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A liberal advocacy group spent a Saturday afternoon knocking on doors to get Howard County residents talking about politics.

Together We Will, a group founded in reaction to Donald Trump's election as president, held a door-to-door "listening campaign" June 10 in Owen Brown to ask residents what political issues mattered most to them. They began knocking on doors around Howard County in March and will continue through 2017, with the next outing in mid-July.

The canvassing effort, called Knock Every Door, draws from a national movement that advocates "deep canvassing," which requires in-depth conversations with voters. Canvassers gather data by asking respondents to rate their preferences on a scale, then getting them to describe those preferences in detail with follow-up questions.

Together We Will co-chair Becca Niburg said the effort is strictly a "listening campaign not an attempt for us to impose views or lecture people.

"Politics has become an exercise of people talking at each other," Niburg said. "Our goal with the campaign is to bridge the divide to truly listen to all points of view."

She said she hopes elected officials will use the data they collect to craft policies that respond to "what real people need."

"Everybody is kind of worried about the same things," said Niburg. "People just want their families to be safe and they want to have a job."

Other local liberal organizations including Red to Blue, Indivisible and Do The Most Good are also participating in the campaign, as is the Howard County Democratic Campaign Committee.

Niburg co-chairs the county's branch of Together We Will with its founder, Chiara D'Amore.

The Howard County chapter of Together We Will began as a chapter of Pantsuit Nation, a private Facebook group of Hillary Clinton supporters that emerged before the election. After Trump was elected, organizers across the country began working to "galvanize" reactions, and D'Amore decided to focus on local issues.

"Politics are highly local," D'Amore said. "I just wanted to do something at the county level where people could get to know each other."

She describes Together We Will as a "progressive solidarity network" whose priorities include fostering inclusive communities, protecting the environment, securing equal rights and amplifying other progressive voices.

The volunteer-driven Howard County group has more than 1,200 members on its private Facebook page, Niburg said. A smaller number, D'Amore said, come to in-person meetings regularly. About 70 percent are women, she estimated, but she said each volunteer has a different drive to show up.

"What I've found is that most people want to do something, they just don't know where to go or what to do," D'Amore said.

One of Together We Will's youngest volunteers is Niburg's daughter, Alyssa. The 8-year-old has helped in Knock Every Door events and said her favorite part is "that I get to hear other people's stories and compare them to some of mine."

One of Alyssa's biggest worries about the next four years is that "more children are gonna have less friends, because their friends are immigrants," she said. "If you go back far enough, everyone's an immigrant. Trump is an immigrant!"

Together We Will Howard County falls under the national group's umbrella, and is also a registered member of the movement Indivisible, recently in headlines for organizing protests at Republican town halls around the U.S. But both D'Amore and Niburg said that their group's focus is local and strictly non-partisan.

Howard County bills that the group has supported include CB-9, , the so-called "sanctuary bill," and CN-30, a bill to create a public finance system for political candidates, Niburg said.

For D'Amore, who said she saw Howard County and Columbia as a "progressive, forward-looking place to be," the presidential election, as well as the Republicans leading the state and county, signified a shift.

On June 10, five volunteers trudged from door to door in the stifling 88-degree heat, knocking on doors, asking residents of Owen Brown what mattered to them.

Armed with scripts and clipboards and sunscreen, the group divvied up neighborhoods and split into two groups. One group approached a quiet block of brick townhouses. It took 10 doors before the volunteers heard the sound of a latch opening.

Later, Hester remarked on the cultural and ethnic diversity of the neighborhood, noting that most people they talked to that day were non-native English speakers. Most residents they spoke to leaned liberal, and none were Republicans.

The first resident they spoke to, Ali Ali, said he approved of Trump despite being a registered Democrat. "He's not a typical politician," Ali said. "That's a good thing." Ali later said one of the most important issues to him was arts education, because "it makes people more tolerant."

Other residents saw Trump in a more negative light. Asked to rate his satisfaction with the president, on a scale of one to 10, Lolu Osoba let out a deep, booming laugh. "Zero," he shouted. "Russia select your president for you!"

Owen Brown resident Michael Ioffe also gave Trump a zero, and when asked to think of words to describe him joked: "Do you really want me to think about him?"

Originally from Nigeria, Osoba told the volunteers that he now votes in every election Hester gave him a fist bump. Ioffe, who came to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, also said he votes regularly. "I came from a country where that wasn't an option," he said.

Nearly every resident named healthcare as a primary issue facing the country; many also named education and the environment.

Though most had strong opinions about national politics, most were stumped when asked about state and local politicians.

One resident said Hogan had "done a lot of beautiful things," but when asked for specifics admitted he did not pay attention to state politics.

Most people, volunteer Jennifer Jones said, didn't like Trump, but were "okay" with Republicans Gov. Larry Hogan and County Executive Allan Kittleman.

Prunier Law, who said Saturday's canvassing event was her first with Knock Every Door, remarked that peoples' political opinions seemed overshadowed by their daily lives. She described asking one rushed resident if they were happy with the election. The resident responded, "Sure not. But I've got to feed my kids."

"I think it's really important that we feel the humanity of people," Prunier Law said.

Read more here:
Progressives launch "listening campaign" in Howard County - Baltimore Sun

The second decade of the 20th century was a heady time for progressives. A Democrat with liberal leanings on most issues, Woodrow Wilson entered the White House. The labor movement was getting stronger, and the suffragettes were taking to the streets. In 1914, Herbert Croly launched The New Republic, which would serve as a flagship for liberalism for the rest of the century. Progressivism had the wind in its sails, and high ideals shaped the political and social landscape.

In 1917, the United States entered World War I, and the whole idea of progress seemed as dead as the millions in the trenches of Flanders. Yet some progressives did not abandon their hopes. They persisted.

In his new book, Young Radicals In the War for American Ideals, Jeremy McCarter looks at this persistent idealism in the lives of five progressives who "didn't surrender their ideals." They are: Walter Lippmann, John Reed, Max Eastman, Alice Paul and Randolph Bourne. "The only way to understand ideals and the people who fight for them is to watch the story on the individual scale, where you can register personal desires, personal choices, and personal consequences," McCarter writes. "The story has to be told in close-up, not panorama."

Full disclosure: I met McCarter when he was an intern at The New Republic more than 20 years ago, and we have remained friends. I have not communicated with him since I received a review copy of this book, as is my practice.

The story begins with Lippmann working for the socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York in 1912, but he quickly grows disillusioned with the tiny steps they manage to take. "The gap between hope and reality brings him quickly to a crisis: Can he condone this sham exercise in socialism, let alone continue to be a part of it? For the first time in his overachieving life, he finds himself in a predicament with no clear way out." He decides to quit and return to New York City, but his idealism is intact. "Their era is 'bursting with new ideas, new plans, and new hopes,' he [Lippmann] writes later that year. 'The world was never so young as it is today, so impatient of old and crusty things.'"

The sentences quoted above not only disclose a lot about Lippmann, and advance the narrative, they illustrate McCarter's gift as a writer: This entire book is fluid and incisive, detailed and universal.

Back in New York City, Lippmann quickly reconnects with a classmate of his from Harvard, Jack Reed. Reed wants to be a writer and enlists Lippmann in a project that results in a 20,000-word unpublishable essay about their time at Harvard and the radicalism they tried to bring to birth. A tour of familial duty back in Oregon when his father dies gives Reed the space he needs to apply his talents to greater effect, and upon returning to New York, he shares in manuscript form an epic poem he has written about life in Greenwich Village, "A Day in Bohemia." It begins to forge his reputation and create a sense of self-identity for the Village, and young people flock to his flat at 42 Washington Square. Here are some lines that give some flavor of the poem, and of the times:

Now with an easy caper of the mind We rectify the Errors of Mankind; Now with a sharpness of a keen-edged jest, Plunge a hot thunder-bolt in Mammon's breast; Impatient Youth, in fine creative rage, With both hands wrests the quenchless torch from Age, Not as the Dilettanti, who explain Why they have failed, -excuse, lament, complain, Condemn real artists to exalt themselves, And credit their misfortune to the elves;- But to Gods of Strength make Offertory,- And pit our young wits in the race for glory!

Some of the best parts of McCarter's book are the many, many quotes from the protagonists' writings, brimming with verve and idealism, at least as the story begins.

Another text that communicates the ambience of Greenwich Village in these years was the statement that ran on the front page of copies of The Masses:

This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank, arrogant, impertinent, searching for the true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a moneymaking press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers there is a field for this publication in America.

The statement came from the pen of Max Eastman, the editor, who could certainly attest to the fact that no one was making money off the publication. In the summer of 1912, he had received an envelope in the mail that enclosed a torn piece of paper which read "in its entirety" McCarter notes: "You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay." With a job offer like that, who could say no? Eastman would accept the position and go on to become one of the most committed and unflinching of the young radicals.

No one was more unflinching, however, than Alice Paul. In 1913, she had already spent time in a British prison for leading protests on behalf of women's suffrage, where she began a hunger strike and was force-fed. Returning to the U.S., she joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which had been pursuing a strategy focused on winning suffrage at the state level. Paul leads a protest for women's suffrage down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on the eve of President Wilson's inauguration. The protest turned into a fracas, garnering the publicity Paul knew it would. Fourteen days later, Paul is part of a delegation meeting with President Wilson. He is non-committal. Impatient with both Wilson and the more cautious leadership of the NAWSA, Paul founds the National Women's Party and would agitate for a federal amendment granting women the right to vote.

Randolph Bourne is the final young radical to whom the reader is introduced. The same year Paul is leading her protest in Washington, Bourne is getting ready to graduate from Columbia University. He had delayed college to earn money, and at 27 years old, he is nervous about his future. But Bourne's writing career has already kicked off with a bang: As a sophomore, he sent an essay to The Atlantic Monthly, and they not only published it, they kept publishing additional essays by him. He brings out a book of his essays in his senior year, Youth and Life, but he confesses to a friend that he was "never young, and has only partly lived." Deformed by a childhood illness, Bourne is a hunchback, and he writes of himself that he is "a man cruelly blasted by the powers that brought him into the world, in a way that makes him both impossible to be desired and yet cruel irony that wiseMontaigneknew about doubly endowed with desire."

I shall conclude this review tomorrow.

[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]

Go here to read the rest:
'Young Radicals' chronicles last century's US progressives - National Catholic Reporter (blog)

This was Saturday night in Chicago, at the People's Summit, and as Sanders addressed loyalists from around the country, rows of diehard supporters, many wearing red, chanted and waved placards with at least one banner declaring an intention to "Draft Bernie."

Asking "what comes next" as it pertains to his 2020 plans is a nonstarter with the Vermont independent. The future, as organizers here are quick to argue, is happening now. Coalition-building on the left, fighting to take hold and remake a party Sanders has pointedly refused to formally join, and strategizing ahead of the 2018 midterms are, truly, the work of the day. Projecting out four years is a stickier wicket, one Sanders has assiduously avoided discussing in any meaningful way.

"It's a little bit early to be talking about 2020," a spokesman told CNN over email. "His focus right now is on defeating Trump's disastrous agenda, to defeat the Republican health care bill that would take health care away from 23 million people and on advancing a progressive agenda to help working families across the country."

Sanders might not enjoy the constant queries, but they are not going away, and not simply because nosy narrative merchants in the mainstream media cannot abide -- or sell readers on -- the nuances of movement politics. Sanders' plans are important, as many activists here readily concede, for reasons they learned the hard way, as his campaign became increasingly hamstrung by the limits of its insurgency. For most here, though, falling short in 2016 was only a first step.

"Absolutely, he should run again," said freshman California Rep. Ro Khanna, who unseated a fellow Democrat, eight-term congressman Mike Honda, last year. "If you look at from the perspective of anyone in the past, if they come that close to the nomination, they'd almost be the de facto nominee the next time. I don't think he should be anointed -- we shouldn't make the mistake of 2016 again -- but absolutely he should run."

Khanna made the political case: Sanders, he said, has the vision, the stamina and "trust at a time when people don't trust anyone in politics" -- but also zeroed in on more pragmatic concerns.

"One of the advantages he would have this time is he'll have an infrastructure, (the support of) more elected officials and the apparatus to be strong," Khanna said.

Among the loyalists at the People's Summit, a three-day convention organized by National Nurses United, the most active and vocal pro-Sanders union, there is broad support for another presidential run. And while most would prefer he again fight for the Democratic Party nomination, others are itching for an independent campaign. The "Draft Bernie" group wants Sanders to break away from the Democrats and form a "People's Party," which he would use to launch either his own 2020 bid or as a platform to lift up another progressive national candidate.

Maria Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, told CNN the organization would support Sanders if chose to run, but wasn't holding its breath waiting for an announcement. She also spoke about the importance of not leaving the decision until too late.

"He needs to build capacity now and build the ground team," Svart said. "He needs to make a plan, to do what he didn't have time to do last time around, which is absolutely necessary this time around."

Unlike in 2015, when Sanders entered the race and began to draw raucous crowds, and 2016, when his suddenly formidable challenge to Hillary Clinton finally faltered, there is now, in effect, a campaign-in-waiting on the left. Sanders' own "Our Revolution" is a formidable political organization, if for no other reason than its vaunted email list. And an increasingly activated and savvy progressive movement would flock to do the grassroots work most candidates would struggle to match.

Still, Jane Sanders is, like her husband, plainly annoyed by the speculation.

"That's exactly the wrong question," she told CNN's Wolf Blitzer last November, days after Trump defeated Clinton. "Nobody cares (about Sanders' 2020 plans) except the political pundits. He is not -- he's concerned about 2017."

Six months later, the realities of the presidential campaign life cycle are beginning to demand a more nuanced response. Sanders' silence on the matter could eventually put off other potential candidates, allies who might not enter if the godfather of the "Berniecrat" movement was lurking on the sidelines.

"I would say that we intend to play a role in the 2020 election," Sanders told CNN during a brief interview on Saturday, adding with a rare fatalist note: "What that is remains to be decided, but nobody should step back. They should be completely engaged now and the leadership will rise. It will emerge."

"I want him to continue to do the work of building a people's movement that is bigger than him," she said, the added with a knowing smile, "And then secondly, yes, I want him to run for president in 2020. Why not?"

Of 2016, Turner said, Sanders simply "needed more time" to match Clinton's organization and reach out to voters.

But there is another clock that might be working against Sanders. Even among devoted supporters here, his age -- Sanders will be 78 when 2020 contests begin -- is a prevailing area of concern.

"I like the idea of him running for president because I think he would do a good job, I just don't think that most of the public will believe that he has the strength and endurance to make it another eight years, let alone four, as president," said Ben Klahn, who organized for Sanders in Michigan.

Klahn recalled a friend telling him recently that she hoped Sanders would "choose someone who really represents him and his ideals and what he stands for and sort of anointing them and having them carry on the movement. To take it from his hands and run with it."

Like who?

"Oh god, I have no idea," he said. "No idea."

Sanders might consider the Democratic Party a mess -- he described its "current model and the current strategy" as an "absolute failure" in a rip-roaring speech Saturday night. But the state of his own movement, though humming along at the grassroots level with a coherence unusual for the left, suffers from at least one very familiar problem: the lack of a bench at the highest echelons.

Were Sanders to stand down, progressives would be met not just with a lack of consensus on who to back in 2020, but few easily named options. Where the liberal center of the party has ambitious elected officials in the mix like Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California, to name a few, the progressive field is quieter. Were she to run, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has made inroads with the party establishment, has the bona fides to woo the left, but her decision to endorse Clinton over Sanders is still painful for activists who expected her support.

People for Bernie Sanders co-founder Winnie Wong, one of the lead organizers in Chicago, compared the state of play among progressives with the moderate liberal wing of the party, embodied by the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank run by longtime Clinton ally Neera Tanden.

"CAP has a slate of people that they think maybe will become their candidate," Wong said. "We do not."

"There's a general consensus among all these groups here that there isn't a single candidate that we are uniting behind," she added, "but we would obviously unite behind and organize up behind Bernie."

If they get the chance.

Read this article:
Progressives consider, or don't, life after Bernie Sanders - CNN

Les Leopold, executive director at The Labor Institute writesWill Progressives Only Talk To Themselves?

For the last generation, progressives have organized themselves into issue silos, each with its own agenda. Survival depends on fundraising (largely from private foundations) based on the uniqueness of ones own silo. Each group must develop its own expertise and activities which distinguish it from other groups. Each needs to proclaim that its issue is the existential threat, be it climate change, police violence, abortion rights or health care. The net result of this Darwinian struggle is a fractured landscape of activity. The creativity, talent and skill are there in abundance, but the coherence and common purpose among groups is not.

Siloed organizational structures also make it extremely difficult to cooperate on a common program to reverse runawayinequality, There is little incentive to form a grand progressive alliance to build what the Sanders campaign, for example, had set in motion. Better to launch your own national effort and claim that it is the center of the organizing universe.

It is therefore not surprising that the two biggest progressive challenges to runawayinequalityin the last decade Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders campaign did not arise from within these siloed organizations. OWS largely grew from a notice in Adbusters, a Vancouver, BC, journal. Most of those who did the occupying at the 900 encampments also did not come from progressive siloed organizations. In fact, the non-profit/NGO community more or less watched from the sidelines.

Similarly, the Sanders campaign also did not emerge from a concerted effort among progressives to create a new politics within the Democratic Party. Rather, it was driven by Bernies own social-democratic vision that he had been espousing for over 40 years, year after year after year. When his effort showed signs of life, progressives broadly divided between the idealists feeling the burn and the pragmatists seeking to back a sure winner, who at least would provide access to progressive ideas.

The advent of Trump certainly has unleashed an enormous amount of progressive activity. In addition to the many sizeable marches, there are now approximately 5,000 Indivisible groups making life miserable for Republican office holders. However, nearly all of this activity is anti-Trump and defensive. There is no common Indivisible national agenda, nor is there a common organization to set a coherent strategic direction.

More importantly, pure anti-Trumpism guarantees we will be talking to the already convinced. By focusing solely on Trump, it becomes next to impossible to reach the Trump voters who also voted for Sanders and Obama.

Some argue that such outreach is a waste of time because there really are not that many Obama-to-Sanders-to-Trump voters. Unfortunately, exit polls do not give us enough data to reasonably estimate the size of this hybrid voting population. But sources inside the United Steelworkers, for example, report that 50 percent of their members who voted, voted for Trump. Given how representative those members are of the broader working class, were probably looking at several million Obama-Sanders-Trump voters.

We do know this: In the state of Michigan there was a 500,000 vote loss from Obama (2012) to Clinton (2016). It was minus 290,000 in Pennsylvania and minus 222,000 in Wisconsin.

Very few, if any of our siloed progressive organizations are targeting these working people. Danger ahead. [...]

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We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. ~Molly Ivins, from her final column, January 11, 2007

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2002No charges against Padilla:

Once upon a time, security agencies needed things like "charges," or "probable cause" to arrest and detain someone. Thanks to the WOT, that's no longer necessary. Case in point: The alleged "dirty bomb" suspect that had the press in titters the last two days. While headlines trumpeted a victorious blow against terror, the government's case against gangbanger Jose Padilla was nothing more than vapor. The latest in this bizarre saga? Rumsfeld now admits that the US is not going to arrest Padilla. They just want to 'question him'.

Yet at the same time, in violation of everything this country and its Constitution stand for, he is being held "indefinitely". This is getting really scary.

Ontoday'sKagro in the Morningshow:Greg Dworkinrounds up the Trump Trainwreck. On the radar: GA-06 andVA-Gov. Trumps trust gap is yooge. Will Republicans skip recess toavoid constituentswork? Latest legal wrangling over emoluments, explained. Caesar? Thats just locker room talk!

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Continued here:
Open thread for night owls: LeopoldWill progressives only talk to themselves? - Daily Kos

WASHINGTON Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam squares off against progressive favorite Tom Perriello on Tuesday in the states highly competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary, where the left flank of the party hopes national momentum will carry it to a win.

Thanks to Virginias status as one of two states with gubernatorial races this year (the other is New Jersey), the primary has attracted historic levels of attention and resources from Democrats eager to land a blow against President Donald Trump.

Northam, a 57-year-old pediatric neurologist, had locked up the support of virtually every major elected official in Virginia and was poised to cruise to the nomination until Perriello, a 42-year-old former diplomat and one-term congressman, announced his run in January.

Thanks to the endorsements of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the countrys leading progressive politicians, and firm stances on several controversial issues, Perriello has excited the states younger and more liberal voters, erasing virtually all of Northams lead in the polls.

As a result, many progressives view the race as a crucial test of whether a more liberal candidate can prevail in a state where moderate Democrats have long ruled the roost.

This primary is really about what foot the Democratic Party in Virginia is going to lean on, said Quentin Kidd, a Virginia politics expert at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Its leaned on the right foot for a decade and a half since Mark Warner evolved this model of a Democrat who can win statewide in Virginia. If Perriello wins it means it will lean slightly to the left foot.

Kidd uses the word lean, because he doesnt think the shift would be any more dramatic than a pivot to the left.

The Washington Post/Getty Images

Nowhere is the potential shift more significant, however, than in the state governments posture toward Dominion Energy, Virginias influential power monopoly.

Perriello has refused to accept contributions from Dominion and opposes construction of the Atlantic Coastal pipeline, which the company is planning to construct across the state. Northam has declined to take a comparable stance against the natural gas pipeline, favoring tight regulation instead.

In the end, approval of the pipeline is a matter for federal regulators, but Dominion clearly views Perriellos vocal opposition as a major threat. The company has mobilized tens of thousands of its employees, retirees and shareholders to campaign in the gubernatorial primaries, using thinly veiled language that makes clear they prefer Northam.

If Northam wins tomorrow, you wont hear much about Dominion any more, because Northam wouldnt make that an issue, Kidd predicted.

When Perriello got into the race, he immediately began to nationalize the contest, claiming he was inspired to run by Trumps election and pitching himself as a bulwark against the effects of the presidents policies for Virginia.

What people want to see right now is that willingness to stand up to Trump and limit those really unconscionable and unconstitutional moves and also have a positive vision, he told HuffPost in March.

Northam emphasizes his legislative experience in Virginias capitol, but has also incorporated Trump, who he dubbed a narcissistic maniac, into his stump speeches.

Whatever you call him, were not letting him bring his hate into Virginia, Northam concludes in one of his television advertisements.

He has also gone toe to toe with Perriello on some of his bolder economic proposals, embracing the $15 minimum wage and putting forward his own free community college plan albeit one that, unlike his opponents, requires community service.

For some progressive activist supporters of Perriello, however, his early involvement in the anti-Trump resistance won them over. Perriellos presence at Dulles Airport to protest Trumps first travel ban in January and participation in subsequent rallies against the executive order made an impression on Virginia Democratic National Committee member Yasmine Taeb, who is now a vocal supporter of his.

He has been very committed to running a grassroots, bottom-to-top campaign, said Taeb, who lobbies on civil liberties issues for a Washington-based liberal nonprofit. He looks to us for guidance, not the other way around.

Taeb, like many of Perriellos most enthusiastic supporters, backed Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

For several reasons though, Sanders insurgent challenge to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not an apt parallel for the Perriello-Northam matchup.

Perriello spent years ensconced in the Democratic Party firmament, including as head of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. And the bid of Sanders acolyte Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison(D-Minn.), to chair the Democratic National Committeewasactively combattedby former President Barack Obama and his aides. But Perriello has attracted the endorsements of more than 30 Obama White House veterans, including close the former presidents confidante Valerie Jarrett. (Northam appealed to former Attorney General Eric Holder to ask Obama not to intervene in the race himself, according to The New York Times.)

Perriello, a Charlottesville native, became a darling of national Democrats during his time in Congress in 2009-10 for voting enthusiastically for the stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act, in spite of his conservative district, which included a large swath of rural Southside Virginia.

Obama campaigned for him in his 2010 reelection bid, which Perriello has publicized heavily in his current campaign ads. That anger over the ACA ultimately cost Perriello his seat only improved his standing in the party.

The Washington Post/Getty Images

But Perriellos time in Congress was also marked by attempts to triangulate on hot-button social issues. He earned an A rating from the National Rifle Association during his 2010 reelection campaign and received a $6,000 donation from the influential group based in Fairfax, Virginia.

More troubling still for some progressives was Perriellos vote for the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the ACA, which would have denied federal funding from the new law to any health insurance plans that cover abortions.

Perriello has since dubbed the NRA a nut-job extremist organization and embraced greater gun safety regulations.

He has also expressed regret for his vote for Stupak-Pitts, claiming he was honoring a promise to constituents to ensure the ACA complied with the Hyde Amendment, a law barring federal funding of abortions. Now the former congressman has embraced the complete abortion rights agenda and is proposing enshrining a womans right to an abortion in Virginias state constitution as a backstop against a Supreme Court ruling that overturns federal protections for the procedure.

But some reproductive rights activists still do not trust Perriello, claiming he has yet to be tested by a vote on the matter since his change of heart. Revelations that in 2004, Periello, a practicing Catholic, co-founded Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a social justice group that has compared abortion to torture and war have only heightened advocates suspicions. The Perriello campaign claims he has nonetheless always been pro-abortion rights.

Northam, by contrast, has a record of only ever supporting abortion rights, and played a key role in the fight to kill the trans-vaginal ultrasound bill as a state senator in 2012. NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia cited Northams record in its statement endorsing him.

This is about trust. I know exactly who Ralph Northam is, and I know exactly what Northam will do as governor. He will not stick his fingers up in the air to see which way the political wind is blowing, said Erin Matson, a Virginia-based reproductive rights activist who supports Northam.

For Matson, the primary is a test of the Democratic Partys commitment to abortion rights at a time when top lawmakers ranging from Sanders to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have loudly proclaimed that Democrats who oppose abortion are welcome in the party.

It is really disturbing to see this play out in Virginia, where the candidate who is considered more progressive has a murky history on abortion rights and Bernie is saying it is an optional part of being progressive, Matson said.

The Washington Post/Getty Images

In a further twist of the races complicated narrative though, Northam has admitted to voting twice for former President George W. Bush, who appointed two anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. In 2011, he also called health care a privilege. (He claims he was not following politics closely during the Bush years, and now considers health care a right.)

On other issues, like overturning Virginias status as a right-to-work state, which Perriello supports, but Northam has demurred on, the contrast between the two candidates is clearer.

One way or another, Perriellos chances of winning depend on expanding the electorate, since he enjoys the greatest advantages among young people, new voters and Democrats in Southside and Southwestern Virginia who have not voted regularly in primaries, according to Kidd of Christopher Newport University.

Northams support is concentrated in more reliable Democratic constituencies, including older Democrats and black voters, particularly in central and Southeast Virginia, Kidd added. The key battleground, he said, is in the Washington suburbs of Northern Virginia, where Perriello has been campaigning most heavily in the final weeks.

There was this pent up energy in the electorate for an alternative to Northam that Perriello tapped into. And that pent up energy has the capacity to surprise people, if the expanded electorate turns out, Kidd concluded. Thats the key.

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This Virginia Democratic Primary Is A Crucial Test For The Party's Progressive Wing - HuffPost