if they allow outsiders to crash into and offend communities they don't bother to know or understand. Anybody could have advised Nida Allam that smearing and attempting to silence a Black woman politician whose family has been in this area for hundreds of years would backfire.

It's so stupid I suspect deliberate sabotage by the same billionaires who brought us Trump.

[Cha]

34. It's Awfully Insulting, Divisive..

and Destructive.

TY, QueerDuck.. I Hope Valerie Foushee WINS!

[JI7]

45. But isn't the candidate herself suing her opponent ?

I don't think you can blame outsiders for that.

[stopdiggin]

20. well said! excellent post - great points - and plenty of homework and grist for the mill

I'm not going to label 'progressives' here (although it could be argued .. ) - but, regardless of what banner you're marching beneath ...
This sh*t STINKS !!

[Cirsium]

21. Completely appropriate critique

There is nothing "disloyal" in what you wrote.

[sheshe2]

22. Thank you, yardwork, very well said.

I won't comment further at this time on the grounds that I might step on the third rail.

[gulliver]

24. We shouldn't care about race, religion, or sex

If there were some alien force wanting to divide and destroy our party, it couldn't have come up with a better weapon than identity worship.

Let the best person win.

[yardwork]

29. That's easy to say when we occupy privileged positions.

It's very easy to not care about race if we're white.

It's easy to say "I don't see color" when nobody is racially profiling us.

Very easy to say "I don't care about anybody's religion" if you don't belong to a religious tradition that is in the minority.

Be careful about insisting that nobody worry about race, religion or sex if you're, say, a white straight cis man raised in a Christian tradition. Walk a mile in the shoes of a Black trans Muslim woman and let me know what you think then.

[gulliver]

30. Fixating on identity makes things worse...

...for the identities "cared about." It's unintended harm, but great harm.

It's not what you don't see in people (superficial, stereotypical identity markers) that matters so much as what you do see. I admit, I tend to say we should be identity blind, deaf, and mute, but it's probably more important to be "virtue" seeing, hearing, and speaking.

If you set your senses on identity, it's all you will see. It's all you will think others see. It's a trap. So-called identity and intersectionality have a tantalizing appeal they don't merit. Identity-consciousness feels like consciousness. Intersectionality has an intellectual appeal that derives from our sense of respect for set theory and Venn diagrams. They feel intellectual, and they are, but they're not useful.

[yardwork]

33. I'm not talking about theory.

I'm talking about the real world - the laws and practices that persist in giving some more rights than others.

I'm not talking about virtue signaling, putting up signs, or focusing on grievances. I'm talking about the real impact on, say, a man with a Hispanic name left by ICE to freeze to death in a storm. That never would have happened to me and I know it. So I can't say "don't think about race" when ICE is full of bigots who want to kill brown people.

[betsuni]

37. Myth that Democrats ignore economic inequality and class, fooling people into voting for them with identity politics

because they're corrupted by money ("corporate Dems" ) and if there's economic equality then gender, race, other identities disappear. Obviously not true because because there's still racism in Europe and other places with low economic inequality.

Their leader (interviewed on Trevor Noah's podcast recently):

"What you're talking about is identity politics. We are so proud that for the first time we have a judge ... who is Black, Latino, Asian, you name it. We have a woman this, we have a gay that. ... Donald Trump has surrounding him a whole lot of women. There are right-wing women governors all over this country. .. The issue is that Democrats have retreated from class issues, from economic issues, from a desire to take on big money to 'Oh, isn't it wonderful that we have a woman here and have a gay person here and we have a Back person here and a Latino person over there.'

"I was in Washington for the March on Washington. ... I heard Dr. King's speech. You know what that March was called ...Jobs and Freedom. ... He said it doesn't matter it a restaurant which is segregated is opened up if you don't have enough money to afford the damn hamburger."

[walkingman]

26. A bad progressive is just that...a bad progressive. Hopefully they will not win.

[Vegan4life]

27. Thank you for bringing this up.

I used to be in this District, and I'm still close enough to be bombarded by TV ads all fricking day. Allam's ads are general election nasty, while emphasizing she's "Bernie's choice". I guess that's the only thing that matters

I know lots of people in the 4th District. They're all voting for Rep. Foushee.

[unc70]

31. I am also voting for Valerie

Not often do I feel my primary vote matters in Orange County and the 4th District. This time I do. Good summary of the situation.

I have been traveling cross country out of NC since mid January, before early voting began. I am traveling back home this weekend for this vote.

[dsc]

32. I live and work in district 3

and we have a primary here too. I voted for Allison Jaslow over State Senator Raymond Smith largely over some of Smith's votes in the NC Senate.

[Jack Valentino]

35. Got a grudge against Bernie Sanders??

Maybe you think Bernie Sanders shouldn't make endorsements in Democratic primaries
(since he isn't actually a Democrat, blah blah blah) ???

Well, I backed Sanders in 2016.... but voted for Joe Biden in 2020
(even though I might have agreed with Bernie more on 'the issues'!)


I will trust the Democratic voters of North Carolina
to correctly choose their own Democratic congressional nominees...


(since I don't live there--- I don't know who the fuck you are talking about
in either case!)

[yardwork]

39. Bernie Sanders dominates all of Nida Allam's ads.

It's far more than an endorsement. He's the voice talking on all her ads. We don't hear her voice at all.

She's a smart energetic young woman and it's disappointing to see her hand over her voice to an older white man from a state far away from North Carolina.

I have no problem with endorsements.

[betsuni]

36. Agree. Creating division when goals are the same and only strategy is different. Character attacks

and making it personal, accusations of corruption, racism, immorality, evil. A "revolution" based on the populist Us vs Them demonizing of Democrats as the enemy.

[Jspur]

38. I will vote for Nida simply because Valerie committed the cardinal sin of taking

money from AIPAC which is blood money.

[yardwork]

40. And what secret blood money did Nida take?

We don't know because she didn't release her financial records until three weeks past the required deadline, and more to the point, we don't know because the SCOTUS determined that letting secret dark money fund our elections is just fine.

Where are the funds supporting Nida's campaign coming from? We don't know.

[Jspur]

41. Well I can say for sure Nida hasn't taken AIPAC money and that to me is

the tie breaker between these two.

[yardwork]

42. A lot of voters in this area agree with you.

If Nida Allam had run a clean, positive campaign I think there's a very good chance she would have won this primary. She had my vote two weeks ago.

Unfortunately, her campaign appears to be run by outsiders who didn't bother to find out anything about this community.

For no strategic reason the campaign shot itself in the foot by suing an older Black woman candidate for running one negative but factual ad. The hypocrisy is startling because ALL of Allam's ads are negative. She doesn't speak in her ads: it's all Bernie Sanders in his Brooklyn accent yelling about the older Black lady who has served at every level of politics, working her way up from local to state to national. Terrible optics.

The reaction has been swift. A lot of white progressives like myself switched our votes from Nida to Valerie because you just don't treat people like this and get away with it. The Black political machine here - which is formidable - is furious at Allam.

So the bottom line is a lot of bad feelings, schisms among Democrats, and a very promising young Democrat's career kneecapped for no good reason.

[Cha]

43. Oh No... wow! ... again I hope

Valerie Foushee WINS

I'm not saying anything about the "ads"... you know how I feel about that.

[Jspur]

46. I can see both sides of the argument and

where your coming from. I don't think either candidate is morally righteous and both have their moral flaws. For me I can't overlook Valerie taking money from AIPAC. That to me is a huge deal breaker much like for you Nida being represented by Bernie and her suing Valerie. Also I want a progressive Democrat and I agree with Nida on all the issues such as healthcare, housing, education. Sure she could be lying and possibly doesn't believe any of the issues that she put on her website but I'm always going to go with the candidate that I agree with on the issues.

You may not know this about me but my parents are from India but I was born and raised in the US. I moved from Boston, MA when I was 11 to RDU and have lived in this area for most of my life since then and I'm now 42 years old. I know this area like the back of my hand and how the political machine works around here. So I have seen all the adds around here that you have described from Nida.

The racial angle is very tricky and something I think everybody should thread lightly around in this situation. You say as a white progressive your offended that Nida is suing a black woman for attacking her when Nida has also attacked Valerie. Keep in mind Nida is also Indian since one of her parents is from India. I can play the racial angle and say well as an Indian man that I was very offended when Valerie attacked an Indian woman and said this Indian woman had the immorality of George Santos and wasn't responsible enough to have this position and that I felt she was implying all Indians are immoral and not good enough for this position. Obviously I don't believe that statement but just showing you how it is easy to manipulate the racial angle to your advantage.

Valerie disgusts me for taking AIPAC money especially her being a black woman makes it worse since I see the hypocrisy in the sense that she is taking money from a group of people that support the oppression of another race of people when she herself comes from a group of people that have been historically oppressed in this country. She especially should know better and how immorally wrong this is.

[JI7]

44. So she ran negative ads first but when the other candidate responded with their own

negative ads she sues them ?

And people thought the Texas Senate Primary was going to get ugly.