Hey Democrats, Don't Pull an NDP -- Run as Progressives

And that's the fact that they should never, ever, ever, tack to the right to win elections.

Doing so is a surefire way to actually lose elections, as Canada's NDP found out the hard way on Monday.

US Democrats should know the feeling.

In last year's midterms a good number of Democrats ran away from President Obama and his accomplishments and tried to pass themselves off as "Republican-lite." Remember Allison Lundergan Grimes running ads on TV saying that she disagreed with Obama?

And what happened? They lost their elections and Republicans took over the Senate.

The frustrating part of all this was that when Democrats did run as Democrats last fall, they won. Senators Al Franken of Minnesota, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Gary Peters of Michigan, for example, all ran as tried-and-true progressives and handily beat their Republican challengers.

This shouldn't be that hard that to understand: Democrats win elections when they run as progressives.

Unfortunately, a lot of establishment Democrats still buy into the right-wing myth that the US is a "center-right nation" when it's anything but a center-right nation.

Like Canada, the US is a center-left nation.

In fact, a recent poll by the Progressive Change Institute, shows that Americans overwhelmingly agree with progressives like Bernie Sanders on key issues from education and healthcare to the economy.

• Like Bernie, 75 percent of Americans support fair trade that "protects workers, the environment and jobs.
  
  
• 71 percent support giving all students access to a debt-free college education.
  
  
• 71 percent support a massive infrastructure spending program aimed at rebuilding our broken roads and bridges, and putting people back to work.
  
  
• 70 percent support expanding Social Security.
  
  
• 59 percent support raising taxes on the wealthy so that millionaires pay the same amount in taxes as they did during the Reagan administration.
  
  
• 58 percent support breaking up the big banks.
  
  

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