#johnnichols — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

DoomsdaysCW @[email protected] · 2026-08-05 · 17:16 UTC

Insurgent Candidate Victories Highlight Growing Movement Against #Corporate & #Elite Power: #JohnNichols

#DemocracyNow, August 05, 2026

Excerpt: "AMY GOODMAN: And let’s go to #WilliamLawrence of the #SunriseMovement —

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — who we just mentioned, who won his primary, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, defeated two opponents to win the Democratic House primary in Michigan’s 7th District, focusing partly on what you just mentioned: #AIDatacenters . This is one of his ads.

' WILLIAM LAWRENCE: I’m #WillLawrence. And #TechBillionaires want to turn this whole field into a massive #datacenter that’ll jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.

RANDY: They put that in, it’s going to plummet the values. It’s an existential threat.

WILLIAM LAWRENCE: I’m running for U.S. Congress because I’ve been afraid to stand up to corporate power. I’m backed by #BernieSanders, and I don’t take a dime from #CorporatePACs . '

ANJALI KAMAT: And in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, #DonavanMcKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has a narrow lead over Congressman Shri Thanedar. This is a part of one of McKinney’s ads.

' DONAVAN McKINNEY: #ShriThanedar and the same #billionaires supporting #DonaldTrump are spending millions lying to you. They know that in Congress, Shri fights for them. I will fight for us — lower costs, higher wages, #MedicareForAll . '

ANJALI KAMAT: #AbbasAlawieh also won the Democratic primary for a seat in the Michigan state Senate. He was a co-founder of the #UncommittedMovement, which pushed for President Biden, and then Kamala Harris, to end U.S. support for Israel’s #WarOnGaza. This is Abbas speaking outside the DNC, the Democratic National Convention, in 2024, where the Uncommitted Movement pushed to include a #Palestinian voice at the convention.

'ABBAS ALAWIEH: Here is the scandal, my friends. Here is the scandal. The scandal is that there are forces within #DemocraticParty leadership who do not want us to talk about #Palestinian #HumanRights. But that’s not sustainable. This is a watershed moment. '

ANJALI KAMAT: John Nichols, can you talk about some of these other key races in Michigan and other states where progressives were challenging more establishment candidates, and just what you think is most important as a takeaway from yesterday’s primaries?

JOHN NICHOLS: I sure can. I’m delighted to do it, because the fact of the matter is that our national media too often focuses on the top-line races and misses the real dynamic, which you start to recognize is when you go down-ballot and you look at contests for U.S. House seats and for legislative seats.

And if you look in Michigan, what you’re seeing is, with Will Lawrence, an example of a real breakthrough win for a young candidate who ran a campaign on dynamic, fresh issues, including data centers. With #DonavanMcKinney, that’s still a close race. There are votes still to be counted there. But this is an incredible thing, because this is a candidate who didn’t have anywhere near the kind of money that his opponent did, and yet, with a real grassroots campaign on the ground there in Detroit and that region, ran very, very well.

And if we move beyond Michigan and you look around the country, what you’re going to see is that Tuesday night was a very good night for insurgent candidacies and for outsiders. In the #Missouri governor’s race, what you saw was kind of a remarkable result. #CindyHolscher, who’s a state senator out there and came from the outside — she wasn’t backed by the sitting governor, she wasn’t backed by a lot of Democratic Party leaders, and yet she won her primary for governor. And she did it by talking, again, about data centers and making that a very central part of her campaign. We’re starting to see a thread here. "

Full interview:
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/8/5/john_nichols_aug4_primaries

#USPol #DSA #Elections2026 #USElections #IsraeliWarCrimes #FreeGaza #FreePalestine #GetMoneyOut #NoDatacenters

#corporate #elite #johnnichols #democracynow #williamlawrence #sunrisemovement