Group backs Elijah Manley in primary election in bid to unseat veteran Democrat in newly drawn district

A progressive group has endorsed a 27-year-old substitute teacher who overcame childhood homelessness in his bid to unseat the veteran Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) said it was backing Elijah Manley in next week’s primary election in Florida’s newly drawn 20th congressional district, casting the race as a contest between a young economic populist and a stalwart of the Democratic party establishment.

The progressive candidate won a Democratic congressional primary after boldly staking positions on voting rights, datacenters and the US war machine

• Justin Pearson and Brent Taylor win primaries for key Tennessee House seat

Justin Pearson made national headlines as one of the “Tennessee Three” – the state lawmakers expelled from the capitol protesting for gun control after a deadly school shooting. Three years later, the state representative won a Democratic congressional primary after boldly staking positions on some of America’s most contentious fault lines: voting rights, datacenters and the American war machine.

“Republicans are responding to elected officials who stand up to billion-dollar datacenters, and the billionaires who own them. Democrats are responding to a vision of Medicare for All, ending genocide,” said Pearson. “The confluence that is happening between those issues, is [that] who profits off of war are the same people who are profiting off of polluting our communities and stealing our drinking water for their datacenters that replace our jobs.”

When Air Force One took off from Turkey after July’s Nato summit, almost everyone believed Donald Trump was on board … but he wasn’t. Jonathan Freedland talks to Tara Setmayer of the Seneca Project about why the White House felt the need to come up with such an elaborate lie to protect the president

When Air Force One took off from Turkey after July’s Nato summit, almost everyone believed Donald Trump was on board … but he wasn’t. Jonathan Freedland talks to Tara Setmayer of the Seneca Project about why the White House felt the need to come up with such an elaborate lie to protect the president

Oliver Larkin, a 34-year-old DSA candidate, is running for Congress in a newly drawn district in Florida. On Tuesday, voters will decide between him and a ‘DeSantis Democrat’

Doors don’t get knocked on much in this stretch of south Florida, where yard signs for Republican and Democratic candidates alternate from home to home. Oliver Larkin, the 34-year-old democratic socialist running for Congress here, knows this.

With a clipboard in hand five weeks before the state’s primary, Larkin and two canvassing volunteers walked down palm tree-lined streets with single-family homes to pitch residents on his plan for a better way of life. Surprisingly, many wanted to chat with the strangers at their door.

The congresswoman’s decision is an assertion of women’s freedom and dignity at a time when our status is rapidly eroding

“Don’t be weird about this,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive star and rumored 2028 presidential contender, said on her live video broadcast as she raised her shirt to angle the syringe into her abdomen. Then, with resignation, “even though I know all of you will be.”

The New York Democrat is 36 years old, and this week she revealed that she is beginning the process of freezing her eggs during Congress’s August recess. In the video, Ocasio-Cortez said that she was seeking to destigmatize the realities of women’s lives as they navigate the conflicting demands of professional aspiration and family building; she explained to viewers the process of the hormonal injections she was administering to herself, showing them the drugs and injector she was using arrayed on a paper towel, beside a disinfecting towelette. The procedure, Ocasio-Cortez explained, was not covered by her insurance, and she would be paying “100% out of pocket”. She had been saving to afford it for some time. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” she said, going on to assert her hope that transparency about such questions will destigmatize women’s reproductive lives and promote their dignity.

A fairly overtly radical socialist winning about 40% of the vote in a primary like this was unthinkable even a few years ago

The left’s insurgency against the Democratic party establishment has hit its first serious bump in the road in Wisconsin. Democratic socialist Francesca Hong entered Tuesday up by big margins in the polls, the huge betting favorite. She left it just a few thousand votes short of the Democratic nomination. What happened, and how, offers extremely important lessons for both the left and the Democratic establishment.

The first is that the party still matters. Its institutions and leaders matter. We saw that power in Democratic primaries in 2020. After Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses and emerged as the frontrunner, party leaders rapidly consolidated around Joe Biden.

Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America