Primary Colors

There is an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza that needs our attention and assistance. Please call your Representative and your Senators and demand that they call for a ceasefire, and that we do not send any unconditional aid to the government of Israel which has killed thousands of children and tens of thousands of civilians, and displaced and starved millions. If you need some guidance, leave a comment, or check out this guide.

My friends, its primary season. And not just for Republican presidential candidates either.  

To be honest, I’ve always found primaries to be pretty uncomfortable. For all I love complicated language, for as much as I appreciate nuance, in my heart I live in the stories of my childhood. I want a clear villain. I crave purity of spirit. And primaries are messy. They are the questions we ask about ourselves and there are no perfect or pure answers.¹

If you’ve been following the Republican presidential primary at all, those answers seem impossibly dark. Do we once again want to elect a rapist to the Oval Office, someone who tried to overturn the will of the voters, someone who faces 91 felony counts including fraud, election interference, and breaches of national security? Is the primary goal of our government cruelty to trans kids or stripping away bodily autonomy from half our citizens? How stringent should educational gag orders and book bans be? These are the questions the Republican primary is asking, and the answers are deeply troubling. 

But importantly, those answers are also clarifying. They remind us what we’re up against, at all levels of government from Moms for Liberty candidates running for school board to Nikki Haley and Donald Trump battling it out for the Republican nominee for president. The more they face questions from the media, from voters, and from each other, the more we learn about them and what we’ll need to do to stop the eventual winner from ending up in the White House. 

Primaries also give us the chance to vet candidates before they go head to head with the nominee of the opposing party. You might find that a candidate whose cruel policies and professed electoral swagger had them declared the future of the Republican party, is actually one of the most awkward, unlikable, and unfortunate campaigners of all time. And you might, if you were the kind of person who enjoyed laughing at evil people who fall flat on their face, have gotten a teensy bit of schadenfreude out of Ron DeSantis’s epic flameout. The rare primary season gift. 

Republicans, it’s clear, are not sending their best. But when primaries are at their best, they help candidates hone their messages and voters clarify their priorities. Where we agree, primaries can help us figure out how best to achieve something. On the left, we agree that everyone should have health care, and so much of our debate happens on how we achieve that. Without getting too into the weeds, there is a lot of debate about Medicare for All verses a public option verses a strengthened Affordable Care Act, and the more candidates have it out in public over that issue, the easier it becomes for us to sort through how we prioritize the ease of passing legislation, the amount of executive power we want someone to have over our health care, and who should bear the cost. 

And where we don’t agree, primaries help us choose the direction we want our party to head. In California there is an open primary (aka a primary with no incumbent on the ballot) for the Senate seat Dianne Feinstein held before she died. There are a lot of folks on the ballot in that primary, including Adam Schiff, who made a name for himself in the Trump impeachment trials and Katie Porter, whose infamous whiteboard has embarrassed many a CEO with their price gouging and predatory business practices. Also on the ballot, however, is Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who was the only member of Congress to vote against the open-ended war in Afghanistan in 2001, and is the only person in the primary who has called for a ceasefire in Israel’s military campaign against Palestine. As tensions in the Middle East continue to escalate and the suffering in Gaza continues unabated, will we send someone to the Senate with unflinching clarity for peace? 

We’ve also been able to use primaries to oust Democrats who are against abortion rights from their seats. In 2023, Delegate Lachrese Aird defeated the incumbent state senator Joe Morrissey, a conservative Democrat open to abortion bans in Virginia. In 2020, Democratic voters voted to remove Reps. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Dan Lipinksi (D-Ill.), two of the last anti-abortion Democrats, from their seats in favor of candidates who would fight for abortion rights. In fact, we only have one remaining in Congress, Henry Cuellar of Texas who has yet to be defeated, but who has faced increasingly viable primary challenges in the past few years. 

And sometimes, primaries are about holding ourselves accountable. Like in the case of Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who refuses to resign from his seat in spite of numerous charges of corruption and, believe it or not, providing sensitive information to foreign governments in exchange for bribes. Since he refuses to give up his seat, we are going to have to do it for him, and primary voters in New Jersey have several options, including Tammy Murphy and Rep. Andy Kim. 

California, Texas, and New Jersey are just some of the big primaries we have ahead of us this year. Across the country there will be primaries for city council and state legislature seats, governors and Senators and members of Congress. And each one is an opportunity to push our country in a better direction and to fight for a future where we can all thrive. Primaries are our chance to ask questions, to push ourselves, to demand better from our party and our politics, and the answers we fight for, even when we don’t win, can shape the direction of the country for decades to come. It's much, much too important to skip, no matter how discomfiting or exhausting or complicated it might be. You can be sure I’ll be rolling up my sleeves and digging in as soon as possible. I hope you’ll join me. 

Here are some questions to get you started: 

1. When is the primary election for your state? Most of but not all of the time, the presidential primary is on a different date than primaries for other offices. You can see them listed out by state here and get more info on all election dates and voter registration deadlines here. 

2. What local organizations around you make endorsements? Whether its Planned Parenthood, Moms Demand Action, or DSA, look at organizations that align with your values and keep an eye on the role they play in your local primary. 

3. Do the state and local races near you have candidates all lined up? Do they have any events you can attend? Are they having debates? Do they have social media you can check out? These races have a lot fewer resources, so it might be a bit harder to find information. 

4. What’s the best way to make sure the people in your network know about upcoming primaries? (Hint: maybe sharing this newsletter?!) How can you let them know what’s at stake? 

1. If you think you read this on one of my Instagram posts before, no you didn’t!!!