October Message from the Chairman

I recently read an article by Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer in San Diego, and a Republican. His basic theme: “Trump is enough to fire up Democrats.”

He writes that Democrats have one job in 2020: Beating Donald Trump. A key line in his article (online at USA Today) is, “If progressives manage to mess this up by insisting on hard-left positions and ideological purity, they will own Trump’s second term.”

Truax states that the 2020 election is not a normal election. He says it won’t be about progressives and conservatives. He says it will be about those who believe America’s democratic institutions are more important than the politics of the day and those who are willing to wreck them for short-term political gain.

The words he writes that resonate with me are, “We who choose to stand with our democratic institutions need to keep our eye on the prize. We can’t afford the self-indulgence of standing on principle and going down in glorious defeat.”

Simply put, if we choose not to support a Democratic candidate with whom we disagree on certain issues instead of doing all we can to defeat Trump, we will be handing him another term. We cannot get bogged down in the minutia of certain issues and subsequently miss the bigger picture of defeating this man who is hurting our country.

As Democrats we must unite around one goal: Defeating Trump. We must get behind a candidate who can defeat that man; that is the only issue on which we must focus. Once we get him or her elected, we Democrats can then address issues that are important to us all.