'BradCast' 6/6/2018: (Guest: Jim Dean of Democracy for America)
It was a wild ride on Tuesday night and into Wednesday, particularly in California, as eight states (CA, AL, IA, MS, MT, NJ, NM and SD) all held their mid-term primary elections, along with another special election for MO's state legislature. Despite California's "Top Two" or "Jungle Primary" system where all candidates, from all parties, run in the same primary, presenting a very real chance that Dems could have been shut out of some \u2018flippable' races altogether, due to the sheer number of Democrats on the ballot. But Democrats in California appear to have dodged a bullet, so far, with candidates successfully placing in the top two (although votes are still being tallied across the state).\xa0 Election Day voting problems raised concerns, such as in Los Angeles, where more than 118,000 voters' names were left off of printed voter rolls, and in South Dakota, where computerized e-pollbooks failed in eight counties. JIM DEAN, longtime chair of Democracy for America (DFA), joins us to discuss and analyze the reported results. Dean excoriates the national, "institutional" Democratic Party for meddling in state primaries, where voters, he argues, not the party, should decide who will run in November. He "celebrates" the "plethora of candidates that are out there running" in response to the nation's "little Fort Sumter moment in 2016." Tuesday brought more good news elsewhere for Democrats and progressives on Tuesday, including in New Mexico, where Debra Haaland now appears poised to become the first Native American woman ever to serve in the U.S. House, and in Missouri, where a Democratic win in a state special election appears to have freaked out Republicans, worried about the potential "blue wave" that Democrats hope to see crashing ashore this November...