I live in Oregon's 5th District, which has the still-undecided race between one of the worst Blue Dogs in the Democratic congressional caucus, Kurt Schrader, vs. a credible progressive democrat, Jamie McLeod-Skinner. Skinner has won decisively in the currently counted votes, but most of the votes of the most populous county (in which I live), Clackamas County, have yet to be counted because there was an error in printing our ballots that makes the bar codes unreadable. So they have to count by hand. We all thought it would be done by now, but apparently it may take into next week. I can't believe what a fiasco the Clackamas County registrar's office is. There are ... just... enough votes in Clackamas to change the result if it goes strongly Schrader.
Biden and Pelosi both endorsed Schrader, even though all the main Democratic organizations locally endorsed McLeod Skinner. Needless to say, we're very unhappy about the bigfooting of the party establishment to support Schrader, who spoke well of Trump on many occasions and voted with the Republicans on numerous key votes. In particular, he sided with Big Pharma to block the Medicare price negotiability elements of the Biden legislative agenda... which contributed to its failure as a whole, as well as being pure Republican policy thinking. This kind of thing, along with complete failure of messaging, is why Democrats nationally are being blamed for problems that they cannot control, and are failing to get credit for the numerous significant accomplishments they HAVE made. As a party we need to stand for a coherent policy agenda, and when politicians in our party fail to live up to the policy goals of the party, they should EXPECT to be replaced by the voters, and the national leaders of the party, at minimum, should stay out of it. I remain hopeful that Kurt Schrader will lose this race and will have to face the fact that you can't walk, talk and vote like a Republican and still be returned to office by a Democratic constituency.
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