Tony Brasunas

The time is here to vote. For everyone in California — and in the rest of the Super Tuesday states —the primary is this coming Tuesday, March 3. Fortunately — perhaps amazingly — it’s not hard to pick the best candidate this time around, as one of them has both the most progressive policies and the best chance of winning the general election against Trump.

Do vote, wherever you are, as these primaries are not winner-take-all, like normal American elections, but rather proportional contests granting delegates based on vote totals. So every vote counts, regardless of where you live.

For Californians, for the first time in many years, we have a relatively short ballot. There’s really just the big primary and then a handful of local measures and central committee elections. So this guide is shorter than those I’ve written in the recent past. We’ll focus on the primary, appraising where the candidates are right now, whether they’re rising in the polls or losing support right now, what they’ve said and done recently, what they ultimately stand for, and their chances to defeat Trump in November. And then look briefly at one important race in San Francisco.

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES — Bernie Sanders

What a campaign we are witnessing. The notion that a major politician in this country could forswear corporate and PAC contributions, provide a consistent and uncompromising critique of corporate control of our society, advocate an amazing suite of progressive reforms that would level the playing field a little for those with less income and wealth, and win major elections across this country — this was considered ridiculous and impossible as recently as 2015. Don’t vote for Bernie Sanders; vote as one small part of your participation in this peaceful revolution to take back the government from a corrupt political, media, and military industrial culture.

Bernie Sanders has won the most votes in each of the first three contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada — something no one else has done in modern political history. And it’s not because of Bernie himself but because of the millions of everyday mechanics and janitors and teachers and Amazon workers and college students and truckers and soldiers and gig workers who have given a little bit of their blood, sweat, tears and funds to build a movement. The movement’s growing base of support and enthusiasm dwarfs that of any other campaign; it’s the campaign most popular with young people, union workers, and people of color. This is astounding and inspiring — a modern-day multi-racial, multi-generational movement — and it’s likely the only thing that can defeat Donald Trump and his MAGA enthusiasts in November. The “Stop Bernie” movement in the DNC and corporate media is intensifying by the day, which is why it is essential these days to balance your media diet.

Do not leave your polling place without casting a ballot for Bernie Sanders.

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When choosing a school, a restaurant, or a licensed contractor, most of us use criteria to make our choice. But very few people actually do this when choosing the candidates they vote for. The media doesn’t help with this either by asking nonsense questions like “who would you like to have a beer with?”

I offer here a set of criteria for progressives to use when choosing a candidate to support in our partly dysfunctional 2019 American political system. Having paid attention to this wild yet somehow predictable 2020 Democratic Primary over the past year, for your reading pleasure, I also score each candidate based on those criteria, although you are invited to tweak the criteria and score them differently if you would like.

There are a lot of candidates and a lot to examine, so this is not a short piece. Grab a coffee or tea and a comfortable chair.

Let’s get two things out of the way before jumping in:

First, basic terminology. I see essentially all politics, politicians, and movements as efforts to control the distribution of wealth and power, and each channels one of three forces:

– Reactionary, seeking to concentrate wealth and power into fewer hands
– Conservative, seeking to keep the distribution of wealth and power as it is
– Progressive, seeking to spread wealth and power more broadly among people

If you consider these strands of political energy and find yourself instinctively reactionary, you might not find much of this article useful. I am a progressive at heart and believe that spreading wealth and power more broadly is beneficial to all and creates a stronger and healthier society, and I consider the grand arc of progressive politics stretching back to Magna Carta to be a good thing and something that I hope will continue. Today, with AI, nanotechnology, weather manipulation, and the rest of the next wave of technology arriving every day, we can and must distribute power (ie decision-making) more broadly throughout the population.

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