The daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants, Mejia ran on an adamantly anti–Donald Trump message and secured a whopping 70 percent of the vote as a result. The Associated Press called her victory shortly after the votes started rolling in.
70 percent… wow!
The progressive Democrat’s positions echo several of the policies that made Sanders a national phenomenon, including support for universal health care coverage, tuition-free college, student loan forgiveness programs, and strengthening unions and expanding labor protections in order to bolster America’s middle class.
She sounds like a Democrat who wants to win and is against genocide.
Mejia has also been vocal in her criticism of Israel, publicly denouncing the state’s war on Palestine as a genocide. That caught the attention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which funneled money into the race to bolster her opponents. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby’s efforts may have been one of the reasons that voters in New Jersey sent Mejia to Congress.
Awesome!
But voting for the lesser of two evils is exactly what’s gotten us here. I’m 38. The Democrats have been running the “vote for us or it’s the end of the world, this is the most important election of our lives! Harm reduction fam!” bit for my entire adult life. And when they get in power, they never bother to put in place reforms that would actually prevent future authoritarian takeovers. They bitch about not having 60 votes in the Senate, while refusing to do the things they can with the power they have.
How often do you hear Democrats talking about dismantling the post-9/11 security state? Biden ran on opposing fascism, but he didn’t lift a finger to dismantle the tools of fascism. Instead, he just wanted to use those powers for himself.