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Upstanding children singing those old time Christian songs back in the heyday of CHOP/CHAZ. Charles Mudede

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He took on Trump to protect our Democratic values. It's time for his proven progressive leadership.

Back to this Vigdor chap. He believes that progressives have brought Seattle to the brink of disaster. Our atrociously high minimum wage, our oversized investments in public transportation, our general utopian dreaminess has left us with bridges that are falling, unemployed people who can't get jobs because they are too expensive to hire, and the horrors of horrors: the autonomous zone. But the most pronounced flaw in this economist's analysis turns out to be the same as Furman's: there is no break between the world before or after the pandemic. Yes, unemployment is 15 percent in Seattle, yes, that is really up there; but it was nearly 3 percent in January. And what does any of this have to do with Ed Murray, Seattle's disgraced former mayor?

Vigdor writes:

Fewer than four years later, that dream remains unrealized.

Yes, Ed Murray promised a new and bright Seattle. That did not happen. A hairy dog sits in the passenger seat of a red Mazda parked at the Columbia City Walgreens. He has many dreams that did not happen. A woman in a hat with a floral pattern looks out at Lake Washington on a sunny summer day. She hopes to see someone walking on water. This does not happen. What I'm trying to express is the feeling I had after reading Vigdor on Seattle. How does this thing (Ed Murray) connect with that (pandemic economics)? No idea. He mentions a whole bunch of developments in the previous decade and somehow attempts to connect them to a city that has been on lockdown for 3 months and is still social distancing and will continue doing so for many months without coming anywhere close to a full economic recovery. What do the West Seattle Bridge woes have to do with the present pandemic?

You get my point. Vigdor is nothing more than a fog machine for some show. And so it is best not to examine the generator of the artificial fog, and instead attempt to make out the show or scene whose mood or feeling Vigdor wants to enhance. Here is what I can tell. The murder of George Floyd found Trump, the leader of the right, returning to a part of his inaugural speech that was not much use to him while the economy was expanding and unemployment was low. But when millions lost their jobs in March due to the pandemic, Trump was left with nothing. All he had was the economy. In this respect, his understanding of the situation was not that different from the one Bill Clinton had during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Clinton survived that episode and its impeachment because the economy was booming. If it was in shambles, the blowjob in the Oval Office would have ruined him. Trump needed to be in Clinton's shoes. 42 had one front to deal with, 45 has more than you can count.

Let's revisit March 2020. Trump's reelection chances depend on repairing the crashed economy, and the process of repair depends on re-opening the economy. But re-opening America can mean only one of two things: the pandemic is over or making people live with the pandemic. Trump is in a terrible hurry, so he settles for the former. But it doesn't work. Re-opening America while infection rates and death rates are very high (what I call necro-economics) proves, by June, to be deeply unpopular with voters. The V-shaped recovery ain't happening like it's supposed to. What to do? Look over here, there's George Floyd and the protests his murder ignited.

At that point, Trump exhumed and dusted off this passage from his inaugural speech: "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now." This was about cities, their liberal mayors, their tolerance. These cities are decaying, are in chaos, are without law and order. This is the show Vigdor is trying to enhance with his New York Post piece. But who is Trump and Vigdor trying to scare? Who is their audience? Oddly enough, it's suburban voters.

CNN:

In remarks on the South Lawn, Trump claimed Washington Democrats want to assume control of local zoning decisions and attacked a rule meant to combat segregation, a move he said would "obliterate" suburbs.

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Seattle Is Now the Symbol of All That Is Wrong with Progressive Politics - TheStranger.com

Civil rights experts point to long wait times to vote as a sign of growing voter suppression in the U.S. Here's what to expect in the 2020 election. USA TODAY

The 2020 congressional primary electionshave been marked by a number of upsets, where candidates with little name recognition have been propelled into the national spotlight.

Early primaryupsets demonstrated the strength of some progressiveand staunch conservative candidates, who sometimes lacked backing fromtheir respective parties.

In New York,three Democraticcandidatesare poised to replaceor succeedmoderate longtime incumbents in June. In Illinois, a progressivecandidate, backed by the Justice Democrats organization, beat the most conservative Democrat in Congress.In Pittsburgh, a progressive statehouse candidate making her first run for officeoustedan incumbent who is the brother of the city's former mayor.

More: Booker beats progressive challenger, Van Drew race set and other takeaways from Tuesday's primary

Candidates of color, specifically Black candidates, have been on the winning side of several notable upsets. PhysicianCameron Webb, who is Black, beat three white opponents in Virginia's 5th congressional districtprimary, a seat Democrats hope to take back now that the Republicanincumbent lost his own primary. Wesley Hunt and Burgess Owens,Black candidates who won Republican nominations in Texas and Utah, respectively, are both running to represent districts in which Black people are minorities.

Jamaal Bowman, who's running against Rep. Eliot Engel in a Democratic Party primary, pictured at an endorsement event with Zephyr Teachout in Mount Vernon.(Photo: courtesy Bowman campaign)

More Republican women are also winning primaries. According tothe Center for American Women in Politicsat Rutgers, arecord 55 Republican women won House primaries this year, clearing the previous barof 53 set in 2004.That's in part because more Republican women are running 220 filed to run for the House, up from120 who ran in 2018.

Here are some of this primary season's most surprising upsets:

Rep. Scott Tipton, a five-term incumbent from Colorado, lostthe 3rd congressional district's Republican nomination to Lauren Boebert, a restaurant owner and outspoken gun rights activist. Boebert beat Tipton by nearly ten points.

More: John Hickenlooper wins Colorado Democratic primary, will face Sen. Cory Gardner

Trump hadendorsedTipton, tweeting his support for the congressman in December as well asthe night before the election. Boebert's website describes her asa supporter of Trump, praising "his policies to Make America Great Again."

Lauren Boebert waits for returns during a watch party in Grand Junction, Colo., Tuesday, June 30, 2020.(Photo: McKenzie Lange, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP)

Boebert's restaurant, Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado,becamethe subject of national media attention in 2014, for an open carry policy allowing staff to be armed with guns. Her commitment to gun rights also earned her a viral moment in 2019, when she confrontedthen-presidential candidateBeto ORourke at a town hall.I was one of the gun owning Americans who heard (O'Rourke)speak regarding your Hell yes Im going to take your AR-15s and AK-47s,'" she said. "Well, Im here to say, hell no youre not.'

Boebert was also covered by local press as a vocal critic of Democratic Gov. Jared Polis' coronavirus lockdown measures, reopening Shooters Grill in defiance of state orders.

Diane Mitsch Bush, a former state lawmaker, won the district's Democratic nomination and will face Boebertin the fall.

New York's congressional primary in June saw a near sweep of Democratic nominationsby progressives. With several candidates projected to beatmore centrist orestablishmentcompetitors, the electionsmirrored Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's upset against 10-term former Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018.

Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal from the Bronx,beat longtime Democratic incumbent Rep. Eliot Engelwith about60% of the vote.

Jamaal Bowman speaks to attendees during his primary-night party in June. The former middle school principal has toppled 16-term U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel in New York's Democratic congressional primary.(Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, AP)

Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, represented the 16th District for more than 30 years.

The Justice Democrats-backed Bowman began to surge after Engel, asking to speak at an event, was caught on mic saying, If I didn't have a primary, I wouldn't care, according to NBC News. Engel was criticized by primary challengers for not returning to his district for months during the COVID-19 crisis.

Bowman, who was endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez, ran a campaign firmly aligned with the party's progressive flank. He is a proponent of multiple "New Deals," including the Green New Deal an Ocasio-Cortez-spearheadedproposal that outlines a broadplan for tackling climate change as well as plans to reform education and public housing.

"I am excited, I am happy, I cannot wait to get to Congress and cause problems for the people in there that have been maintaining a status quo that has literally been killing our children," Bowman said during his election night watch party.

There is no Republican challenger for the November election.

More: AOCs blowout win, last-minute voting in Kentucky and other key takeaways from Tuesdays primaries

Madison Cawthorn, theowner of a real estate investment company, unexpectedly beat Lynda Bennett, a real estate agent and activist, in the race to claim the Republican nomination for Mark Meadows' 11th District seat in North Carolina, which he gave up to become Trump's chief of staff.

Madison Cawthorn(Photo: Courtesy Cawthorn for NC)

Cawthorn, 24,beat Bennett with 65.82% of the vote in the district's runoff election in June. The outcome was considered an upset, given that the Trump and Meadows-endorsed Bennettwon the vote in March (but not by a wide enough margin to avoid a runoff election).Like Boebert, Cawthorn is a supporter of Trump.

Cawthorn said that he was inspired to run for Congress because he was disappointed by how the Republican party handled full control of the White House and Congress in 2017.

It felt like Donald Trump was having to pull teeth from Congress to try to get anything done, and so I want to go over to Washington D.C. to break that status quo, to actually get something done, he said in an interview with The Hill.

More: With second primary underway, Cawthorn addresses voting in-person, by mail options

Cawthorn's website toutshis conservative views on health care, immigration, abortion rightsand gun control. "Im running because our faith, our freedoms and our values are under assault from coastal elites and leftists like Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," he states.

If elected in November, Cawthorn would become the youngest member in Congress, a title currently held by Ocasio-Cortez. He willface off against Democratic candidateand retired U.S Air Force colonel Moe Davis in the fall.

Iowa Republicans ousted nine-term incumbent Rep. Steve King, nominating state Sen. Randy Feenstra to run for the state's 4th congressional district seat. Feenstra beat King by nearly ten points.

State Sen. Randy Feenstra and Rep. Steve King. Feenstra is challenging King in the GOP primary for the 4th District Congressional seat.(Photo: Robin Opsahl)

The conservative district has long had to contend with King's controversial remarks. While talking about "Dreamers" in a July 2013 interview, King claimed that for every young immigrant who becomes a school valedictorianthere are "100 out there that, they weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."In an interview with The New York Timeslast year, Kingsuggested that the term "white nationalist" should not be consideredoffensive.

King was removed from his committee seats over the comments he made to the Times. King'scompetitors, including Feenstra, used King's rejectionfrom those committees as proofFeenstra would be more effective as an ally of Trump.

Republicans largely rebuked King through their support of Feenstraduring the primary campaign. Feenstra significantlyoutraised King, andwas endorsed by theU.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Right to Life Committee. Five Republican congressmen even donated to Feenstra's campaign.

Feenstra will compete with J.D. Scholten, who ran uncontested for the Democratic nomination, in the fall. Scholten previously lost to King by a slimmarginin the 2018 general election.

Feenstra's win is likely. Support for a Republican representativein Iowa's 4th congressional district exceeds support fora Democrat by 22%, according to aJune Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

Republican Mike Garcia, a former U.S. Navy pilot and defense contractor executive, beat Democrat Christy Smith,a member of the California State Assembly, in the special general electionfor Illinois Rep. Katie Hill's seat in May.

Mike Garcia(Photo: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

Garcia's 25th District victoryrepresents the first time a Republican candidate has flipped a Democratic seat in California since 1998. Trump had endorsedGarcia on Twitter, though he originally saidthe election would be "rigged" by California Democrats.

The two candidates will run against each other again in the fall.

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a freshman congressman, lost the Republican nomination for Virginia's fifth district seat to Bob Good, aformer official in the athletics department at Liberty University in June.

Denver Riggleman speaks during a forum at the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance in Lynchburg, Va., Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.(Photo: Taylor Irby, AP)

Riggleman, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was the subject of intense criticism from Republicans in his district after he officiated a gay wedding for two former campaign volunteers last summer.

The Virginia county GOP formally censuredRiggleman last fall, doubtinghis "support for traditional family values, and other conservative principles," according to The Hill.

"He's out of step with the base of the party on life," Good saidin May,in a debate with Riggleman on The Schilling Show, a Charlottesville radio program. "He's out of step on marriage. He's out of step on immigration. He's out of step on health care, on climate, on drug legalization."

Riggleman claimed the election process was riggedby Republican insiders, by makingthe nomination process a convention instead of a primary. Conventions traditionally favor more conservative candidates and have been used for years by Virginia Republicans to block moderate candidates from winning elections.

Good will face off against physician Cameron Webb in the fall's general election.

Ronny Jackson, aTrump-backed former White House physician with no political experience, beatJosh Winegarner, a former cattle industry lobbyist, in the Republican runoff for Texas' 13th District House seat.

Jackson, whowas a White House physician to President Donald Trumpand former PresidentBarack Obama, received endorsements from Trump on Twitter, who called him "strong on Crimes and Borders" and insisted Jackson would "protect your #2A."

Winegarner had the support of outgoing Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry.

Former White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson arrives at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, April 2, 2018.(Photo: Andrew Harnik, AP)

Jacksonpositioned his relationship with Trump as the biggest asset to his candidacy. Thedistrict has some of the highest rates of support for Trump in the country, giving the president 80% of its vote in 2016, according to the Cook Political Report.

Jackson had afundraising advantage over Winegarner as well, accruing just over $490,000 since April, comparedto Winegarner's almost $300,000 haul duringthat same time period.Jackson won with about 56 percent of the vote, beating Winegarner by more than 11 points.

Jackson, who is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, was in the running to be Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2018, but ultimatelywithdrew from consideration amid a swarm of allegations of prior misconduct.

More: Some Americans refuse to mask up. Rules, fines and free masks will change that, experts say.

Former colleaguestold Senate investigators that Jackson regularly drank on duty, had an "explosive" temper, and that he abused his powers to prescribe himself prescription drugs for recreational use, among other allegations of misconduct.

Jackson denied all of the allegations leveled against him, calling them "completely false and fabricated." Theinvestigation was opened by the Pentagon inspector general in June 2018 and remains ongoing.

More: Wearing a mask doesn't just protect others from COVID-19, it protects you from infection, perhaps serious illness, too

On election night, Jackson celebrated his win by tweeting, "Jane and I just got off the phone with @realDonaldTrump! Its official! I am honored to be the Republican nominee for #TX13! I promise I will make you proud!"

Jackson will face off against Gus Trujillo, who won the Democratic runoff election.

Mondaire Jones, a lawyer from Rockland County, wonthe nomination forlong-time incumbent Rep. Nita Loweys 17th District seat in New York. The Associated Press did not call the race until about three weeks after it ended, though the nomination was always considered Jones', who had picked up more than double the votesof any other candidate by election night.

Mondaire Jones, Democratic candidate for Congress in the 17th C.D., speaks during a rally honoring lives lost to police violence in front of the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains July 15, 2020. The rally was sponsored by the Westchester Coalition for Police Reform.(Photo: Seth Harrison/The Journal News)

His closest competitor, former federal prosecutor Adam Schleifer, hadfour times Jones budget.

Jones received endorsements from progressive members of Congress such as Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Jones' campaign did not accept corporate PAC donations, and signed the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge.He ran on a platform that advocated for labor rights and student debt relief, as well as Medicare for All and paid sick leave as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Bowman, he is also a proponent ofthe Green New Deal.

In an interview with NPR, Jones said that it was his commitment to progressive policies that set him apart during the primary election."I am the only candidate in a crowded Democratic primary who supports the only policy that would literally ensure everyone has health care in this country and that is Medicare for All," he said.

In the fall, Jones will face Maureen McArdle Schulman, who won the district's Republican nomination.

Marie Newman, a former management consultant and founder of an anti-bullying non-profit, narrowly beat incumbent Rep. Dan Lipinksi in the Democratic race for Illinois' third district seat in March.

Lipinski's father, WilliamLipinski, held the seat for more than twodecades before his son succeeded him. Newman's win represents the first time the seat will be out of the Lipinski family since 1983.

Marie Newman smiles as she campaigns in the Archer Heights neighborhood of Chicago.(Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast, AP Images)

Lipinskiisnotoriously one of the last few conservative Democrats in Congress. His opposition to abortion rights, the DREAM Act, and the Affordable Care Act all alienated him from his party. In contrast, Newman was backed by progressive groups such as Justice Democrats, the political action committee that supportedOcasio-Cortez in 2018.

Newman will compete withCounty Board Member Mike Fricilone, who won the Republican nomination, in the fall.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was previously Alabama's U.S. Senator for 20 years, lost his runoff bid to former football coach Tommy Tuberville.

Tuberville considers himself a Christian conservative,and ran a campaign that was pro-life and pro-gun rights. He told the Montgomery Advertiser in March that he supported Trumps efforts to build a border wall with Mexico, and wanted to reduce the national debt through cuts to social programs, with exceptions for Social Security, Medicare, andMedicaid.

The race to see who would compete with Sen.Doug Jones, who flipped the traditionally Republican seat in 2018, also highlighted the rift between Trump and Sessions.

Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville defeated former Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Alabama Republican Senate primary. Tuberville goes on to challenge Democratic Senator Doug Jones. (July 15) AP Domestic

In the early days of Trump's presidency and during his campaign Sessions was a prominent ally. Sessions was the first U.S. Senator to endorse Trump's campaign, providing it cruciallegitimacy before the 2016 Super Tuesday elections. Sessions publicly supported Trump as early as 2015, sporting a Make America Great Again hat at a Trump rally in August2015 and praising Trump's border wall plans.

More: Illinois GOP congressman criticizes Trump for lack of 'loyalty' to former Attorney General Sessions

Sessions' goodwill with Trump expired when herecused himselffrom the Russia investigation, whichled to Robert Mueller'sappointmentas special counsel and anearlytwo-year investigation that shadowed Trump's early years in office. Trump was not charged, and fired Sessions in 2018.

In a television interview last summer, TrumpcalledSessions' appointment as attorney general the "biggest mistake" of his presidency.

Although Trump regularly endorses GOP candidatesusually on Twitter he paid special attention to the race between Sessions and Tuberville,explicitlytyinghis endorsement of Tuberville to Sessions' recusal.

Tuberville will face off against Jones in November.

Contributing: William Cummings, Brian Lyman, Stephen Gruber-Miller, and Nick Coltrain

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/07/22/2020-election-democrats-republicans-both-see-congressional-primary-runoff-upsets/5369587002/

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Congressional upsets: Progressives, candidates of color, and GOP outsiders net primary wins - USA TODAY

Solving Americas race-related problems is hard. So hard that nobody really has any clue how to do it. Burning down an auto-parts store isnt going to help. But forcing people to attend reeducation seminars also seems unlikely to work.

Just as we spend more time watching TV than training for marathons, we lapse into doing whats easy. And whats easy, when it comes to race, is pretending to be outraged about commonly used words. Trying desperately not to get canceled, bosses are trying to think ahead about what words might create a fake Duraflame firestorm of anger, and preemptively ruling ordinary words out of bounds.

At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word looters, which has been used many times in the paper, now has a pejorative and racist connotation and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should talk to your immediate supervisor. Translation: Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed. So what to call looters? Non-paying shoppers? That doesnt quite tell the story: Ordinary shoplifters dont usually bust up all the windows. How about self-appointed retail-justice-commandos? Revolutionary mass goods-redistribution agents?

Harvard, which in 2015 abolished the name House Master for professors in charge of residential houses, is being sweated by a group called the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard that decided to be triggered by the term Board of Overseers, an alumni panel dating back to the 17th century that selects the university president. Past members include John F. Kennedy. The Coalition proclaimed that the name must be changed because Overseer also refers to men hired by plantation owners during that same time period to violently control and abuse enslaved people. Plantation overseers were paid to elicit the most work out of enslaved etc. I didnt finish the paragraph because my stupidity alarm was ringing in my ears. In June, the University of Louisville ditched the name overseer from student government organizations because of slavery.

In Houston, a Realtors association announced it would no longer use terms such as master bedroom or master bathroom not because any sane person ever associated a nice Mediterranean-style 4BR with Kunta Kinte getting whipped in Roots but because some yellow-blazered property guru thought this would be a way of expressing generalized racial niceness. Is any single black person better off because of this word-juggling? No, but people are confusing gestures with actions more than ever.

Twitter, which is saturated with woke-campus paranoia, this month announced that it was blacklisting the word blacklist, along with other supposedly non-inclusive terms such as grandfathered (ageist, I guess), guys (too gendered) and sanity check, which is something most of us could use a little more of in our lives, but Twitter desperately needs on a daily basis, the way Uma Thurman needed that adrenaline shot in Pulp Fiction.

But any noun that has any association with anything bad in anyones mind, or ever did at any point in history, is now under scrutiny. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah says the Texas Rangers name is racist. Now that the woke left has succeeded in getting the Washington Redskins to change their name a decision that despite nonstop cheerleading by the media never enjoyed more than 29 percent support in polls every other team name is under scrutiny.

The teams name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen, Attiah wrote.

Wait till she finds out what cowboys did. For that matter, doesnt the term Vikings trigger deep-seated fears of marauding, raping and pillaging, often carried out by people wearing horns they had cut out of the heads of innocent animals? I feel unsafe. Clearly the Minnesota football franchise should stop celebrating a people associated with bloodshed and rename themselves the Conflict De-Escalation Counselors. Rethinking every noun in America is the only way forward, people. Or do you want to be considered one of the Klansmen?

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.

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These are the innocuous words progressives want to ban you from using - New York Post

WASHINGTON Congress went two-for-two swatting down measures to slash the national security budget by $74 billion, rejecting a proposal Wednesday from Sen. Bernie Sanders to redirect the money toward domestic needs.

The Senate voted 23-77 against an amendment to its version of the $740.5 billion annual defense policy bill. Progressives floated the plan to use defense dollars (excluding salaries and health care of military personnel) to address the pandemics economic fallout.

The amendments sponsors argued the social spending would better align with peoples needs and views, and that national security should be redefined in the wake of the global pandemic. They said the military budget is loaded with waste and unjustly benefits defense contractors.

Given all the unprecedented crisis the country faces, now is not the time to increase the Pentagons bloated $740 billion budget, said Sanders, I-Vt. At a time when 30 million Americans are in danger of losing their jobs, now is not the time to be spending more on national defense than we did during the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Korean War.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., encouraged senators to vote against the amendment. McConnell accused Democrats of trying to decimate the defense budget and chided Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for throwing Sanders his support.

The Democratic leader, who in almost every floor speech tries to accuse this administration of being too soft on Americas adversaries, wants to literally decimate our defense budget to finance a socialist spending spree, McConnell said. Defense spending demonstrates our will to defend ourselves and our interests in a dangerous world. Keeping our nation safe is our foremost constitutional duty. We cannot shirk it.

Progressives hoped to spark an internal debate among Democrats, who were evenly split by the Senate vote.

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SASCs ranking member, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the amendment would jeopardize defense-related jobs and upend the carefully negotiated bipartisan budget agreement from 2018, which set spending levels for defense and domestic spending for two years. He acknowledged Congress needs to address historically neglected communities.

This across-the-board approach, its good for a headline, its good to make a point, but were here to make policy, and I hope we do make policy, Reed said.

Winning 23 Democratic votes was the most significant step forward in recent years, to reduce the militarys budget, Sanders said in a statement afterward.

We are going to continue building a political movement which understands that it is far more important to invest in working people, the children, the elderly, and the poor than in spending more on defense than the next 11 nations combined, he said.

On Tuesday, the House rejected a companion bill, 93-324, which is roughly a 3-to-1 margin. Democrats split, 92-139, while 185 Republicans voted no.

After the House vote, advocates and the measures co-sponsors said change was on the horizon.

Ninety-three members of Congress stood together to oppose a bloated $740 billion defense budget, tweeted Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Though our amendment didnt pass, progressive power is stronger than ever. We will keep fighting for pro-peace, pro-people budgets until it becomes a reality.

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Progressive effort to cut defense fails twice in Congress - DefenseNews.com

New York (AFP) - Energized by the US's massive anti-racism protests, history-making progressives from New York -- young, black, Latino and gay -- want to shake up Congress's status quo when they are likely elected in November.

Mondaire Jones, 33, and Afro-Latino Ritchie Torres, 32, are set to become the first black, openly gay members of the House of Representatives following the November 3 vote.

Galvanized by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, they recently won primaries to become the Democratic Party's candidates in districts that overwhelmingly vote Democrat, all but securing their election to Congress's lower house.

Although they recognize the significance of the moment, they say they aren't going to be content with just being the first, and aim to engineer real change.

"I am not running for Congress to make history as the first openly gay black," Jones told AFP.

"But it is not lost on me the power of representation. Growing up, I never imagined that someone like me came to run for Congress, let alone win, because it had never happened before," he added.

The pair will be joined by 44-year-old Jamaal Bowman, who is black. He is a school principal and has three children with his wife.

Bowman stunned 16-term veteran Eliot Engel in the June primaries despite the 73-year-old being backed by the Democratic Party's elite, including Hillary Clinton and House leader Nancy Pelosi.

The trio's victory proved that the surprise election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018 when she was in her late 20s was no one-off. She stunned the party establishment by taking the seat from a Democrat who had been in the House for 20 years.

"It's a victory for the new left," said David Barker, an expert on government at American University in Washington.

"The more overtly socialist wing of the Democratic Party did not really used to exist at all until not that long ago and now is a major force," he told AFP.

The presumptive congressmen are part of a wave of New York politicians belonging to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who are unseating veteran, mostly white, legislators.

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Fans of senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, these men want to shake up their party and push it further to the left.

President Donald Trump is using their ascendency to score his own political points, arguing the Democratic Party is becoming controlled by "a radical left."

He has said the Republican Party will beat "Marxists, anarchists, and agitators" during his re-election bid.

- Coronavirus -

Mass protests following the killing of George Floyd in police custody in May and the racial and economic disparities highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic helped spur the New York trio's candidacies.

Torres will represent an area of the Bronx that is one of the poorest in the country.

Jones won in an overwhelmingly white district where only ten percent of the population is black.

"We are undergoing a shift within the Democratic Party: new voices, diverse voices that bring a sense of urgency about the climate crisis, about the health care crisis, about the housing crisis," said Jones.

They have pitched themselves as champions of the poor and universal healthcare. Forty million Americans lost jobs due to the COVID-19 crisis, which has killed blacks and Latinos in disproportionately large numbers.

Jones was brought up in poverty by his grandparents in the New York suburbs. He studied at Stanford University and then Harvard Law School before working in the US Justice Department during Barack Obama's presidency.

He suggests some of the old guard have not done enough and must "be replaced by people who understand what's at stake, especially under the presidency of Donald Trump."

In addition to championing racial justice, Jones and Torres pledge to fight for LGBTQ rights.

"Their voices are going to make a tremendous difference," said Elliot Imse of the LGBTQ Victory Institute, which helps LGBTQ people win elected office in the United States.

Barker -- the politics expert -- notes that Democratic representation in Congress has become much more diverse with regards to gender, race and religion, in recent years.

"But the opposite has been true with respect to Republicans," which is getting more male, more white, and more Christian, he said.

Currently, only two of the US Senate's 100 members and seven of the House's 435 representatives identify themselves as LGBTQ.

Although the LGBTQ community comprises 4.5 percent of America's population, members occupy only 0.17 percent of elected roles, according to the Victory Institute.

"We certainly have a long way to go," Imse told AFP.

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Black and gay: New York progressives aim to shake up US Congress - Yahoo News