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Progressive has long been viewed as the best-managed major auto insurer in the U.S., with the highest returns and superior technology. Its strengths were apparent as Tricia Griffith, a Progressive lifer, and her team responded to the Covid-19 crisis and sought to support multiple constituencies. Progressive quickly had 95% of its 43,000 employees working from home, and provided $1 billion in rebates to customers after receiving a windfall, as Americans reduced driving and had fewer auto accidents. Then there were meals for truckers who had a hard time finding open places to eat on the road, and financial aid to independent body shops with fewer cars to repair but payrolls to meet.

Were based in Ohio, and the state didnt have enough people to adjudicate unemployment claims, Griffith tells Barrons. To help, Progressive lent the state 100 employees, all kept on the company payroll.

Griffith, 55, addressed employees weekly to give them a sense of calmness during the crisis. She did so via folksy videos, each about five minutes long, shot by her son in their Ohio homes library. On one, she joked that she had to pull back from eating too many unhealthy snacks, like M&Ms.

For customers, the idea was not to make auto insurance an added worry. People have all these different things coming at them, she says. When they needed it most, Progressive came through.

Data as of 6/19/20

Sources: Bloomberg; FactSet

Write to Andrew Bary at andrew.bary@barrons.com

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How Progressives Patricia Griffith Went Beyond the Call of Duty During the Covid Crisis - Barron's

It should be the Congressional Black Caucuss biggest moment.

Multiple CBC members being vetted as a potential vice presidential pick. A national uprising over systemic racism in policing that could finally address core issues in Black communities. And a host of Black progressives winning Democratic nominations that will almost certainly sweep them into office.

But with the CBC either not endorsing some of those liberal Black candidates who won Tuesday night or outright opposing them many activists are wondering if the CBC is progressive enough to lead this movement.

If it wasnt clear before tonight, I hope it is now. The CBC is disconnected from middle and lower black America, progressive Black activist Danny D. Glover tweeted Tuesday night after the election results.

Do not listen to them, he added.

Glover, who ran the outreach program for historically black colleges and universities for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanderss 2016 presidential campaign, told HuffPost on Wednesday that the CBCs reluctance to endorse Black candidates with left-wing credentials candidates who appear to have won their Democratic nominations Tuesday speaks to a lack of connection to working-class voters.

The fact that theyre willing to stake their entire reputation and legacy on folks that exist outside of the mission of the Congressional Black Caucus says a lot about the leadership, Glover said, referring to the CBCs endorsement of 16-term Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) over Black middle school principal Jamaal Bowman.

Maurice Weeks, the co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, also said the Engel endorsement over Bowman spoke to a larger crisis for the CBC in this moment, where its clear theyre not actually representative of the progressive Black agenda in America.

Folks like Bowman are the face of that agenda, Weeks said.

Bowman ultimately defeated Engel, the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, and a number of liberal activists noticed that the CBC threw its weight behind Engel, who is white, over, say, helping Black challengers in open races, like Mondaire Jones in a nearby district.

The CBC has spent more to protect Eliot Engel against a Black challenger than theyve done to get a Black man across the finish line, activist Sean McElwee, the co-founder of the liberal think tank Data for Progress, noted to HuffPost last Friday.

A spokesperson for the CBC PAC did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

CBC PAC Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) defended the Engel endorsement to Politico, citing Engels role in advocating against police brutality. You judge a person based upon the merit of their service, he said. So if you earn it, thats who we support.

Jones, who was the clear front-runner in a race to succeed retiring Appropriations Committee chair Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), didnt get the CBCs endorsement until Saturday, three days before the primary and only after HuffPost began asking CBC leaders why the group hadnt endorsed Jones.They endorsed Mondaire when it didnt matter, a senior aide to a progressive House member said, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Meeks told HuffPost last week that generally the CBC stays out of it if there are multiple Black candidates in an open-seat race. In the Jones race, among a field of seven candidates, there was another Black challenger, Asha Castleberry-Hernandez. But while Jones was polling at 25%, Castleberry-Hernandez was polling at 3% and she had raised a fraction of the money that Jones had. Meanwhile, there were two other white candidates polling in the mid-teens.

And if the CBC PAC generally stays out of it when there is more than one viable Black candidate, that wasnt the standard they held in a different New York City race.

In the South Bronx, Afro-Latino progressive Ritchie Torres beat out another crowded primary field to represent one of the most Democratic districts in the country. Yet he wasnt the one who got the CBCs endorsement. That went to New York Assemblyman Michael Blake, despite Torress apparently greater electoral viability.

Many activists think the CBC preferred Blake, the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, because of his ties to the New York Democratic political machine, whereas Torres who, like Jones, is gay touted himself as the most electable progressive option. (Blake also prided himself on being a liberal candidate, running on an affordable-housing platform and amplifying criticism of Torres for watering down a police reform bill while on the City Council.)

Tom Williams/Getty ImagesRep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC, has defended the decision to endorse Rep. Eliot Engel's reelection.

Regardless, in a number of Democratic primaries Tuesday the first major elections since Black Lives Matter protests swept the country in late May Black insurgents cleaned up.

Although the abundance of votes cast via absentee ballots has postponed the official results, the score was clearly in progressives favor. Bowman holds a lead over Engel widely viewed as insurmountable. Jones won his nomination. Torres, too. And Charles Booker is currently ahead of well-funded and longtime favorite U.S. Senate candidate Amy McGrath in Kentucky.

In all of those cases, electing a new generation of liberal leaders went hand in hand with a new generation of Black candidates. And with other new, stalwart progressives in the CBC like Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) combined with more experienced liberal lawmakers like Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and CBC Chairwoman Karen Bass (D-Calif.), the caucus could be a progressive force in the House in years to come.

In fact, the CBC is already flexing its muscle. On Thursday, the House passed a sweeping police reform bill that was largely composed by members of the CBC.

But activists and progressive aides worry that some of the old trappings of the caucus taking corporate money, being friendly with Wall Street and lobbyists, and defending institutionalist norms, like seniority and incumbency could threaten its ability to be a progressive force. And the decision to endorse Engel over Bowman typifies that concern.

Endorsing Engel over Bowman is absurd, the senior progressive House aide told HuffPost. They should have been aware of the dynamics of that race. More sophisticated actors would have stayed out.

Part of the issue is that, despite a desire for change from a number of members in the CBC, many are party loyalists. The CBC has had success in supporting a tenure system in Congress, which rewards the members who can stick around the longest with powerful committee chair positions. Many CBC members sit in safe Democratic districts, and dont like the idea of primary challenges. In fact, the CBC has a policy of supporting incumbents.

In 2018, the CBC endorsed then-Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.), who went on to be unseated by Pressley, the first Black woman to represent Massachusetts in Congress. And barring a massive upset, Bowman will enter Congress and the CBC next year after the organization opposed his candidacy.

But its not just the CBC supporting incumbents over Black candidates. The CBC has endorsed or chosen not to endorse anyone in a number of curious races.

For instance, the CBC hasnt endorsed Will Cunningham, a former aide to CBC lion Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who died last year.

Cunningham is running to unseat Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Democrat turned Republican in South New Jersey. And while Cunningham who, like Jones and Torres, is also gay has not generated nearly the money or enthusiasm of other Black insurgents, a campaign adviser argued that a CBC endorsement could change that.

This is the kind of race that the CBC should be pushing, Cunningham adviser Kaushal Thakkar told HuffPost.

Will Cunningham for Congress/FacebookWill Cunningham, an attorney and former House aide, is competing for a South New Jersey congressional seat. He doesn't yet have the Congressional Black Caucus PAC's endorsement.

The CBCs non-endorsements are especially glaring alongside the list of candidates they have chosen to back. In addition to standing by Engel, the caucus endorsed the reelection of Josh Gottheimer, a white, centrist Democrat facing a progressive challenge July 7 in a suburban New Jersey swing seat. Gottheimer leads a bloc of moderate Democrats and Republicans that prevented the Democratic-controlled House from placing tougher humanitarian conditions on a border funding bill in July. Gottheimers challenger, Arati Kreibich, is a neuroscientist who immigrated to the U.S. from India as a child.

Questions remain about how the CBC PAC actually decides its endorsements. The PAC told The Intercept in February 2016 that it endorsed Hillary Clinton for president based on a vote conducted by its board of directors. At the time, the 20-person board included 11 lobbyists and seven members of Congress.

The CBC PACs board now includes 11 members of Congress. But it still contains many corporate lobbyists, including Cherie Wilson, a General Motors lobbyist; Daron Watts, who recently represented two pharmaceutical companies and the tobacco vape manufacturer Juul; William Kirk, who last year lobbied for a Michigan-based electric utility, an Atlanta-based real estate development firm and Starbucks; and former Rep. Al Wynnof Maryland, whose clients in 2019 included British American Tobacco and coal company Peabody Energy. (Wynn entered the lobbying world after losing to progressive primary challenger Donna Edwards in 2008.)

But that is not to say the CBC simply bows to the whims of corporate lobbyists, nor does it mean the caucus is monolithic. The group includes members of the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition, including Reps. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) and Val Demings (D-Fla.), as well as storied progressives such as Lee, Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.). And Pressley and Omar also offer a left-wing perspective as part of a young vanguard that has sometimes clashed with Democratic leadership.

But, as a group, the CBC has been especially hostile toward the activist lefts strategy of targeting incumbents.

Justice Democrats, the group that recruited Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has only ever run two candidates against CBC members. The organization supported nurse Cori Bushs unsuccessful run against Rep. Lacy Clay in Missouri in 2018, and attorney Morgan Harpers losing bid to unseat Rep. Joyce Beatty in Ohio this cycle. (Bush is running a second time against Clay in Missouris Aug. 4 primary.)

The races were enough to prompt CBC to lambaste Justice Democrats in the press. Last July, Meeks, the CBC PAC chairman, implied that the progressive political action committee might be motivated by a bias against Black members of Congress. Clay compared the outfit to the Russian trolls of 2016.

For some Black progressives, Bowmans victory, in particular, provides an opportunity to take some of the air out of the idea that the CBC is under attack from a predominantly white group of progressive activists.

In the words of Weeks, who organizes low-income communities of color behind progressive economic policies, Bowman exudes a working-class work ethic and is supported by this very, very diverse community.

It really does push back on this notion that progressive challengers are just white hipsters, Weeks said.

Progressives might soon get their wish. Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) told Politico that it was time for the CBC to take a closer look at its policy of supporting incumbent Democratic allies, particularly when the primary challenger is Black. Black candidates are running and fighting and qualified to run for office, she said.

Glover called Bowmans win a reckoning for the CBC. He predicted that if CBC members didnt embrace the more ambitious calls for reform issued by the younger Black protesters taking the streets over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, individual CBC members would be run out of office with primary challenges.

This inflection point we have does not deal with only white people. This inflection point also speaks directly to the establishment of both Blacks and whites, he said. Gone are the days of them just giving us lip service.

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Is The Black Caucus Ready To Ride The Progressive Wave? - HuffPost

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posits an interesting theory. As the Democratic Party prosecutes an internecine conflict over the way in which Americas dark blue urban enclaves police minority neighborhoods, one side of this debate is clearly winning. It is the side that argues for radical societal transformation, an embrace of paradigmatic intersectionality, and retributive rather than reparative racial justice. On the losing side of this debate are the status quo ante progressives who argue that Democrats should focus primarily, if not exclusively, on the prosecution of inter-class conflicts and pursue policies that would promote economic leveling. As Douthat observes, that was ostensibly what Bernie Sanders advocated unsuccessfully over the course of his failed presidential bid. This moment of cultural reckoning has dealt Sanders a second humiliation.

Amid the passions of this present moment, Democrats have traded in the tedious pursuit of marginal reforms to the tax code and accelerating the growth of Americas unfunded liabilities for the fervent zeal of cultural combat. Its most active partisans are dedicated less to redistribution than retribution. Those who resist are, at best, unenlightened; deviationists, at worst. And there is no room for compromise with such a distasteful lot.

Douthats column is compelling, but it includes a cliffhanger. [T]he longer arc of the current revolutionary moment may actually end up vindicating the socialist critique of post-1970s liberalism, he wrote, that its obsessed with cultural power at the expense of economic transformation, and that it puts the language of radicalism in the service of elitism. This deserves to be teased out.

If Democrats are indeed abandoning the pursuit of incrementalism and legislative remedies to American socio-political dilemmas and opting for all-consuming culture war, the trajectory of the partys political evolution is not unknowable. Weve seen how movements that dedicate themselves to the expurgation of intangible facts of lifeparticularly things as elusive as sub rosa (even subconscious) racial biasesend up running aground. The Republican Party in the age of Trump provides some clues as to how this all ends.

At the dawn of Trumps ascendancy to lead the GOP and, eventually, the executive branch, conservatives had adopted a fatalistic narrative about the direction in which the country was headed. But the problems that beset the nation were immune to political remedies. In 2016, the right bemoaned an increased antipathy toward law enforcement, the perception that immigrant groups were failing to assimilate, hedonistic themes in popular media products, totalitarianism on college campuses, and whatever cultural Marxism is. The conduct of conventional politics had failed to rectify or even address these concerns. Thus arose a permission structure that led the right to sacrifice the idea that good governance was competent governance. What the status quo needed was a good smashing.

This was a terribly self-defeating conceit. In the process of adopting the idea that cultural matters should preoccupy lawmakers, conservatives invented a set of metrics that would constitute success in government no lawmaker could hope to meet. This paradigm rendered governance itselfan unsatisfying project in which success is measured by the incremental advances that result from often painful compromisesuspect. Whats more, it blinded conservatives to the inroads they had made in transforming the culture through the powers of persuasion, example, and deductive reasoningnone of which are the fruits of legislation.

Democrats and progressives have been inclined toward this form of fatalism for some time. As the party adheres more closely with the vision espoused by practitioners of identity politics, it has come to fixate on grand social inequities. Income disparities across sociodemographic divides, sexual and racial discrimination in the private sphere, and the privileges and disadvantages acquired at birththese are the conditions that preoccupy the left. But most of these are beyond the capacity of our constitutionally constrained government to address.

Indeed, you can be forgiven for thinking the left regards the legislative efforts to mitigate these social maladies, even legislation as expansive as the Great Society, as failures. If there has been little perceptible progress toward racial reconciliation in the last 50 years, as some claim, it is because government cannot reach into the human soul and make men perfect. Even those who advance unpopular and improbable legislative efforts to address the legacy of slavery and Jim Crowmeasures like monetary reparations to the descendants of slaveswould be disappointed if they were to ever achieve their goals. They would awake the morning after to a nation that retained all the same prevailing systemic inequities they despise and with the same intractable evils in mens hearts.

Republicans learned that the culture war cannot be won in Washington, and progressives seem determined to repeat their mistakes. If the left is dedicating itself not to a realizable political program but to an abstract crusade to remake American culture, it will fail.

View original post here:
The Culture War and the Progressive Delusion - Noah Rothman - Commentary Magazine

New York's coronavirus-delayed primary is Tuesday and it has the potential to throw a wrench into the power structure in the Democratic-controlled House while in Kentucky there's a Democratic battle for the right to challenge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November.

In New York, among those fighting primary challenges from their left are Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee; Carolyn Maloney, chair of the Oversight Committee; and Jerry Nadler, chair of the Judiciary Committee all longtime incumbents.

Of the powerful trio, Engel, who's in his 16th term in Congress, is by far the most vulnerable. His race has become a flashpoint in the battle between establishment Democrats and the progressive wing of the party.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the district next to Engel's, has endorsed his more progressive challenger, Jamaal Bowman, a 44-year-old father of three and former middle school principal who has campaigned on racial injustice and human rights.

Other progressives have followed Ocasio-Cortez's lead, with her fellow "Squad" member, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, both of them former presidential candidates, endorsing Bowman, as well.

Engel has countered with his own big-name backers, including former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the civil rights leader.

"If veteran congressman Eliot Engel falls, the Democratic Party will be apoplectic," longtime New York political strategist Hank Sheinkopf told NBC News. "They'll have to deal much more with the AOC wing of the party. The left wing of the party will be better positioned, and Joe Biden will have a bigger headache the next morning."

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Maloney and Nadler appear to be on much safer ground, Sheinkopf said.

Maloney is running against three challengers, including Suraj Patel, whom she defeated in a one-on-one contest in 2018. Nadler is running against two challengers who ripped him as "all talk" on progressive issues during a NY1 debate last week, arguments that he countered by pointing to the endorsements he's gotten from Ocasio-Cortez and Warren.

Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, is defending her own seat from a challenger who has been using some of her own tactics against her.

Ocasio-Cortez won the seat in 2018 in a major upset over Joe Crowley, one of the top-ranking Democrats in the House. She'd argued that he spent too much away from the district focused on issues that didn't involve his constituents the same complaints her main challenger, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, has made against her by saying "AOC is MIA."

Because of the pandemic, Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC anchor, hasn't been able to knock on as many doors as Ocasio-Cortez did in 2018, and Ocasio-Cortez has a significant money advantage, having raised over $10 million. That's five times more than Caruso-Cabrera has raised.

Primary day will also include a special election delayed from April to fill the upstate New York seat left vacant by the resignation of Republican Rep. Chris Collins, who pleaded guilty to insider trading last year.

The pandemic is looming over the primary in other ways.

Cuomo issued an executive order in April calling for absentee ballot applications to be sent out to all voters in the state in a bid to make voting during the pandemic safer. In New York City, the city Board of Elections has sent 679,000 ballots to voters who've requested them.

Statewide, over 1.6 million absentee ballots have been sent out, according to the state Board of Elections. In 2016, 115,000 people voted absentee in the presidential primary.

What the surge in absentee voting means for the primary is unclear, Sheinkopf said.

"Nobody knows what the outcomes will be, because there's no previous barometer for this in New York," he said. "The answers are all in the mailboxes."

Under state law, absentee ballots can't be counted until one week after the election. And as for how long it will take to count all those ballots, city Board of Elections spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez-Diaz said, "We don't know."

Tuesday is also primary day in Kentucky, where Democrats will select a candidate to take on McConnell in the fall.

Former fighter pilot Amy McGrath had been the favorite, with strong fundraising numbers and support from establishment Democrats. But over the last few weeks, rival Charles Booker, a progressive state representative, has picked up steam and the endorsements of Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders.

Booker has campaigned on racial injustice and inequity, and he has taken to the streets with Black Lives Matter demonstrators to protest the killing of Breonna Taylor, a Louisville woman who was shot dead in her apartment on March 13 by police executing a "no-knock" warrant.

He has also made an issue of McGrath's failure to protest leading her to air an ad decrying the death of George Floyd. Booker noted that she didn't mention Taylor in the ad.

As in New York, there's been a surge in absentee voting in Kentucky, with Gov. Andy Beshear regularly pleading for voters to vote by mail.

It may be hard for them to do otherwise only 200 polling places are expected to be up and running on primary day, instead of the usual 3,500, which could lead to substantial voting problems and long waits Tuesday. The state has cited a shortage of available poll workers amid coronavirus safety concerns for the drastic reduction.

Voting rights experts say that while mail-in voting is key to reducing density at polling places, election administrations should expect that a significant number of people will still want to vote in person. Georgia's primary, for instance, had a surge of absentee ballot applications, but droves of voters still showed up to vote in person either out of choice or because absentee voting applications or ballots never arrived.

According to a court filing after advocates unsuccessfully sought to add polling sites last week, Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, is one of several counties with just one in-person polling location.

As of last week, 202,652 absentee ballots had been requested in Jefferson County, suggesting a strong appetite for absentee voting, but those who want to vote in person on Election Day will have just one place to do it: the Kentucky Exposition Center. The Kentucky Exposition Center is quite large, with 1.3 million square feet of indoor space and more than 19,000 parking spaces. It will be set up to have 420 voting booths, according to the filing.

But if turnout is high, the center could easily have long lines: To serve just a quarter of the county's registered, eligible voters in person, roughly 213 voters would need to vote every single minute continuously for 12 hours straight.

Read more from the original source:
Incumbent Dems face a reckoning on primary day: Will progressives unseat them? - Yahoo News

A slew of ideological battles within the Democratic Party over the coming weeks, stretching from the Bronx to the hollers of eastern Kentucky to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, will test Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumers ability to dictate primary outcomes both nationally and in his home state.

Senate Democrats political operation, previously led by former Nevada Sen. Harry Reid and now by Schumer, has not lost a primary since the 2010 election cycle, but must fend off left-wing candidates in both Kentucky and Colorado over the course of the next week. And after originally declining to pick sides in a contested House primary in his home state, Schumer endorsed House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel, who is desperately trying to fend off a challenge from educator Jamaal Bowman.

Both Bowmans bid in New Yorks 16th District and the Kentucky contest which pits Schumer-backed former fighter pilot Amy McGrath against progressive state Rep. Charles Booker point to a still-emerging alliance between Black and Latino voters and progressive groups that could spoil the Democratic establishments ability to swat aside primary challenges.

These coalitions potential strength has only grown as the coronavirus pandemic and the protests following the death of George Floyd have exposed systemic inequalities in health care and policing. If the left can successfully re-create them in the years to come, almost every Democratic politician in America up to and including those as powerful as Schumer could face serious primary challenges.

From New York to Kentucky, theres a multiracial slate of progressive candidates that are surging, said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York state director of the Working Families Party, which is backing Booker and Bowman. Primary voters are sending a clear message that politics as usual wont get us heading in the right direction.

L. Joy Williams, a New York Democratic strategist and consultant for New York Rep. Yvette Clarkes re-election bid, was blunt about the potential impact progressive wins could have on Schumer.

It will have an immediate impact in terms of people thinking about whether he is vulnerable, she said.

Schumers office declined to comment. Any attempt to unseat Schumer, who remains popular throughout the state, would be a monumental uphill battle. Persistent rumors have suggested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the pioneer of modern left-wing primary challenges, could run against Schumer in 2022.

Win McNamee via Getty ImagesSenate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is navigating increasingly powerful ideological currents this primary cycle as progressive challengers face off against establishment candidates.

Progressives are targeting a number of primaries in New York. The Working Families Party and other left-leaning groups are optimistic about Mondaire Jones chances to replace retiring Rep. Nita Lowey in a district representing a swath of suburbs to the north of the city. Adem Bunkeddeko is mounting a second challenge to Clarke in a Brooklyn-based seat after losing by less than 2,000 votes in 2018. And there are two dueling progressive candidates in the race for a Bronx-based district that is the nations most Democratic.

But its the battle for Engels seat where Schumer has expended the most political capital. In early June, Schumer made it clear he hadnt picked sides between Engel and Bowman as the latter picked up political momentum. Schumers declaration forced Engel to remove his states senior senator from an online list of campaign endorsers.

Schumers neutrality couldnt last: Pro-Israel groups count both men as crucial allies, and are desperately working to keep Engel in office. Dov Hikind, a former New York assemblyman, questioned Schumers pro-Israel credentials.

A little over a week later, Schumer told the Jewish Insider he was supporting the incumbent.

Schumer has long been more conciliatory toward the left wing of the party than other Democratic leaders. He backed now-Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison for Democratic National Committee chair in 2016, gave both Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren roles in Senate leadership, and voted with Sanders and other progressive senators against a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada late last year.

Chuck is responsive to these kinds of pressures when he pays attention to them, said Adam Jentleson, a Democratic strategist who was a top aide to Reid. Theres a misplaced confidence in the centrist vision of the party based on [former Vice President Joe] Bidens victory in the primary.

I think the important thing moving forward is to take the left seriously,he continued.Its going to be the place where the most energizing ideas are coming from, and where a lot of the grassroots money is coming from.

And Schumers long-term political goal of reclaiming the Senate majority is now within his grasp. President Donald Trumps continued political decline has increased Democrats chances of winning Senate seats even in red-tinted states like Georgia and Iowa, and Schumers political operation has matched or outspent Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells in most states. And after some early recruiting struggles, he managed to convince two former presidential candidates former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to run for Senate instead.

Still, the structure of the 2018 Senate map, which was heavy on Democratic incumbents running for re-election, meant Schumer has largely been able to avoid the partys Trump-era ideological battles until this year. So far, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee-backed candidates have cruised, easily winning in Iowa and North Carolina against a mostly disorganized left wing of the party.

But that may change in Kentucky and Colorado. Senate Democrats have long viewed victory in the Bluegrass State as unlikely, but believed McGraths incredibly strong fundraising shes raised more than $40 million, compared to McConnells $23 million, according to Federal Election Commission records could help pin McConnell down and prevent him from aiding other GOP incumbents financially.

Early last week, Schumer told reporters he believed McGrath would triumph, happily explaining how a super PAC controlled by McConnell had reserved $10 million worth of airtime in the state. Later in the week, he ignored a HuffPost reporters questions about his confidence in his prized recruit.

Senate Democrats are still confident McGrath can hold off Booker, though they acknowledge the race will be far closer than previously expected. Bookers participation in Black Lives Matter protests in recent weeks has helped galvanize support, rallying progressives both in Kentucky and nationally to his cause. One of his ads features McGrath struggling to answer why she hasnt participated in the protests.

McGrath has hit back with an electability argument.

Shes Kentuckys best chance to move on from Mitch McConnell, an announcer says at the start of McGraths latest ad. Polling shows shes the only Democrat who can beat him.

If the race in Kentucky is mostly about draining McConnells resources, the contest in Colorado on June 30 is essential to Democratic victory in the battle for the Senate. It was seen as a coup when Schumer convinced Hickenlooper, a popular former governor and mayor of Denver, to drop out of the presidential race and run for Senate against vulnerable incumbent GOP Sen. Cory Gardner.

Instead, Hickenlooper has made multiple gaffes in recent weeks as his lone remaining primary rival, former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, has repeatedly attacked him from the left on climate change and other issues.

After Romanoff released an ad on Friday attacking Hickenlooper over an ethics violation, a quickly formed super PAC fired back with an ad attacking Romanoffs immigration record.

The super PAC, Lets Turn Colorado Blue, wont have to make its donors public until after the primary because it began spending after the pre-primary FEC filing deadline. Groups affiliated with Schumer have used similar tactics in the past to temporarily hide their donors.

The race between Hickenlooper and Romanoff has not become the flashpoint the Kentucky contest has. While both Warren and Sanders endorsed Booker, Sanders has remained neutral in Colorado and Warren has sided with Hickenlooper.

In part, this is because Romanoff doesnt have sterling progressive credentials, even if he now supports the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. In 2014, he aired an ad touting his support for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution while running for House, and he voted against in-state college tuition for undocumented college students in the legislature.

Even if Schumers Senate picks survive, however, its clear the left is growing more capable of causing headaches for the establishment.

Progressive voters, and voters as a whole, are embracing and running toward the most systemic policy changes, Nnaemeka said. Thats the ground were operating on now, and I dont think its going to shift.

CORRECTION: This article previously misidentified the district in which Bowman is running as the 17th; it is the 16th.

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Chuck Schumer Faces The Progressive Surge - HuffPost