Please tell Elissa Slotkin she got 23,847 fewer votes in Michigan than Kamala Harris

Senator Elissa Slotkin is again taking some time away from her hectic schedule of avoiding constituents to lecture the Democratic Party, according to Politico:

Slotkin’s plan lays out why she thinks Democrats suffered sweeping setbacks last year, including focus groups of home-state voters who she said described her party as “weak and woke.”

…

Her strategy also focuses on language and tone. She said Democrats should stop using the term “oligarchy,” a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes “kings.” And to beat their weak and woke rap, Democrats should channel the “no-bullshit” energy of the Lions’ Campbell, she said, “A wonderfully sappy guy with his players,” but who is also “smart and tough and lovable.”

Why should anyone listen to her? Politico explains:

Slotkin won her seat last year in a state that Trump carried (and where Trump will return to for a 100 days event Tuesday), defeating Republican challenger Mike Rogers to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow. That has given her some cachet among party leaders, operatives, donors and activists following an election in which Democrats wiped out.

Because I’m in Michigan and a long-time observer of Slotkin and a fan of how she won her very tough district—maybe toughest swing seat in the entire House—three times, I feel the need to give the rest of the country some context about Slotkin’s “cachet" in hopes she’ll abandon the hippie-punching focus of her PR campaign. 

I hope she’ll focus on her much better ideas, like “My definition of success includes free and fair elections in 2026, retaking the House, defending the seats we have in the Senate,” though even that goal feels somewhat “moderate” to me. If we’re ever to pull out of this doom cycle, we must aim much higher.

So let’s be clear.

Elissa Slotkin got 23,847 fewer votes than Kamala Harris in Michigan last November.

How and why did she win? 

Because the super-low-information voters who Elon Musk helped drive to the polls with his $45 billion initiative to elect Donald Trump, who has outperformed the polls in Michigan three times now, didn’t bother to click one oval, which is all you have to do to vote the entire Republican ticket in Michigan. 

If 23,848 more of Trump’s voters clicked, I guess Slotkin would be “too weak and woke.”

It’s remarkable that Mike Rogers—Slotkin’s opponent, who doesn’t even live in Michigan—even got so close because Republicans in our state haven’t been able to produce a candidate besides Trump who can win a statewide race in nearly a decade, coincidentally since the GOP-engineered Flint Water crisis.

Slotkin is a cautionary tale, not a role model

The warning signs about Slotkin as a Senator started during her campaign, when she voted to nullify two laws that elected officials in Washington, DC, had enacted. 

Home rule for DC and a belief in “no taxation without representation” are necessary beliefs for any Democrat in the time of Trump and his Intolerable Acts. DC statehood is a moral obligation and one of the clearest paths to pulling ourselves out of the anti-democratic makeup of our US Senate.

We also need to discuss another reason why Slotkin and her fellow freshperson Senator, Ruben Gallego, have been acting so shady since their elections last November—crypto.

Slotkin “strongly” supports cryptocurrency, unlike the great Sherrod Brown, whose defeat was largely financed by the cryptocurrency industry. And this could be why she’d shy away from a term like “oligarchy."

You don’t have to be an enemy of the Nerd Reich and the way tech fascists want to use crypto to undermine democracy to know that if there’s a legitimate use for cryptocurrency, besides making the rich richer and less accountable to the people, no one has told anyone it yet.

Democrats in swing districts and states face an existential threat from this industry that has far too much money to drown voters with the misleading and scammy information that drives people into vices like cryptocurrency and online gambling. The rise of these antisocial “technologies” has neatly paralleled the rise of Trumpism in the United States. They play into the worst myths that unite neoliberalism and fascism—DIY/grinder culture and faux meritocracy—to break down society when community is the only antidote we have to authoritarianism.

These anti-democratic stands must be deal breakers in Democratic primaries, not any model to emulate. Instead, anyone who cares about a party that fights for the Second Bill of Rights defined by FDR, needs to participating in a Manhattan Project to figure out how we counter the threat of the crypto industry by getting non-voters, who are still overwhelmingly progressive to the polls, instead of trying to win over that last 1-2% of completely uninformed “swing voters” who tend to decide national elections.

Anyone who uses “woke”—a term the right has mainly adopted because you can’t say the N-word on TV—derogatorily doesn’t spend enough time around the people who make up the Democratic base to represent this party with any honor or integrity.

Alarm bells for Trump and Democrats aping Trump

Remarkably, Slotkin is sticking with her “be the second-best Trump” schtick even as Trump’s ratings are nosediving at an unmatched rate in recorded American history. (And even if he weren't, trying to appeal to infrequent voters who love Trump and can't be bothered to fill in an oval feels like the definition of a fool's errand for a Democrat.)

Unlike Senator Slotkin, Americans are waking up to the horror of what Elon Musk bought in a second Trump regime. Everyone must understand what has happened to bring our country to this disastrous point.

Our last election wasn’t indicative of anything except how hard it is to overcome an anti-incumbent trend and a campaign finance system that has been entirely corrupted by the Republicans on our Supreme Court. Voters need to get to the bottom of how their country is being wrung out of their hands by men with too much power and money and far too little decency. 

That’s what the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour is all about. Yes, Trump wants to be a king, but what he’s more likely to become is our Putin with his oligarchs propping him up and looting the spoils that come from the corruption of our Constitution. If we focus on kings exclusively, the argument only becomes about Trump, not everything that made him possible.

And guess what, Senator Slotkin, (as The New Republic’s Jason Linkins noted) voters have a pretty good idea what oligarchy means: