Progressive candidates get a head start in US primary elections

Democrats in the US state of Vermont on Tuesday night nominated the country’s first transgender gubernatorial candidate for a major party, while in Minnesota, former governor Tim Pawlenty, once an open critic of President Donald Trump, lost his reelection bid in Republican primaries.

It was a resurgence night for progressives, the liberal factions of the Democratic Party, in the primaries across four midwest and northeastern states of Minnesota, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Vermont.

Christine Hallquist, a transgender woman, won Vermont governor’s Democratic primary. In Connecticut, an African-American who grew up in public housing won a nomination to the US House of Representatives. In Minnesota, Democratic primary winner Ilhan Omar will become the nation’s first Somali-American immigrant in Congress if she wins the mid-term elections in November.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a popular leader of progressives, easily won Vermont’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday but was expected to turn down the nomination, as he did in his previous campaigns, and campaign as an independent.

“You can feel the progressive earthquake from Milwaukee to Danbury to Burlington,” said Joe Dinkin, a progressive activist. “A new generation of trailblazing progressives are running, and they’re running without the backing of any political machines.”

However, in the midwest, it seems Democrats are arming themselves with general election candidates widely considered palatable to a broader electorate than the party’s progressive base, local analysts say.

Tim Walz, a six-term congressman from Minnesota, and Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s 66-year-old state education superintendent, won their states’ gubernatorial contests in Democratic primaries on Tuesday.

On the Republican side, Pawlenty’s loss in Minnesota Republican gubernatorial primary was widely seen as the latest evidence proving Trump retains strong support among Republican voters.

Weeks before the 2016 Election Day and in the wake of the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women, Pawlenty openly called Trump “unsound, uninformed, unhinged and unfit to be president.”

“The Republican Party has shifted... It is the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician,” Pawlenty lamented.

“Republicans proved once again that they will punish primary candidates who have disparaged Donald Trump,” John Fund, a political columnist for National Review, commented on Wednesday.

In primaries, Democrats go for diversity and Republicans go for Trump supporters, he observed.

Some analysts are concerned that big wins of progressives on Tuesday, which have reenforced the trend of growing strength of Democratic Party’s left wing since the 2016 general elections, may set up highstakes mid-term election battles against their Republican rivals.

The article is from the Xinhua News Agency. opinion@ globaltimes.com.cn