Who we are:
Primary School is a collaboration between Nick Tagliaferro and Opinion Haver. They spend too much time focusing on elections and doing terrible tweets.
Nick Tagliaferro is a long-suffering New Jerseyan with bad opinions, which you can find on Twitter at @NickTagliaferro.
Opinion Haver has a Maryland address, but lives on Twitter at @asinmarx.
Some issues of the 2019-2020 cycle have Ellie Appelbaum and Tisya Mavuram as contributors to previous issues
Ellie Appelbaum is a big New York politics nerd. Follow her on Twitter at @ElForProgress.
Tisya Mavuram is a writer, digital strategist, and fervent defender of the state of New Jersey. Follow her on Twitter at @tmavuram.
What are we doing here?
There’s no shortage of elections coverage out there, but it’s nearly all about general elections, to the point where when a primary does get noticed, it’s probably because the general election is expected to be competitive. That leaves out most of the country, where the general’s a formality, which is where Primary School comes in. We’re looking at Democratic primaries for races where the primary’s likely to be the only interesting election.
What kind of races?
A lot of kinds! Open races and incumbent challenges in Senate, Congress, governor, state legislature, and municipal stuff. It’s going to be limited to pretty safely Democratic seats, but a Democrat with a primary challenger in a more purple seat won’t go unmentioned. “Safe" is subjective, of course, but we’ll include some talk of the partisanship of anything that’s not comically, lopsidedly Democratic.
Any sort of of ideological angle here?
Oh yeah, totally. We want to clear out the gunk in the system and move the party left. We’re going to be taking sides in most of these contests.
Okay, paid subscriptions…
There are of course the built-in community member benefits with Substack. Mostly that comes down to being able to leave comments and reading back issues (older than 2 years). But we do have some subscriber-only pieces, including our “The Progressive Case Against…” feature and our interviews. We only tackle the worst of the worst in the “case against” section, and they generally give us a lot to work with. Interviews are what they sound like, discussions with progressive candidates. In the interest of brevity, the regular newsletter will hit the major points, but there will be an extended cut that subscribers get to see first before they’re eventually ungated. Mostly subscribers get the satisfaction of helping out a project they enjoy.
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